Friday, July 13, 2007

Generation-Y Employees

I have never been really keen on generation nomenclature. I am never sure whether I am in generation X or Y. But I am concerned when surveys show a certain bias towards people of my generation. This came to my attention through my Engineering Association newsletter. So I dug up the original article from smartcompany.com.au.

The gist is that younger employees have a high technical skill level, but lack corporate slick. Their bosses increasingly rely on them to provide technical solutions and solve the problems that were impossible 1year ago but are probable now( due to pace of technology movement). The bosses then complain about the high expectations and low loyalty of the younger employees.

Over all the article is not all negative and puts forward a few useful suggestions for making the most of Gen-Y employees.

''The key issue for employers, then, is not whether to hire a member of Gen-Y, but how to make the most of them.''

BigTiff support coming to LibTiff 4.0

Thanks to the input from Joris and others various enhancements from the BigTiff proposal are now part of LibTiff. Hopefully it will soon get the blessings from Adobe, who own the Tiff Standard and become part of the official Tiff spec and encourage wider adoption.

Adobe seems to be aware of the issue with the 4Gb Tiff barrier and looking into already implemented enhancements such as by Aperio. John Nack points to it in his Adobe Blog. Hopefully Photoshop will soon take this up and implement a tiling scheme for images bigger than 30kx30k pixels.

Meanwhile I am busy shuffling BigTiff into my processing stack. Testing it with Gdal(Support works fines) and Ossim(Support not yet stable). If anyone wants to help in the testing with other applications grab some sample images here.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Qgis 0.9 to be released soon


Tim is warming up to release Qgis 0.9 before FOSS4G 2007. I am happy to report that it builds easily and cleanly in windows thanks to CMake with all the goodies and the much anticipated Python support via PyQt-Sip.

The Python API makes quick development and debugging of Qgis plugins as breeze. Quite a few have already been made to show the possibilities. To support the release ( and to plug my name choice for the release) I made up a new splash screen. I will welcome any criticism of my design's shortcomings.

Monday, July 2, 2007

Sweet and Sour Pork ... return to World Wind coding


I have been taking a break from coding World Wind. With the Java version building up and a lot of things on my plate, I was not sure where to concentrate. Knowing the code base well enough I can quickly solve problems and add features in the C# version. So I touched up a small section of KML Importer today for Image Overlays, now hopefully all sorts of image overlays work(local,over http and embedded in kmz). The rotation tag still needs working and I would like to add handles for editing the overlays as well from the Image Overlay plugin. The other nice upgrade would be support for multiple KML files.

Anyway to celebrate this small achievement I tried out the recipe for sweet and sour pork. The results were delicious and rewarding.

Sunday, July 1, 2007

M-Party





Went to Marine's farewell M'Party. The dress up was hilarious , including those not willing to dress up and turning up as 'Me' . Overall there were some pretty good costumes and I attracted plenty of attention strolling home in my magician gear across the crowded Saturday night streets, pity I had to give away my and wand and kanga-rabbit.

The party was taken over by Martians of both sexes and Mummies till the MIB came to rescue.
But they let their hair down and messed up, even the 3 Maids could not get the alien dust off.