Thursday 26 February 2009

15 years ago...

The legendary Bill Hicks passed away on this day 15 years ago.

His comedy material is not only enlightening, but also clarivoyant.

How could he have predicted:
Must've been his squeegeed Third Eye.

Achievement Unlocked

1. Become a FDO project contributor
2. Become a MapGuide project contributor
3. ???
4. Profit!

I'm still figuring out step 3.

AutoCAD: Powered by bananas?

I was debugging an application I'm writing for AutoCAD Map when I found this little nugget of WTF in the Visual Studio output window.



Does AutoCAD require bananas to function optimally?

Wednesday 25 February 2009

FDO Toolbox v0.7.1

Fresh from the binary oven. Changes include:
  • You can now create connections by dragging and dropping SDF/SHP/SQLite files into the Object Explorer
  • A new Copy Spatial Contexts command, allows you to copy spatial contexts from one connection to another.
  • Connection nodes in the Object Explorer now show all spatial contexts in the tooltip.
  • Express module support for SQLite
  • Express module connection support for the following providers: MySQL and PostGIS
  • You can now save Data Preview queries in SQLite format
  • Saved Data Preview queries will now have spatial context information included.
  • NSIS installer now checks for .net Framework
  • If this is your first installation of FDO Toolbox, Visual C++ 2008 Runtime is now optional, as the required CRT dlls are now bundled with this release.
  • Fixed crash in Data Preview when querying without a geometry property specified.
  • Fixed bulk copy ignoring property name mappings
and finally...
  • Improved bulk copy insert performance. Especially for SQLite. SQLite is super fast!
Get it while it's hot!

Report bugs or feedback

Monday 16 February 2009

A bad relationship: Google Earth 5.0 & MapGuide 2.0.2

Something. Broke. Bad.

Those of you who have the latest and greatest version of Google Earth may find (like I have) that it doesn't like the kml that the current release of MapGuide is serving up.

Basically a GetMapKml call will fire up Google Earth, zoom to the region defined by the Map Definition, and that will be all she wrote. You'll see the map layers in the layers pane, but the features in those map layers do not get streamed across from MapGuide's KML service.

Unfortunately, Google Earth doesn't seem to have any useful way to diagnose Network Links and MapGuide's logs don't seem to reveal much useful information either.

I'm setting up a test matrix of various versions of Google Earth and MapGuide to see what more information I can ascertain. It would be nice to know what has changed with regards to Google Earth's KML handling since v4.3 (where this problem seems to have originated from)

UPDATE: It seems Google Earth is the offender here. (Thanks Jason!)