The Loop

Well its taken a while to put together, but I am finally reaching the point at which its really useable and sweet to work with. I would love to hear peoples thoughts on this - are you already using the DW controls? If so, what are your thoughts on this new style of working? Is it too limited by way of being too techie?

Its important to note that this framework is 100% cross platform any only requires Ruby, and the RubyGems package management; this screen-cast however was created on OSX Leopard.

MAKE SURE YOU VIEW FULL SCREEN TO READ THE TEXT

Enjoy!

Of late of been writing some nice gems makings heavy use of meta programming. If anyone is looking at doing something similar, I would high recommend you check out these resources:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/metaprogramming-ruby

http://www.rubyplus.org/

The talk about self and its meaning was extremely interesting - its really surprising how flexible it can be in the right hands :)

Well, its been a while, the but the guys at Exclaim Skiboards came through and I know have in my possession a slick pair of Revel8 KTP skiboards!!! Were off to Tamworth snow dome tomorrow to try them out – god I really cant wait! Just look how hot they are….

Updated after snowdome trip….

Well, they rock. Simple. Everyone on the slope kept asking what they were and saying how they were the coolest thing they’d ever seen – it was annoying that people kept calling them “snowblades” tho; they were hastily corrected – no… their “skiboards” you muppet!!

God, im so hooked – bring on Italy!!!!

Well, its time for production now – remember that tutorial way back about building PostGRE on OSX? Well Ive just done it on Ubuntu Server, but from scratch, with all the GIS bells and whistles ;)

Lets tuck in…

First off, rather than me labour the point (anyone familiar with linux will breeze this part) check out this really usefull post – its got all the things you need for doing the actual compilation and install.

There are however a few Ubuntu related “gotchas”. Firstly, after you install GEOS, both ldconfig doesnt yet know about the new libs you’ve just installed at /usr/local/lib. To make it read the new libs you’ve gotta create a new file called ld.so.conf and stick it in /etc – fill it with the following:

/lib/
/usr/lib/
/usr/local/lib/
/usr/X11R6/lib/

Then to make it read in the new config, do this:

/sbin/ldconfig -f /etc/ld.so.conf

To check that its now reading your GEOS libs, run the following, and make sure you see a similar output (depending on the version of GEOS you installed)

$ /sbin/ldconfig -p | grep geos
    libgeos_c.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/lib/libgeos_c.so.1
    libgeos_c.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/lib/libgeos_c.so
    libgeos.so.2 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libgeos.so.2
    libgeos.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libgeos.so

Another helping sir?

OK – were good to go on that front. The key thing now is that we need to be able to add GIS functions and type handlers to any given database. Provided you set up the ldconfig stuff correctly, doing:

su -- postgres /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql \
-f /usr/local/pgsql/share/lwpostgis.sql \
-d yourdbnamegoeshere

If this didnt work, you have a problem with your ldconfig! There are fixes out there which advise changing the lwpostgis.sql script, but in my personal opinion, thats not fixing the problem, thats just dirtying a fresh install.

Next, after I had everything up and running, it was puzzling me that there was no init.d script available (the google force was not strong today), I rummaged around in the source I downloaded, and found a startup-scripts dir in the contrib directory, result. Take that script, and bosh it into /etc/init.d and do:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d postgresql-8.2.5 defaults

Then you have a fully working PostGRE install with GIS sugar!!!

Hopefully this might help someone one day :)

Recently I found out that their is a swath of stuff avalible to install on your mobile device if your running Symbian OS.

My personal favorite is Google maps, which works amazingly well – check out an online demo of it here

There is also a GMail app, which works really nicely – More info on that can be found here

Also, for those of you who might want to restart your remote box on the go, there is a mobile SSH client that runs on an mobile with a JVM. Fly over to XK72 to check out MidpSSH client; it even lets you record macros for repeats tasks! Magic!

Well, its finally happened – an independent, open, and crucially free forum for discussing XMPie technology in a global community.

This is all pretty new but I would love to see some good conversations bubble up on there in the not too distant future – if you would like to sign up get yourself over to this page ASAP!

We are hoping that this will prove a useful and valuable resource for XMPie discussion – I hope to see as many of you on list as possible!!