Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you can be with your loved ones and have a great time. Again, I will be celebrating Christmas alone. But I won’t be celebrating by myself. No!!! I will be surrounded by my family, and by my friends. I just hope Santa fulfills my wish next year…

I’m not sure that I like Thunderbird 3.0. I was a big fan of TB up until 2.x, but with the 3.x version released, I’m not sure. Double click on a message, and look at the (default) buttonbar. Why is there a “write” button, and and “address book” button? Where are reply (all) and forward? Oh, they are in the message-header-block, but why can’t I remove them there? Why don’t the previous/next buttons work properly (not even with add-ons)? What’s the fuss about tabbed reading? Why would I want tabbed email-reading? There is a smart-folders reading mode, but where can I see/setup how smart I want TB to be? Why is the “new” button renamed to “write”? Write an event? And what’s with the hint texts: Write event hints “create a new message”, write task hints “create a new message”? Why can’t I see my calender AND my email in one view, why can’t I disable the tabs?

Adding features is never really a bad thing, but don’t touch thing that work. And have worked for decades. Don’t reinvent the wheel. A round one is just fine on our planet.

Did a custom build of Thunderbird yesterday, since openSUSE comes with version 3.0b4 and that’s not recognized by all plugins. It took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the annoying “Shredder” name, but at last I found it: it’s in some files in the branding directory. Once you change those, and do a rebuild, Thunderbird is called Thunderbird again.

As per February 1st, 2010, I will be changing jobs. The company I work for now has its focus on Oracle. Nothing wrong with that, I’m a senior Oracle consultant (working with Oracle since 1989). But my interest lies with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and that’s not where the company focuses on. We don’t do PostGIS, we don’t do .NET, we don’t do mobile, we must use the Oracle Application Server (Weblogic now). To me, Oracle is not always the solution. So I decided to change jobs, and go work for a GIS-company. They focus on GIS-solutions, and don’t really mind about what technique is used. The company is Merkator. It’s headquarters are located in Groningen, together with a colleague I will be starting a new “cell” in the midst of the Netherlands, somewhere below Utrecht, or in Utrecht, that hasn’t been decided yet.

Please consider hiring me

Cheers!

If you’re a happy GeoServer 1.7.x user, then seriously consider upgrading to GeoServer 2.0. It’s a lot faster, its menu structure is a lot better, the UI is much improved (with a touch of Ajax here and there). I found some minor issues (which I’m looking into before raising my voice), but nothing that should keep you from updating.

I run GeoServer in Oracle’s OC4J 10gR2 (the standalone development version), and it runs without any problems. Since the OC4J is declared dead, I will be looking into deploying it to Weblogic, but that’s a completely different monster to conquer…

From a colleague I got to view the DVD of Donnie Darko. Wow. This is a MUST! OWN! DVD! Don’t argue with me. You don’t know shit. MUST OWN. Yes I did hear good stories about the movie earlier, no it’s not a new movie, but for some reason I never got around viewing it earlier. So I’ll say this to you again: go buy the DVD, or better yet, the BD (there is no Dutch version of it, so I’ll have to order it abroad).

Thank you. Now go on living.

Finally, it works. I found some new samples on the OpenLayers site and some posts in the mailinglist that OpenLayers.Layers.WFS just plainly sucks. Indeed, so I experienced. Instead the writer suggested to use OpenLayers.Layer.Vector and give it a type WFST. So I googled around for some samples, found one, modified it, and….voila….no more empty geometries in the database. YEAH!

Yesterday I installed JBoss 4.2.3 and deployed Geoserver 1.7.6 to it and installed the OracleNG plugin. Unfortunately, after setting up the Oracle datastore and some features, inserting via WFS-T still resulted in an empty geometry in the database.

SVN access to the OpenLayers trunk gives an error at the moment, so I guess I’ll have to do some further testing with the 2.0RC of Geoserver.

I tried Geoserver with Oracle 11g, and still I get empty geometries inserted into the database. With Firebug I can see that the GML sent is correct, it contains the correct geometry information (in this case: point coordinates), but the receiving end fucks it up. Not sure whether the OracleNG plugin for Geoserver or Openlayers does the fucking up, but I suspect it is the plugin.

Dear all,

I’ve been struggling with Geoserver and Oracle as a datastore. In a webpage that uses OpenLayers, I’m trying to use the WFS-T features. Don’t get me wrong, WFS works great. That is, the read-only part. WFS-T works great with shape files. WFS-T works great with PostGIS. But the same page, same WFS-server (my local Geoserver) with Oracle as a datastore just inserts empty geometry columns (NULL). When making the geometry column “NOT NULL” Geoserver and/or OpenLayers just inserts a point with 0.0,0.0 as coordinates. Which is NOT where I clicked on the map (0.0,0.0 isn’t even close to being visible on screen).

So, anyone got WFS-T with an Oracle datastore working? I’m using Geoserver 1.7.5 on Tomcat 6.0.something (latest as of now), OracleNG plugin, OpenLayers 2.8 (local, not the hosted version). With Firebug I can see that the GML being sent in the POST command is CORRECT, i.e. it shows the correct coordinates. Somewhere along the line these are discarded and NULL or 0,0 (depending on the column definition) is inserted.

Change to PostGIS (with almost the same table definition, that’s the beauty of PostgreSQL) and everything works like a charm. PostGIS + Geoserver + OpenLayers is a killer combination!

Let the comments pour in……