Geospatial Haiku

This might be of your interest to see  how music production software solved the UI for many controls and options the user might want to control at the same (real!) time.   SONAR X1 actually haven’t brought any new functionality in this new version, just completely redesigned UI and build on top of this marketing campaign. Another fact I like is that they haven’t use all these fancy styles on windows that makes things look ‘nice’ like powerpoint but are not well readable or effective for eyes. To me it is kind of mixture of VisualStudio 2010 UI plus Office Ribbon bar plus good color scheme and additional tweaks to make it really usable.

watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97LnrViar38

   I have quickly tested my new Windows Phone 7 (Samsung Omnia) device with the Czech cadastral map WMS overlay over the BingMaps and DeepEarth (also see this blog here: http://blog.sumbera.com/2010/11/10/wms-overlay-on-bing-maps-vs-deepearth-on-wp7/) . if you are familiar with www.ikatastr.cz and iPhone version of it (iKatastr) than this example is using same data sources.

In short : it was a great experience – WP7 was smoothly  registered, automaticaly connected to internet even without  a SIM card using USB cable and Visual Studio 2010 integration just works perfect (so far:) In comparison to many difficulties and ‘certification hell’ on iPhone this is a great relief. Now giving the fact that Nokia is going to support and develop Windows Phone 7, great user experience with WP7 and (for me and menay others) great development experience, this might change the mobile landscape significantly over the 1 or 2 years.

I will guess here that WP7 platform will exceed number of iPhone applications in less than 2 years.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 12 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 85 posts.

The busiest day of the year was November 17th with 117 views. The most popular post that day was Overlay WMS on Google in OpenLayers.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were sumbera.com, mapshake.cz, en.wordpress.com, ikatastr.cz, and youtube.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for iphone wms, wms iphone, sessionviewsize, iphone gps bluetooth, and powerpoint carousel.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Overlay WMS on Google in OpenLayers February 2010
2 comments

iPhone and HOLUX1200 GPS bluetooth with Navigon October 2009
2 comments

Comparing iPhone GPS November 2009
4 comments

Overlay WMS on Google in Silverlight Bing February 2010
6 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Apple-like image carousel for Microsoft Power Point September 2009
1 comment

***updated 02/2011 : Power Point 2010 includes lot of out-of-box nice animation – they are part of the Transitions effects, including “slide carousel” so you do not need to use below procedure unless you want to have glass reflection that ppt 2010 doesn’t provide in its default transitions “orbit” and “doors”.***

here is the ultimate Power Point “technology” that I have used in my previous blog for animation of pictures (check here: http://blog.sumbera.com/2009/06/15/whatevermap-alpha/ ). Yes ! it is just powerpoint animated and captured by video capture software. I believe you might find this useful too  when you need to present multiple screenshots (and impress audience)  with your cool image  carousel . You can easily customize it and use for your own presentations. Each image is self contained animation so you can copy/paste/change picture and possible sync by mouse clicking.  But deafult is that each image is waiting for cca 2 seconds in the front and then fade out and zoom out from the screen (while the next one is zooming in an fading-out)
In the following ‘image carousel pptx’  you can change images  by right clicking on any image and selecting “change picture” menu option.

http://www.sumbera.com/blog/ImageCarouselPowerPoint.pptx

Netezza announced today availability of their revolutionary mobile device “iQuery”. “Netezza is redefining database”.

Quoted from press release: The Netezza iQuery is a fully integrated, portable, data collection device with five terabytes of queryable storage that allows users to collect and store data for ‘on the go’ analysis. Analytic functions are supplied to iQuery through downloadable applications — called “applytics” –which provide solutions to common dilemmas such as ‘should I wear a coat today’, ‘will the price of bread fall in my supermarket’ or ‘should I talk to that interesting looking person at the bar.’ When docked, iQuery connects to the Internet to search social media websites and other information providers to bring back options quickly and help decisions be reached with a minimum of debate and discussion

Definitely LOL for the 1^st April , Netezza smart marketing always positively surprises me. http://www.netezza.com/data-warehouse-appliance-products/iquery.aspx

WCF 4.0 introduce a concept “Contract Projection” – exactly ‘the right term’ I have tried to find while expressing the logical diagram of service concept, but called it “payload serialization/deserialization”. This concept of Contract Projection is about dcoupling integration logic from service, about posibility to have stable interface (type based .NET ) decorated with contract attribute (I call it mapping interface to contract) and multiple expression of how the contract will be used for integration with consumers. That is- what message format, encoding, protocol it will use. Contract Projection together with flexibility of binding through endpoints represent great way how to shield service code from interoperability standards details. So whether you want to access service through endpoint A, or endpoint B using JSON, SOAP,GeoRSS,GeoJSON, OGC/WPS,etc.. doesn’t matter. This is “flexibility of integration”.

“The .NET Framework 4.0 introduces the concept of a contract projection to separate the logical contract definition from the representation of the messages that are sent and received. This allows you to define a single-service contract that can be projected differently to support different messaging styles. For example, you can have one contract projection for SOAP-based messaging and another projection for REST/POX messaging, but both are based on the same logical service contract”

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.01.net40.aspx

In summer last year I was experimenting with what I call “Geospatial Operating Environment” – a client based virtual appliance for geospatialy related operations that would give to user immediate (instant) tools and applications. Well, there is already approach to have USB drive and put there portable applications that can be run directly from USB drive without any need of installation. This approach is fine but definitely not error-prone since ‘the virtualization’ level is just on top of operating system and more dependent on a  host OS state and health. Running any executable from USB can potentially crash whole OS. Another approach is to virtualize applications using ThinApps or App-V but again the level of separation of OS from applications is not always guaranteed (I mean look on a way how you define virtualized applications – you need to sequence them (or ‘capture them’) where differences between initial state of OS and state of the OS after installation of apps represent the ‘properly installed and configured application’ that can be virtualized). Is this a right way ? why the industry is not looking more for jeOS and virtual appliances ? May be virtualized applications will give us more robust application sandbox that will less crash OS and less side-interact with other applications. Well may be the whole point is to always assemble OS+Apps where producer has always under control fresh new OS plus set of apps on top of that (Actually both CITRIX and VMWare are promoting this dynamic approach). Simply said, I do not trust so far to virtualized applications. OS is still pretty complex piece that you can make better, reliable but not as stable as hardware operations  today.Virtual Appliances rely on thin layer of hypervisor and hw while virtualized applications have much more large stack of software underneath.

Back to my topic… so I have done experimental client-side virtual appliance with lot of installed open source and free applications. One of them GoogleEarth was performing very slowly in virtualized environment due to the fact that virtualized environmend can’t so far utilize special hardware (a typical problem of virtual machines or common denominator).  But why not to run same appliance either virtualized or on physical hardware ? with VMWare it is possible with physical disk – once appliance is installed, you can either boot it directly from hard drive (or USB) or if you want to run it virtualized in some host environment, then this is possible too:

vmdk file then look very simple and access in fact regural disk image of the ‘virtual appliance’ – this is not any more virtual appliance but somehow ‘semi-virtualized’ appliance :

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=2ccad3f7
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="fullDevice"
# Extent description
RW 625137345 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive1" 0
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.toolsVersion = "0"
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "38913"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "38913"
ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "255"
ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"

It is official now – we have been granted by Apple to enter iPhone Development Program for Universities. There are only two members so far, but anyone who would like to join for iPhone geospatial development  is welcome (and save time dealing with byrocrazy / restrictions of Apple while maintaining licenses and legal purity of development).  The team is located in Brno at Mendel University and virtually anywhere :). Are you interested in WMS for iPhone ? for supporting rich professional  map displays on iPhone ? What if  iPhne would serve as very good marketing  channel (while users are using some map application ?) So far plans are very simple – enable iPhone to consume maps stored in MapShake. The crazy idea is to enable OLON consumtion directly in iPhone. (since MapShake now stores OLON definitions) . Consider your role in this team and project and join today ! Any support is welcome.

preview of current work  is available here: http://mapserver.mendelu.cz/iphonelayers

Another good news is that this project has received start-up grant by Internal Mendel University Grant (IGA). The project has been evaluated as 16th out of 22 accepted projects for 2009.  Full version of the project proposal is available (in Czech Language) on request.

I wanted to  evaluate originally  ThinInstall  (now newly renamed by VMware to ThinApp) only. ThinApp requires as much as possible clean OS before capturing apps that should be virtualized. Since I didn’t want to boot my VM/install clean one I gave 2nd chance to MojoPac (a great idea, but half year ago MojoPac was crashing my entire Laptotp when trying to open files  with QGIS 10..) . This time MojoPac 2.0.0.0 positively suprised me. First of all I still don’t know how they technicaly do this. Could be by new windows session, but that was not proven…Back to my test. I decided to install fresh MojoPac ainto my WD external HDD and there I have installed trial version of VMWare ThinApp. I have choosen to virtualize complex caliber installation  application Bentley view v8i. All worked fine to my suprise. MojoPac was able to run Bently View as well as ThinApp successfully virtualised it. The footprint of the exe and dat file was huge (no compression)..1.3GB.  virtualised Bently view was able to run on host as well in MojoPac. The last test I have tried was to run both in MojoPac – Bently View installed reguraly as well as virtualised…just worked. To summarize this, I believe that MojoPac is a great way (if stable and improving) and directly competting with ThinApp from VMWare (which is not free).

On page http://www.xpnet.com/appvirt2008.pdf you migh find quite interesting  benchmark of current application virtualizations technologies of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 4.5; VMware ThinApp 4.0.1; Citrix XenApp 5; and Symantec Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) Pro 2.1.  In the report ThinApp is a winner.:[quoted from the research ]:

” Application virtualization solutions that use an embedded virtualization model (ThinApp) deliver the best application throughput. Only ThinApp delivers the combination of excellent raw performance plus low overall CPU utilization, making it the better solution for organizations seeking to minimize the performance “hit” typically associated with virtualization technology. “

2 Bently View v8i running inside MojoPac - 1 installed, 2nd virtualized by ThinApp (and both virtualized by MojoPac)

Here are my numbers of lunching Bently View v8i (all are measured by 4th run and untill dialog for selecting dgn file will appear):

run from installation in MojoPac: 2.8 s
run from ThinApp virtualization (uncompressed) in MojoPac: 4.9 s
run from ThinApp in host: 4.9 s
run MojoPac + Bently View from host : 14.8 s

this would give MojoPac 1.75x faster than default ThinApp virtualized application (regardless whether ThinInstall runs inside or outside MojoPac). But if compared to time from host to virtualized applicaiton run, than winner is ThinApp (3x faster) since there is no overhead with virtualisation of whole desktop environment.  (I  personally prefer – with regard to coherence introduced by Parallels – ThinApp way for smooth integration with current desktop)