chris holmes, one of the developers of geoserver, has become very interesting to read recently, re: collaborative mapping, standards, etc
Month: July 2007
Google Earth is still weak sauce
The ‘outrage’ that fostered this particular rant is the completely broken way in which it supports ‘management’ of ‘my places.’ Basically, it just doesn’t work for any definition of work which includes what I consider the bare minimum functionality. The only interface to your data is to organize it hierarchically. And frankly the drag and drop interface is persnickety as hell, and painful to use.
complaints about the left-side panel. justified, i think
Burger threat
yay for statistical literacy
Collaborative Mapping Redux
many NGO just want an interface for users to throw some information on the map – like Google Earth. But they don’t want to be passing KML files all around. they need a ‘cvs for the geospatial web’.
Microsoft’s big win in China
You are a friend to the Chinese people, and I am a friend of Microsoft. Every morning I go to my office and use your software.
Virtual Earth to support KML
About time.
Outing bureaucrats
In the day to day world, the Churchills write books in the country, the Mandelas serve their prison sentence and the Grants get drunk. The bureaucrats run countries, banks, schools, armies, drug companies, government agencies and our lives. My hope though is that the bureaucratic power is revealed for what it is by organizations that adopt the use of social software. My hope is that as millions of young enter the workforce expecting to use social software that they will open up the internal workings and “out” those that have little to say about the real work of delivering the result to the customer, or the voter, or the patient, or the student.
Survivorman
Les Stroud is the “host” of the show, and he gets dropped off in some random far-away location with bare minimum of supplies and they come back to get him a week later. He then films himself making shelter, finding food, etc.
I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!
I remember a time, it must have been the early 1980s, when it was common to ban phones with direct dial facilities. Why? Because people might talk to their friends and family during work time. It took a while for firms to figure out that this was a stupid thing to do, but most carried on with a limited ban, usually on international direct dialling. That lasted a little longer. Then, by the early 1990s, when internet e-mail emerged, it too was banned. In fact there are stories about the banning of corporate e-mail as well, continuing into this century. Soon it was the turn of Instant Messaging to bear the wrath of Corporate Policy. Then came blogs and wikis and social software in general. Now it’s about social networking.
only companies with already low productivity would think about banning social networks. how about working on the real problem: people running around looking busy and doing nothing?
Evolutionary algorithms now surpass humans
To mainstream engineers there is a disbelief that a self-organising process like an EA can produce designs that outperform those designed using conventional top-down, intelligent design
Gregor J. Rothfuss 