Update (2008-01-25): the link immediately below is broken. Fake James was just a candle in the wind, I guess.

Is Steve Citron-Pousty right? Is there nothing I like? I'm sure he never could guess how much I like feeding the birds in my neighborhood. There's a gang of 5 Black-capped Chickadees (which sing an extra third song here in the Fort, bet you didn't know that either), a pair of Mountain Chickadees, 3 Red-breasted Nuthatches (back, plus one, after shunning us last year), a White-breasted Nuthatch (my favorite), pairs of Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, every variation of Junco, Goldfinches, Blue Jays, House Finches, Sparrows, Mourning Doves, and Flickers. The Flicker is a pigeon-sized woodpecker that thrives in this town. We have about 9 regulars ... minus one.

Returning home for lunch today, we found a Cooper's Hawk standing on, and tearing at, an unlucky Flicker directly underneath our feeder. My daughter was fascinated, no squeamishness at all. We were able to observe it feed for about 5 minutes before it hauled its prey off to a more private spot. Sadly, I'd removed my camera from our backpack just this morning or I would have been able to get a awesome wildlife action photo on my doorstep.

I meant to write this last week, but ran out of time. Stefano Mazzocchi writes:

My holy grail hiking/exploring map should have points of interests, morphology (contours/rivers/lakes), access roads and trails ... in that order of importance.

The best way, of course, would be to build your own and I did research a bit into ways to do that, but I had to give up pretty early on: there is a lot of software on how to get data in and out of your Garmin but not a lot of freely available mapping data and, worst, there was no community where people would get together and share experience and tools.

Until OpenStreetMap came along, that is.

Actually, the GDAL and MapServer communities were doing this kind of stuff well before OSM started, but it's interesting that a technically savvy person starting from scratch today might find the OSM community first and completely overlook the old timers.

Stick your head in there and you might get clocked. Seriously: REST and web frameworks aren't mutually exclusive at all. Rails prides itself on being RESTful. There's Restlet and others. You don't think that the Google web apps are developed without some framework, do you?

Brady Forrest nearly equates Zillow's free (as in speech) neighborhood boundary data with Urban Mapping's free (as in beer, while supplies last, domestic only -- hey, no sharing) neighborhood ID API. I'm not calling on anybody to give away their proprietary data, just pointing out that, in fact, these things are only equivalent if you have no other application than answering simple questions like: "what neighborhoods contain (long, lat)?" There are many interesting questions that you can only ask with the boundary data itself, or only by hammering the Urban Mapping services Monte Carlo style.

The Friday before a 3 day weekend may not be the best time to release, but it's done and I'm ready to move ahead. Share and enjoy: Shapely 1.0 (RIP, Douglas Adams).

I had fun working on this project. I had fun picking the name. I even enjoyed writing the manual. Major portions of this work were supported by a grant (to Pleiades) from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (http://www.neh.gov). It was part of my day job and I think that goes as well for the other contributors, but I also did some after hours volunteer work to keep it real. I'd also like to thank Yo la Tengo, Sonny Rollins, my family, and the letters G, E, O, and S.

I've been hearing great things about Mercurial (for a while. At the Pythoneers meeting I attended last spring, IPython developer Fernando Perez attested to its usefulness in a code sprint: programmers can pull changesets from each other with no need for a central server. It's written in Python, free (as in speech), backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy, and has a great tutorial. For what it's worth, Linus Torvalds says Mercurial is no git but doesn't suck like Subversion. The interface is similar in many ways to cvs or svn, but with no central repository getting started is trivial:

$ apt-get install mercurial
$ cd /tmp
$ hg init foo-project

There's your first repository. I set up a publicly readable repo on my server (using the Hg CGI) and pushed my local Gdawg repo to it using ssh. Voila: http://sgillies.net/sgillies/hg. Clone Gdawg (think checkout) to your own computer like this:

$ hg clone http://sgillies.net/sgillies/hg/gdawg my-gdawg

That Autodesk had acquired CS-Map and was going to donate it to us open source orphans was pretty much the only thing the average GIS person heard from the media in regards to the 2007 FOSS4G conference. Any news? Is it waiting on a MapGuide release or what?

I'm trying to keep up with INSPIRE developments because I'm curious about how big time architects approach big time geospatial projects. I don't have time to ingest all the papers coming out of the INSPIRE community and am partially dependent on the recommendations of others such as Jeff Thurston, who is following INSPIRE more than any other blogger. I was surprised to see, in the European Commission's Data State of Play, such an emphasis on Model-driven architecture (MDA). Surprised in part because of Ed Parson's explanation of the conservative approach required by INSPIRE:

Now here is the rub, despite the fact that much of the INSPIRE directive is not expected to be implemented until at least 2010, it is been designed now and must used well specified and recognised standards - things like the ISO 19100 series of standards developed by the Open GeoSpatial Consortium.

It’s not difficult to appreciate the problem, REST based interfaces, KML, GeoJSON, GeoRSS etc might actually be the best technologies to use today and would be the tools of choice of many, however like many other Government IT projects INSPIRE needs to follow the low risk route of SOAP, WSDL, WMS, WFS etc.

Nevermind that I think Ed's assessment of WS-risk is wrong. Gartner's 2006 analysis had MDA 5-10 years out and nowhere near the so-called plateau of productivity that INSPIRE should be mining for technology. MDA is emerging technology. It is conceivable that, like CORBA (probably the most famous OMG technology), MDA may never really emerge into mainstream use.

Here's where I agree with proponents of MDA: code is not an asset. Under MDA, designers write models and code is generated by tools. The tools are presumably written by extremely talented programmers using bombproof processes, or by meta tools, or by a hierarchy of meta tools and AIs. Or idiot-savant demons from another universe where time runs faster. Theodore Sturgeon's Neoterics. Gods of programming. Ideally, the code generated by these tools would be of higher quality and lower cost than code written by merely mortal programmers. It would also be practically disposable. As Steve Vinoski explains, very few of us write machine code anymore, and MDA is just taking the abstraction to greater heights.

Lest you think I'm just talking through my hat, know that I'm actually "doing" MDA for Pleiades: we have an entity model in annotated UML from which we generate Python classes for Plone using the ArchGenXML tool. It works well enough, but I honestly think we're only just breaking even. Python is a terse language already, and learning and writing the UML annotations eats up the resources I would have spent writing Python code directly. Perhaps if we were using a language full of boilerplate and syntactic noise we would find code generation more productive. Certainly if productivity were measured by lines of code, but maybe also if measured by the time to deliver products. But we're not using such languages. We're using Python, which lets me accomplish the same tasks with the fraction of the code I'd need to write in C, or Java, or C#.

Maybe the INSPIRE community is overlooking a simpler and more mature solution to the overabundance of code problem: more productive programming languages like Python and Ruby? It's a large and sure step in the right direction.

Incidently, Vinoski's and Tomayko's views on definition languages and code generation came together Monday on Vinoski's blog. Lots of food for thought in that post.

An SOA governance platform based on AtomPub. Why not? Via James Snell.