Gav's Blog

I came across this one-stop geospatial portal in Scotland. I wish that someone in Central Government, probably the State Services Commission, would hurry up and start a similar project here.

Geographical Information is vital to the operation of many business and government processes. During the process of developing a GI Strategy for Scotland it became clear that an important requirement was the ability to forge links between GI initiatives, projects, implementations and research activity. An easily accessibly registry of existing projects was seen as a necessary first step in this process. This site allows the searching of a catalogue of initiatives based in Scotland and beyond and lets you record details of projects and initiatives your organisation is involved in.

CNN’s Show and Tell has a video up on their website introducing people to geocaching. It’s quite a nice introduction to caching. The direct link is here (note this links directly to the m4v file – you’ll need a video player capable of playing MPEG4). Note that it is not streaming, so it has to download the whole file first.

Here are a couple of articles that were posted on the Garmin Blog recently.

Firstly, Garmin appears to be following a number of other technology companies into the realm of setting up their own dedicated retail store. Of course, I expect it will be a long time before we get anything like that here. There is a Garmin press release available here.

Secondly, a tale of a rather hardy GPS unit…

…it was no surprise that the display was nothing but a horizontal straight line; I did not give up. I put the thing in my oven at 200 degrees for 1.5 hours. When I turned it back on…

Police officers in the United States pulled over a guy during a traffic stop, had marijuana in his possession, as well as a GPS. They checked the GPS, found a pile of waypoints, plotted them on Google Earth, went out hunting and found a pile of pot plants. Quite amusing.

According to this article, which interviews Peter Maire – the founder of NavMan, it sounds as if Brunswick have put them on the market again.

Over on Spatially Adjusted, James Gee has an article discussing what appears to be an increasing movement away from ArcIMS as the mapping server platform-of-choice. It appears that there have been few additional features or must-have functionality added to the commercial servers in recent years, and at the same time open source solutions have been growing in capability and reliability. The increasing trend towards interoperability has also speed up this change, as there is less reason to proprietary client and server solutions – you can choose the best client and server for your needs.

The American owners of NavMan are instigating a round of job cuts that may see up to 5% of their workers fired.

Dan Kubera, director at marine and leisure products giant Brunswick, said up to 5 per cent of Navman’s employees could be made redundant from positions across all departments.

The company employs more than 600 people at sites in Auckland and Christchurch.

Job losses on Navman’s radar. It seems as though there has been a longer standing exodus of personnel from NavMan – for reasons described as a culture clash in this Herald article.

The serendipitous discovery of GPS signal degradation during a research experiment in 2005, has highlighted that degradation of up to 90% may occur around 2011-2012 when more solar flares are expected. This could impact all daytime users more than previously expected.

The first stage of a new regional park has been opened in Canterbury on the banks of the Waimak river. When fully completed in 2012, the park will cover around 11,000 hectares. The main activities supported will be mountain-biking and hiking, but I dare say a few geocaches may appear there in the not to distant future. At this stage, only 10km of MTB track is available.