Code Sprint Location

Just a reminder the code sprint is today (are you awake?) Information sheet is here.

University of Technology Sydney – Ultimo Campus, Level 3, Building 6

Please remember to bring your own water :-)

FOSS4G Day n+2

A big thank you to all of those who attended the GeoTools tutorial today; it was a great success - with a few surprises for me! I would like to especially thank Michael Bedward for slanting the tutorials into being visual. I was happy to see the laptops already out when I arrived in the tutorial rooms; we had a little more Eclipse in the crowd then Netbeans (but a fairly even split) with a lone VI user to keep us all honest.

I managed to catch up with the JGrass presentations this afternoon and enjoyed the information. Often we focus on the technology; and I was happy to see results. I was hoping for a bit more on climate change out of the conference and glad to see these presentations playing to a busy room.

GeoMajas presentation is walking me through how Javascript development is hard. With a few scary examples to make your blood run cold; or you just relax and work a bit harder. At the ten minuet mark we are starting to get to GWT.

FOSS4G Day n+1

Okay I know we cannot all count; rounding up some of the other posts we have a classic off-by one error (and I think as usually I have introduced the bug).

- Mark is considering starting Day 1 and Day 2

- He is supported in this numbering by Cedric with Day 1 and Day 2

It seems I have started at zero with a post about Workshops and Installfest and the commenting on the first day people started speaking (rather then doing).

Doing was a big theme for me today; with a "A Friendly Hands-on Survey of Popular Geospatial Services". The Hands-on aspect of the tutorial was a bit startling; and when asked to bring out their laptops around 40% of the people left - later it was explained that the tutorial descriptions were not published in the program.

The tutorial was a great success; thanks to Mark, Andrea and Silvia for the assistance. I will publish the workbooks online when I sort out how the conference plans to handle this; and I hope they will offer a great complement to the LiveDVD.

Conference wise I really enjoyed the demonstration theatre (where I finally got to see the GeoServer extension publishing information into world wind). It is great to see the format extension mechanism used in such a creative manner.

Also in the demo theatre was blown away by the deegree teams accomplishments with the Climate Change Integration Plugfest. I am really happy to see such a strong open source response to an interesting Challenge.

I manned the OSGeo booth for the afternoon and had several interesting conversions in response to yesterday's strong Web Processing Service showing. Apparently my enthusiasm was noticed.

I managed to catch a little bit of the GeoServer Users Group; and was excited to hear about the real world experiences (and really wish we could get more case studies - both good and bad - for the GeoServer blog).

FOSS4G Day 1

Opening session.

Nice introduction from Cameron; kudos to thanking the local indigenous community for managing the land. I could not write down interesting statistics fast enough.

Warwick Watkins for the intro to the local market let us see if we can learn something.

• Government monopoly on content; which is fair enough since land is the substance of land. 2500 property dealings a day. Scary that British Columbia has out sourced this management :-(
• Platforms and service delivery; mentions Google and Wester Australia SLIP. Spatial Data Infrastructure as a goal for open source; nods to INSPIRE. In Australia ANZLIC is focused on building first generation catalogues. Setting up SLIP, Open Street Maps and OpenLayers as the second generation. Reminder to focus on data quality; regardless of what software useful.
• Licensing as a lead up to Australia generally moving to creative commons (which is very cool to hear this at a government level). Apparently ANZLIC will be talking in this direction in their next meeting.

Richard Marles; standing in for the Minister. Plenty of funding mentioned; interesting track on IP which has been adopted by GeoScience Australia.

Raj Singh; open standards and open source; long term relationship. And a canned video CCIP? I was hoping to hear him talk. The video just said extract three times in a row. And now we are looking at an ArcMap client as part of the intro to FOSS4G. Fun. Still nice to see the ties between OGC and OSGeo working out with WMTS being an offshoot of FOSS4G 2006

Paul Ramsey; fun. "What is that we do?". How do we make a living. Interesting Paul can get away with a video since he talked through it. And then Monty Python. Nice transition to the economy of programmer attention.

----

Tutorials - wow are tutorials full. The rooms are slated for 46 people; and there was standing room only. I also saw that Dr. Koch presentation on "Custom GIS Applications using Open Source Toolkits" had gone past standing room only and had people in the hallway looking in.

This afternoons demonstrations were great; I was very impressed with the TERENO sensor data work and how in touch that community is. ESRI's demonstration of OGC SWE using 52 North plugins was polished; and it was nice to see the Tasmania services getting used.

This afternoon I am in a session focused around Web Processing Services; and although I am fascinated by the applications of this technology I am suffering a bit from the gap between the abilities opened up here and the reality of what is available today.

It was refreshing to see actually deployed systems; thanks to SCENZ-Grid for showing working examples (and hitting almost every open source project along the way!).

Goa Ang provided a great visual query builder for distributed WPS work; looks to be built on NetBeans. I would love to see this group hooked with some scientific data in order to ground the work. Really fun photo of OSGeo China; and it looks like they have monthly lecture.

Zoo is up next and they are following the recipe for open-source success. They were formed last year at FOSS4G 2008 - and they have a diverse group of collaborating organisations. Looks to be GeoExt based...with python backend.

Workshops and Installfest

Today was the 1st day of the conference; almost a prequel. I would like to thank Mark Leslie for doing an excellent job of organising the workshops this year. And remind any of those attending that feedback forms are online... somewhere.

A special thanks to today's instructors; a fascinating range applications and adventures in spatial wonderment were displayed.

The Installfest broke up into stations around individual software packages; but we never quite got a rotation going which I was looking forward to. Ended up acting a bit more like a bird of feather hands on session.

Thai Food 4 You and The Point Pub

Thai Food 4 You, at 55 Harris Street in Pyrmont, is run by the very friendly Amy. Mark certifies that most of the dishes are gluten-free, and reasonably priced. Tucked away in a courtyard behind The Point Pub, Thai 4 You is a 15 minute walk from the convention centre, but very close to the LISAsoft office. Amy knows several of our staff by name, and can usually prepare takeaway dishes in ten to fifteen minutes, so you can call ahead on 02 9518 7848 and then start walking over to pick up. Lunch starts at $8.90, and dinner around $12. Rice and noodles, curries and stir-fries, noodle soups and satay chicken. Cash only. (This is common in takeaway restaurants so be prepared.)

The Point Pub is a good spot to wind down and enjoy a drink or three in an evening, or even a leisurely lunch. The kitchen turns out tasty steaks, burgers and fish, and the daily specials are superior to typical pub food. Downstairs is split into a pub at the front and a sit-down restaurant at the back, and you'll find more of a lounge atmosphere upstairs. Outside picnic tables are perfect for an afternoon drink. For a local brew, try Coopers or Carlton - or there's Stella Artois on tap. The Point is on the corner of Harris St and John St.

Arrivals

People have been landing with various tales of travel woe for a couple of days now; I caught up with some collaborators on the GeoServer project over the weekend.

A nice group hack session; with a couple very sleepy JGrass members propped up in the corner.


Remember travel tales are safe conversation starters :-)

Thanks to the volunteers who are getting the conference materials sorted this morning.