mobile and gis dev notes

The easiest way to install mapserver on your Leopard is by downloading and installing dmg files from www.kyngchaos.com (courtesy of William Kyngesburye). These binaries were also noted from Mapserver’s Download Page.

1. Download the ff binaries in order (please note the version numbers at the time of writing):

1. UnixImageIO_Framework-1.0.22a.dmg
2. FreeType_Framework-2.3.5-3.dmg
3. GEOS_Framework-3.0.0-2.dmg
4. PROJ_Framework-4.6.0-1.dmg
5. SQLite3_Framework-3.5.7-1.dmg
6. MapServer-5.0.2-2.dmg

2. Once installed, you can copy the mapserv binaries to your apache cgi-bin

sudo cp /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mapserv /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/

3. Check the mapserv output

rupert:~ rupert$ /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/mapserv -v
MapServer version 5.0.2 OUTPUT=GIF OUTPUT=PNG OUTPUT=JPEG OUTPUT=WBMP OUTPUT=SWF OUTPUT=SVG SUPPORTS=PROJ SUPPORTS=AGG SUPPORTS=FREETYPE SUPPORTS=WMS_SERVER SUPPORTS=WMS_CLIENT SUPPORTS=WFS_SERVER SUPPORTS=WFS_CLIENT SUPPORTS=WCS_SERVER SUPPORTS=SOS_SERVER SUPPORTS=FASTCGI SUPPORTS=GEOS INPUT=EPPL7 INPUT=POSTGIS INPUT=OGR INPUT=GDAL INPUT=SHAPEFILE

This is actually the first time I was able to install mapserver NOT BY SOURCE and still achieve the same binaries that I wanted (with AGG support). Full credit should be given to William.

Been very busy for the past few days/weeks in the office. Just read this one from Google Reader, Nokia develops navigating system based on image recognition, landmarks. In summary, base from Nokia’s Palo Alto Research center, providing direction guiding varies from gender and culture. However, providing examples such as “Turn Right after the next gas station” seems to be a universal and a normal behavior of providing directions, the person can relate more to the advice than providing line routes above synthetic maps.

This is interesting facts as it supports our theory in Call Center Directed Guiding. Although, a 360 or panoramic view of any point along the line would be ideal, an easier and more realistic approach for the time being would be to include important landmark snapshots along the route. However, I believe our organisation’s project is one step ahead since we have a warm body who already gave a summary of the route during the conversation. This means the caller have an idea of the route complexity beforehand. Then, we could also send this landmark images to the subscriber’s mobile as his future reference (which means additional VAS).

Another interesting location technology, fruitful for direction guiding, would be iPointer. I believe, base on the coordinates and orientation, the server could algorithmically predict which POI you are looking at or infront of. They mentioned they have a thin client on the mobile device, so I guess the S60 client tries to get the orientation base on the bearing. Also check this one out, “users can now walk down the street anywhere in Japan and point at over 700,000 objects such as buildings, shops, restaurants, banks, historical sites and instantly retrieve information on what they are looking at or find what they are looking for just by pointing their phone.”. Niche eh? Just compells me more to start up our mobile pursuit…

But what rocked me the most was indoor tracking by Ubisense using ultrawideband technology which is close to a foot?!?. This I have to see, as it opens new business cases for direction guiding indoors such as big malls, etc. Imagine mapjack views inside malls with Ubisense technology. Sweet.

Other References:
http://www.openlandmark.com/

I had a few problems with TileCache the other week which I am eager to blog about, since I knew for sure that later on, I might encounter the same. I don’t have the exact errors with me right now, so I’m jotting this down from my head…

1. Classic Resolutions problem. Use extent_type=loose
2. Can not set image type

UPDATED (JAN 11, 2010): Classic Resolutions problem:

How are resolutions calculated? Assuming we have:

Original:
Lower Left (LL) or minx, miny: 12453557, -5434940
Upper Right (UR) or max, maxy: 16980842, -1180729

maxResolution = (max – minx)/tilesize = (16980842 – 12453557)/512 = 8842.353
where tilesize = 512.

Therefore, we can set/guess for max so that we have maxResolution as a whole number.

Adjusted:
minx, miny: 12453557, -5434940
maxx, maxy: 16980661, -1180729

gives a maxResolution (whole number) of 8842.

Now, you can use 8842 in both the TileCache.cfg and OpenLayers Javascript. Read more…

As noted from my previous blog post regarding Mapserver on Debian, you don’t get AGG with Mapserver when installing directly from Debian packages. Thus, it would be better to install Mapserver by source. However, debian still helps because it would install all the necessary libraries needed for compiling mapserver. Read more…

It seems very nice for the new PostGres8.3 installer to bundle up third party libraries installation with the new admin pack feature. Using this feature, you can install PostGis, nPgsql, etc. The installation was painless and smooth this time. I have to backup all my data though using pg_dump.

To lessen the learning curve on installing PostGres + PostGis together, I made a short flash movie here. There is no audio in the tutorial. The idea was to introduce PostGres to my Chinese staff. I have to remove PostGreSQL 8.2 first before installing 8.3.