Sad ending and exciting beginnings

As of July 23rd I am no longer gainfully employed by Jones & Stokes. It was a long process that led to this event. The most important driving factor in this chain of events was that my families’ allergies were terrible in the Sacramento valley. Moving from this area couldn’t happen through Jones & Stokes and so I had to look outside.

First question from some people is going to be “How could you leave ecology after all the glowing posts you gave”. I loved the chances I got to do field work and to talk conservation biology shop with my colleagues. The problem was that I was too expensive for my level of expertise in NorCal flora and fauna. While I am good at field work and know a few things about deserts and birds - most of my ecological experience is as a landscape ecologist. My billable rate was too high to really make it feasible for me to get out in the field that often. I would suppose this is actually close to academia, where the higher up the food chain you go the less time you get to spend outside. So in the end I didn’t get to do that much field work.

Some of you may want to know if I left because I didn’t like Jones & Stokes. This is an easy question for me - I can say without hesitation say that I think J&S is one of the best natural resources consulting firms out there. I really liked almost everyone I worked with. They generally treat their employees with respect. The work is, on balance, interesting and ecology in the real world. When I started looking outside J&S I did not even think about working for a different consulting firm.

I think once I realized I couldn’t stay with J&S I started to think what I did and did not like about being in the consulting world. The biggest problem for me was the whole billable hours thang. While my goal was not that high there were several consequences of the system I did not like.

The first problem was that no matter how many hours you worked if you didn’t meet your billable goals it doesn’t matter. So if I was working 60 hours a week trying to roll out a new service or investigating something that had to be done to take our GIS practice to another level, it wouldn’t count. I mean it would count in that my supervisor would note the extra effort, but it was all secondary to making your billable hours goal.

Second, to insure that I had enough billable hours I had to take on more than I could do, thereby insuring that I would have enough hours if a project got halted or changed direction. This was an uncomfortable position for me to be in and I am not sure I could have grown used to it over time. I don’t think any of these things were particular to Jones & Stokes but are more a fact of the consulting business.

The next logical question in the series is - what am I doing now and for that I will tell the name of the company and my position title. I am now the technology evangelist for deCarta in sunny San Jose, CA. There will be a posting in the near future talking about why I chose deCarta, what I will be doing, and my goals. On of the plus side (or the downside for you if you don’t like my writing) is that I will be blogging now as part of my “official” duties. I am really psyched about my new position and I want my next post do it justice. Then again - putting the weight of doing justice on a post is a sure fire way to make it months before it gets written.

I would write more but I am finding it hard to find time to get the thoughts together. We still don’t have a place to live in San Jose or Oakland/Berkley. This lack of a very basic foundation in life - along with trying to get up to speed in a new position, is consuming most of my mental energy. If you know of a nice 3+ bdrm, 2+ bath house that takes dogs in either the willow glen/cambrian area in San Jose or in a nice safe neigborhood in Oakland or Berkely please let me know.

My Lightning talk

So I gave a lightning talk about building an OpenSource stack to move beyond collecting spatial data and putting pushpins on a map. I just showed a bunch of web pages of my dream stack being integrated into a platform for deriving spatial knowledge

Here are the links I used:
Started with some local pages that are really not important…

Data mining - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Decision support system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Role of Business Intelligence in Knowledge Management

Business Intelligence Network delivers business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics resources provided by Claudia Imhoff, Bill Inmon and other experts. Additional topics include data quality, data integration, CRM, data marts, data mining, business performance management, BPM, data modeling, enterprise application management, ERP, RFID, storage, supply chain and others.

PostGIS : Home

PostGIS spatial database extension for PostgreSQL.

OpenJUMP

GeoServer

OpenLayers: Home

World Wind JAVA SDK

GeoVISTA Studio Project

Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence: Product Overview

Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence: Dashboards

Processing 1.0 (BETA)

Processing is an electronic sketchbook for developing
ideas. It is a context for learning fundamentals of computer programming
within the context of the electronic arts.

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The Omega Project for Statistical Computing

GRASS GIS - The World Leading Free Software GIS

GRASS GIS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is an open source,
free software (FOSS) Geographical Information System (GIS) with raster, topological
vector, image processing, and visualization functionality

MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit

Interesting times to be a Java Spatial Developer

Following up on James’s post about my IM ping - it is a good time to be a Java developer if you deal with spatial problems (for other problems as well but I am just going to talk about spatial today.

There is the ESRI Stack. So if you want to go down that route with the full support and need to use ESRI technologies you are good to go.

Here is the stack that is available to you today for free (as in beer and speech) with some brief personal experiences tacked on…

IMS server: geoserver - super easy to set up, performs well, does WFS, WMS, and KML, and reads a bunch of formats

OpenLayers: not specifically Java but works perfectly fine with it and some of their demos hit against geoserver.

Datastore: PostGIS with PostgreSQL - not much experience using but a large user community, a plugin to use with ArcGIS (oh if I didn’t have billable goals), an interface to geoserver, uDig, and geotools, and a JDBC driver that can talk spatial talk

Desktop : uDig, Jump, OpenJump, and a couple more that I can’t keep track of. They are not at the level of ArcGIS but they can do quite a bit of stuff and are open so you can extend the code however you like.

Virtual Globe: WorldWind Java - easy cheezy to get running, runs really fast, and in very active development with a friendly user community.

Toolkit: Geotools and OpenMap- spatial toolkits that have been around for at least 6 to 7 years maybe longer.

IDEs: Eclipse and Netbeans - both excellent IDEs with large user communities and active corporate support.

So there you have it, a huge stack of Java spatial applications and libraries - running on all the major OS’s - running server side and desktop side.

Do you know what your cost as a consultant or developer is to entry into this space? $0 in actual startup costs. Buy yourself a laptop, leech off your neighbors wifi connection (not that I would condone such behavior), and dig in.

Java is taught in most of the CS and IS programmings as the programming language of choice so it is also easish to find developers or learn yourself. You would be in good company with firms such as Fedex, NASA, and Motorola to name a few.

Open source and proprietary solutions all with the same language. I just think it is an interesting proposition to those who want to start developing and building spatial solutions.

Java WorldWind

It is here… So I think the opened the door a bit too soon, since the streaming of tiles is painful. But once you get some tiles it is really fast in their demo app. Much faster than GE. (big picture here)

And the labels always face you even when you rotate the earth (big picture here):

So fun to play with though they definetly need to work on getting the data out there faster. It responds nicely to movement and now I want to see if it can read KML. If so then this plus geoserver make me a very happy man….

Maybe more to follow…