The slides from my talk at the January 2007 Ruby.MN meeting, entitled “GIS and Rails” are available.
The slides cover the use of Rails, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, GeoRuby, spatial_adapter and YM4R/GM for creating a simple zipcode map, which is adapted from Guilhem Vellut’s tutorial.
Edit: Wow, what a turnout tonight! I appreciate the positive feedback from the presentation.
I just noticed the JavaBlogs.com redesign, and I noticed the “Hot Entries” link on the side was gone. Oh look, it moved to the top of the page. SO WHY CAN’T I CLICK ON IT IN SAFARI?!
Beginning in October 2007, the National Weather Service will issue storm warnings using polygons instead of for entire counties.
This means fewer people will be unneccesarily warned, hopefully making warnings more accurate.
My only criticism is that it’s not starting until October 2007, which means that we’ll have one last spring Skywarn season of county-based warnings.
Ok, this a “slap me on the forehead thing”. This is probably the worst possible way to secure a web site. It’s one step from NOT securing it at all. I can’t believe I’m writing this, because it’s painful to know that companies do this sort of thing:
if (username == "client1" && password == "client1") { window.location = "http://www.blah.com/client1/"; }
if (username == "client2" && password == "client2") { window.location = "http://www.blah.com/client2/"; }
This should be obvious now, and the only reason I’m mentioning it is because I’ve seen this type of “security” in the wild. If I were a potential client, I’d be afraid.
So please… never, EVER rely on Javascript to secure your site. Especially if you want clients to take you seriously.
After almost 2.5 years of ownership, my trusty Revision C G4 Powerbook is no more.
The first problem I had was in March of 2005, when suddenly the 1GB stick of Cruicial RAM wasn’t showing up. The lower RAM slot had failed, and Apple promptly replaced the motherboard.
My next problem was a hard drive that was crapping out, so they replaced that.
Over the next year or so, I’d been having problems with intermittent lockups, unable to boot the machine, etc. Two weeks ago, it finally gave up the goat. The machine hard locked, and no amount of PRAM zapping or power-module-resetting would revive the box. So, in to the Apple store.
Luckily, this time my laptop did a kernel panic when the tech at the store booted it, and he’d been pretty familliar with the lower RAM slot failing, and he had a pretty good hunch that this was the problem again.
So, the Apple store proceeded to order a motherboard, and I waited. A week went by, and I hadn’t heard a peep from the store, so I called them. Apparently the first TWO motherboards they received from Apple H.Q. were DOA, and they had their third one in-store, but were waiting on RAM.
I waited another week.
This week, I called them and bugged them. The tech was very apologetic, and became very proactive in making sure he communicated what was going on with the repair. He said they managed to dig up some known-good RAM, and were going to get it on the bench the next day.
Today, a woman from the same store called, and explained that she was upset with the quality of replacement parts they were getting from Apple H.Q. The third motherboard was also DOA, and she explained that they were going to just replace my laptop with a new MacBook Pro (!)
All I have to say is, thank god for AppleCare :)