Pretty tiles…
Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, Open Source on June 17th, 2009
Zac Spitzer just tweeted:
one of my projects just went live - http://www.exploreaustralia.net.au/
This is a pretty cool implementation. I believe that the maps on this site (e.g. Victoria) use OpenLayers, hitting an S3-hosted tile set generated by MapGuide Open Source, and show off some of MapGuide’s advanced renedering capabilities.
-J
Nanaimo Photorealistic Buildings in Google Earth
Posted by Jason Birch in Google Earth, Nanaimo, Sketchup on June 8th, 2009
Just a quick shout-out to Pauline Hackwood and the City of Nanaimo’s planning department for their initiative in starting to model Nanaimo’s downtown in Sketchup Pro, and for making these models available to others in Google Earth via the 3D Warehouse.

The City of Nanaimo is now managing a 3D Warehouse Collection called Nanaimo Current Models, containing Pauline’s models and any other good models of Nanaimo the collection managers run across. If you’re interested in having your high-quality photorealistic geocoded model added to this collection, let the City know in the Nanaimo 3D Models Google Group.
These tools are a great way to convey planning information to the public. In the future, hopefully the City will also be able to publish historical models of buildings that have been replaced and conceptual models of new developments for public review.
-J
P.S. Cheers to the Sketchup folks too; it didn’t take them very long at all to evaluate the initial set of models and push them into Google Earth.
P.P.S. Like all articles on this site, this represents my personal opinion and viewpoint, not that of my employer.
MapGuide 2.1 Beta 1
Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, OSGeo, Open Source on May 26th, 2009
Late last night, Tom announced the release of the first MapGuide 2.1 Beta.
Jackie Ng has a better description of this than I could write.
Apart from the improved scalability and stability of this release, I’m most excited about the WiX-based open source MSI installer that I got to work on alongside Jackie and Kenneth. Huge learning curve, but not having to count on Autodesk resources to build new installers should allow us to push new releases as needed. It also means that someone who understands the installer can easily create custom deployments for internal use.
Anyway, please give this beta a try. If you notice anything it’s not doing right, please let us know.
-J
Now we’re cooking! MgCooker for MapGuide Tile Seeding
Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, OSGeo, Open Source, Utilities on February 19th, 2009
The latest preview release of MapGuide Maestro (r3620 currently) comes with a nice little surprise: a tool for pre-seeding tile caches. MgCooker can be run from the command line (more on this later), or through the Maestro GUI. It couldn’t be simpler. Open up a Map Definition that has a Base Layer Group, highlight the group that you want to cook, and click on the MgCooker icon:
In the following dialog, either leave the default of all checked, or choose to only pre-render certain zoom levels of your data, the choice is yours (probably best to start with the smallest scale - in this case 100,000):
Then click "Build tiles now" and sit back and watch the tiles cook:
Of course, this isn’t practical for a production environment where you would want to batch this operation. That’s where the second option comes in; clicking on "Save as script" generates a Windows batch file similar to the following that you can script to your heart’s desire:
"C:Program FilesOSGeoMapGuide MaestroMgCookerCommandline.exe" batch --mapdefinitions="Library://Samples/Sheboygan/MapsTiled/Sheboygan.MapDefinition" --basegroups="Base Layer Group" --scaleindex=7 --mapagent="http://localhost:8008/mapguide/mapagent/mapagent.fcgi"
I have no idea if the MgCookerCommandLine.exe works under Mono, but given that the rest of Maestro seems to work fairly well there I would not be surprised.
Great job Kenneth; this is something we have been sorely missing since MapGuide 1.2, and it’s great to see it as part of Maestro!
-J
Dear Google Maps,
Posted by Jason Birch in Google, KML on February 19th, 2009
I love you. You have disrupted me for the last four years, changing my life forever.
I feel that you must return my feelings. After all, you indexed the entire KML collection of my city’s RESTful property database.
You seem shy to admit your love. No matter how hard people look, you won’t reveal our secret. Instead, you show a cold public face of centreline geocoding and pretty pictures.
Please Google Maps, won’t you shout our love from the rooftops, exposing our deep data relationship to the world?
Yours Unrequited…
-J


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