Mateusz Loskot

Front page of http://geourl.info has been welcoming visitors with Offline message for a few days. Anyone has an idea what’s going on with the geourl.info service?

I hope it won’t be down for 9 months as the previous services was.

Recently, I’ve been playing with Sanoodi - activity-based social networking website for participants in sports and leisure activities. The idea of Sanoodi is very similar to Sports Tracker by Nokia.

The Sanoodi version 1.1.0.0 is based on Google Maps API. It works well, rarely reporting errors. Today, I migrated my account to Sanoodi Beta available for mysterious Friday the 13th (month unspecified :-)). Besides new & ugly user interface, I’ve encountered that mapping capabilities in Beta are based on OpenLayers engine. Great choice, if my vote counts. The core of Sanoodi application is based on Django framework. Another good choice :-)

If you are doing any outdoor activities, Sanoodi is a nice gadget and worth to try. I recommend to use version 1.1.0.0 for regular diary. In my opinion, the Beta version is still unusable. It is throwing errors while saving preferences or uploading GPX file, Save button for new route sees to be not even linked, etc. BTW, I’ve reported all my problems to the Sanoodi Team. Hopefully, they will fix it soon.

mloskot says Cuil

OSGeo says it too

more

Update 2008-07-28: Below, see my reply to Jason’s comment and here is a small visualization of the problem

NASA Images is

a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections

I’m not sure when it was launched, but PC Authorities magazine announced it a few days ago. Regardless, there is a great set of interesting images of Our Mother Earth, Solar System and more.

goosh.org is a new Web-based tool that has been warming up the wires for last hours. The idea is really cool, though it does not work in text lynx-like browsers, as one would expect.

Hmm, looks like the next (and obvious) step is to implement GDAL utilities plugin for goosh, so everyone can run:

guest@goosh.org:/gdal/> ogrinfo -ro PG:'host=gdal.org user=root dbname=cool'

Layer name: streets
   Geometry: Line String
   Feature Count: 13
   Extent: (-87.634943, 24.543945) - (-80.031369, 31.000975)
   Layer SRS WKT:
   GEOGCS["GCS_WGS_1984",
      DATUM["WGS_1984",
      SPHEROID["WGS_1984",6378137.0,298.257223563]],
      PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],
      UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]]
…
guest@goosh.org:/gdal/>

What about hackers/crackers? Don’t worry! This time, lucky works for Google:

I tried “rm -rf /”, but Google is still up.

;-)

Update: Stupid me! I really should not use the term hacker inappropriately above.

Victoria,BC is a beautiful city. Stop. The weather is fully satisfying. Stop. People here are fantastic. Stop. The FOSS4G 2007 rocks! Stop. More on the flickr. Stop. (mloskot)

More on:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mloskot/
• http://www.foss4g2007.org/pictures/

Sometimes reading a code of Open Source Software gives a lot of fun. Programmers put many different and weird things into blocks of comments. It’s like a kind of source code blogging, isn’t it :-). You can find jokes and funny sentences or sentences expressing anger on a mad manager who forced a developer to stay next 12 hours at work in front of debugger screen…

Today, I was browsing sources of the OSGeo FDO Provider for OGR and I encountered one of these source code jokes. Here it is:

const double OgrSpatialContextReader::GetZTolerance()
{
    //zero tolerance!!! Yeah!!!!!!
    return 0.0;
}

Now, I wonder if the value returned from this function is what a user usually expects or may be it’s actually an expression (or better, a materialization) of programmer’s state of mind advertised here ;-)