Introduction of new srid to load autodesk data for mapguide not supported by oracle?

In the Netherlands we have (had) a lot of problems when introducing Autodesk geo data in Oracle Spatial, because of the different spatial reference systems used in both applications. A company ISIS (these days part of Bentley) develloped a fix for the problem, which is widely used by local administration in the Netherlands (organisations using mapguide FlexiWeb).

In the fix ISIS, amongst other things, introduces a new srid in Oracle (srid 19025), similar to RD (dutch standard system).

However yesterday i learned this fix is not officially supported by Oracle. So lots of organisations will miss oracle support when there software solution fails. The province of Limburg didn't agree with the ISIS-fix and tried to find another solution, so they brought a team of Oracle, Autodesk and other developers together working on an Oracle supported fix. The project is in full progress and a fix is expected soon.

read more
introducing an srid in oracle (autodesk)
known bug in 8i/9i with srs's (autodesk)
problems showing oracle data in mapguide (autodesk)
Loading data from autodesk (oracle)
Nice mapping application (limburg)

the world of fusedoccing

off course i don't have to explain the good sed of documenting the code... but some years ago, we didn't have the same habits to document code. So these days, while upgrading some fusebox 1.0 applicatons to nowerdays standards (read all about fusebox methodology), we had to add lots of documentation in the scripts too. But fortunately some guys develloped tools to make our work much easier. I used three tools to automate the code documentation and i liked them!

AutoFusedoc is a plugin for Homesite/CFstudio. When pressing ctrl-shft-d it scans the current document and generates fusedoc including io-parameters it can find in the cf-code and the name of the current file. It saves you lots of hours for only $50,- (if you have applications of 1000+ files like we do)

There is a tool out there, fusedocer, with which you can automatically read all fusedocs from all files in your Fusebox 3 application and generate a nice report from it. We're currently improving the tool, to make it more stable (right now it crashes on simple cf-errors). When we're ready you can download it here. Those guys are working on a version for Fusebox 4.

Fusebox 3 to 4 converter: well if you've got your code in FB 3, why not change it to 4 and profit from the performance gain. It needs some manual fine tuning, but the xml-generation is perfect!

Macromedia -> Adobe

Yesterday, word got out that abobe purchases macromedia for $3.4 bilion. http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html. Wow... What will happen to Freehand, Dreamweaver and Fireworks? The most elegible candidates for dissolving in Illustrator, GoLive and Photoshop. And what will come of Flash, will it all be (open) SVG or PDF soon? Time will tell.
Other issue: ColdFusion incorporated open source pdf-generation in it's latest release. I guess it will be depreciated soon.
By the way Macromedia still sells Homesite and ColdFusion, which they acquired, when bying Allaire a couple of years back, probably the Macromedia product line will still be available for a while.

Smallworld 4 introduced

GE introduces smallworld 4, the gis-system that lots of energy/gas/water distributors use to map their wires/lines/cables/tubes. Smallworld Internet Application Server brings their wires to the web. The server is WMS-compliant.

News about the 4-upgrade is that, unfortunately it is not downwards compatible to code added in Smallworld 3. So probably it will take up to 2 years to get everybody upgraded. Thank you GE, to having saved our developer-jobs.

alternative for a virtual oracle data layer in mapserver?

So you have got some non-spatial data in oracle, but containing simple xy attributes and want to map it using mapserver (event theme)? Don't start defining a virtual data layer using ogr (especially difficult if you have to compile it with unixodbc). Just define a (materialized) view in Oracle 9i in which you convert the x-y attributes to a spatial-field, and add the view as a normal oracle layer:

select
MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY(
2001,
900211,
MDSYS.SDO_POINT_TYPE(st.x, st.y, NULL),
NULL,
NULL) as geom
from world.data st

good luck!

By the way mapserver 4.4.2 has arrived (i hope they fixed some mis-configurations in the precomiled win32 binaries with oracle support)

Mapping Google

Recently http://maps.google.com added some satellite images to their map-service. With their tile-strategy, it works amazingly fast. Open http://maps.google.com and click on 'satellite' (in the upper right corner). The resolution isn't perfect, but the performance is!

Have a look at this article, this dude checked out how google maps works
as simple as possible, but no simpler: Mapping Google