Queen E. does care about design (from BBC): Jonathan Ive, the man behind Apple’s iconic iPod and iMac, has become a Commander. Blue blooded always appreciated beauty!
a personal website slash blog
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
Successful PPP (Politics Posters Porn): Carlos Aires & Tanja Ostojic’s 25peaces contribution to spice up EU’s image.
How to generate some income while participating in open-source projects? This site lists coding bounties offered by free and open-source software projects.
GIOVE-A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element A), Galileo’s first demonstrator satellite, is being launched today. Galileo is without doubt one of EU’s most important projects. It offers the possibility to cut dependency from US’s Global Positioning System or Russian’s GLONASS (expected completion by 2008). One major difference between those services – Galileo, GLONASS and GPS – is that Galileo will be a civil system, run by a private consortium and guarentee uninterrupted service. Now european sat-nav businesses, such as aviation and maritime industries, directly depend on (foreign) military decisions.
Yet both military operators can downgrade or even switch off the signal whenever the need it. Of course switching of GPS for civil use would affect global economy as well and it wouldn’t be reasonable, but in the long run this dependency couldn’t be considered as favourably for EU. ESA (European Space Agency) lists the european independence as chief reason for developing Galileo. Nevertheless will Galileo be interoperable with GPS and GLONASS and will be a cornerstone of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) as ESA declares.
Furthermore Galileo should come with more positioning accuaracy than existing systems, expected down to 1m and even less.
Certainly Galileo is costing a lot of money, estimated 3.6 billion EUR for 2020. PriceWaterhousCoopers, who developed the business plan, estimate the total benefits of the project at EUR 17.8 billion in Net Profit Value, implying a strongly positive benefit cost ratio of 4.6. Well, I don’t have the background nor am I in the position to judge this numbers. In my opinion the aspect to initiate new Europe-based businesses around Galilieo is priceless. Almost the same strategy was embarked when EU decided to initiate Airbus. As history has shown it was a successful plan.
Similar intentions are behind certain efforts to bring open source software into public administrations: to achieve independence from some software companies and to establish local software development businesses along with knowledge transfer.
According to its schedule Galileo should be going into service in 2008 and is expected to be fully operational by 2010.
I think Galileo is worth the cost. On the one hand because of the mentioned achieved independence and on the other hand I’m confident that it’ll push innovations on new european geospatial services, products, applications and businesses.
Further information on Galileo:
ESA: The future – Galileo
BBC News Q&A: Europe’s Galileo project
The agreement between EU and USA, which basically contains cooperation and interoperability issues of GPS and Galileo, is available here. Especially Article 7 “Open Access to Civil Satellite-based Navigation or Timing Signals” called my attention. It starts with “1. Except for reasons of national security, …”, meaning either USA or EU can demand from each other to downgrade or switch off the signal for certain regions/users if some bad terrorist appears with GPS- or Galileo-guided weapons of mass destruction…
After decades of theories: Art Brut seem to be the first to demonstrate the existence of time machines! Get this seventies classic on iTMS!
Today I upgraded this site to WordPress 2. Despite some skepticism WordPress 2 comes with awesome new features and the whole upgrade process is pretty straightforward! So far everything is working as expected. Thanks Matt!
ArcGIS 9.1 Service Pack 1 was released last week. A day before Christmas holidays I had the chance to install it and run a quick test. A PDF-export made some problems that day, minor problems: certain lines remained for some unknown reasons grey while they should have been white, people kept asking if we could color the line white, somebody had to explain why the line is grey and not white, followed by another attempt to export the PDF. So in the end this “minor problem” cost a lot of time and money. Once I had Service Pack 1 installed this behaviour was gone and the line was exported white as it should – sort of early Christmas present.
Especially the various adressed export-to-vector-graphics-issues called my attention. As far as I can remember Illustrator export for instance was more reliable before 9.1. Regularly we encountered problems with CMYK colors and the listed font-size-issue. I still have to check if all those problems are gone with Service Pack 1 and ArcGIS now proper exports to Illustrator.
However, in my quick test I focused on one bug. Besides reproducible bugs that cause full system crashes is this the most annoying one I’ve ever seen since I use computers:
I’m or better I was using the non-US regional setting for numbers on my system. Outside US we tend to use a “.” as thousend delimiter and “,” as comma. For some reason ArcGIS is the only application on my machine which doesn’t want to take this system wide setting over. It ignores them and only accepts US settings (“.” as comma and “,” as thousand delimiter). Still more confusing is that it only happens on my machine! The other ArcGIS installations work fine with non-US settings. The problem is that every time I want to edit a number in ArcGIS it gets confused about thousand delimiter and comma. For instance a stroke width of 1,00 points which is reasonable for non-US-settings (meaning 1.00 points) is considered by ArcGIS as 1,000 points as it would be entered in an US-system because it takes “,” as a thousand delimiter and not as comma.
So it gives me two of this popups, every time on every single input box on every opened window. I don’t know how much time I already spent on clicking those popups away until I changed my regional settings to US standards (as the only one in my company). So far I didn’t run into problems with other applications or data exchange with some colleagues. On certain formats we have to mind that we’re using different comma-settings.
Funny thing is that our local ESRI support first denied the problem, after I insisted that I’m not blind and if he wanna come over to see it our local ESRI support admitted that he believes he can remind that he has seen this behavior one time before. Finally he told me that they already knew the problem, that it apparently depends on certain hardware combinations and that ESRI developers know it for about 2 years. Due to the fact that they can’t reproduce that behavior it has not been fixed yet.
Usually I don’t like and don’t read this oh-look-how-funny-that-is spam mails. But this email thread indeed is hilarious! If you don’t know it, well, read yourself…
FROM: Pauline Lewis, Human Resources Director
TO: All Employees
DATE: 4th November 2004
RE: Christmas PartyI’m happy to inform you that the company Christmas Party will take place on December 23rd, starting at noon in the private function room at the Grill House. There will be a cash bar and plenty of drinks!
We’ll have a small band playing traditional carols…please feel free to sing along. And don’t be surprised if the MD shows up dressed as Santa Claus!
A Christmas tree will be lit at 1.00p.m.. Exchange of gifts among employees can be done at that time, however, no gift should be over £10.00 to make the giving of gifts easy for everyone’s pockets. This gathering is only for employees! The MD will make a special announcement at the Party.A very Merry Christmas to you and your family
Pauline
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FROM: Pauline Lewis, Human Resources Director
TO: All Employees
DATE: 5th November 2004
RE: Holiday PartyIn no way was yesterday’s memo intended to exclude our Jewish employees. We recognise that Chanukah is an important holiday, which often coincides with Christmas, though unfortunately not this year. However, from now on we’re calling it our ‘Holiday Party’..
The same policy applies to any other employees who are not Christians. There will be no Christmas tree or Christmas carols sung. We will have other types of music for your enjoyment. Happy now?Happy Holidays to you and your family, Pauline.
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FROM: Pauline Lewis, Human Resources Director
TO: All Employees
DATE: 6th November 2004
RE: Holiday PartyRegarding the note I received from a member of Alcoholics Anonymous requesting a non-drinking table…you didn’t sign your name. I’m happy to accommodate this request, but if I put a sign on a table that reads, “AA Only”, you wouldn’t be anonymous anymore!!!!
How am I supposed to handle this? Somebody? Forget about the gift exchange, no gift exchange allowed now since the Union Officials feel that £10.00 is too much money and Management believe £10.00 is a little cheap.
NO GIFT EXCHANGE WILL BE ALLOWED.Pauline.
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FROM: Pauline Lewis, Human Resources Director
TO: All Employees
DATE: 7th November 2004
RE: Holiday PartyWhat a diverse group we are! I had no idea that December 20th begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which forbids eating and drinking during daylight hours. There goes the party! Seriously, we can appreciate how a luncheon at this time of year does not accommodate our Muslim employees’ beliefs, perhaps the Grill House can hold off on serving your meal until the end of the party – or else package everything up for you to take home in a little foil doggy bag. Will that work?
Meanwhile, I’ve arranged for members of Weight Watchers to sit farthest from the dessert buffet and pregnant women will get the table closest to the toilets, Gays are allowed to sit with each other, Lesbians do not have to sit with gay men, each will have their own table. Yes, there will be flower arrangements for the gay men’s table too. To the person asking permission to cross dress – no cross dressing allowed.
We will have booster seats for short people. Low fat food will be available for those on a diet. We cannot control the salt used in the food we suggest those people with high blood pressure taste the food first..
There will be fresh fruits as dessert for Diabetics, the restaurant cannot supply “No Sugar” desserts. Sorry! Did I miss anything?!?!?!?!?!Pauline.
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FROM: Pauline Lewis, Human Resources Director
TO: All F****** Employees
DATE: 8 November 2004
RE: The F****** Holiday Party.Vegetarian pricks I’ve had it with you people !!! We’re going to keep this party at the Grill House whether you like it or not, so you can sit quietly at the table furthest from the “grill of death”, as you so quaintly put it, you’ll get your f****** salad bar, including organic tomatoes, But you know tomatoes have feeling too, They scream when you slice them. I’ve heard them scream. I’m hearing the scream right NOW!! I hope you all have a rotten holiday, drink, drive and die.
The Bitch from HELL!!!!!!!!!!!
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FROM: John Bishop – Acting Human Resources Director
DATE: 9th November 2004
RE: Pauline Lewis and Holiday PartyI’m sure I speak for all of us in wishing Pauline Lewis a speedy recovery, and I’ll continue to forward your cards to her. In the meantime, the Management has decided to cancel our Holiday Party and instead, give everyone the afternoon of the 23rd December off with full pay.
That’s the way how Austria deals with minority rights and pursues minority policy: politicians continuously break constitutional law and our “unprejudiced” public broadcasting corporation (ORF) refuses broadcasting background information.
Another side of Laurent Garnier presented by a sensational downtempo set. The right soundtrack to start the day!