07.01.2013 13:45 · Notes · books
Yesterday I finished “The Idiot” by Dostoyevsky. Impressions are twofold, it was a bit easier to read than “Crime and Punishment”, but in general I did not like it. I haven’t decided what to read next, and I won’t have much time for books in the near future.
31.12.2012 16:35 · Notes · year-in-review
Traditionally, at the end of the year, I try to summarise the most important and interesting events.
This year I have had to work hard. In addition to working on various projects, I have been quite active in QGIS, especially at the beginning of the year. In total, more than 50 bugs in QGIS were fixed, and 4 new plugins were released. It looks like next year will be even more intense.
The year was rich in releases: GDAL 1.9.0 (and related shapefile encoding issues), Proj 4.8, QGIS 1.7.4 and 1.8.0, PostGIS 2.0 (topology and raster), OTB 3.12 (full support for Πλειάδες). 181317 OrbView-3 scenes have been released under the Public Domain licence. Also, this year SEXTANTE for QGIS was announced — a powerful geoprocessing platform that soon became part of QGIS.
QGIS is now 10 years old.
I released several new QGIS plugins, including Geotag and import photos, and participated in GSoC as a mentor. For a short time I became a SEXTANTE core developer (then it was integrated into QGIS and I lost that title).
Moved this blog to my “own” server.
Happy New Year!
02.12.2012 15:54 · Notes · books
Finished “Anna Karenina”. The next book will probably be Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”.
18.10.2012 16:41 · GIS, Notes · qgis, plugins
Two of my plugins are in the TOP-20 by downloads, 4 by ratings and 5 by votes. It’s a small thing, but it’s nice.
Actually, the list is not complete, as there are still C++ plugins that are distributed as source code and plugins that are not published in the official repository. And some plugins, although they have been significantly reworked by me and are now maintained by me, were originally created by others.
07.10.2012 17:52 · Notes · qgis, meetings
The 8th QGIS developer meeting, also known as the hackfest, has come to an end.
This time there were no presentations, which had been a feature of the previous two meetings, and this had a positive impact on the results: more than 120 commits were made, and about 60 bug reports were closed. Among the most notable changes:
On top of that:
According to the participants, this meeting was one of the most productive, which was greatly facilitated by the venue — Villa Vogelsang.
04.10.2012 09:42 · Notes · qgis, gsoc
Morning. I’m working in the office when the silence is broken by a ringing telephone. A call from an unknown number. I answer. A man asks if it’s me, and when I say yes, he continues, “It’s FedEx bothering you”. O_o. “Your package has arrived. Should we deliver it to your place, or will you pick it up from our office? My eyes started to twitch. What package? From where? I asked for more details. Hm… they seem to be correct, but that didn’t make things any clearer.
In about 30 minutes, the package was on my desk. I checked the return address and didn’t understand anything. It was only when I took out the contents that it all made sense. There was this T-shirt
30.09.2012 14:12 · Notes · books
Read it. Wonderful book: funny cases, interesting stories and thoughts. Much of what was said is still relevant today, and some things even have gotten worse:
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.” It was a kind of oneupmanship, where nobody knows what’s going on, and they’d put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a highhanded attitude, acting as if it’s not confusing at all, telling him that he’s wasting their time.
19.08.2012 17:12 · Notes · books
Georgiy Daneliya, “A Passenger Without a Ticket” and “Toasted Drains To the Dregs”. I read both in one breath and loved it.
09.08.2012 11:57 · Notes, Site · blog
Yesterday this blog turned 5 years old. After that time, I can say that the idea of blogging was not that stupid. And even though I don’t write regularly and it’s more for myself, maybe some of the posts have been useful or just interesting to readers.
I don’t know how many readers I have, but thank you for sticking with me.
25.07.2012 17:12 · GIS, Notes · qgis, processing
Four patches + an elegant solution to a problem, and… I became a full member of the development team of the SEXTANTE project.