Hobu, Inc.

It’s been a busy couple of months here at Hobu, Inc. First off, I’ve completed my co-location facility (under my basement steps). It is much nicer to have a whining, 100 db Dell server out of my office. In addition, my office is no longer 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. It was a challenging project, as I had to do some electrical wiring (needed power under there), drag a phone line down for DSL, and put in a wall-mounted ethernet jack and fish the wires through my walls down to the server room.

Even though it is a bit cramped, I have plenty of room. I never monkeyed with the servers much anyway when they were in my office. Now I can add another ;).

Even though Sean has been giving me crap for not blogging, I’ve been plenty busy. A Guide to the Python Universe for ESRI Users was published in this quarter’s ArcUser, and I have been working feverishly on workshop materials for the Python Open Source GIS Hacks workshop at this year’s MapServer Users’ Meeting.

I thought I’d give you a taste of what we’ll be covering in the workshop. The first hack we’ll be doing expands on the geocoding tool that I build for this website. It takes in an address and returns a TerraServer image with a pixel map point on the location of the address. It is simple and straightfoward, and it illustrates how to build up a MapScript mapObj from scratch. Click here to take a peak. Enjoy!