For those of you that follow Dave Bouwman's blog, this picture from a year or so ago may look familiar.  And I'll ask the same question he did when he originally posted it.  Could this be your workstation?  Sadly, no...I took this one.  But we'll build you another just like it if you'd like to work for DTS.  We're looking to grow our Fort Collins team. I may follow up with a more detailed job description later, but for interested parties we'll be looking for someone with MVC and JavaScript chops including all the Dojo and JQuery shiny stuff.  Geo background and skills particularly with the ESRI stack, VE, Google Maps, Open Layers, etc. are all nice to haves but not required.  If you've got experience modeling data schemas and working with components on the back end as well, so much the better. If you're interested in working on some pretty cutting edge web technologies in a focused and fast paced environment, drop your resume to Dave or myself and we'll have a gander at it and get back to you.

So a proposal for a National GIS "new deal" to save the economy has been making the rounds lately. You can grab a copy of the PDF here.  It came to my attention while reading James Fee's blog and a tidy little flamefest is afoot in the comments to his original post.  I gave it a quick read and had a pretty good chuckle. Haven't we done this at least twice already?  Anybody familiar with the USGS National Map Program? No?  How about the National Spatial Data Infrastructure?  Why don't we just fully fund/fix one of the foundering programs out there already? Lots of tasty funny business with a detailed read of the doc.  Can't you just see this thing fronted by a WebADF nightmare with national geoprocessing tasks? LOL It's sort of disappointing that this didn't involve or come out of an organization like the OGC...or that there's no mention of OGC initiatives that support an effort of this size and scale. Sean Gorman has a good rebuttal over here.  And I poached the following quote by Sean from James' original post...

I don’t think anyone is going to complain about government funding for geospatial technologies - it has the potential to be a very good investment. The question here is how do you get the most benefit for the citizenry out of that investment. I’d argue that perpetuating a proprietary legacy technology at an even more massive scale by tacking on a few buzz words - open standards, SOA etc. etc. is not the answer. Instead invest in making government data open and freely available in standard formats so that companies can innovate around it.

Nuff said!

Dave has been posting some good stuff relating to a project we're working on right now that leverages SubSonic in the data tier with MVC providing all the shiny goodness in the web tier. SubSonic has been an excellent code generator for our DAL and handles somewhere between 75-90% of the cases for our data schema. Specifically it hasn't liked multiple inner joins with attribute queries that include more than one of the join tables. Secondly, it's not real good about self-referencing (or recursive) foreign keys on tables.

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Ok, completely non-technical personal post today.  I've become increasingly frustrated over the years, more so now that I have a small child, at how individuals and society at large select role models.  In particular I'm troubled by the tendency to put a movie star or a sports legend on a pedestal because they're famous and have a lot of money.  This is usually done with little regard for the often public personal failings of said role models.  We elevate Elvis Presley to the status of god come down to earth and wonder why our kid has a drug problem.  We hang posters of Kobe (women), Gooden (drugs), and Burress (guns)in our child's room and then marvel at how kids today could have ever gone so wrong.  Is anyone else as completely UNSURPRISED as I am?

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