Since winter, I’ve been planning to participate in the next QGIS developer meeting: I gathered the necessary documents, booked tickets, applied for a visa, and so on. But it didn’t work out — the airline canceled the flight a week before departure. Of course, they offered an alternative and, after a quick check to see whether the new flight fits into the planned schedule, I agreed to the replacement. The application for a ticket change was processed for almost a week (!) but without any outcome: the availability of seats on the alternative flight was not confirmed. So what was the point of offering it?
Then even better. Less than a day before departure, and now they offer another option (the second one, yeah), and the departure/arrival dates are different from previous ones and do not match with the visa and other tickets. I tried this and that… but in less than a day before the departure it was impossible to find a more or less acceptable solution (including buying other tickets) which could allow me to come for at least a day or two.
I have been going to Khortytsia a lot lately. I get there on my own - it’s not as far and as long as it looks at first glance, and it keeps me in shape. As the new bridge is still under construction, I have to walk across the old one. However, the junction in front of the bridges has been partially built, and, in some places, even paved with asphalt. But there are no more crosswalks. Neither old nor new. And the only way to get to the Preobrazhensky Bridge is by breaking the traffic rules: crossing a four-lane road at any point.
Of course, you can still take the right side of Tyulenina Street (if you’re facing the island), but there is a pipe that takes up almost the entire footpath on a bridge. So you have to walk very close to it, stepping over the supports every 2–3 metres. I did it twice: trust me, you don’t want to walk on that side.
Another problem is narrow pavements and cyclists. I have nothing against the former or the latter. But when they are combined… In the whole time, I have seen only 2 (two!!!) cyclists obeying the traffic rules, even though they ride in droves in this area. And here you are walking on the pavement (the pavement, I remind you, is narrow, two people can pass each other, but not walk side by side), you don’t cause any trouble, and there it is… a cyclist on a boneshaker is coming towards you or overtaking you from behind. I don’t mind and step back from the pavement in the thicket and let him pass, I’m not a very important person after all. But WTF… is it fear of the road or something else?
Let’s be clear. The list of projects I’m involved in and things I do isn’t very long at first glance and includes:
maintaining and developing 26 QGIS plugins (23 Python and 3 C++)
maintaining translations of 3 manuals
QGIS core development/bugfixing
from time to time, small patches to other GIS projects
SlackBuilds for various GIS software
But. All of this, oddly enough, is done in my spare time (which is quite limited, by the way), not on a full-time basis at work. Some of the things have come about because the functionality I needed was not available or did not meet certain criteria; something was done just for fun.
Therefore, do not be offended, and even more, do not try to play boss, having received a refusal to implement some feature; do not breathe down my neck and constantly pester me to fix a bug that annoys you; do not complain about slowness and lack of attention. I don’t want to and won’t reduce my free time any further. I’d rather just stop doing some things.
The collaborative project to translate the QGIS 1.5 User Guide into Russian is nearing completion. I’m busy with the final editing and formatting.
Recently, I had to look into the OGC CSW (Catalogue Service Web) standard. It’s an interesting and useful thing, but most of the public servers I managed to find implement various aspects of it in a strange way :-(. So I have to add a monstrous construction to the code to catch exceptions and give the user a more or less understandable error message.
I am also slowly writing Pascal wrappers for the GDAL/OGR and Proj libraries. I couldn’t find any Pascal bindings for GDAL/OGR, so I’m making my own. I already have a more or less working module for OGR and some examples of its use. A module for OSR is also ready, but has not been tested yet. Next in line is a module for GDAL.
The situation with the Proj wrapper was a bit more interesting: first, I found a Pascal module for Proj 4.4.3 (the current Proj version is 4.7.0), and this wrapper required changes to the source code of the Proj library. I didn’t like this approach and started to make my own module, partly based on the one I found. Later, when updating the FPC compiler, I accidentally noticed that the available packages included modules for Proj 4.6.1. Now I’m not sure what to do: should I continue developing my own wrapper or not?
I plan to push the results of my work upstream, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just publish them somewhere.
I have been using PeopleNET as my ISP for quite some time. The speed was not very high, and the only plan available was pay-per-gigabyte. But it was more than enough for email, jabber and most websites.
There were simply no other options. Ukrtelecom cited a lack of technical capacity and offered to pay a fee and wait for the capacity to appear (they could not give an estimate of how long this would take). Beeline said they couldn’t provide service to this address, although they had connected the house next door. And there have never been any LANs in our neighbourhood, and if there were, they were very far away and not for a long time.
The Telza ISP didn’t make any excuses or problems, they just pulled the cable through a block and a half. So now I have internet like this
SpeedTest results for my new ISP
And PeopleNET was left as a backup and travelling option. Their USB modem fits perfectly into the small pocket of a laptop bag.
There has been less work lately, and I have more free time to spend on interesting and useful things.
I have resumed work on GdalTools, but the frequency and number of commits are not as high as before. Mostly small improvements and bugfixes.
From time to time, I fix bugs in my own and other people’s QGIS plugins. I also write articles and notes, not often and not very long, but still. If someone had told me 5-10 years ago that I would be writing articles, I would not have believed them. But here we are.
I’m involved in polishing and improving fTools, which is where my more or less active participation in the life of the QGIS project began: just today I submitted three more patches and picked up a few more bugs to fix.
I plan to get my hands on Ubuntu (and thus Debian) and the process of creating a LiveCD, because I want to participate in the creation of a localised (Ukrainian and Russian) version of Arramagong — LiveCD/DVD for GIS specialists.
And with the possibility that QGIS will eventually migrate from Subversion to Git, it’s a good idea to improve my skills with that version control system.
I was taken with the idea of non-cyclic layout switching and configured my notebook to work this way.
What is non-cyclic keyboard layout switching? Imagine you have several keyboard layouts; for example, I have three: English, Ukrainian, and Russian. Normally, to switch between these layouts, you use a single shortcut, like Ctrl + Shift, and the layouts change one by one all around: en → uk → ru → en → uk… So, if the current layout is English and you need Russian, you would have to press the shortcut twice to get there. Another problem is that in order to switch to the desired layout, you have to remember which keyboard layout is currently active and the order in which they change. You could argue that this is no big deal, as there is a visual indicator in the system tray most of the time. But the truth is that if you often have to switch between layouts and use different layouts in different windows, it is not very convenient, although most people are used to it and do not realise it.
With non-cyclic keyboard layout switching, each layout has its own shortcut, for example, CapsLock for English, Shift + CapsLock for Ukrainian, and Ctrl + CapsLock for Russian. In this case, you only need to press the shortcut once to get the layout you want. You don’t need to worry about which layout is active or remember which layout is used in a particular window. Just press the hotkey before you start typing. Simple.
After a few days of using this setup, I agree that it is indeed much more convenient than the standard cyclic switching, where you have to press the hotkey several times to get the layout you want.
I’m gradually moving from a desktop to a laptop, and spending more and more time on Linux.
By and large, the transition to Linux is almost complete. There are still a few projects that were originally developed for Win (they are very specific tools), some of which I plan to port and those that cannot be ported at all — will run in VirtualBox.
From time to time, I find myself missing some programs and tools that I am used to as a user of another system. But this is more due to ignorance.
P.S.: vim, of course, is very powerful, but to get used to it… its tutorial is very short and covers only a few topics.
