april 2003 archives

Monday, April 28, 2003

Who's running what? To answer this question, there's the Netcraft Services. Amazingly, most online mapping providers are running Microsoft Internet Information Server on Windows 2000:

The big European players seem to be hooked on the LAMP configuration:

There's no real surprise when it comes to MapQuest. As they were bought by AOL some years ago, the site's running AOLserver on Solaris.  permanent link for this entry

Hilarious place names were discussed at webmapper.net before. At the time, the only Dutch example I could think of was “Sexbierum”, combining the Dutch words for “sex”, “beer”, and “rum”. In June 1983, the Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij published a list of naughty place names titled “Uitstapjes voor smeerkezen” in one of the Dutch newspapers. Some of these, I looked up to please your curiosity:

In the same newspaper, Ewoud Sanders published several articles about fictive place names that refer to existing places. So stay tuned to locate “Aarlanderkutkachelveen” or “Hendrik-Ido-Godverlaten-Jezus-Tering-Ambacht”.  permanent link for this entry

Thursday, April 10, 2003

Yesterday MySQL released the latest version of its RDBMS: MySQL 4.1.0 Alpha! Most exciting features from a GIS point-of-view are:

  1. Defining character sets for any column, table, and database, including extensive Unicode support.
  2. Spatial extensions.

The first feature enables the GIS community to store toponyms in an Open Source without losing special characters, for which endonyms are notorious. The spatial extensions, pushed by the OGC, allow generating, storing and analysing of geographic features. Who needs proprietary GIS software?  permanent link for this entry

Friday, April 04, 2003

The distance is death. Long live the distance! Although the convergence of the virtual and the physical world has been talked about by various people on their blogs, mainstream journalism has caught up on this. Last week, The Guardian featured an article in their Online section focusing on collaborative mapping. Yours truly was not particularly “slashdotted”, but I can easily say that traffic ten-folded. This week, my attention was drawn to The Economist's take on the various aspects related to this development.  permanent link for this entry

UpMyStreet. Good and bad (?) news.... Good news first: on his blog, Stefan Magdalinski presents each UMS Conversation plotted on a map! Very interesting representation: space is a very effective way to structure huge sets of data. Not so good news? UpMyStreet is up for sale. Let's where that's going. Great opportunity for Mapminder or Streetmap I'd think...UPDATE: Okay, of course I am prejudiced towards online mapping suppliers as possible buyers. The Register suggests several portals as potentially interested parties.  permanent link for this entry