Mapping Hacks

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 […]

In yet another informative post to the MapServer users mailing list
(login required), Frank Warmerdam explains how to use the tiling and overview
features of GDAL’s GeoTIFF driver to get
optimal performance on large raster images in MapServer, QGIS, OpenEV, etc.:

Assuming your GeoTIFF input is in.tif, you would do something
like:

$ gdalwarp in.tif latlong.tif -t_srs WGS84 -co TILED=YES
$ gdaladdo […]

David Blasby, the new maintainer of GeoServer, has had a pretty keen idea -
why, he reckons, shouldn’t all databases have spatial geometry
columns, operations, and indexes, rather than just the usual suspects, like
Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on. He’s hacked a wrapper around the Java Topology
Suite (the precursor to Refractions’s excellent GEOS library, which PostGIS
uses) with libgcj, […]

Since meeting on the openstreetmap list, we’ve been talking to the maintainer of navsys mapeditor on irc. From the mailing list:

due to the amount of requests, mapeditor now features a gpx loader (you
don’t even need to decompress the files)

grab it from cvs while it’s hot

Hopefully, out of all the pieces being put in the pile […]