Since end of January one of the largest projects I’m currently involved in is online and open for public access. We decided as first step to publish it silently before the official announcement and receive more user feedback as well as reserve some extra time for fine tuning.
It’s a national atlas (ÖROK-Atlas online is the official name) containing socio-economic information, mainly focused on the Austrian territory but providing a European perspective as well. The entire application is based on 100% Open Source software like MapServer, PostGIS, GDAL, Proj4 and other usual geo open source suspects.
You won’t find any fancy AJAX driven user interface or high-res imagery to sneak a peek into your neighbor’s garden. Instead you’ll be able to visualize a comprehensive collection of predefined maps as entry point to a large database of socio-economic data and indicators relevant to regional analysis and spatial planning. An important user group, already involved in the development process, were decision makers and other administration departments (ministries, federal states).
Traditionally the atlas was published annually on paper. It was one of the main challenges of the project to transform those rather complex printed maps (most of them containing multiple socio-economic information layers, multidimensional signatures, etc.) into an online application in terms of retaining the same information content.
We’re still working in the background – the English version isn’t 100% completed yet, data and maps are extending continuously and some bugs need to be fixed – so please be patient if something isn’t working as expected.
Ellen DeGeneres did a fairly well job at the Oscars, but the big remaining question is:
Where is the picture of her and Clint Eastwood taken by Steven Spielberg?
Besides, highlight of the night was of course Martin Scorsese’s dust catcher, for a film I didn’t watch because I loved the original Infernal Affairs trilogy and almost started hating Scorsese for adopting it. Departed will always be favored over Infernal Affairs. It’s not going to be Infernal Affairs what we will be shown on TV here, it’ll be Departed. Because Departed is the Oscar winning movie.
Anyways, I’m sure Departed is worth watching and I’ll give it a try when it’s shown on TV.
A small Flickr user meet up is announced for tomorrow afternoon. Everybody who wants to join is of course very welcome! Here is the full thread about the “organization”.
When: Sat 24th Feb, 2.30pm
Where: Südbahnhof, Markus-Löwe (in the hall)
I never thought I would license a text editor for 39 Euros. After reading quite fantastic reviews of TextMate I decided to give this supposedly divine editor a try. Turned out to be a terrible mistake as I know now.
The first impression was like “OK, it’s a good editor, but 39 Euros while TextWrangler is still free, no way!”.
10 days later I already was knee-deep in TextMate projects, accustomed to its keyboard short-cuts, had the blog-editor configured, let alone all the the bundle-features (discovered the secrets behind FIXME, CHANGED and TODO!!) and was overall very impressed by TextMate’s slick and fast usability. To make a long story short, I couldn’t imagine switching back to another text editor again.
However, TextMate was very helpful today when I changed my blog-theme from my badly hacked and messed up Unsleepable to a clean K2 setup, doing search&replace orgies in my database dumps and WordPress files. K2 is surely one of the best available WordPress themes. It offers an excellent reading experience and nifty features like archive pages sliders or sidebar modules.
Main reason for my clean-up was the migration from UTW to the Simple Tagging Plugin, which I couldn’t get to work very well on my former theme. On K2 it basically works, but for full support (e.g. archive pages) some of the K2 files have to be edited too, not a big problem though. I put the changed files in a zip-file, so if you didn’t modify your K2 installation, just download it and overwrite your existing K2 files.
Simple Tagging Plugin performs better than UTW, comes with built-in features like type-ahead tagging, tag suggestions, related posts and is, unlike UTW, still under ongoing development.
Update
Changed files for K2 v0.9.6 are available here.
According to this TechCrunch post you can put Digg on the list of OpenID adopters just as AOL or Microsoft.
Great!
Single sign-in, we’re getting closer!
Just in case you’re trying to access SharePoint with IE7 and the server kindly keeps telling you to upgrade your Internet Explorer to version 5.5 or higher, here is the solution:
At evolt.org Browser Archive you can download any old Internet Explorer version as standalone application and run it on the very same machine together with your (automatic updated) IE7 installation.
Besides, I really had no idea how many different browsers exist!
Yahoo! Pipes is for sure one of the most exciting recently released toy and I was desperately seeking a reason to play around with it.
Why climb a mountain?
Because it’s there.
Sir Edmund Hillary
So today I tried to find Bengal cats for sale in and around Vienna. Yahoo! Pipes helped me to merge existing content of different sites regarding Bengal cats in Vienna to a single feed, filter it by my chosen keywords and re-publish it as RSS feed again. As result I get noticed by my RSS reader whenever a new Bengal cat is available for sale in Vienna.
The tricky part was to integrate a site without existing feed. Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t provide comprehensive content analysis of non-feed-content out of the box. So I used Dapper instead to transform HTML content into a valid RSS feed and pipe it through my Vienna Bengal cat search pipe.
Funny thing, those pipes… but one problem I still have is that if one source fails the whole pipe screws up.
I’m selling my good old friend the iMac and would love to see him in a nice new place were people really do care about him.
There is nothing wrong with him. He’s still shiny, very fast and handy.
It’s just because one computer seems enough per apartment and since I got the MacBook he has almost retired. So he is seeking new tasks and opportunities. If you know one, feel free to place a bid or contact us.
