Sometimes you work on something so hard for so long you actually miss the point where it became, for lack of a better word, “usable”. There’s this idea in software development of the minimum viable product, which in my opinion isn’t the same thing as the minimum useful feature set, but there’s probably some debate. The first […]
Continue reading
The short story is that I don’t have enough scientific knowledge to know how to calculate magnetic declination, but enough to know that it can be done, using just a position on the surface of the earth and some information about the earth’s magnetic field. This is such an important topic that I was pretty […]
Continue reading
I love the Mac, I really do. If you look at my resume, one of my earliest jobs was doing tech support for it, and I had another job writing software for it. It was fun. However, after supporting and programming so many different systems over the years I do have some insights, and this one […]
Continue reading
I recently went to the trouble of figuring out how to use BruTile to access ArcGIS online maps. ArcGIS serves the maps as a tileserver. I came up with the following URL to access the tiles of the world topographic map. http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer Then I used the following code to configure the TileSource TileSource = new ArcGisTileSource(m_url, […]
Continue reading
One of the strangest IT experience of my software career so far. As an independent contractor and software developer I have to maintain all of my own computers so while I am not a professional IT person I do have a lot of experience since I’ve built all of my development machines from scratch (parts) for the […]
Continue reading
One of the major features of TrueNorth is data interoperability, and one of the most common file formats for exchanging GPS data is GPX. GPX is supported by many smart phones, GPS devices, and hundreds of software packages. So, one of the earliest features added to TrueNorth was GPX support. GPX is an XML File […]
Continue reading
Google announced it’s new Public Alerts service today. This isn’t like the other Google Alerts service which lets you enter a few search terms and have Google email you when new results are found (although this tool is also useful for alerting you for public safety). Google Public Alerts is a tool based on Google Maps that shows relevant alerts from public […]
Continue reading
While busy working on TrueNorth, I implemented this based on the the Wikipedia Article. The Extents class, and the PointDType are simple structures to contain the view window, and the double precision coordinates respectively.
Continue reading
I just got back from SARScene 2011, and I’ve posted a page containing links to the presentation, supporting materials, all the videos from the search, and references. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in anything about the presentation. The feedback I got from the SAR community was encouraging; there was some interest in […]
Continue reading
I was just reading The State of the Art is Terrible by Zack Morris, which is quite well written. I couldn’t have put it better. In his words It really, truly, is all crap. And it’s much worse than anybody realizes In my words, the entire software world from banking, to games, is held together with rubber […]
Continue reading