MG4 Whitepaper published

My white paper on LizardTech's MrSID/MG4 has now been posted. (It's an uncredited piece, alas.)

Ads?

I've just enabled Google ads on this blog. I may regret it -- we'll have to see how intrusive it feels.

Update (11 Jan 2011) - Removed them.  Low-traffic blog means little revenue, and it looked really annoying.  (But it was worth it to watch what sort of ads were selected for display...)

Flaxen Comes Alive (A New Beginning)

After 11 long years at LizardTech, the time has come to move on -- my last day as a Lizard will be December 31st.

Which means of course that now I get to do something new, and so with a lot of encouragement from a lot of good people I know, I've gone ahead taken the plunge... I have at long last set up my own consulting shop: Flaxen Geo Consulting, specializing in the emerging area that lies at the intersection of geospatial technology, open source software, and C#/.NET.

Watch this space for more news in the coming weeks.

-mpg

That Sort of Book

From today's NYT, a review of "A Week at the Airport" by Alain de Botton:

There’s a funny, revealing moment in Alain de Botton’s new book, “A Week at the Airport,” when he discovers that the largest bookstore at Heathrow Airport, in London, does not stock his books. He decides to have a conversation with Manishankar, the shop’s manager, about what else might be available.

“I explained,” Mr. de Botton writes, “that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”

Manishankar, confused, wonders if Mr. de Botton might want a magazine instead.

If pressed, I would admit that I have no idea who Alian de Botton is and that I probably don't read That Sort of Book anyway. But if the book holds up to the first three paragraphs of the review, I'm in.

Control-Alt-Delete for your Telly

So on the way in to work this morning I read the following bit in Stephen Seow's book "Designing and Engineering Time" (page 28), discussing users' perceptions of reliability and stability of products:

A television set, for example, does not come with a reset or refresh button for the end user because it is regarded as an appliance that just works.

That's from 2008; well and good. But then not six hours later, over lunch, I read in the NY Times that Google is partnering up with makers of television sets so that

Devices running Google TV will also be able to run applications written for Android phones, and will feature Google's Chrome web browser, which would allow consumers to surf the web from their television sets.

Yup.

A nickel says your next telly will indeed be sporting a reset button.

NYT: The secret to a happy workplace

Nice:

As he looked around the room, he noted that my employees seemed happy. I told him that I thought they were.... I asked him how he thought I did that. “I’m sure you treat them well,” he replied.

“That’s half of it,” I said. “Do you know what the other half is?”

He didn’t have the answer, and neither have the many other people that I have told this story. So what is the answer? I fired the unhappy people. People usually laugh at this point. I wish I were kidding.

I’m not.

-mpg

1st Annual Bainbridge Mapping Party

Great mapping party by the CUGOS gang last weekend -- full post here.