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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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.
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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 […]
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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 […]
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What is an “app?” Is it a useful tool, or a toy? Is it a piece of software carefully designed to fulfill a purpose, or is it just a bit of code that is part of a larger marketing and branding ploy? Is it necessary, bringing something unique to the world, or is it just […]
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At the prompting (or complaint) of a reader, I’ve shared a base class that I use with my code generator. The generated code is “pure” in that it doesn’t contain any methods that don’t have to do with the data — it doesn’t implement saving and loading methods. I could create a codemodifier for this, […]
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