Technical Ramblings

Upgraded WordPress so that I can use Akimset for spam prevention. This means I may actually be more diligent about approving comments now…

So, the most recent (2005) MassGIS orthophotos have taken to ‘blurring’ imagery of some nuclear facilities, as discussed on Slashdot. Specifically mentioned is a  nuclear facility in Lowell.

As Chad points out in The Earth Is Square, this is a change in policy from the previous rev of the MassGIS aerial data.

I wonder what changed…

So, for the past several months, one of my main projects has been working inside of MetaCarta to put together the tools neccesary to let our customers integrate MetaCarta search results into all sorts of web pages inside their networks. Over the past several weeks, my main project has been taking the work we did in that regard, and making it available to the public.

So, if you’ve ever had an interest in finding out what MetaCarta does, the best way to find out is to:

• Check out MetaCarta Web Services
• Create an account
• Follow the step by step tutorial on adding a MetaCarta geographic search interface to a web page

Sure, it may not seem the most glamorous thing in the world, but we’ve definitely put a lot of effort into making these tools available, and I’d love to see some people try it out.

Wow, I’d never used the optparse module before. That’s pretty damn cool. (And to think I came close to writing my own option parser for a bit before I looked up the documentation.) The automatic addition of –help output is super-cool too. I definitely need to start using this in more of my code.

Hooray for Python!