Carson Farmer

Two quicks notes to share:

Firstly, please check out this excellent introduction to GIS by Tim Sutton, Otto Dassau, and Marcelle Sutton in partnership with the Chief Directorate for Spatial Planning & Information, Department of Land Affairs, Eastern Cape, South Africa, and the Spatial Information Management Unit, Office of the Premier, Eastern Cape, South Africa. They use QGIS to present some basic GIS concepts and skills, and I particularly like their section on Coordinate Reference Systems.

Secondly, don’t forget to checkout the FOSS4G 2009 Free and open source software for geospatial conference in Sydney in October. There will be loads of excellent presentations and exhibitors, and the atmosphere is always very cool. I will be presenting some software that I’ve been developing for a while now, and will hopefully get a chance to represent QGIS there as well!

C

The other day I was loading a shapefile of approximately 11 million records into a PostGIS database (stay tuned for more on that later) and I wanted to know when shp2pgsql was done. Instead of continually checking the console, I decided to ‘watch’ the process using the *nix command watch. I discovered this handy tool a while ago, and have found that for long running processes, I can use watch to notify me when the process has finished, using the following command:

watch -ben 1 "ps u -C shp2pgsql"
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A few months ago I decided to add syntax highlighting capabilities to a piece of software that I have been working on. Since it is a PyQt based application, the obvious choice for implementing syntax highlighting was to use Qt’s QSyntaxHighlighter. Unfortunately, there weren’t many examples around that implemented syntax highlighting in Python, so I decided to post my own.
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