The next MapGuide is shaping up

Following the Timeline for MapGuide Open source, there has been a flurry of commits in the last week or so. What is particularly refreshing to see is a lot of minor bug fixes and tweaks which reflect the evolution of this product over time.

Evolution is great thing to see, here are some highlights of the next release:

• Performance improvements, mainly the caching of schema information which drastically improves the performance of database providers. (RFC 53)


• Unmanaged mappings no longer require a server restart (#829)


• Raster reprojection (RFC 51) means you no longer need to have your raster in the current map projection


• Legend images aren't requested when the legend is hidden (#827)


• Numerous WMS fixes (#794, #808)


• Annotation drawing should be faster when display is dense (#761)


• Pooled RDBMS connection fails if RDBMS drops connection (#825)


• New CS-MAP projection system, as used in MapGuide Enterprise(RFC 55)


• Polylines can disappear completely using AGG renderer (#632)


• Advanced placement problems (#732)


• Detailed Server Logging (RFC 49)


• ResourceExists API call implemented (#288)


• MgWktReaderWrite performs horrendously on large Polygons (#627)

Fusion has also been drastically improved and loads much much faster!

King Oracle 0.8.5 is the first version of this provider which I have been happy enough to actually put into production! This also works with the current release 2.0.2

All up the next release is shaping up to be a pleasure to use!

Fingers crossed that the long oustanding GDAL provider problem gets fixed (#462)

I am also hoping to see some improvements with the labelling for tiled maps (#792)
and the issues with PNG8 compression not preserving fill colors (#813)

For more information, head over to Mapguide Central

Oz Gov complains about less visitors, but is waay too strict

Over on The Register, there's a story about Sun MySQLers barred from Oz, which highlights how disfunctional Australia's visa system is. These people are smart, well paid and are going to spend money. With a world wide recession, this kinda of malarkey is costing Australian jobs, rather than protecting them.

Over Christmas, my brothers wife who is Indian and works in the states, couldn't get a tourist visa to come visit for one week. This is complicated because I think the shortest visa is three months and she only was coming for a week.

We sorted it out in the end, but I think both these stories really highlight how broken the system is. My brothers wife is bloody married to an Australian, how dumb is that!

Chris Evans, Where the bloody hell are you? sigh

CFLOCK type="parallel"

Just been doing some image conversion and I have used cflock type=exclusive to avoid swamping the server, however, it occurred to me that this would be a nice addition to support parallel processing, defaulting to say the number of cores on the machine.

Israel and it's WMD Style spin on Gaza, Obama MIA

As we watch the last days of the Bush Administration, the world is breathing a sigh of relief. The problem is that Israel has adopted the terrible spin approach used by the neo-cons in it's war in Gaza.

The media campaign by Israel has video of oxygen tanks being loaded into a truck being mispresented as rockets, de-ja-vu Iraq and WMD...

Propaganda war: trusting what we see?

and the methodology about the casualties is also totally flawed

UN count of civilians killed in Gaza excluded all dead men

This is outrageous behaviour on behalf of Israel and Obama cannot continue his silence.

Obama needs to rebuke Israel (and it's use of the current Administration flawed spin), which is difficult and obviously given that Bush is almost out of the White House, unfortunate timing, but many, many lives are being lost.

Shame on Israel, I can really understand their situation, having rockets landing everyday in their towns is an outrage, unfortunately, they have overstepped the mark completely and now have lost most of their credibility with their actions in Gaza.

Kevin Rudd has been MIA on this as well, the Federal Opposition is going to have it's hand tied somewhat having Helen Coonan as the Shadow Foreign Affairs, given her seat lies in the heart of Melbourne's Jewish Community.

It's one thing to complain about wars whilst in Opposition, it's entirely different when a war is happening now and lives are being shattered and your now the (almost) the government.

The world is waiting for some leadership on this issue, time and time again the international community sits on it's hands whilst people are being killed.

Once again the UN Security Council shows itself to be impotent, isn't Democracy based around majority opinion, which is achievable? rather than this unachievable unanimous opinion...

That said, Hamas does appear to be acting as a terrorist organisation, with a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to the allegations of war crimes against Israel.

In the end we are all losing on this one, some more than others