Tuesday, August 19. 2008

Open Source Text Books

Slashdot highlights an LA Times front page story about professors dumping traditional text in favor of open source and non-free online texts.

We are doing that at Penn State Online Masters in GIS. So far, two texts are open source: Open Web Mapping (updated URL per course author comment below) and The Nature of Geographic Information. I'm working to open source my course (Comparative GIS) for Winter quarter.

Garmin to Support uLocate's WHERE

No word yet on which of Garmin's devices (the nuvifone?) might support the platform and its apps (GasBuddy, Yelp, etc.)

- C|net

Non-Geo Person Reviews MapInfo

Trudy Walsh reviewed MapInfo 9.5 in GCN. Walsh makes it clear she's not a GIS person:

"As a casual map aficionado, I found MapInfo fun to work with after I had mastered a few simple file opening techniques."

Some of her comments confused me.

"This version of MapInfo has taken great pains to work in an open source way with as many other kinds of files, systems and software as possible. "

"It also gives you access to the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Web Feature Service, a service offered by an international standards consortium that lets clients retrieve and update geospatial data encoded in Geography Markup Language. "

She ended up giving MapInfo 9.5 an "A" for performance, an "A" for features and a "C+" for ease of use. I'm guessing the last score is in comparison to Google Earth, the only other product mentioned. My comparative GIS students who have done projects with MapInfo all pointed to its ease of use as one of its strengths.

GIS Person Wins Gold in Discus!

Stephanie Brown Trafton of Galt, California threw the discus 212-feet, 5-inches to win the gold medal. In real life Tafton "has worked for Sycamore Environmental Consultants Inc. of Sacramento for the past two years in project management and CAD/GIS analysis."

Cool!

- Central Valley Business Times

Spaghetti Map of Hurricane Models

That's what AppScout calls this map from Weather Underground. It just goes to show we have lots of models, that don't all agree!

Virtual Alabama Wins 5th Award; Is it being replicated?

We had the folks behind Virtual Alabama at our Rocket City Geospatial event last year. The app was impressive as was the path to creating it. The big issue for me was "great, let's repeat this!" I've not heard of any states following suit, but awards are nice.

- WAAYTV