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.

+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.

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.

In my old post Terminus, my eyes saver, there is more information on Terminus font, with pointers to where to get it and how to install it.

colormake is really helpful for someone who heavily works in Unix shell environments to visually analyse messages generated during programs compilation. Simply, colors are used as another language for communication with a user, complementing letters printed out to the console. The colormake wrapper in combination with clean console fonts like Terminus serve as a great tandem in hacker daily job.

First, I started to use colormake 0.2 on Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install colormake

Next, I tried it on Mac OS X 10.5, though with no luck. Basically, because of subtle differences in Bash and format of GCC output messages. So, simple patch (colormake-0.2-mloskot.patch) is required to get colormake 0.2 working on Mac OS X. I’ve sent this patch to Bjarni - the author of colormake, so perhaps he will like to include it in next (0.3?) version. BTW, thanks to Bjarni for the colormake tool!

open, decentralized, free framework, which allows Internet users to control their digital life with single identity

Stefan Brand collected number of opinions about OpenID and compiled a very interesting post on his blog about problem(s) with OpenID. Stefan’s blog entry is pretty long, so to understand his findings easier, I decided to abstract key thoughts on that matter.

Stefan summarized main problems and sources of OpenID criticism as follows:

OpenID is highly vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, creates insurmountable privacy problems, is not a trust system, suffers from usability problems, and makes it unappealing to become an OpenID consumer.

Next, complaints about the OpenID framework are presented in a few categories, which I’m going to summarize below.

The most serious complaint is about lack of security and vulnerability on phishing attacks as well as browser exploits based on XSS and CSRF. Another problem was pointed by Kim Cameron: OpenID is as strong, and as weak, as DNS. It’s also easy to imagine user’s computer attacked with trojan or key logger sniffing her OpenID password. It could eventuate in giving attacker access to all identities controlled by user’s OpenID.

These insights let to consider OpenID as a broken authentication, though:

This is fine if what you protect with your OpenID is worthless, but it seems clear that these types of protocol are going to be used to authenticate for things of value.

The privacy issue is next. OpenID providers do recycle unused or orphaned user IDs and

if an OpenID is recycled, the new owner will be able to access the previous owner’s‚ data if the RP is not aware that the OpenID has changed ownership.

Some users find problematic or unethical fact that [OpenID] identity provider is able to track all websites you log into. The tracking capability may be used for purposes like users profiling and cross-sites profiling - sounds like a big brother reality.

OpenID is very easy to use, also for unexperienced Internet users. However, OpenID use requires more client-side intelligence than today’s standard Web browser. These two seems to stay in contradiction.

A good privacy on the Internet means: untraceability, unlinkability, authenticated anonymity and pseudonymity, and minimal disclosure. However, OpenID’s simplistic URL architecture seems fundamentally incompatible with these privacy features.

What about trust? OpenID is supposed to play a role of an identity system. In common understanding, an identity system is based on trust. There is no authority that can promise OpenID mloskot.myopenid.com is Mateusz Łoskot. The implication is The OpenID is not a trust system but OpenID is an identity transport system but without trust. Why? Because no trust, no identity.

Usability and adoption also seems to be questionable. Some experts prove that OpenID can be easily replaced with password managers available in popular Web browsers. Another issue is selection of trusted OpenID provider and the fact that there are many providers, but still not enough sites and consumers.

An interesting and realistic issue is availability of OpenID services. The decentralization, an OpenID’s strength is also considered as its weakness: If your openID server goes down then you’re locked out of all of your other web accounts that used that login.

Patents. It seems possible that some aspects of OpenID patented and parties have made claims that OpenID is covered by their patents.

As a word of disclaimer, I’m not the author of the concerns presented above and this is not my aim to criticise the concept of OpenID system. I’m just a member of Internet users hordes who is interested in OpenID applications. All the comments above helped me to understand OpenID better, so I collected and rewritten them here in more adoptive, I believe.

Authors of all citations I used above can be easily find in Stefan’s blog post.

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.

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?

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 :-)

For all interested in development of the PostGIS provider for FDO, here is detailed list of the recent updates (links point to tickets in FDO Trac database):

• #94 Generate extent for features assigned to default spatial context
• #106 PostGIS provider cannot delete a feature class
• #171 Fdo Postgis Autogenated identity property is mandatory
• #178 PostGIS : Can’t insert in a non-feature class
• #232 Fdo Postgis null and not null filter does not work
• #233 Fdo Postgis in and not in filter does not work
• #234 Fdo Postgis currently does not support anything but lowercase identifiers
• #235 Fdo Postgis Exception with insert
• #236 Fdo Postgis does not support non spatial classes
• #241 Implement Support for SelectAggregates, SpatialExtents and Count
• #310 PostGIS provider : change class naming convention without ~
• #311 PostGIS provider : mismatch between FdoGeometricTypes and FdoGeometryType
• #312 PostGIS provider : remove boost_date_time dll dependency
• #313 PostGIS provider : can’t filter,insert or update date/datetime
• #314 PostGIS provider : check-out/check-in crashes Autodesk Map
• #324 PostGIS provider : Insert and update geometry failed when a table has a srid
• #328 PostGIS FdoIInsert::Execute always returns NULL
• #329 PostGIS FdoISQLCommand::GetSQLStatement always returns NULL
• #337 PostGIS defect : insert,update more than one column failed on dates
• #338 PostGIS defect : insert with srid -1 failed
• #339 PostGIS defect : Srid is not set properly when creating a FeatureClass
• #341 PostGIS defect : SelectAggregate does not support DISTINCT

All the fixes listed above will be included in next version 3.4.0 of Feature Data Objects.

From another area of the FDO development, check Jason’s post about the brand new SQLite for both FDO and OGR

The conference will provide a forum for the presentation of recent progress in the use of modeling techniques to help in the understanding and managing of complex natural resource systems

The call for papers has been opened very recently and not yet widely announced. As I’ve been told by organizers, it’s possible to present applications and software packages related to the conference matter. I’ve been wondering if there would be anyone from the OSGeo Community interested to present FOSS solutions for environmental related problems.

By the way, RMA 2008 is planned on the same week as Cascadoss symposium and workshop. So, there is some chance to visit both events.