Lots happening this week. The top story is Google's hire of Plone co-founder Alexander Limi. Limi claims that the one day a week he'll be free to work on the Plone codebase is more than he now has. We'll have to wait and see. At any rate, a great opportunity for him.

The Open Planning Project is helping to organize the Big Apple Plone Sprint. Folksonomic tagging, annotations, and syndication are the topics that are the most immediately interesting to me. We'd like to put some of this to work in the Pleiades site.

I'll be attending the Plone Conference this year instead of FOSS4G. Josh Livni and Chris Calloway have suggested PrimaGIS as a topic for the post-conference sprint, and now there it is on the tentative list. Sweet! I think it would be even better to expand the topic to Plone and geospatial in general and aim to come away with more interoperability between the several Plone mapping products.

Via the Google Earth Blog I see that the Grand Boucle has teamed up with Google to address their need for KML. Meanwhile, I'm bummed that Valverde crashed out of the race in stage 3.

Stunning. And I was really looking forward to watching a bike race this summer. Instead, it's a soap opera.

La Quinta is Spanish for America West and US Airways screwed me. The worst decision I made last night was trying to get onto the last flight to Denver by hook or crook instead of cutting my losses and calling James Fee to see if he wanted to go out for a beer and a taco. At least the airport has free wireless so that I can catch up on email and continue to publish the new scandal-loaded tabloid edition of import cartography.

TOPP, which employs Chris Holmes and sponsors GeoServer, just hired Ian Bicking. I've been reading Bicking's blog for a while now, and am hoping that they get him involved a bit in Python geospatial stuff.

Update: made corrections based on a comment.

ESRI and other businesses are being drawn into an investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) and a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm.

From the AP:

Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., located in Lewis' hometown of Redlands, Calif., received a subpoena seeking records of its dealings with the Washington, D.C., firm of Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton & White, a person with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday.

A couple things I'll note, which Adena did not, are the $55.4 million earmarked for ESRI in 2004 and 2005, and that the company is referred to by the AP as a "defense contractor". I'm not sure whether the writer is unware of their large software business or not. Earmarking, for readers outside the US, is not illegal, but is a practice inconsistent with responsible government.

OpenLayers 1.0 has been released. It's a simple open source map browser in the style of Google Maps. According to the discussion on several lists the OpenLayers team may be joined by the leading ka-Map developers, and OpenLayers may replace some client-side parts of ka-Map. I suggest that we consider the same move for PrimaGIS.

I'm very grateful for the kind hospitality of Chris Calloway and TriZPUG this week. I hope their upcoming Python Boot Camp is a huge success. For anyone who may be interested, here are the few and skeletal slides of my talk.

I made a mistake in a previous post. My talk for the Triangle Zope and Python Users Group is actually at Duke University next Tuesday, not UNC-CH. I'm really looking forward to meeting the members and finding out what interesting applications they might have for PCL and PrimaGIS.

I love holidays, particularly the old school holidays. Fertility rituals, Dionysian excess, and bonfires. Nothing says summer quite like a bonfire! My friend and colleague Kai Hanninen is off enjoying the Finnish holiday of Juhannus, which sounds a lot more exciting than our Father's Day. I'm going to do a pale imitation of Juhannus here this weekend: grill the last steaks from 2005's steer and open the bottle of Vieux Telegraphe that I've been saving in the cellar. A citronella tiki torch will have to do for a bonfire. In addition to Midsummer we're also celebrating my wife's tenure, and our daughter's 8 month anniversary.

Juhannus also seems to be the occaision for rock festivals. Check out the headliner for Joensuun Juhannus: Lordi!