Aha!

Several FRII accounts have been compromised over the past few weeks due to a spoof email sent out to obtain their login info. These compromised accounts, unfortunately, led to the FRII ip being blacklisted on several ISP's. We our hopefully on the tail end of the matter but it sounds like Akismet might be an additional ISP we need to contact. If you haven't attempted to send a message to an Akismet user today, go ahead and attempt to again. If you get a bounce back, please forward the message to customercare@frii.com for our evaluation.

I got confirmation yesterday that Akismet was indeed sending my comments to WordPress blog spam bins. I think this is the first time I've ever been blacklisted.

And now I just received the spoof email:

Dear Frii Email Account Owner,

This message is from Frii messaging center to all Frii email account owners.

We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center.

We are deleting all unused Frii email account to create morespace for new accounts.

To prevent your account from closing you will have to update it below sothat we will know that it's a present used account.

CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL IDENTITY BELOW Email Username : ......... ..... EMAIL Password :................

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Thank you for using Frii!

I can't believe people still fall for this con.

Wouldn't you know: Dick Cheney and his shadow scientific community have other plans for those Right Whales.

Most cynical. Government. Ever.

Howard and Marios have released SpatialIndex 1.3.1. This fixes a few memory leaks and gets us a couple steps closer to being ready for production on Windows. From the release notes:

• Fixed gcc/vc compatibility issues with TemporaryFile.cc
• Fixed memory leaks in LineSegment.cc
• Fixed memory leaks in MovingRegion.cc
• Fixed memory leaks in mvrtree/Node.cc
• Renamed rand48.hpp to rand48.h

Here, continuing on from my previous post, are some of the forces arrayed against an all-encompassing OSGeo Python framework:

Scarcity: few develop GIS applications using Python, fewer applications that would benefit from a global library, and fewer yet would contribute to the development of the global library. From my experience, you can't expect more than 3 people at the top of this community pyramid. That's probably not enough. And you can't really count on this number increasing very much in the future. Users want apps and data, not libraries and APIs. See Google Earth. Yes, there are exceptions, but Java, not Python, is their home.

Scale: GDAL, OGR, PROJ4, GRASS, QGIS, MapServer, ... data, analysis, projections, stats, graphical user interfaces, printed and plotted maps, service oriented architecture, ... that's a lot to keep in your head. Designing such a thing is a big job for a small team, not something you knock out in a week unless you join the GeoTools/GeoAPI cargo cult like I did when I started PCL (after which you'll realize that Python programmers don't want GeoTools). Programming in Python is more productive than programming in Java, or .NET, but designing Python libraries isn't any easier. Without a driving business need or lots of itch scratching (which won't happen, as I explained above), the task of designing a global OSGeo Python library is doomed by the size of its scope.

Physics: a Python library that depends on

• GDAL/OGR (and Xerces, etc)
• MapServer (and Agg, etc)
• GRASS
• QGIS (and Qt, etc)

is like a giant cinema spider, awesome on the drawing board, but in reality something that can't but collapse under its own weight. There are too many dependencies, too many of which have no current binaries, with incompatible Python bindings written by hand, or generated by SWIG or SIP. There's also a rather large amount of functional overlap among these projects, governance of which is something that GeoTools (which I'm continuing to hold up as a successful holistic library) doesn't have to be concerned about. I suspect the social and software engineering details haven't fully dawned on OSGeo developers yet. These details are not an itch I need to scratch, they are a patch of poison oak I need to avoid falling into.

Well, that's the verbose edition. The shorter history of PCL: it's brutally hard and there is precious little reward for the designer. I feel like there's more to write on Python and geospatial or GIS frameworks, especially with reference to the Python web framework debates, but that's for another day.

GeoJSON, the Python project, is a reference implementation of GeoJSON, the format specification, and also of the Python geo interface. Matthew Russell and I have brought it up to date with the current draft version of the spec and uploaded 1.0a4 to PyPI.

Before the final 1.0, I think we need to rename this. The package name, "geojson", is fine, but a new project name would invite less confusion with the specification project.

My comments on WordPress blogs this week are vanishing without any confirmation or trace. Dan Cohen's Digital Campus, Stephen Ramsay, and now Andrew Turner. Nothing. I'll bundle them together here as a last resort:

• Digital Campus episode 25: good stuff! Anybody who is wondering whether they'd better start porting their PHP apps to Python should read Ian Bicking's recent posts about PHP and Python deployment.
• Stephen Ramsay: I have the same reaction to "My" sites. That word can be almost like a code smell.
• Andrew Turner: better yet curl -X PUT ... ;) I'm not a Twitter user, but still, there's an HTTP method dedicated to updating the state of a web resource.

Got an email today with a link to an OSGeo Python Library proposal:

Several OSGeo software projects support Python. However, a global abstraction layer is lacking which would help to do "OSGeo Python programming". We think of well documented bindings to the various software projects which are handled as plugins (or whatever appropriate).

I'm going to write more on this topic in the near future, but let me begin simply by warning that those who do not learn from the history of PCL are doomed to repeat it.

Fort Collins, my hometown, "where renewal is a way of life" (ugh), is going through a branding fiasco. Check out the lifeless new logo below:

But maybe we should be grateful: it could have been much much worse (or better, for comedians). Thanks for the link, Josh.

Here's the neighborhood vulture roost at sunset, with half of the birds still incoming.

As we did last year, we're regularly one light-colored Buteo soaring with the vultures when they return, and occasionally a second. Ferruginous Hawks, from their markings, and we speculate that they might be using the vulture flock as cover while hunting prairie dogs and jackrabbits. I know I would, in their shoes.