OpenSource GIS applied

mapwindow & metadata

2012-01-21T23:40:00.002+01:00

Today i looked at the mapwindow/dotspatial project http://mapwindow.org. A plain-functional .Net desktop gis product. The program has a very nice plug-in architecture. Through a vast list of plug-ins quite some advanced geo-actions can be done. My interest lies in metadata, i was hoping for a CSW-search imlementation. Unfortunately it's currently not available (and no work being done), even WMS/WFS is not supported out of the box (basic WMS through a plug-in). However I was quite surprised to find a metadata-plugin in 4.8 (not in 6?). The plug-in works quite nice. A tree structure for the metadata and for every item a clear edit-form appears. The metadata is however very ESRI-FGDC oriented. In the metadataviewer are actually esri-stylesheets used.
So disappointing to find very limited support for iso19115.
I think (through the WMS-plugin) the basis is there for a CSW search plug-in, extending mapwindow in that direction would be nice. A first quick win is in the context-menu for a WMS-layer, 'show metadata' should not result in a warning ('not available') but get the metadata-link from getcapabilities and display the metadata from the WMS-server!
Maybe i'll dive in the code one day and get it done myself...
Good luck dotspatial/mapwindow team....!

Changing jobs: Nieuwland -> GeoCat

2011-12-31T16:36:00.001+01:00

With the turn of 2011 to 2012 i had the oppertunity to change jobs. This year i start at Geocat bv (http://www.geocat.net). Geocat is the project lead in the open source project geonetwork (http://geonetwork-opensource.org/), a geo-metadata catalog server. Also they (or we) developed an esri-extension to publish data from ArcGIS to GeoServer, Mapserver, PostGis and GeoNetwork (or any CSW-server), GeoCat Bridge. The extension is sold all over europe, in the US and in Canada. Extra opportunities to visit the open source communities abroad. GeoCat also customises OpenLayers/ExtJS clients for customers in a variety of industries.

Aside the international oppertunities i'm looking forward to working in a fully opensource atmosphere amongst at least 4 great colleagues. I wish everybody a great 2012.

OpenLayers 2.11

2011-09-13T10:22:00.001+02:00

Just upgraded to OpenLayers 2.11, unfortunately my scale control broke down, appeared to be because of new language-keys in i18nUse these new keys in Lang/language.js 'permalink': "Permanente verwijzing", 'graticule': 'Arcering', 'overlays': "Overlays", 'baseLayer': "Achtergrondkaart", 'scale': "Schaal = 1 : ${scaleDenom}",see: http://trac.osgeo.org/openlayers/ticket/3364And somehow my bbox-strategy doesn't refresh anymore... I have to look into that further.

Geoserver 2.1 and Inspire View Service Requirements

2011-07-03T21:18:00.002+02:00

We currently host Inspire View Services for two customers using GeoServer. Since Geoserver 2.1 the required WMS 1.3 is available, and an Inspire extension is available to add some extra required fields to the capabilities document. However the View Services in Geoserver are not yet fully conformant to the Inspire requirements.

Some points of non-conformance:
- In the keywordlist a reference should be made to which thesaurus the keyword is coming from
- For every layer for every available CRS a bbox should be provided in that CRS
- In the top layer a authority url should be provided, referencing the publishing organisations website
- In every layer a identfier should be available referencing the
dataset (which is also mentioned in the metadata for data and
metadata for services records)

Note that this only applies to scenario 1 (where a metadata for service record is available). And only 1 language supported (which is also default language).

The dutch government proposed a 'workaround' to be able to use products like Geoserver and still be compliant. The capabilities document can be manually altered and saved anywere on the web. In the metadata for service record a hyperlink should be included to the altered capabilities document (however i don't know of any viewer supporting this workaround)

examle of altered capabilities document

Most of these short-comings also exist in the deegree project. Although the developers convinced me they're nearly there.

OSGeo hacking event bolsena

2011-06-23T23:45:00.002+02:00

It's been a while since i published an article... But here it is.
So i'm spending some days at the OSGeo hacking event in Bolsena.
Listened to some nice presentations about Talend Open Studio Spatial Plug-in, deegree, inspire, openSDMX and Heron-mc. I played a little with deegree. the guys from Bonn really did a nice job implementing the Inspire data schema's. I tested the hydropraphy data schema and the metadata store. Ok, it's not all perfect yet, some Inspire requirements are missing (even for view services), but i'm really surprised nobody is using deegree to host Inspire services up till now. Esri must really be big in Germany. I think it will change soon, because deegree (compared to others) is totally ready for download services.

Also i tested the metdatastore in deegree, since deegree 3 doesn't have a csw-search-interface itself, i used the excat javascript search tool, a very light weight csw-search option. Unfortunately it didn't work out of the box. Somehow excat uses lowercase fieldnames where deegree expected first letter uppercase. With some changes in cswclient.xml and getrecords.xsl it all worked fine (line44 escape should be escapeChar, title -> Title etc)

http://wiki.deegree.org/deegreeWiki/DownloadPage
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Bolsena_Code_Sprint_2011
http://spatialdataintegrator.org
http://heron-mc.org
http://www.couchbase.org
http://sourceforge.net/p/opensdmx
http://www.gdsc.nl/gdsc/software/simple_csw_client

proj4js can't find proj4js.js because it's called proj4js-compressed.js

2010-10-13T16:20:00.001+02:00

in proj4js there is a getScriptLocation function which retrieves the path of the current script by looping over the script tags in the document. Unfortunately the function won't find the scriptlocation if your script is called proj4js-compressed.js in stead of proj4js.js.

This results in proj4js won't find extra projections, which results in errors in your page when trying to call a non standard projection.

So change the name of the script to proj4js.js (or include the needed projections by hand)

And if you need EPSG:102113 (the Esri alternative for the common mercator projection), copy EPSG900913.js to EPSG:102113.js and change ['EPSG:900913'] to ['EPSG:102113'].

one week open source primer

2010-10-09T23:53:00.001+02:00

A company asked us to provide a one week open source primer for their employee's. This is the program we proposed:

mo:
Quantum GIS
Mapserver, Gdal

tu:
Udig
GeoServer

we:
PostGIS
GeoKettle

th:
OpenLayers, GeoExt
MapBender

fr:
GeoNetwork
Oracle, Autocad and Esri support in Open Source Apps

Bolsena Hacking Event 2010

2010-06-10T18:44:00.000+02:00

These days i'm in Italy to visit the Bolsena Hacking Event 2010. A group of open source GIS developers meets every year to work on several projects. I'm here to work with GeoCat developers on a ArcGIS-GeoNetwork bridge extension. But in the meanwhile I have interesting discussions with and presentations of developers of GeoServer, MapBender, Deegree, GeoCouchDB, GeojQuery, OpenLayers, Inspire and Grass. Send me a message if you'd like to bring in a subject.

Rotation in SLD and Esri

2010-06-01T22:39:00.006+02:00

In ArcMap you can rotate point symbols geopgraphic and arithmatic. SLD/Geoserver rotates features in only one direction (geographic). So to get the arithmatic rotation in GeoServer (based on a field value) you should multiply the Esri-direction by -1:

<sld:Rotation>
<ogc:Mul>
<ogc:PropertyName>RICHTING</ogc:PropertyName>
<ogc:Literal>-1</ogc:Literal>
</ogc:Mul>
</sld:Rotation>

* <ogc:Mul> is the multiply implementation of SLD (all functions)

To get geographic rotation you have to add 90 degrees.

SLD for GeoServer from QGIS

2010-01-29T23:58:00.005+01:00

To be able to publish proprietary formats on the internet using open source techniques, one of the mayor chalanges left is the definition of styling (or export/import of styling from the proprietary system). QGIS not only offers a set of data conversion tools and styling interface, it also contains a mapserver export plugin, with which one can export the styling of a set of layers to mapserver to be published on the internet.

Last year Luca Casagrande launched a SLD export plugin (python). These SLD's can be used to define styling for data published with GeoServer. It's an early version (only supports vector layers with unique values-styling), but it's a great starting point for starting out with SLD and GeoServer. Create styles in QGIS, download the plugin, put it in /qgis/python/plugins and activate it in 'manage plugins' section of QGIS. An 'SLD' button is added to your toolbar, which opens a dialog with the SLD for the styled layers.

For GeoServer there is a great webbased styling tool out there. It's an early version (only firefox 3). The tool is build using GeoExt and uses the GeoServer REST-API (installed as a geoserver plugin) to save the created styles in GeoServer. the tool can not be downloaded with the latest stable geoserver 2.0.2, but it's available with the 2.0.0 version. The styler is also present in the OpenGeo Geo Suite (a suite of opensource GIS applications).

upgrade windows xp->2008 &oracle 9->10 (ms4w/gdal)

2009-09-15T13:09:00.002+02:00

Today i performed an upgrade on a ms4w/chameleon app from win xp -> 2008 and oracle 9 -> 10 (non-spatial). I met the following difficulties:

Register apache as a service by rightclicking cmd and choose 'run as administrator', next type apache_install

Open up the firewall by running cmd as administrator and typing:
netsh firewall set portopening TCP 80 "Apache Web Server"

I couldn't get the instant oracle client working in combination with odbc, so in the end i installed the full oracle 10.2 client (error 126, could not load translation library)

Next ogrinfo didn't want to show my virtual odbc layer, it appears the table_name should be in capitals in Oracle 10, (ERROR 1: No column definitions found for table 'mpm_gisonline_mv', layer not usable. and Failed to find layer 'xxx' on datasource)

ogrinfo ODBC:user/pw@tns,XXXX (use table_name here to prevent that all tables are scanned at each request)

sld for geoserver from arcgis

2009-05-08T09:12:00.004+02:00

There is a (german) tool out there by Albrecht Weiser to create a sld from an arcgis project, it used to be hosted by http://hgis-germany.de (http://web.archive.org/web/20080123212031/arcmap2sld.geoinform.fh-mainz.de/ArcMap2SLDConverter_Eng.htm) but these days it can be found at http://wald.intevation.org/projects/arcmap2sld

Some documentation is provided by vera lindsay:

How to install and use ArcMap2sld:

1. Download v1.2.2 from http://wald.intevation.org/projects/arcmap2sld

2. Download and install Microsoft .NET Framework from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en

3. Unzip Setup_ArcMap2SLDConverter_1.2.2.zip.

4. To use it open one and only one ArcMap (it lookes for all ArcGIS applications so you can't have catalogue or tools open either).

5. Run /bin/ArcGIS_SLD_Converter.exe. It will default to German so change it to English: Extras>Sprache/Language>English

6. It's prety straight forward from there (at least once you've selected English): select where to save the SLD and other options and click the SLD button on the bottom and whala! Looks like a very nice, clean formated SLD file.

Have a look at http://www.geographie.uni-bonn.de/karto/chapter35_weiserzipf_sld.mobile.pdf

map colors

2009-05-06T12:19:00.002+02:00

when writing mapserver mapfiles i always tend to choose the wrong colours (even if the mapfile is created from qgis). Today i found this easy webbased tool, colorbrewer, to create and evaluate great colour schemes http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorBrewer/ColorBrewer.html

Coldfusion uses inner db connection when nesting cfquery

2008-12-12T12:54:00.004+01:00

When you implement a nested cfquery to different datasources, ColdFusion will use the inner connection for both queries. Symptoms are that tables can not be found: ERROR: relation "mapdef" does not exist

<cfquery datasource="vista_monitoring2" name="x">
select * from mapdef limit 1
<cfquery datasource="vista_wintermanagement_r" name="y">
select * from rides limit 1
</cfquery>
</cfquery>

oracle odbc very slow in ogr/mapserver

2008-07-30T17:16:00.002+02:00

Today i converted an adress-table from mysql to oracle (9.2). The data is presented on a map using virtual spatial data over odbc. It appeared the oracle odbc connection was very slow (up to a minute for a couple of records). After a search on google i found some suggestions:
- enable tracing in odbc to see what data is send and recieved (it appeared all the oracle tables where investigated, since there are 100's, it takes a while)
- in this post http://osdir.com/ml/gis.mapserver.user/2004-07/msg00245.html JF presents a solution 4 this by adding the tablename to the DSN-definition in the ovf file
That helped, response time dimished to fractions of a second

ODBC:me/secret@db,table table
wkbPoint

ID

Install a routing mechanism on postgis (windows).

2008-04-02T16:24:00.002+02:00

based on http://pgrouting.postlbs.org/wiki/WorkshopFOSS4G2007

download and install
- postgres 8.2 (pgRouting is not yet available as binary for postgres 8.3)
- postgis (comes with postgres 8.2)
- pgRouting 1.0

C:
cd Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.2\bin

//create db
createdb -U postgres -E UNICODE routing
createlang -U postgres plpgsql routing

//load postgis and pgrouting into db
psql -U postgres -f ../share/contrib/lwpostgis.sql routing
psql -U postgres -f ../share/contrib/spatial_ref_sys.sql routing
psql -U postgres -f ../share/contrib/routing_core.sql routing
psql -U postgres -f ../share/contrib/routing_core_wrappers.sql routing

//load datafile generated witd shp2pgsql

//add columns
ALTER TABLE dummy ADD COLUMN source integer;
ALTER TABLE dummy ADD COLUMN target integer;
ALTER TABLE dummy ADD COLUMN length double precision;
UPDATE dummy SET length = length(the_geom);

//create network
SELECT assign_vertex_id('dummy', 0.001, 'the_geom', 'gid');

//optimise table
CREATE INDEX source_idx ON dummy(source);
CREATE INDEX target_idx ON dummy(target);
CREATE INDEX geom_idx ON dummy USING GIST(the_geom GIST_GEOMETRY_OPS);

//test network trace
SELECT gid, AsText(the_geom) AS the_geom FROM dijkstra_sp('dummy', 1, 100);

//update srid (option)
select updategeometrysrid('dummy', 'the_geom', 4326);
update dummy set the_geom = setsrid(the_geom,4326);

//finished! now check out http://boston.freemap.in/routing.html for implementation options!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

SRID stuff in PostGIS

2008-04-02T11:39:00.001+02:00

Got these errors?

ERROR: Operation on mixed SRID geometries

ERROR: new row for relation "dummy" violates check constraint "enforce_srid_the_geom"

Be sure all your geometry tables share the same srid! Srid is defined in tabel geometry_columns. update srid in this table using this statement:

select updategeometrysrid('dummy', 'the_geom', 4326);

Next update the srid in the geometries itself using this statement:

update dummy set the_geom = setsrid(the_geom,4326);

check it using:

select getsrid(the_geom) from dummy

select asewkt(the_geom) from dummy limit 10

Map file export from qgis

2008-03-18T14:00:00.001+01:00

In QGis (a desktop GIS client supporting esri-shape, postgis, wms...) you can export a project as a umn mapserver mapfile. When i tried that out yesterday, QGis 9.1 threw an error: map export error:ms_export phyton module not found. I tried replacing ms_export.py by a new one, but that didn't work out. Today i installed QGis 9.2 rc1. In QGis 9.2 ms_export is converted to a real plugin (amongst many other improvements). Also debugging is better, it still threw the same error, but the message was more descriptive! It appeared i forgot to select a project file, in the export-window. Export was succesful! http://guinea.genuchten.net

Blogged with the Flock Browser

CF/Oracle 8; expected NUMBER got DATE

2008-03-17T12:55:00.001+01:00

Today i found this error in ColdFusion 7/Oracle 8

Error Executing Database Query. [Macromedia][Oracle JDBC Driver][Oracle]ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected NUMBER got DATE

It appeared to be the fact that oracle 8 misunderstands <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_bigint"> as a date.

oracle import/export dumps

2008-01-18T15:41:00.000+01:00

An easy way to port data from one oracle database to another is import/export (bundled with oracle client software). Open a dos-box/shell and type

exp user/pw@tnsname file=export_data.dmp tables=table1,table2,table3

Import the data again with:

imp user/pw@tnsname file=export_data.dmp fromuser=olduser touser=newuser

Remind:

an export made by an user with dba-rights can't be imported by a user without dba-rights. Export the data with a user without dba-rights
You can check a dump-file on having been exported by a dba-user by opening it in Textpath. On the second line the first character is a U for User or D for DBA.
an oracle 9 client cannot export data from an oracle 10 database
If importing geodata from a 9 to a 10 database, use SDO_MIGRATE.TO_CURRENT(tabname,column_name) to convert the geometries.

optimize mapserver performance

2008-01-11T15:44:00.000+01:00

There are several ways to improve UMN-mapserver performance. These are a couple of them:

- Take care that mapserver only draws features which are visible and readable by setting proper scale-ranges for layers. If you have mapserver draw 1000s of features leaving you with a chaotic map which is onreadable, think again.

- For shapedata use the mapserver tool shptree to create a tree index for larger shapes. Mapserver uses the index to find the proper features to draw. The index is saved in shape.qix file. http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/utilityreference/shptree. Very usefull is this batch file which indexes all shapes in a directory at once (save as xxx.bat and place in shape directory)

@ECHO OFF
set shptree=""
IF EXIST C:\ms4w\tools\mapserv\shptree.exe (
set shptree=C:\ms4w\tools\mapserv\shptree.exe
)

IF %shptree%=="" (
ECHO shptree.exe is missing.
GOTO:EOF
) ELSE (
GOTO loopDir
)

:loopDir
FOR /R %%A in (*.shp) do CALL :Subroutine %%A
GOTO:EOF

:Subroutine
ECHO Index: %1
%shptree% %1
GOTO:EOF

- For a set of rasters use gdaltindex (bundled with gdal/ms4w) to index the rasters into a single shape file.

- If you have a set of comparable shapes (like shapes per city in a district). Combine them into one layer using a tileindex (tile4ms tool). http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/utilityreference/tile4ms. Tile4ms uses an input file with all the shape titles to combine. This input file can be generated with a dos-command

dir /b /s *.shp > metafile.txt

If you ever decide to move the shapes to another location. Remember to update the tileindex-dbf since it contains file references.

If you have a very large shape, it's sometimes faster to cut the shape in parts and combine the parts using tile4ms. Imaptools has created a tool, shp2tile, which can automatically slice a big shape into a set of tiles. Shp2tile as windows binary is included in ms4w.

UMN Mapserver development tools

2007-12-20T08:59:00.002+01:00

Here are some interesting tools to improve your mapfile coding work:

- http://www.mediamaps.ch/download/MapFileSyntaxColoration.zip for mapfile syntax highlighting in Eclipse
- http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=12766 is a plugin for ArcMap
to convert a set of configured layers (mxd) to a mapfile (or axl)
- See all utilities at http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/link

ColdFusion password reset

2007-09-19T12:19:00.001+02:00

Can't enter your ColdFusion administrator anymore, because your brain has a blank where the CF administrator password should be? Try this:

Log into your server with ssh as 'root'

Edit the file /opt/coldfusionmx7/lib/password.properties with your favorite text editor, something like this should work:

vi /opt/coldfusionmx7/lib/password.properties

The contents of this file look something like this:

#Wed Mar 30 14:44:26 PST 2005
rdspassword='(5_K42"O"
npassword='#<,(F-# Q
nencrypted=true

Put your new password after the = signs in the rdspassword= and password= lines, erasing everything after.

Change the encrypted=true line to encrypted=false and save this file A fully modified file might look like this:

#Wed Mar 30 14:44:26 PST 2005
rdspassword=my_new_password
password=my_new_password
encrypted=false

Restart coldfusionmx like this:

/etc/init.d/coldfusionmx restart

this may take up to a few minutes.

What about JSON

2007-07-07T13:12:00.000+02:00

Last year Yahoo introduced JSON. An ajax-alike javascript methodology. I recently used this technique in a website where ajax was not an option, since the server running the website (a .Net cms) was not the same as the server responding to the ajax calls (ColdFusion/Oracle). JSON however can be used in a construction like this (though if everybody starts exploiding it, browsers may close this option in future releases).

JSON is based on
<script src="http://www.someserver.com/some_script_engine.cfm/php/aspx" lanuage="javascript">

Yahoo offers a tutorial which uses a client-click to introduce a new <script>-tag in the html, performing a new JSON-request.

Another advantage of json is that it's fast! Ajax is xml, it means lots of overhead on your internet-line. JSON however is pure javascript content.

{ "Image": { "Width":800, "Height":600, "Title":"View from 15th Floor", "Thumbnail": { "Url":"http:\/\/scd.mm-b1.yimg.com\/image\/481989943", "Height": 125, "Width": "100" }, "IDs":[ 116, 943, 234, 38793 ] }}

Waiting for ColdFusion 8

2007-05-07T12:55:00.000+02:00

ColdFusion 8 beta is available. The new version offers some very usefull improvements like Step through code debugging in a new Eclipse plug-in debugger and Image creation and manipulation with more than 50 new CFML tags and functions. Next to that they offer better performance, a new tag suporting threading and the introduction of javascript syntax like ++, > and = (in stead of ) For more improvements view the specs

Fusebox 5 released

2007-03-04T10:48:00.000+01:00

Why should you upgrade! Actually why not, Fusebox 5 is backward compatible, so you don't have to make any changes. For me Fusebox 5 has some advantages.

Nesting of and is possible.
You can use to include a template from a different circuit.
Performance has improved (completely build as cfc)

Read about fusebox at http://www.fusebox.org/

Good to know:

Reparse your fusebox.xml using &fusebox.password=dummy&fusebox.load=true
Fusebox.org has been restyled recently

Coldfuion interface to mapserver

2007-02-03T16:41:00.000+01:00

Siber Solutions offers an CF interface to the Mapscript API via the SWIG / Java API. Now you can ask things like createMap. But also manipulte the layers (setLayerData) in the mapfile the way you want them (in stead of using %var%-variables in the url-request).

Read more at the mapserver wiki

Or download instantly at http://www.sibern.com.au/index.cfm/spid/1_8.cfm

Notice that the latest mapserver is compiled for java 1.5, ColdFusion needs java 1.4.

drag & drop
lists

2007-01-02T08:26:00.000+01:00

I bet you always wanted to re-arrange your -internet-map-layers (or pages in a cms) using drag and drop like in arcview. Recently introduced dhtml features allow you to do it. Both Dojo and script.aculo.us offer a script which can re-order <ul><li> items using drag and drop.

look at the demo at http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/show/SortableListsDemo

WMS flash viewer

2006-04-18T14:26:00.000+02:00

National Aerospace Laboratory The Netherlands has build a WMS-flash viewer. Check it out at
http://nlr-gis.nlr.nl/beeldblad. Some nice examples of several wms-services worldwide have been provided. You can also download the viewer and implement it on your own services.

ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel

2006-04-12T16:52:00.000+02:00

If you happen to get this message when (spatial) querying an oracle table. Probably the spatial index is incorrect, because it has been based on wrong dim-information in the user_sdo_geom_metadata table.

- Drop the index
- Correct the diminfo in user_sdo_geom_metadata
- Rebuild the index

INSERT INTO USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA (TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, DIMINFO, SRID)VALUES ('table', 'LOCfld',MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ARRAY(MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('X', 180000, 220000, 0.005),MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('Y', 380000, 450000, 0.005)),Null);

CREATE INDEX si_ITEM2D on table(LOCfld) indextype is mdsys.spatial_index

edges faces nodes (topology in Oracle 10g)

2006-04-05T09:16:00.000+02:00

I always tend to forget this... What exactly are edges, nodes en faces

The start node and end node for edge E4 are N1 and N2, respectively. The next left edge for edge E4 is E5, but its direction is the opposite of edge E4, and therefore the next left edge for E4 is stored as -E5 (negative E5).
The previous left edge for edge E4 is E3, and because it has the same direction as edge E4, the previous left edge for E4 is stored as E3.
The next right face is determined using the negative directed edge of E4. This can be viewed as reversing the edge direction and taking the next left edge and previous left edge. In this case, the next right edge is E2 and the previous right edge is -E6 (the direction of edge E6 is opposite the negative direction of edge E4). For edge E4, the left face is F1 and the right face is F2.
Edges E1 and E7 are neither leftmost nor rightmost edges with respect to edge E4, and therefore they do not appear in the edge table row associated with edge E4.

AcceptEx-error in apache op win

2006-03-29T16:38:00.000+02:00

When you find these kind of messages in your apache error-log: The specified network name is no longer available. : winnt_accept: Asynchronous AcceptEx failed then upgrade to apache v2.0.49 and set the Win32DisableAcceptEx directive to true.
AcceptEx() is a Microsoft WinSock v2 API that provides some performance improvements over the use of the BSD style accept() API in certain circumstances. Some popular Windows products, typically virus scanning or virtual private network packages, have bugs that interfere with the proper operation of AcceptEx() Read more

nifty corners

2006-03-27T08:36:00.000+02:00

Alessandro Fulciniti created a Nifty Corners solution based on CSS and Javascript to get rounded corners without images. Look at it at http://pro.html.it/niftycube/

OSGEO update

2006-03-11T09:40:00.000+01:00

On March 6, the open source geospatial community announced the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO), a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The board of directors that will be responsible for the drafting and execution of the foundation's charter and bylaws represent various open source projects and technologies. They are:

Arnulf Christl, Mapbender
Chris Holmes, GeoServer/GeoTools
Gary Lang, MapGuide
Markus Neteler, GRASS
Frank Warmerdam, GDAL/OGR

Ajax tutorials

2006-02-17T09:44:00.000+01:00

Looking for an introduction to Ajax (client-server dhtml).
There are quite a few AJAX demos and examples on the web right now. While these are invaluable to learning AJAX, some people need a bit more information than just a raw piece of code. Surf to http://www.maxkiesler.com/

http://local.live.com/

2005-12-09T10:08:00.000+01:00

Well, another mapping service popped up. Microsoft inproved its msn virtual earth to create http://local.live.com. Some gui-improvements are implemented, but the most interesting thing are the bird-eye views of some mayor downtown areas in the US. Pictures have been taken by Pictometry International Corp. with low flying airplanes. From each point you can look into four directions.

MapServer + Autodesk = ... Enterprize?

2005-12-02T12:20:00.000+01:00

This week autodesk and mapserver announced a cooperation in a new project MapServer Enterprize. A GPL project in which both organisations combine their technologies, to generate a new open source gis internet tool in which developers can use php, .net or java. New for the mapserver users are autodesks vector-viewing possibilities (where is SVG/GML?) and a desktop tool to configure the gis-data (at last!).

Well good news i guess. Though autodesc, not specifically being a GIS company, might not be my first choise to cooperate with. However they have a zilion of users. If they all are using MapServer soon, the comunity will be bigger than the mozilla team...

Download an early release here: http://www.mapserverfoundation.org/mapserver_enterprise

wkt syntax (howto)

2005-11-28T14:32:00.000+01:00

Geometry types and their text representations

Geometry type	WKT representation	Comment
point	POINT EMPTY	empty point
point	POINT ( 10.05 10.28 )	point
point	POINT Z( 10.05 10.28 2.51 )	point with Z coordinate
point	POINT M( 10.05 10.28 4.72 )	point with M coordinate
point	POINT ZM( 10.05 10.28 2.51 4.72 )	point with Z coordinate and M coordinate
linestring	LINESTRING EMPTY	empty linestring
polygon	POLYGON (( 10 10, 10 20,20 20, 20 15, 10 10))	polygon
multipoint	MULTIPOINT Z(10 10 2, 20 20 3)	multipoint with Z coordinates
multilinestring	MULTILINESTRING M(( 310 30 1, 40 30 20, 50 20 10 )( 10 10 0, 20 20 1))	multilinestring with M coordinates
multipolygon	MULTIPOLYGON ZM((( 1 1 1 1, 1 2 3 4, 2 2 5 6, 2 1 7 8, 1 1 1 1 )))	multipolygon with Z coordinates and M coordinates

Advanced drawing in chameleon

2005-11-24T17:08:00.000+01:00

Today i noticed the guys at http://www.uwaterloo.ca have been working on some really advanced javascript drawing techniques for chameleon. They used walter zorn's drawing library to create dynamic circle and polyline drawing tools.

opensource gis desktop clients

2005-11-23T16:37:00.000+01:00

Recently some opensource (free) desktop GIS clients came to my attention.

uDig (http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Home ) is a java-eclipse based environment for viewing maps (.shp,tiff,wms,wfs,postgis). The eclipse environment offers you ease of configuration to build your own gis-cleint.
gvSig is a free multi langual gis-client in java by a spanish firm (wms, wfs). (http://www.gvsig.gva.es )

Basic clients

openEv is a basic gis-viewer by frank warmerdam (http://fwtools.maptools.org/ )

development environments

Lots of groups offer platfoms in which you can easily build your own desktop gis client.

http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu

http://www.vividsolutions.com/jts/jtshome.htm

http://openmap.bbn.com

Free clients
- the guys at http://www.tatukgis.com created a Delphi.net environment in wich you can build your own viewer with a few clicks. But they also offer e simple viewer for free. Tatuk manages to put all gis-functionality in just a tiny 10mb application.

soon to come
- At http://fmaps.sourceforge.net they are coding to bring a decent gis-client to the linux-platform. They use postgis to store data.

sql-flavours

2005-10-20T10:54:00.000+02:00

when talking to lots of databases you notice there are many flavours of sql. Once in a while it drives me crazy to get for example the syntax for a limit in db2 and so on. Recently i found a nice overview of the different flavours: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/ So now we all know that a limit in db2 sql = 'FETCH FIRST n ROWS ONLY'

bbbike.de (open source navigation)

2005-10-14T11:52:00.000+02:00

We recently discoverded an open source navigation tool (to calculate shortest distance between points of interest) at www.bbbike.de It can be used as a standalone perl desktop application or in combination with mapserver as a server based navigation tool on the web. Good work, as far as we know, the first open source navigation map.

Eclipse all-in webdevelopper

2005-09-16T14:39:00.000+02:00

We recently changed to using Eclipse as a web-editor. Eclipse is an open-source editor which has been designed to program java-applets, but in the meanwhile lots of other tools have been incorporated to support web-development in general. Now we can use 1 tool to edit web-templates, look in to jdbc-databases (oracle,mysql,postgres), do file-comparissons and cooperate using version management.

A special plug-in is available to work with cold fusion (cfeclipse) this plug-in has equal capacities as studio/homesite (like syntax highlighting,collapsing).

Another nice thing is that it runs on java and you don't need to install anything to get eclipse going, so if we visit a customer where we do not have lots of privileges, we copy eclipse to the harddrive and start working.

Some disadvantages are: the total code is at least some 200mb of files (huge download) and it runs on the java-platform which sometimes gives some performance issues on windows computers.

Mapserver virtualspatialdata

2005-09-16T14:29:00.000+02:00

It's a long time ago since i posted something here... (got married in the meantime). These days we are working on an application in which users can insert point-data in an mysql-table. The data is displayed in the map afterwards.

The application is based on chameleon/mapserver. To present the data virtualspatialdata is used. The mapserver Wiki gives a clear description on how to implement is. However i'd like to point you on a single issue.

When i first tested my virtual ogr file using ogrinfo (on a windows 2000 sp3 server), I recieved messages that the file gcs.csv could not be opened, containing the projection information.

ERROR 4: Unable to open EPSG support file gcs.csv. Try setting the GDAL_DATA environment variable to point to the directory containing EPSG csv files.
ERROR 1: Failed to import LayerSRS `EPSG:28992'.

The reason was that i hadn't run setenv.bat.

Later when i tried to view the virtualdatalayer in mapserver i got the same messages. Apparently mapserver/apache/ogr also didn't know where to look for the projection-files. After introducing the parameter gdal_data in apache config the layer was displayed properly.

SetEnv gdal_data "/ms4w/tools/ogr-utils/data"

Good luck trying out yourself.

Msn virtual earth

2005-07-27T09:16:00.000+02:00

So it seams MSN copied google's ideas to create a world-mapping-application... Unfortunately they lack speed and functionality. Test it at http://virtualearth.msn.com. It seems they virtually destroyed Apple's headquarters (1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014) and reinserted old farm houses (= in that specific situation they used old photographic material).

*fun* Do you know what material the moon is made of primarily? Find out by zooming in at any position at http://moon.google.com

chameleon-shirts

2005-07-26T18:24:00.000+02:00

I recently noticed you can buy t-shirts with the chameleon logo, so from now, you can show all you're friends, what you're working on (and hope they understand).

http://www.cafepress.com/maptools

satellite imagery of europe in Google maps

2005-06-21T11:23:00.000+02:00

Google recently added satellite imagery of the whole world to its fast mapping service. Until now only the united states could enjoy their fast mapping service. But we're very pleased to see the whole world getting visible in google maps

Very interesting is the imagery of Africa. A part of the world where not much internet-mapping is available (in most cases, no maps are available). Maybe the google service can aid scientists and development workers there by providing easy-to-use, fast imagery of the region. Personally i visited Cameroon, Kenya and Guinee and could easily point out the various trips i made to maintains and cities.

Variables in CF

2005-06-10T14:06:00.000+02:00

Try this out...

<cfoutput>
<cfset x["y.z"] = "a">
#x.y.z#
<cfset x.y.z = "b">
#x.y.z#
#x["y.z"]#
<cfdump var="#x#">
</cfoutput>

the amazing world of CF

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

2005-04-27T12:18:00.000+02:00

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

2005-04-26T22:15:00.000+02:00

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

2005-04-19T12:00:00.000+02:00

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

2005-04-14T16:51:00.000+02:00

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?

2005-04-13T14:51:00.000+02:00

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

2005-04-06T16:29:00.000+02:00

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

New css stuff

2005-03-31T11:14:00.000+02:00

i'm frequently amazed what those dhtml-boys can do with just a little html, javascript and css. check these out:

clagnut.com (firefox only) these guys present draggable, resizable stickies (found at www.stylegala.com).
alistapart.com shows a pure css menu, but it looks very non-css.
Walter zorn created some scripts to enable dynamic drawing in your html-website. Draw a polygon and submit, write the form-fields to your oracle spatial db and a simple red-lining module was born.

By the way, do you need a small, free, windows photo editor and don't want to install the gimp? Try http://photofiltre.free.fr

label angle in mapserver

2005-03-30T12:28:00.000+02:00

The department of natural resources Minnesota set up a demo-site with some nice features of mapserver. All nicely documented with examples and downloads. Go have a look. Things like label angels dynamix label sizing, automatic rotation for lines(streets), live mapping and dynamic queries. Visit http://maps.dnr.state.mn.us/mapserver_demos/tests40/index.html

By the way anybody has an sql-implementation of an oracle spatial conversion from two x-y colums to a spatial point geometry field (like an event-theme in arcview)? I have a ColdFusion script doing this one time (interested, send me an email), but i'm looking for a dynamic solution.

FGS Linux Installer

2005-03-29T11:47:00.000+02:00

on www.maptools.org a new package (FGS) is available. This package can install all required components to compile mapserver at once on Linux. The following distibutions are supported:

Redhat 8, 9
Fedora Core 1, 2, 3
RedHat Enterprise 3
Debian
Gentoo
Suse 8

The package contains things like apache, php, mapserver, gd, gdal, proj, tiff, jpg and freetype

Extra modules are available like mysql,postgis,chameleon. I hope this package solves some installation problems for some of you. Somebody any idea why suse 9 is not supported?

alternatives for sqlplus/enterprice manager console

2005-03-24T10:05:00.000+01:00

Several alternatives exsist for oracle's sqlplus/enterprice manager console. Some of them free (gpl), some of them commercial.

www.sqltools.net brings a free lightweight oracle client, but unfortunately without support for spatial fields.
www.sqlpal.com has a free java client that can connect through jdbc, for that reason it doesn't need oracle client to be installed at the local machine. sqlpal can't show spatial fields either.
www.toadsoft.com sells a commercial client which can show spatial fields, and a free client which can not (free license has to be updated every 3 months).
www.dbtools.com sells a commercial client that can connect to lots of databases, including oracle (display of spatial fields unknown). Their free license can connect to mysql, postgres, interbase and sqllite. Very usefull to convert msAccess to MySql

Mapserver hosting

2005-03-22T22:42:00.000+01:00

It's hard to find an affordable mapserver host. These are the ones i found. From each site i chose the cheapest option.

mapserver hosting	price ?/month	disk	postgis	mysql	php
http://htmlx.com	15	500	y	y	y
http://www.zopecms.de/
http://www.dvm.at/mapserver.html	36	1000	y	y
www.gishosting.net
www.nieuwland.nl	25	100	y	y	y
http://www.eikonix.net	89	1000		y
http://www.sibern.com.au	110		y	y	y
http://www.gdv-gis.de/hosting/	30	500	n	n	n
http://mapserver.eligeos.org/
http://textdrive.com/	12	300		y	y
http://www.gislogic.com/hosting.cfm			y	y	y
http://www.pghoster.com			y	y	y

did i forgot your company, send me an email.

webbased ftp client

2005-03-22T20:53:00.000+01:00

Lots of you are behind firewalls, or can't install progs... i found a nice solution 4U guys. On the website www.net2ftp.com you can upload and download files from an ftp-server in a webpage.

By the way, wanna see some nice aerials from barcelona, check this out: http://www.gencat.net/ptop/actuacions/hipermapa.htm

So you wanna boycot some bad companies...

2005-03-16T21:43:00.000+01:00

Go to http://www.karmabanque.com/ and subscribe. Choose different companies to boycot and see their share-value go down (and your karma-dollars go up). Bad companies are companies who ruin the environment, earn money on childrens labour or do other bad things to society (like mc donalds, microsoft, Exxon, Ryanair). Good work guys.
After subscribing send me an email and i'll invite you to some boycots (the way to earn karma-dollars)

"name can't be empty"... what?

2005-03-16T16:54:00.000+01:00

Somewhere deep in my cfc's i got this message thrown by ColdFusion mx61. The problem appeared simple, Somehow my datasource variable got blank. Cold fusion throws this descriptive error when you ask [cfquery dsn=""]Select...

And now this: while doing CF-webservices 1000 of times already i've seen the CF-quote: '[java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError : Dependent CFC type(s) have been modified. Please refresh your web service client.]'. Some discussion can be found on the net, but nobody really can tell what's going on. First try to clean up the webservices cache in cf (use this script). That solved some, but not all problems. I ended up renaming all the cfc's i extend with the webservice and the references to them. That did the trick, but in the end leaves me with cfc's called error23.cfc
i hope so much CF7 solves these issues. Hope to tell you about it soon.

Now it's time for some interactivity

2005-03-15T22:01:00.000+01:00

Hi, just a little fizzling around with inlinewms

click=zoom in;ctrl-click=zoom out;shift-click=recenter

why guinea? well i've got some family there...

mapserver/oracle on win2000/iis

2005-03-15T16:19:00.000+01:00

Oh man, i hate iis, you can never find what aspect of it is causing a problem, just too many screens and options (each different per os/iis-version). Today i tried to install a mapserver precompiled binary on two servers (one winxp and one win2000).

after starting up by placing the files in the required directories, i found out (type mapserv.exe on the dos-prompt, fix dependencies until: 'This script can only be used to decode form results and should be initiated as a CGI process via a httpd server.') some more dll's were needed (msvcp60.dll (windows runtime) and a libpq.dll (postgis), both found in the fwtools package). Then all worked fine, on the winxp-test server (calling mapserv.exe as a cgi should result in 'No query information to decode. QUERY_STRING is set, but empty. '). When i repeated the procedure in the win2000 machine up to type mapserv at the dos-promt. But when trying to call mapserv.exe as a cgi things went wrong. First the very descriptive message 'file not found'. Appeared to be a problem with rights, i had to tell this IIS to permit .exe programs (also you have to allow script execution in the folder). When i fixed that i got a blank response on all my requests. I thought iis was the problem, but when i replaced the binary by a slightly newer binary found at http://fwtools.maptools.org, an answer as expected was shown (but this binary doesn't have oracle support unfortunately). So somewhere in that server is a misconfiguration or dependency, which i can't resolve, because mapserver-logging was not triggered (Does iis have a logging option?).

oh, do i love compiling my own progs in linux, easily add all the options i want, and skip all the utilities i don't need, they only give unwanted side effects.

By the way i used gdaltindex.exe (part of fwtools) for the first time today. It is used to make a tileindex of a set op jpg/tiff aerial photo's (and add all photo's as a single layer in mapserver). This really works great: 'c:\profi\fwtools\bin\gdaltindex indexname c:\data\photos\*.jpg'. Be sure to have a world file (did you know all *.tfw (for tiff) *.sdw (for mrSid) can be renamed to *.wld and instantaniously work for jpg's) for each image (type 'copy *.tfw *.wld' at the dos-prompt). If the location of the photo's changes, re-run gdaltindex or open the shape dbf in Excel and search/replace the file location in the location field.

I forgot to tell you about the ora-03113 error, according to resources on the net, it is the error oracle throws when it doesn't know what went wrong. Since we were getting it when creating materialized views on large tables, i suspect it's a memory problem (experts say: try increasing the buffer size... well were can i find the buffer-button?)

FarCry open cms in cf

2005-03-15T15:32:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately one of the greatest open source CF projects is not available in cfopen.org. Farcry is a spin-off of the discontinued Allaire Spectra project. Spectra has been used by some large firms, a lot of them switched to Farcry now. It takes some time to get used to the large file structure, but possibilities are limitless.
Read about FarCry at http://farcry.daemon.com.au/

New gdal version 1.2.6 available

2005-03-15T10:37:00.000+01:00

Frank Warmerdam announced last sunday there is a new version of gdal 1.2.6. With one of the most important improvements, support for mrSid. Gdal is the GPL spatial conversion lib used by mapserver to convert all types of geodata to geodata used by Mapserver. http://www.gdal.org. Gdal enables oracle,postgis,ecw and much more in mapserver.

Cold Fusion Image manager for htmlarea 2 and htmlarea 3

2005-03-14T11:29:00.000+01:00

Before i started using fckeditor, i've been using htmlarea, i've rebuild the phpimage_manager-module to CF. I got some questions to share the code. Here it is. It's a while back, so i'm not sure all off the configuration still is right. The code is based on the Wei-module.

download image_manager4htmlarea3.zip

For htmlarea 2 I develloped a basic file manager in coldfusion. Get it here: image_manager4htmlarea2.zip

Recently the developers of htmlarea discontinued htmlarea 2/3 and removed it from their website. They launched a new site, htmlarea, in which they offer a listing of all kinds of wyswyg editors. htmlarea is only available via the wei-module at sourceforge.

cfopen.org

2005-03-14T10:22:00.000+01:00

This weekend found a nice initiative: http://www.cfopen.org/, which must have been around since mid 2004. Unforunately not much is going on in the forums. So i'm curious whether there will be some response on my questions about the two most interesting projects: cfbughunt and cfusergroup. Perhaps the coldfusion community is not used to the world of sharing, since all of them payed a lot to macromedia to get started in the first place and most of them still develop apps for CF on Windows using db's like Access and MsSQL.
But still a nice idea, i wish'm good luck.

Weird bug in winXP 'no disk in \device\harddisk1\dr12' when starting QuickTime

2005-03-13T13:36:00.000+01:00

Another weird micr$oft bug... (or is it a quicktime bug). When starting QuickTime a popup keeps showing up showing the massage 'no disk in \device\harddisk1\dr12' (and none in \device\harddisk2\dr14, \device\harddisk3\dr15, \device\harddisk4\dr18, 12 popups in total).

Microsoft wrote a technote on it, but that didn't work for me...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330137/en-us

Finally found an answer on some german site.

http://nickles.de/c/a/forum2-537724576.htm

They claim QuickTime keeps a list of recently used items and every time QuickTime starts, checks for the items in the list. Some of the recently used items were on removable drives (memory stick). Quicktime (or is it windows) doesn't recognize the removable drive and shows the error.

Solve the problem by clearing the list of recently used items, or remove the file
c:\docs&seetings\all users\appdata\quicktime\QuickTimeFavorites.qtr

Oracle 9i 3D to 2D data for mapserver

2005-03-11T16:34:00.000+01:00

Another weird thing we discovered in mapserver / OraSpatial is the fact that mapserver can not display 3D data. Fortunately Oracle has a function to reproject the data to 2D. To prevent that in each query, all the data is converted to 2d, before making the extent-selection we used a materialized view (snapshot) to reproject the data and keep it available for mapserver. In a snapsot all data is copied so it takes a lot of diskspace. In this months oracle magazine, u can read a nice article (http://oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/05-mar/o25data.html) on snapshots.

CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW ITEM2D
BUILD IMMEDIATE
REFRESH NEXT sysdate + 1
AS select
SDO_LRS.CONVERT_TO_STD_GEOM(i.geometry,m.diminfo) as loc
from
item i,
user_sdo_geom_metadata m
where
m.table_name = 'item'
and
m.column_name = 'GEOMETRY'

In for example Toad, the materialized view is not stored in the list of views, but as a table. However the snapshot can not be removed using drop table, instead use drop materialized view ?item2D? (in quotes). Don?t forget to create a new spatial index on the materialized view (since its not a normal view)

INSERT INTO USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA (TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, DIMINFO, SRID)
VALUES ('ITEM2D', 'LOC',
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ARRAY
(MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('X', 180000, 220000, 0.005),
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('Y', 380000, 450000, 0.005)
),
19025);

and

CREATE INDEX si_ITEM2D on ITEM2D(LOC) indextype is mdsys.spatial_index

Finally installed CFMX 7

2005-03-11T10:37:00.000+01:00

We finally got some CFMX 7 servers up and running. Some weird problems occured which we can not find in the macromedia forums: Every time CF starts up (on a SUSE Linux box), it tries to register in the apache config. Occasionally the server hangs when it finds out it has already been registered.

Well this is a moment we've been waiting for quite a while. Major issues fixed in this release are:

Better cfc/Web services support (as we found out unfortunately not all the wishes of the community)
querynew function can finally set fieldtypes for colums (and it works great!).
cfdocument and cfreport can easily create pdf docs of db-content (first tests look great, support for divs)

Mapserver project 4 Mambo CMS

2005-03-11T10:29:00.000+01:00

Recently a mr Ye Shakka started a new project to bring GIS (UMN mapserver) to the popular world of Mambo CMS (PHP/MYSQL). Off course we encourage the efforts of mr Ye Shakka, but wouldn't it be nicer to integrate exsisting projects into Mambo, like mapbender, chameleon or very basic solutions like inlineWMS and WMC.

Afterall a good moment to join the Mambo community, however when i tried to subscribe the system failed and sent me a blank confirmation email.