November 25th, 2009
It’s not just stand-up comedians wondering that anymore! In the brave new world of “serverizing” (nee Geoweb (nee SDI)) being promoted by ESRI’s Jack Dangermond (and us, and many others) the health of your server could directly impact the health of real live people.
When you stand up a public server with useful services, people will start using that server, and eventually will expect it to be there when they need it. And the better you are at keeping your server up, the stronger that assumption of reliability will become! At the highest levels of expected reliability, outages become newsworthy events in and of themselves.
So, to run a good service, choose good, reliable software — and then don’t trust it! The FGDC has recognized that monitoring is a key to providing reliable SDI services, and has stood up a public system for checking the health of spatial services, the Service Status Checker. As an added bonus, it’s not just for feds, anyone can use it, so give it a try!
November 5th, 2009
If you missed attending FOSS4G, you can now experience a part of the conference via videos! Here are the talks that we gave that were captured by the video team from FOSSLC:
Happy viewing!
November 4th, 2009
One of the items we launched with our new web site this spring was what we have been internally calling “the menu”, and ended up calling “core development“. The premise is that a generation of proprietary software experiences have broken customers of the idea that they can directly pay a vendor for a new feature — as customers we’ve been trained to just wait until the next version and hope. But in an open source world, developers (us) are happy to work on new features directly for customers. So in our core development “menu” we try to provide customers with some guidance about what is possible, writing up some descriptions of larger development pieces and enumerating the functionality they would provide.
One of the items I put in my PostGIS menu last spring was “geodetic types“, native support for latitude/longitude coordinates that allows for indexing of features that cross the poles or dateline, provides direct calculation of distances and areas on the spheroid, and integrates with the other functions in PostGIS. And a few months ago, that menu item was funded by a client! We are currently approaching the final delivery date, the code is committed to the PostGIS SVN repository, and I’m spending the rest of the week testing and polishing.
Amazingly, the open source development started paying off almost immediately — I was getting testing and bug reports from third parties very early in the process, which means the final delivery will be that much stronger for the client. I’ve also added a large number of functions above and beyond those itemized in the contract terms, since this code is going to be in wide use as soon as it is released.
To get a feel for the functions that have been added, check out the documentation for the upcoming PostGIS release. For more technical details on using the new type, see this post.