A friend pointed out this Guardian article about Stallman's (and others) perspective on the cloud computing direction. From an open source perspective I've felt similar concerns re: the shift to GMail, but I know that many users (like me) merely use it for mail mirroring, not a wholesale dependency.

What better way to spend a long weekend that experimenting with a new Linux-based file-sharing and networking platform? ;-) Amahi Linux Home Server aka the Home Digital Assistant is a set of pre-configured tools and services that are added on to the Fedora Core base. I just learned about it and thought I'd give it a try.

I haven't had time to put up more photos or instructions, but have made a little progress with adding sensors to my Arduino (aka Freeduino) board. I now have a range of code and devices working including:

• my GPS receiver (Garmin eTrex Legend) - parsing coordinates and, for example, positioning the camera in ossimPlanet

With OSSIMPlanet's nifty camera control and listener functionality, as demonstrated in my last post, you've got so many neat opportunities. A couple nights ago I got a basic GPS NMEA parser working. Here's a pic of the ultra-professional connection method I use to hook it to my arduino board :)

A while back Mark Lucas took me through a demonstration of the sort of peer-to-peer communication capabilities of OSSIMPlanet. Little known to me after turning on a few check boxes in the preferences (and opening TCP ports in your firewall) it will let you share what you are viewing with others. It can even syncronise the WMS layers the source has loaded. It was really exciting to see this sort of collaborative viewing experience turning into reality.

For most of my life I've wanted to do some fun stuff with computer hardware, especially robotics and UAV sorts of things. This is where fun software and down-to-earth applications come together. Finally I've been able to do something about it!

OSGeo hosts their annual conference - FOSS4G 2008 - this September in Cape Town, South Africa. Come to learn about the latest tools, attend workshops and meet fellow users and developers. I'll be there as will hundreds of others. Last year in Victoria, Canada, we had record attendance of over 700.

See you there!

In my last post I mentioned the use of a script for mass cataloguing of dataset assets and the production of an XML document describing them. Mateusz justifiably asked for more of the purpose behind such a project, so here is some of the background that brought me to this point.

I've picked away at a Python script over the course of a few years, that helps scan a tree of file folders and find spatial datasets. It's pretty simple and uses GDAL/OGR libraries to identify the formats and examine the contents. Now it outputs an XML structure that I'd love some constructive feedback on.

Some like reading Slashdot to get their fill of news for the day, others like CNN, but whenever I'm bored I turn to freshmeat.net. Sure, I don't get my fill of politics but it sure gives me enough food for thought. It was a great resource when I was looking for ideas or new projects to try out. The site lists recent updates to open source projects and provides all the quick links to try it, download it, see screenshots, etc. I see there are even some geospatial apps listed as well.