bertrand’s brain grep

Exploring the world of Open Source GIS, one cannot miss the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, which is in many ways similar to the Apache Software Foundation, but focuses on GIS-related projects.

Frank Warmerdam from OSGeo is currently talking about their foundation, and he just said their incubator is modeled of the ASF’s because it seems to work very well.

It’s good to see the ASF’s model used as an example for other similar foundation – this is a great testimony to the vision of the people who created the ASF, and to those who go out of their way to keep it on the right track!

ongoing updates:

One interesting difference is their project sponsorship program (still being worked on IIUC), where people can give money to a specifiy project instead of the OSGeo foundation as a whole. Sounds like a useful way to get more targeted sponsoring, as long as the bases of the foundation are covered.

Frank also says they’re going to hire an executive director, it’ll be interesting to see how this compares to the ASF’s way of working.

Thanks to Colm (who’s finally published the much expected but-how-do-you-pronounce-your-name post) I got to play a bit with their Google Mini.

To summarize, it feels like a solid but basic search appliance. The ranking looks good, and it’s an important feature for Joe User. On the other hand, “advanced” features like multi-language stemming, date range searches and the much expected “did you mean?” keyword suggestions don’t seem to be available.

I haven’t been able to dig in the configuration parameters, but there doesn’t seem to be much in terms of enabling more precise “database-like” searches in addition to full text.

At this point, my conclusion would be that the mini is a nice out-of-the-box solution for “usual” search requirements, but toolboxes like SOLR can enable a much wider range of uses (dynamic RSS feeds, automatic generation of website navigations, faceted browsing, etc.).

Of course, products like SOLR will require more work to setup than just plugging the thing into your network – but the Mini is not free either, and gets more expensive the more documents you need to index.

Anyway, here’s a summary of my findings about the Mini:

• Processing of French accented characters works, searching for “referencement” finds “référencement” (that’s an easy one).
• Language inference looks good, a document in French is marked as such.
• French stemming did not work in my tests, searching for analyse de code did not find a document containing analyses de code, even though it had been recognized as French. That’s a big drawback IMHO.
• English stemming does not seem to work either.
• Did you mean? suggestions do not seem to be implemented, searching for jawa language did not suggest java language.
• Date-based searches do not seem to be implemented.

All in all, assuming my tests are valid, it seems like the Mini is missing many of the niceties that the real Google has spoiled us with.

So this Guy, waiting for a job interview at a BBC office, is rushed to a TV studio, to answer questions live about the Apple vs. Apple case. Except he’s not the right Guy…

A noble man has got to do his job – and give the audience what they expect. Guy Goma answers the questions in a perceptually real way and gets instant fame. Is he really worse than the usual experts?

The video will stay as an important piece of our TV history.

Via pieceoplastic who’s got a great visual analysis of Guy Goma’s initial reaction (“it’s not me – but what the heck”).

Trying to install Kino on a Fedora box for my son who’d like to play with video…but gtk-config is missing, which yum package do I have to install?

The answer is yum provides gtk-config, which tells you which package contains that file. Cute.

On the way back from my teaching duties (riding my Flyer), I listened to Bill Strickland’s IT conversations interview, and it’s IMHO a must hear for the above categories of people. More about him at http://www.bill-strickland.org/.

Very briefly summarized, his message about enabling people to grow is

• Set the bar high.
• Consider people as assets instead of liabilities.
• Provide a world-class environment (as in efficient and cool, not necessarily expensive).

All this rings lots of bells here, for several of my roles in life this sounds similar to how I’m trying to act, and I can tell that when I do it works. So go get the podcast!

Jazz comes up several times during the talk, paralleled with the state of mind that’s needed to make things happen – seems like a jazzy state of mind helps.

I’ve written about this before, so I cannot agree more: the jazzy way of playing music, where you set the bar high and improvise with people that you trust, with all your feedback channels fully active, applies to much more than playing music.

I really like improvisation…

Update: good synchronicity between this and my good friend Sylvain‘s post!

Like someone who would have the bright idea of patenting a filesystem from the dinousaur era.

Of course, if FAT was “invented” by M$, doing this is certainly 100% ok from the legal point of view.

But from the shame factor point of view? You guys sleep well?

On the positive side: this makes a perfect case for software with clean open licenses!

Via Tristan Nitot (in French).

Thanks to David Reid and the site-dev folk for their great work on projects.apache.org!

You’ll find a centralized source of information about all ASF projects there, assuming the projects have created the required information files.

Tomorrow we’re heading to the Pearl of the Alps for a nice (I’m sure) week of skiing.

As usual, no electronic devices there except my mostly turned off cell phone. Holidays are better this way!

I’m still (at least mentally) working on my blog-in-french project, in the meantime if you care about free software and understand French go read Tristan Nitot’s latest post about lestelechargements.com. Hilarious in a way, but a bit scary as well.

I agree with Tristan about the price…180’000 euro sounds a bit steep for a slightly improved blog. Me, I’d happily do it for 179’000 ;-)

Here’s the winner of my (newly created) Best Quote Of The Week Award:

The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with photoshop or vim, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter.

From Signal vs. Noise, 37signals’ blog.

Deep Resonance here – I could list a ton of examples from past projects, and the current trend towards Simpler Systems That Work makes me really happy.

I’ve been lucky to work for projects with hard deadlines (exhibitions, TV shows, etc.) where being (a bit) rushed helps in throwing irrelevant things out of the window.

But sometimes, despite all your efforts, some customers still keep their focus on the things that just don’t matter. What’s one to do then? Running away as soon as you can might be your best defense ;-)