Mateusz Loskot

All OSGeo mailing lists are managed by GNU Mailman. Mailman is a great piece of software but it lacks of user friendly search engine. In order to search, for instance, gdal-dev archives I usually feed Google with a query like this:

+libtiff +crash site:http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev

It works well but requires me to know and input direct URL of archives I want to scan. There are nearly 100 OSGeo mailing lists and sometimes I need to juggle quite many of them. Not much fun. The Nabble comes in handy when I have to do many searches at the same time.

I have been using Safari as main Web browser since I moved to Mac OS X - it just runs faster on my PowerBook G4. Shortly, I discovered Inquisitor plugin for Safari and my lists searching practice have changed. Thanks to Inquisitor’s feature of additional search engines, I use it as an interface to the OSGeo mailing lists archives and OSGeo.org.

With a very little configuration, the Nabble and OSGeo.org search engines are accessible in the Safari search box and also using keyboard shortcuts.

Configuration steps:

1. Install latest version of Inquisitor
2. Go to Inquisitor pane in the Safari preferences dialog box and click Edit sites…
3. Add OSGeo add-ins to the additional search engines (see screenshot below)
4. Click on the plus button to Add new custom search shortcut… and input Site Name, search engine URL with query placeholder and optional Shortcut.

Here are texts I used to define the three search shortcuts:

Site Name: OSGeo.org
URL: http://www.osgeo.org/search/node/%@

Site Name: OSGeo Mailing Lists
URL: http://www.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp?forum=18127&local=y&query=%@

Site Name: GDAL Mailing List
URL: http://www.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp?forum=1192&local=y&query=%@

Notice the %@ part, it is a search query placeholder.

Use of the shortcuts is simple, issue Cmd + Option + F to jump to the Google search box in Safari, input a query and use custom keyboard shortcut of desired search engine, for instance I press Cmd + Shift + G to search gdal-dev list. Alternatively, while you type your query, the Inquisitor drops down Spotlight-like box and then use arrow keys to select one of listed search engines.

From time to time, Google helps me to find and get new treasures laying deep on the Internet. Today, it dug out OpenGeology.pl website. Apparently, it has been launched quite recently and Google reports very few references about it. Because it’s mostly in Polish language and English version is incomplete, I will give a short overview of it here. So, what is this website about?

The front page explains it very well:

The OpenGeology.pl is devoted to the applications of Open Source Software in Geology

Later, one can browse various resources organized by topic - reviews of Open Source Software, tutorials ie. on DEM processing and 3D technologies in geology as well as collection of free and public geodata. DEM of Poland based on the SRTM-3 is available through a friendly map-based interface in two alternative coordinate systems (WGS 84 and PUWG 92) and three grid formats. It’s worth to notice that holes in original DEM files have been patched. I’ve not played with this data myself but it sounds very promising.

Now, let’s get to the point - the software. And here, my eyes saw a nice list of FOSS packages, including OSGeo Foundation projects…and there was much rejoicing.

OpenGeology community (see below) has found following FOSS4G and OSGeo projects useful: GRASS, Open Source Software Image Map (OSSIM), Quantum GIS, GDAL/OGR and FWTools.

A couple of words about the OpenGeology.pl authors. If my understanding is correct, the website was founded by Polish Geological Institute and Maciej Tomaszczyk is the main author and content provider. Kudos to the OpenGeology.pl Community for their efforts to spread the FOSS4G in Poland.

A few weeks ago, CASCADOSS project leaders requested for patronage from the OSGeo Foundation for two upcoming events: International Symposium and International Information Workshop. The request was approved and final decision was made during the 36th OSGeo Board Meeting.

Yesterday, Frank Warmerdam officially announced this fact in the OSGeo News: OSGeo Supports CASCADOSS

Detailed document describing the Support for CASCADOSS is available on the OSGeo Wiki, together with body of letter of support. Printed copy of the letter was sent to the CASCADOSS project leaders.

On May 8th, Ross Turk posted on the SourceForge.net community blog: Hey! So I’ll just blurt it out: we’ve joined the OpenID Foundation!. As Ross confirms, OpenID use is becoming very popular, means users like the idea of decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.

In the initial announcement about the OpenID idea, SF.net stuff revealed they use OpenID implementation from Zend Framework - Open Source Software (oh yeah!) available under BSD License.

Recently, I’ve noticed that Chris brought the idea of OpenID to OSGeo year ago and setup necessary infrastructure, so OSGeo userid can be used as an openid.

I tried today to use OpenID capabilities of OSGeo User ID, but without any luck. It seems like the service has been disabled or moved without update in docs. Anyway, I hope we are going to keep it running. Hmm, it’s unclear to me if the OSGeo User ID is supposed to work as an OpenID and allow OSGeo users to authenticate to external non-OSGeo services with it, like to SourceForge.net. Is it?.

I’m wondering if it would be reasonable and beneficial the OSGeo Foundation participates in activities lead by the OpenID Foundation. What about joining the OpenID Foundation as a non-profit organization?

During last weeks, a lot of fresh bits have been contributed to the PostGIS provider for FDO Open Source. The great part of this work was committed by Bruno Scott and his colleagues. Bruno has recently joined the FDO development team. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Bruno for his fantastic help in improving the PostGIS provider. The provider has got better shape and stability.

Recently, I’ve failed my duties in the provider development, so motivated by the load of Bruno’s work I found some gaps in time to submit a few fixes too :-)

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The March 20th, 2008 brought us new patch release of GDAL library. It doesn’t include any new features but a very tidy set of 65 bug fixes. Great Job GDAL Team!

The source code packages with GDAL/OGR 1.5.1 are available from the OSGeo download server.

In this post, I’m going to spread a word about the Cascados project. The project is founded by the European Commission in frame of the Sixth Framework Programme and is focused on development of a trans-national cascade training programme on Open Source GIS & Remote Sensing software for environmental applications. The Cascados project is formed by a number of partners from Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. More detailed information can be found on the project website (multilingual) recently launched at the http://cascadoss.eu/

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