Sam’s random musings

Herbert Spencer:

“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”

(Via Motivational Quotes of the Day.)

GeoURL 2.0 Slated to Open Soon:

Joshua Schachter’s GeoURL, one of the original webpage geo-mapping sites, fell into spam and disuse about a year ago (and was sadly only given brief mention in the book), but it’s now being given new life by Ask Bjorn Hanson of CPAN fame. The website reports that its 2.0 launch will be “Real Soon Now”. It should be interesting to see if the concept can be expanded, given the frankly astonishing (pun unintended) developments in Open Source GIS that have come about since GeoURL’s birth.

Can’t wait

(Via Mapping Hacks.)

Spatial DB in Box:

David Blasby, the new maintainer of GeoServer, has had a pretty keen idea - why, he reckons, shouldn’t all databases have spatial geometry columns, operations, and indexes, rather than just the usual suspects, like Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on. He’s hacked a wrapper around the Java Topology Suite (the precursor to Refractions’s excellent GEOS library, which PostGIS uses) with libgcj, and voilá — it’s a Spatial Database in a Box. Currently, there’s support for Apache’s Derby (aka IBM’s Cloudscape), PostgreSQL and HSQLDB, a Java database engine. Personally, I’d like to see an SQLite port, as well. Although this project is still at a very embryonic stage, it’s interesting to see the idea of spatial databasing abstracted out in a way that can be put to use on more and different platforms, like embedded systems, for example. We’ll be watching this one.

Beginning to collect issues related to geo coding and the like, for a project…

(Via Mapping Hacks.)

User Errors in PHP - SitePoint PHP Blog The trigger_error function in PHP allows you to generate a PHP error on demand. If you haven’t used this function before, you may be asking, “Why would you want to generate an error?” Well, it is a much more flexible solution than using exit or die to display your error message.

Old: XMLHttpRequest, New: Ajax:

I’ve blogged here before about XMLHttpRequest, and a frequent complaint about that term (besides “which letters get capitalized, again?”) is that’s it’s too unwieldy and needs a better name. Jesse James Garrett and Adaptive Path have a suggestion: Ajax, a new approach to web applications.

The name comes from Asynchronous Javascript And Xml, and while it’s better than XMLHttpRequest, I still wish someone would come up with a name that’s more Google-unique.

(Via Backup Brain.)

Numa Numa: Is that Steve Ivy?!?:

I love that little movie! The, uh, “dancer” is hilarious (and not untalented at lip sync), and the music is great. Anybody know the name of the band?

(Via TruerWords.)

J. S. Bryan:

“Many men can make a fortune by very few can build a family.”

(Via Motivational Quotes of the Day.)

Children’s Resource Group:

The latest project to roll off the OrderedList shelves: Children’s Resource Group. CRG needed a web presence that was fundamentally and technically accessible. Combine that with a clean, consistent look and they’ve got a site to be proud of.

Very nice simple css design

(Via OrderedList.com.)