Free G-NAF, Free Australian Geocoding

I have posted a request to freely publish the G-NAF Address Dataset to data.gov.au

It's 2013 and Australian companies and developers shouldn't be concerned with having to pay to use such an essential Government dataset.

Basic spatial services like geo-coding should not be costly or illegal, let's face it, lot's of people are using Google and violating their terms of service.

Please vote for this request, after all, aren't we now "Open for Business*" ?

*except when it involves Boats, on water and not Friday afternoon

SQL Server 2008: ARITHABORT error with Spatial data

This is a nice cryptic error:


UPDATE failed because the following SET options have incorrect settings: 'ARITHABORT'. Verify that SET options are correct for use with indexed views and/or indexes on computed columns and/or filtered indexes and/or query notifications and/or XML data type methods and/or spatial index operations. 

If you get the following error with a SQL Server 2008 database when your trying to update some spatial data, the solution is to check the compatibility level for the database, I was working on an application which has been around for a while and it was set to be compatible with Sql Server 2000, hence the error.

I was a bit stumped initially, as this was my first look into spatial data with MS SQL Server, luckily Jackie Ng sits next to me and he found the solution pretty quickly.

Overall, my initial impressions of the Spatial support in SQL Server is that it's pretty basic compared to Oracle which is a much more complete implementation, but I'm glad spatial is finally a standard feature. I am rather surprised that re-projection is not part of the standard feature set.

I really loathe Oracle for it's recalcitrant attitude to Oracle Spatial licensing, but having seen what Sql Server offers, I understand why Oracle still does what it does, as SQL Server is not nearly equivalent.

Of course, IMHO anyone starting out on a new project requiring a spatial database should use PostGIS period.

New Explore Australia website with expanded content

Explore Australia recently relaunched their website with a new design (by Thirst Studios) and heaps
of new content, including Fishing Spots, National Parks, Campsites and Caravan Parks.

So next time your going travelling anywhere around Australia, remember your Explore Australia Travel Guide !

Behind the scenes, the website was developed by Ennoble Consultancy Australia. It's powered by Coldfusion
and Oracle, with Maps produced via MapGuide Open Source and statically served using Amazon Cloudfront
and Openlayers.

Mapguide 2.1 final windows build

Jason Birch announced the release of the Final 2.1 candidate installer for Windows

http://download.osgeo.org/mapguide/releases/2.1.0/MapGuideOpenSource-2.1.0.4283-Final.exe

2.1 Release Notes

This is a really solid release which resolves a lot of issues and should
make the MapGuide experience even better, it's focus was

• Performance, scalability, stability
• Better and more informative error messages

I have been using early builds of this for quite a while in production
and it's much more stable the previous releases.

If your using an earlier release, I would highly recommend trying out this
new release.

Raster support now works out of the box and supports raster reprojection.

Road labelling has had a number of useful improvements as well

The Fusion Map Viewer has had a major rewrite and is much faster and improved

On the Linux side, the build is still somewhat troublesome and we are
looking for help on implementing CMake and supporting Ubuntu.

This release has taken quite a while to get out the door, I blogged about
some of the new features in 2.1 back in Jan.

and don't forget MapGuide Central!

New Releases from Explore Australia

Fusion 1.1 Released

I would recommend that anybody who is currently using fusion should try out this release.

Fusion Supports both Mapserver and MapGuide (that includes MapGuide Enterprise installations too)

MapGuide Studio also uses fusion so keep that in mind.

This release is much faster and resolves a lot of little niggling problems with Fusion, you should be seeing less errors in the mapguide server logs which the older versions of Fusion generated.

Here's the announcement, it contains all the info. There's a follow up thread on mapguide-users from jason with a few additional installation tips.

Introducing MapGuide Central

I have created a quick site which I have called MapGuide Central. It has links to all the major resources I use and a google custom search engine which indexes the same resources.

MapGuide Central (url changed 3/sept/09)

I just found discovered Get Satisfaction whilst returning to Ubuntu (which has been great, blog post to come) and using songbird.

I think it might be really useful for MapGuide as a project for support. Thoughts?

OpenLayers Architect

Erik Hazzard just posted an update about his GSoC 2008 Project OLArchitect.

OLArchitect is a web based gui/gui for building maps using OpenLayers, it's looking promising. No Mapguide support yet tho :(

For anyone who considering building a web based map interface today, OpenLayers is the must use Swiss Army knife for web mapping.

Forget using the Google Maps API, Virtual Earth, Yahoo or anything else. OpenLayers can handle all these different maps using one API.

It means you can change mapping providers or servers without having to re-code all your mapping javascript to another API.

If your a developer you will love this because all the support is there under a single API.

From the business side of things, not being tied to a propriety vendor API means your investment is more flexible and can easily respond to changes.

The future of mapping is open source!

EPSG for Australia

http://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/3112/

http://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/4283/

for things like PSMA & GA datasets

notice that Tassie looks better and australia isn't so wiiiide in EPSG:3112

tho, generally speaking EPSG:4283 is better choice as it's there out of the box

Oracle didn't have EPSG:3112 so i created one, EPSG:4283 is srid 4283

INSERT INTO mdsys.SDO_CS_SRS ( CS_NAME, SRID, AUTH_SRID, AUTH_NAME, WKTEXT )
VALUES ('GDA94 / Geoscience Australia Lambert', 3112, 3112, 'EPSG',
'PROJCS["GDA94 / Geoscience Australia Lambert",GEOGCS["GDA94",DATUM["Geocentric_Datum_of_Australia_1994",SPHEROID["GRS 1980",6378137,298.257222101,AUTHORITY["EPSG","7019"]],TOWGS84[0,0,0,0,0,0,0],AUTHORITY["EPSG","6283"]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0,AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],UNIT["degree",0.01745329251994328,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9122"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","4283"]],UNIT["metre",1,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9001"]],PROJECTION["Lambert_Conformal_Conic_2SP"],PARAMETER["standard_parallel_1",-18],PARAMETER["standard_parallel_2",-36],PARAMETER["latitude_of_origin",0],PARAMETER["central_meridian",134],PARAMETER["false_easting",0],PARAMETER["false_northing",0],AUTHORITY["EPSG","3112"]]'
);
COMMIT;

Mapguide 2.0 Released - PNG8 Goodness

I have really enjoyed helping test on the new Mapguide 2.0.0 Release, it's a bit slower than the previous release, but that's not so much an issue if your caching everything heavy using tiled maps.

One of the new features is support for PNG8 images. You can configure the tile service to use PNG8 in the serverconfig.ini under the [TileServiceProperties] Imageformat parameter, the header comments don't mention it yet, here's my patch.

It would be nice in the future for the tile format to be configurable in the Map Definition per Base Layer Group, rather than a server wide setting.

Here is a True Marble Tile using PNG8 (36.98 kB)



The same tile as a 24 bit PNG (135.26 kB)



You can barely visually tell the difference, basically there is loss of detail of a black shadow next to the coastline, but there is 100kB difference in file size per tile.

That adds up to well over 1 MB saving per map, depending on you map size. That's 1GB over 1000 page impressions for a page containing this map. That is a huge improvement ! I will investigate later the savings for non-raster tiles

There is also the Fusion framework for doing flexible layouts which also includes the Native Mapguide Layer support for OpenLayers which rocks!

How to kill a well hung Windows Service

I was doing some beta testing today with Mapguide RC4 and Gdal, playing with the True Marble imagery and i managed to crash the windows service in the stopping state.

BTW, True Marble is a colour corrected version of NASA's satellite imagery, have a look it's quite cool.




Anyway back to the hung stopping service. This is really soo frustrating especially as on Windows Server 2003 you will get an access denied if you try to kill the service process via task manager or pskill type tools.

You can always do the three finger windows salute, but there was an Oracle backup running and I just wanted to keep playing beta (besides rebooting is so 1990's). So i googled the problem again and this time i found a solution

ZeroWave: a powered TaskManager which has an INSANE mode which managed to kill the process off :)

The phrase "very friendly graphical interface" for something which lists PID's and Executable names, that's one i hadn't thought of before.

Usual disclaimer, you can seriously render things broken doing this

Mapguide 2.0 - AGG versus GD Renderers

Using the AGG Renderer ( New default in MG 2.0 )



Using the GD Renderer



Here is the same layer using the different renderering engines in Mapguide 2.0. The main difference between the two is that AGG does sub-pixel rendering which give smoother lines, whereas GD is pixel level.

The AGG lines feel a bit too thick to me, they are line thickness one for a polygon boundary. Even for a straight line in the middle of the map, it's just to thick (That's SA/NT border in Australian for those aren't so familiar with Australia.) The src data is 29 MB so there is a fair amount of generalization being done but hey that might be the reason for the thicker lines.

GD is the same as earlier Mapguide Releases and is still available via changing the Renderer value in the server/bin/serverconfig.ini file.

I like the darker smoother stronger feel of the AGG lines, but i think they would be better if they were maybe 1/2 to 1/3 thinner. What do you think?

These are rendered from SDF's exported from Oracle using FDO2FDO which is now work again in Mapguide 2.0 RC4. Generally everything is working well since installing it an few hours ago, next up i will upgrade my java libs with Coldfusion 8 and do some more testing API wise.

Using WMS TileCache on Apache Win32 with Mod Python

TileCache is a cool tool for caching WMS titles. Using it with Openlayers which is a great javascript library for using with WMS Servers

I had a few issues installing it on Windows using Apache 2.0.61, Python 2.5 and mod_python

This configuration worked for me nicely, the PythonPath directive fixes the "ImportError: No module named TileCache.Service" error

<Directory "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/TileCache/">
    AddHandler python-program .py
    PythonHandler TileCache.Service 
    PythonOption TileCacheConfig "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/TileCache/tilecache.cfg"
    PythonPath "['c:\inetpub\wwwroot\TileCache'] + sys.path"
    PythonDebug On
</Directory>