Alessandro Furieri has announced the SpatiaLite Cookbook, an excellent guide to SpatiaLite with many practical examples, optimisation tips and information on using SpatiaLite with different programming languages. You can check it out here.
Frank Warmerdam has announced that OSGeo4W is moving to the recently released GDAL 1.8.0. Instead of GDAL 1.5.4, the default version will be 1.8.0, additional packages like gdal-python, gdal-autotest, gdal-ecw etc. will also be updated or removed if no longer needed.
For compatibility with some packages that still require GDAL 1.5.4, a new package gdal15dll (with the necessary libraries) will be added. This package will be automatically installed if needed.
Since the transition to a new version of GDAL is a rather laborious and time-consuming process, the update of some packages included in OSGeo4W is temporarily suspended. In particular, this affects QGIS nightly builds.
The maintainers of the QGIS OSGeo4W package have already announced that they will rebuild the package with GDAL 1.8.0 as soon as possible, GRASS will be rebuilt after GRASS 6.4.1 is released.
Nathan has published an interesting video showing 8 years of QGIS development.
The video was created using Gource, detailed explanations of the process can be found on Nathan’s blog. Each cluster of files represents a directory, and branches show the directory hierarchy of the source code.
With this post I’ll try to summarise the past year.
Last year I changed jobs twice. I left the area where I had been working for more than 6 years - the land registry. Then I worked for some time in a software company developing a trading platform for the Forex market. I had to learn the Ada language as the trading server was developed in this language. Despite the new field and new tools, I did quite well, although there were some difficulties. But I wanted something else…
Private life, this area is best described by the title of E. M. Remarque’s famous novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”. There is nothing to add.
There were lot of changes in the GIS world. The OSM (OpenStreetMap) project has gained worldwide recognition. In addition, Microsoft has given the project access to raster data from its Bing Maps service. Unfortunately, I am not yet involved in the OSM community, but I am very pleased with the development of the project.
ESRI has opened the Geodatabase API, Shapefile is still alive. GIS are pawing their way into the mobile device market.
QGIS is evolving: improved new symbology, raster calculator, QGIS MapServer, many new useful plugins. I have developed and released a few new plugins and continue to improve existing ones. QGIS User Guide was translated into Russian.
This year I was unable to attend the QGIS developer meetings in Pisa and Wrocław. It’s a shame and a pity.
Party of Regions won majorities on most regional and city councils as well as most of the mayoralties.
It’s been 10 years since school and 5 years since university.
On the desktop, I switched from Slackware to Debian testing. There is a dual-boot to Windows XP, as I need it sometimes, e.g. to build QGIS and/or test some bugs (the power of the computer does not allow comfortable use of virtual machines).
Basically, this is the year I gave up dancing. Most likely, for good.
A few days ago I wrote about the kCube Consulting initiative. The ideas have been collected, and the voting has started. Unfortunately, you can only vote for one option.
So far “Fixing bugs” is leading with 23.8%, followed by “Improving import/export on dwg/dxf” with 8.8% and “QGIS Mobile (e.g. on Android)” with 7.5%.
Tim Sutton gave a good overview of some new features in QGIS: a graphical rule editor (which helps to create rendering rules) and complex styles for vector objects (fill, outline and centre marker).
Yesterday, Martin Dobias added icon support to the QGIS Plugin Manager. Among other things, this will make the display of available plugins more user-friendly and make it easier to navigate through the large list. However, to take advantage of this feature, plugin authors will need to make small changes to their code (add two lines). In the future, after the launch of the new plugin repository, it is planned to add icon support to the Plugin Installer.
Another interesting news — kCube Consulting has decided to help the QGIS project by assigning one of their programmers to work on QGIS for 6 months. You can read more about this on Tim’s blog, and visit the wiki to check out the list of possible tasks and leave your own suggestions.
/me put on “Sax & Sex” and began to add icon support to his plugins and those he could reach.
