2005 year end review
January
In January, I was organizing the “lightning talks” for
OSGIS ‘05. The
plan was to have a bunch of speakers be given five minutes at the beginning of the
conference to build buzz, give people a sense of what all was going on in the Open
Source GIS world, and to provide a nice kickoff to the conference.
Also in January, I was doing the technical edits and review of
Beginning MapServer: Open Source GIS Development. The book provides a very
detailed exploration through CGI and MapScript MapServer development.
Throughout the beginning of the year, I was in the process of switching to
Mac and not looking back. I still have a
windows machine that I use from time to time for compiling things and playing a
video game or two, but most of my full-time development, content creation, and
everyday webbrowsing, email, and IRC at Hobu, Inc. is all Apple.
February 10th
My neighbor, with whom I share a driveway, backed his crusty old BMW through my
garage, knocking it off the foundation, blasting out one of the doors, and
doing $3000+ worth of damage.
ER Mapper announces
that they are open sourcing their ECW wavelet compression technology.
February 20th
ESRI notified me that they were publishing
A Guide to the Python Universe for ESRI Users in
ArcUser. I
was surprised that they were willing to publish an article in their glossy magazine
that actually covered very little ESRI software and focussed more on Open Source tools
that make GIS programming fun, enjoyable, and even tolerable.
March 2nd
A whacked-out screed by the president of the company that makes
Manifold in the GIS Monitor prompted me to write a good fisking of it.
March
March seemed to me to be the month where the GIS webloggers congealed into a critical
mass. Adena was blogging. Sean was blogging. James was
just about ready to start blogging. Many more started rolling out pretty quickly.
There were finally enough out there that you could put a category together into a news
aggregator and see enough new posts in a day to make it interesting.
June 16 – 18
The middle of June saw OSGIS ‘05 happen. It had a profound effect on the open source GIS community, just as OSGIS ‘04 and MUM 1 before it. It was an exhilarating and exhausting three days.
Sean and I gave our Hacks workshop, which failed and succeeded in equal parts in my mind, and the Lightning Talks were well received and went off without a hitch.
August 20th
I got married.
August 28th
Katrina hit. I spent some late nights over the next few months working on data dissemination efforts with a really smart mob.
October 6th
I signed an NDA with Autodesk to investigate a MapServer Foundation.
October and November
Throughout the fall, I continued talking with the Open Letter group about the foundation. Near the end of it, however, I was getting
really uneasy and nervous that we were forgetting a few important things.
November 28th
MapServer Foundation website lights up and Autodesk and DM Solutions make the announcement. Things started out a bit rocky, but we’re still learning and things are still moving.
December 16th
The new MapServer website lights up. This was my quixotic quest to have a good, through-the-web editable website for MapServer that was easy to navigate, easy to search, and generated massive amounts of google juice.
Conclusion
As you can see, it was a pretty busy year for the president of Hobu, Inc. Hopefully next year will see the MapServer Foundation light up, I will get to go to Switzerland, and I will actually get a chance to write some real software.