Oracle Grant Sequence Syntax

It's dead simple: GRANT select ON schema.sequence_name to schema

Amazingly, Google's results for this are shocking at the moment, dead end unanswered or confusing results

MapGuide End User Survey - RFC 111 Subversion

I put forward an idea for a RFC for Mapguide, which involves deploying the MapGuide web viewer apps
(Fusion and AJAX Viewers) checked out from Subversion.

The initial proposal is MapGuide RFC 111 - Deploy Viewer Code with Subversion Attributes
with the follow up discussion over on MapGuide-Internals

There have been some questions over how the end users of MapGuide would find using this
solution. Of course it's entirely optional solution for keeping your MapGuide Server running
with the latest bug fixes / improvements for the web viewers.

So I have put together this Quick Survey to get some background on our user base.

http://zackster.polldaddy.com/s/mapguide-source-control-survey
(Poll is now closed)

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.

Some Android Market Improvements I'd like

I just this story Hands on: Android Market website a step forward, still lags AppBrain and it's a pretty good review.

There's a few basic design things I'd like to see changed on the Android Market.

1. Use a different colour for the INSTALL and INSTALLED buttons, while your at it, pick another word, it's too confusing only differing by '-ED'
2. Offer list views with more content per page,  paging 12 apps at a time is very 1990's
3. Allow users to filter out installed from the listings
4. Continuous scrolling rather than tired old paging
5. The ability flag individual apps to be hidden from the listings, i.e. hide this app

Other Android observations ...

I've had a Nexus S for a while now and I'm really enjoying it as a phone, it's much smoother than my previous N1.
Battery does take ages to charge, thankfully I got two (more) chargers when I bought the phone.

Alas, the Gingerbread phone reboot bug has occurred a few times, otherwise the phone is really sweet.

The Gallery app is still a bit slow and the amount of time it takes to open a photo straight after taking it is a joke.

Tweetdeck is great, but it's started crashing all the time. The fancy scroll to the
top animation will crash it every time I jump back into the app after a few hours.

Perhaps a long press on the title bar bypass the scroll animation?

MapGuide 2.2 RC testing with PostgreSQL (Success)

I tried out the newer FDO PostgreSQL driver for PostGIS in the latest MapGuide 2.2 RC2 beta
with a local PostgreSQL db on Windows 7 64-bit (32-bit version of MG),

result? it works really well

Just make sure your not using version 9 of PostgreSQL , FDO 3.5 doesn't
support v9 yet, FDO 3.6/ MapGuide 2.3 will

I ended up downloading and installing the db twice as I forgot about
the lack of support for 9.0 with FDO 3.5

Remember! you need to make sure the libpq.dll's are in your system path

http://trac.osgeo.org/fdo/wiki/FdoPostgreSQLNotes

My testing was with some OSM (openstreetmap) data for Victoria, Australia
which I downloaded and loaded with osm2pgsql (use -s if you don't have lots of ram)

http://downloads.cloudmade.com/oceania/australia/victoria

IMHO, the OSM shapefile's have a nicer data structure than how the
OSM files get imported by default into PostgreSQL

Alas, the shp files have ":" in the column name which breaks SHP FDO,
PostgreSQL FDO works fine with these, translating them to _

but you can load the shape files easily into Postgres

lack of ordering support in MapGuide does still leave proper road rendering
rather inanely complex, http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/MapGuideRfc69

PostGIS rocks, faster than Oracle and free! Oracle's spatial licensing is so like 1990's

I wrote this, coz I figured it's important to tell some software success stories,
often people only post about problems, which can be depressing when your searching

http://mapguide-central.ennoble.com.au/

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.

Firefox Page Zoom problem with the Numeric Keypad Solved [Ubuntu]

Ubuntu by default doesn't work with the numeric keypad because of
n annoying system default. So in Firefox, page zoom using Ctrl-Plus and Ctrl-Minus with the
numeric keypad doesn't work. Grrr

solution: under System, Preferences, Keyboard, Mouse Keys (tab)

simply uncheck the "Pointer can be controlled using the keypad" checkbox (i.e. like the above)

CFIMAGE: Invalid image format - solution

Sometimes when you try to read an image with CFIMAGE using the filename,
it will fall over with "Invalid image format" using Coldfusion 8.0.1

The solution is easy enough, just read the image into a variable
and Coldfusion inspects the binary file contents rather than just being annoying


<cffile action = "readbinary" file="d:\inetpub\wwwroot\test.jpeg" variable="tmpBin">
<cfimage action="READ" name="tmpImage" source="#tmpBin#">


Australian Election 2010, Did Australian's dream thru the recession

Tony Abbott is spinning bullshit about debt like Australia Emits CO2, ie chronically.
I saw a banner in the Melbourne CBD about the $100 million a day the government is borrowing.
As mentioned on twitter, that is for each Australian (22,416,196) that's roughly $4.46 per head per day.

This video has better stats... and explains itself unlike the Liberals spin.

Other places to find interesting stuff about the Australia Election 2010 are:

I have a political list on Twitter has lots of interesting (political) wonky stuff http://twitter.com/zackster/politics,
it's not quite as rabid, scary and wonderful as the full raw ausvotes hashtag moshpit.

Crikey Blogs and Grogs Gamut are some of my favourite political blogs and has been
providing a great commentary of the election.

MapGuide: Using Fusion with Selection Events (aka reports)

Sometimes, you just want to do simple things and it seems frustrating. I was
frustrated and I solved it, here's my contribution back!

Having come into the geo-spatial world with Autodesk MapGuide in the 6.x series (aka classic),
the world was a lot simpler. The MapGuide Open Source Classic (or
Basic Viewer) made things easy to make a url launch from a selection. Fusion is a
little different, here's some pointers :)

MapGuide Fusion (aka flexible layouts) is a bit more technical to use, but is also
far more powerful, being based on OpenLayers.

If you want to launch a report, or popup window form a selection you need to
register an event to handle the selection.

The answer is pretty simple, as this mailing list post explains.

It's all you need to know to get started and hacking.

If it doesn't work, flip into Firefox, with Firebug enabled and dump
the sel inside the function selectionCallback(sel) and add a line to
window.console.info(sel); and see what your dealing with!

Learning by trying is the best way to learn

MapGuide Central for a good starting point for playhing with MapGuide, Openlayers and Fusion.