There are various tools to automatically keep a Debian/Ubuntu system security wise up to date, among others the unattended-upgrades package. Also, there’s the checkrestart script from the debian-goodies package, that scans all the open files on a system and tries to determine to what service they belong and how that service might be restarted. The last piece that’d tie all those scripts together and would automatically restart all services that are using stale libraries or files was missing. Read on

Dia is a nice cross platform application for diagram drawing. It can be scripted via Python, which opens the possibility to generate code from Dia diagrams. Below we’ll create a python plugin that generates C code from UML state machine diagrams. Doing the same for other languages should be trivial. The first thing you need is Unai Estébanez Sevilla’s nice finite state machine code generator. The version that we are using here has been abstracted in order to be able to produce code in various languages. Read on

Tuesday, 2012-03-20 11:00: FOSSGIS in Dessau, Germany starts with a workshop for programming QGIS plugins A great conference begins, with about 400 people attending presentations and workshops over three days. Tuesday, 2012-03-20 14:42: Changeset c27c89045c: “Add WFS support for QGIS server. Provided by René-Luc D’Hont” Wow. Tuesday, 2012-03-20 14.48: QGIS 1.7.4 uploaded to DebianGIS Ok, QGIS 1.7.4 is already a few weeks old. But current version on Debian is 1. Read on

Die FOSSGIS und deutschsprachige Open Street Map Konferenz 2012 – die grösste deutschsprachige Anwenderkonferenz für Freie Geo-Informationssysteme und freie Geodaten – findet vom 20. bis 22. März 2012 an der Hochschule Anhalt in Dessau-Rosslau statt. Sourcepole ist mit folgenden Vorträgen und Workshops vertreten: Neues vom QGIS Server und -Webclient TinyOWS - der schlanke WFS Server MapServer MapCache - der neue WMTS Tile Cache Workshop: Neue Funktionen in QGIS für Poweruser Da mehr als 400 Teilnehmende erwartet werden, ist eine Registrierung bis zum 16. Read on

Creating a shaded relief map from digital elevation data is a nice way to create a backround map for web mapping or other GIS work. Thanks to the know-how and the funding from the Swiss Humanitarian Aid Unit, QGIS now has a sophisticated function for relief map generation. The method is described in detail in an paper by Marc-André Bünzli. An important part of the method is the choice of the elevation colors. Read on