Hobu, Inc.

… we’re making excellent, industrial software too. Jeff seems to dismiss the notion that self-organized software development can provide the same level of quality or standing that closed-source, cathedral-style software can. Readers of my weblog should be able to fill in my arguments against this idea without me even having to write them

Speaking of beer and pizza, if ESRI ever wants developers to go out and sell their products for them, they need to quit charging for EDN. As ESRI moves to selling server-focussed software, they need to realize that *developers* are the people they should be marketing to. Yes, the developers don’t hold the purse strings, but if you give the developers the ability to build out a one-off that demonstrates specific organizational functionality, your sales job is done. As it stands now, I think developers are one-off’ing in OpenLayers, MapServer, FeatureServer, GeoServer, and PostGIS. My evidence is completely anecdotal, but I’ve noticed a continuing stream of curious developers showing up and asking very basic questions how to get going. ESRI’s missing these folks, and in my opinion should be taking the same tact with developers that Oracle does. Otherwise, a day or two of fiddling with OpenLayers doesn’t cost $1500 like an EDN seat does…

Even having EDN doesn’t get you much. One fairly serious security-related bug has been stuck in my craw for over a year, and even though I have an EDN seat, I don’t have “support” and I’m not allowed to file bugs. This is completely ridiculous. I wasn’t asking to have my hand held through installing ArcGIS Server. Instead, I was filing a very clear and easy to demonstrate bug. Had this been an Open Source project, I would have filed the bug *with* the patch to fix it as well. Currently, my only hope is to make enough noise on places like this weblog in the hopes of guilting or shaming someone to notice and fix it

OSGeo is a member supported organization, and its entire operating budget comes from sponsorship. One thing that I think is critically important to ensuring continuing sponsorship is to report back to them annually with a “here’s what we did because of your support” report.

We’ve had an Executive Director for over a year, and we’ve been in operation for almost two, but we’ve yet to have an annual report of OSGeo’s activities. I think an annual report is extremely important to help reduce the opacity of OSGeo, show sponsors how their support has actually helped, and give potential volunteers a window into the organization so they can see where to start. Without it, the whole thing’s just a giant black box. In this case, we do need to know how the sausage is made…

Sean tagged me, so here goes:

1. I have cheated death three times.  First, I overturned a farm tractor and had a 500 lb. barrel roll inches past my head.  About two years later, I fell asleep driving and drove off a curve at 60+ mph.  Finally, about a year afterward, I was struck by lightning driving down the freeway at 70 miles per hour (totaled the car but didn’t touch me). 
2. I am halfway to completing my private pilot’s license (no close calls so far
3. My first successful Linux installation was on a Compaq iPaq using the handhelds.org distribution about five years ago.
4. I own an original Palm I handheld. I still would have rather had a Newton.
5. My first computer was an Apple IIgs.  Graphics and sound, baby!

Mateusz, Frank, Sandro, Jo, and Gary,  you’re it.

The materials are located here.

I spent a bit of time talking with Adena about
weblogs and GIS weblogs in particular. I thought I’d give a little background on how I started
blogging, what I’ve found out about blogging over the years, and how I hope to see the
GIS blogging community develop.

Famous among dozens
I think I started a weblog on my university account the day that
Blogger came out. It was some time in late 1999, the
internet bubble was just cresting, irrational exuberance was all around, and Y2K was
rapidly approaching. I had been reading some of the nascent weblogs that were out there for some
time, and two of those that still exist include Scripting News
and Camworld. Some of the same buzz that currently
exists in the Open Source GIS community existed then in the emerging weblog community. People
realized they had created a new medium (or evolved a different one from existing ones, rather).
They were excited about the possibilities and still defining what made a successful
weblog (personality goes a long ways). This was way before RSS, tracebacks, aggregation, and
weblog APIs existed, and the only way you really found out about other weblogs that were
reading and pointing to you was to look through your Apache referrer logs. It was fun, new,
and exciting.

My personal definition of a weblogger is one who digests news and information,
reacts to it, and posts about it. You could argue that a journalist does the
same thing, but a weblogger also injects analysis and opinion into the discussion. But posts
and a website alone do not make a weblog. A weblog also must contain inbound and outbound
linkage to other weblogs.

I continued actively weblogging until sometime in 2003. I would put my flamesuit on,
post about things I was passionate about, and engage in the flamewar about whatever the
current story du jour was. Eventually, however, the entire exercise started to feel
rather masturbatory. Weblogs (of the political or techno-political variety anyway)
tend to congregate and associate with other weblogs of a like mind or temperment. They are
self-selecting (you seek out other like-minded individuals to discuss topics with), and this
limits the scope and utility of the discussion. Once the fervor is gone, there isn’t much
left that is interesting enough to continue posting about. Hence the devolution into posts
about your cat.

Insight, foresight, more sight
The one type of weblog I have seen (and participated in on this website) is where a
topic expert starts to post about his or her domain. Sometimes the weblog author
even picks a domain that doesn’t have much coverage (like a specific form of cancer, tivo-like
devices, or using Python for GIS and starts posting away. These types of weblogs have
the potential to be much more interesting and long-lasting. With Sean,
the Mapping Hacks crew, Adena,
Tyler and others starting to post about GIS, hopefully
we’ll see a thriving GIS weblog community in the coming year or two.

Evolution happens. This was the third consecutive year that I have attended the
MapServer User’s Meeting. Each conference has been electric (really, people are
running out of appropriate adjective to describe the thing). Buzz, excitement,
momentum, cool stuff, connections, and egoboo are all copiously exchanged and
generated at the thing. The first conference was all about realizing you could get
a significantly-sized group of Open Source GIS hackers together. The second
conference in Ottawa was about confirmation of the first, and the Open Source
GIS community started to gain more consciousness. The third, IMO, demonstrated how the
OSGIS community is growing up.

Some examples of how the community is growing up include Frank
receiving the Sol Katz award, the slew (ok, maybe 4 isn’t quite a slew yet) of books
that are starting to show up, and the group thinking about how to circle the wagons
should external pressures (patents, groups with competing agendas, big money) start to
cause trouble.

Frank’s reception of the award (congrats Frank!) demonstrates how the community respects
all of the work the trailblazer(s) have done that have made the formation of the community
possible. I won’t embarrass Frank with any more platitudes, but work like his, Sol’s and
many other pioneers clearly make the whole thing tick. The recognition of this fact by the
community means that it will probably work to grow beyond disparate embryonic projects into
a software ecosystem of (hopefully) non-redundant, mutually-supporting software systems.
There are already some good examples of this, and the OGC work is the ether that makes much
of the collaboration possible, IMO.

Books allow the community to preserve its history, transmit its identity, and
most importantly, to scale. Developers develop. While they are generally pretty good at
describing the intention of a new feature or the steps to follow a technique, they often
don’t have much time for producing documentation that can clearly extract all of their internalized
knowledge about the subject. Authors, whether learning it for the first time or coming from
a perspective that does not worry about every detail (which a developer must), provide relief
to developers. More users can then come into the fray (the support load on the developers
lessens) and the developers can continue doing what they do — write software.

Serendipitously, Dirk-Willem van Gulik of the Apache Software Foundation presented some cautionary tales for the community.
While the software stacks and communities of both Apache and OSGIS have significant
differences, there are some similarities in the problems (legal and otherwise) that
both have to potential to face. As the OSGIS community continues to grow, it needs to
plan and think about these issues, and Dirk’s wonderful presentation gave the community
a language with which to communicate about them.

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!

Adena found another interesting GIS blog from Ed Parsons at the Ordinace Survey in the UK. You can read it here.

And I found this one from Jeffrey Hicks in my referrer logs.

Sean Gillies has begun blogging about his open source GIS developments. You can find his weblog here.

You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

Napoleon Dynamite has got it right… you gotta
have skills. But how do you get them? The trick to getting good at open source GIS hacking is to do it a lot (well, that’s
the trick to getting good at anything). There are many resources available out there on the net to help you
attain those skills.

Slashdot
The nerds congregate at Slashdot. They have congregated there for years. This is the place where you
will find out the latest happenings throughout the day, serendipitous stuff that you’ve never thought or
heard of before, and the full, if slanted, gamut of opinion about political, social, and technology issues
that affect the lives of geeks.

#mapserver on IRC
You may joke about mainlining the internet from time to time, but if you really want a whiff of
high-test ether, IRC is the best way to do it. The folks on the channel #mapserver on IRC chat
about everything. We work through technical issues on MapServer,
chat about happenings, pick each other’s brains, and learn from of some of the best GIS developers (open source
or otherwise) around.

The GIS Monitor is a weekly webzine that was a dependable source
of industry gossip, happenings, and technology. The verdict is still out on whether or not Adena’s
successor will be able to maintain the high level of quality that she kept. In either case, Adena still keeps
a weblog at Directions Magazine.

More later…