Hobu, Inc.

Upload 4500 Oracle SRIDs to http://spatialreference.org, even though sr.org can’t interpret them.  Your IP address was XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX.  I admire your curl and bash skills, but don’t you think that maybe sr.org should provide Oracle SRID support through another mechanism than just bulk uploading them?  Please send an email next time…

/me wonders about adding more restrictions to who can post SRSs to sr.org…

Update: ok, the person who did this contacted me and I may have overreacted just a little :)  The reason why Oracle SRIDs aren’t supported by sr.org is they aren’t supported by GDAL/Proj.4.  Oracle has different names for many of its SRS WKT elements, they are different between versions of Oracle, and GDAL doesn’t have a dictionary to map these names to OGC/ESRI WKT names.  It is hoped that once CS-Map is released, we’ll have a dictionary to do this mapping, but until that time, open source GIS support for Oracle SRS WKT is pretty limited.

Some may have noticed hobu.biz had a week long outage a couple of weeks ago (not that I post enough for many to notice anymore).  This outage was related to the fact that the building that houses this server in Cedar Rapids had 10ft of water in the first floor for five days and the backup generator for the machine room had its wiring plumbed through the basement — preventing its usage.  Up until the 1000 year flood, my ISP had performed reasonably well except for the fact that they are rather expensive … $250/mo for 2U and 1.5mb of bandwidth.  I could have probably gotten a much cheaper colo someplace else, but it was the only thing within reasonable driving distance to Iowa City, so I took it at the time.

My ISP didn’t really handle the flood too well, and it was almost a week after the power was pulled on the machine before I was contacted.  A 1000 year flood was definitely not something they had planned for in their five 9’s ISO planning, and while understandable, me and my clients found it unacceptable.  Besides an unclean shutdown, hobu.biz is still diesel-powered and will be for the foreseeable future.  With the situation fluid and unstable, I started looking for alternatives…

I had been watching Amazon’s developer services for a while, and with the flood I’ve had strong motivation to investigate more fully.  I found the offering to be quite impressive, and I think I will be moving all of my essential services and websites to EC2 once I get an image built and my 3TB of data migrated.  I think EC2 and its competitors are really going to put the squeeze on the mom and pop ISPs with a 42U rack and a DS3 line.   

Are you running stuff on EC2?  GIS stuff?  What have your experiences been?

libLAS continues toward the march toward a 1.0 final release with Friday’s 1.0.0b1 release.  libLAS is a C/C++/Python library for processing ASPRS LAS LiDAR data, and it supports the LAS 1.0 and 1.1 formats.  It will probably support the upcoming 1.2 format as well once that spec is ratified.

With our approach of 1.0, we are looking for more beta testers to squeeze out any of the remaining showstoppers that we might have.  If you work with LiDAR data at all, give it a spin.