Mapping Hacks

A bona fide mapscript recipe this time, on annotating features with python/mapscript. Some of it may be a little cargo-culted.
This only describes about 1/3 of my recent mapscript adventures, but i’m
trying to create some distributable code and do a python rewrite of map.wirelesslondon at the moment…

Part of the Southern border of the Netherlands, with Belgium, has a certain,
shall we say ‘complexity.’

Orange portions within green portions represent exclaves of the Netherlands
completely surrounded by Belgian territory which are in turn completely
surrounded by the territory of the Netherlands:

Traditionally, the nationality of your house is determined by the country where your ‘front’ door opens, […]

As i learn more about mapserver and mapscript, I keep feeling compelled to contribute docs of some kind to it; sometimes it’s taken a lot of digging around in the API docs and source to figure out what i want to do.
Today i turned a couple of my mapservers into Web Feature Service servers and […]

Jonathan Moore sent us a link to The
Neighborhood Project:

The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city
neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users. Addresses and
neighborhood data are translated into latitude and longitude values, and then
drawn on the map…. This is an experiment in collective knowledge. The more
people who add their opinion […]

GRASS 6.0.0 was released yesterday, with the shiny new vector model finally
in a stable version. Read the comprehensive
announcement, then get it from the European or US mirrors.
You can also read the full history, as well
as the SLOC
analysis.
GRASS turns 24 this year.

In their continuing quest to have something to say about everything on the web,
Google has a phone book service. If you enter a phone number it will often
return listing information, along with an address.

One could refer to this as YACK, Yet Another Category Killer. Google seems
to be good at these. A slightly […]

The English ‘defra’ (Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs) has
a site on Noise Mapping England

Noise - unwanted sound - is a universal problem and most of us have been affected by it at some point in our lives.

It goes way beyond noise as a problem. Noise is. And it has effects, and
those […]

How would you like to create your own geo-annotations and lay them on top of Google
Maps? Do I hear ‘Yes sir, please sir?’ Jon Udell wrote about his
Five minute walking tour of Keene, NY. He also created a Flash Animation that
demonstrates the power of showing context with the big view before zooming in […]

Layton Graphics has released a
plug in for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader that lets you georegister a PDF.
This is more or less the same as georeferencing a raster image.

George Demmy says it best, so I’ll just quote his mail to the geowankers list

Layton Graphics, the company I work for, has released a plug-in to
Adobe Acrobat […]

We recently ran across HostGIS
Linux, which purports to be a compact, easy-to-install, self-contained
Linux distro, with PostGIS, MapServer, etc. built-in. I don’t think I would use
this myself, given the availability of GIS packages for Linux distros with packaging systems, but it might remove some of the
sting for someone who’s just getting started - word has it […]