Microsoft Embraces PHP
In the if-you-can’t-beat-‘em category, Microsoft and Zend (creator of the PHP engine and a big corporate sponsor) have announced “a technical collaboration agreement……that aims to provide customers running PHP on the Win
Gartner: 8 of Every 10 Dollars Spent on IT "dead money"
I have an I love you/I hate you relationship with think tanks for two reasons:You can find a think tank that thinks just about anything.When making forecasts (the primary reason for think-tanking), their accuracy is gene
And Now a Note on the Windows Vista EULA
I don’t know if you’ve checked out a Vista release candidate yet, but it looks like it may actually arrive in November (January for non-business users). It’s several years late, minus a bunch of features (WinFS, Monad,
Citizens in Britain Take Back Their Data
I while ago I ran in to this story about a group suing Santa Clara County, CA for charging huge fees to access its GIS data. The fees could grow in to six figures for the entire county.For Santa Clara’s part, they claim
Web Services: XML-RPC, SOAP, and REST
A now a note on web services.Web services and their prime role in a service oriented architecture are all the rage in IT at the moment, including GIS. I’ve talked about SOA and web services before, but I never hit on th
Connecting to a REST Web Service from .NET
This came up for a project I was doing recently. A lot of .NET developers know how to connect to a SOAP web service, as that is the type of web service Microsoft favors. REST web services, however, are arguably the mor
ArcGIS 9.2 Uses GDAL for Raster Support
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the GDAL (pronounced “gee-del” I think) project here. It’s an open source translator library for raster geospatial data formats that a lot of open source projects, such as MapServer, us
Software Project Management at Google
Recently I ran across a good article on project management. See if the author’s description of typical project management sounds familiar:Hire a bunch of engineers, then hire more.Dream up a project.Set a date for when
IDC Finds 71% of Developers Use Open Source
This is a study I mentioned during a presentation at the 2006 Carolina URISA/GITA meeting, so I thought I’d post some additional details here.The IDC surveyed over 5000 developers from 117 different countries and found o
Eclipse Favored Over Visual Studio in Online Poll
Online opinion polling site Teeza.com asked the question, “What is your favorite IDE?”The results were interesting and unexpected enough to rate an eWeek article. The results stacked up this way:54% Eclipse15.5% V