As no-one should have noticed, this blog is running on the new server now. Building the server turned out to be very easy, just pop in the CPU and the RAM at the correct places, connect some cables and put everything in the case. Installing ubuntu turned out to be much harder. For a starter I needed to have a CD-rom drive. Just before my holiday, I had stored a lot of stuff in my basement(ish). Somewhere there was supposed to be a working CD-rom drive. After discovering 2 scsi drives and 1 non-working IDE drive I discovered my trusty old Philips drive which has installed me many versions of linux so far. Having a working cd drive I switched on the computer once again only to discover that my shiny new motherboard (asus M3n78-emh) doesn’t work on ubuntu 8.04 by default. Luckily I used the old trick of installing OS’s: have a working internet enabled computer alongside! It turned out to be some settings in both BIOS and linux (pci=nomsi) and once you know it, it’s a breeze to install it. So the second computer was build and installed in less then a quarter of the time :).

Copying data from the 4 old IDE disks to the 2 new SATA ones

The hardware for my new server setup has arrived. To make sure I’ve got a proper off-site backup I’ve arranged with my sister and her boyfriend to buy two identical machines, put one here and one there and mirror the content using rsync. So everything is in dual-form: 2 antec 4480b cases, 2 dual core AMD X2 4450e, 2 2GB DDR2 (actually 4 1GB but it breaks the dual flow), 2 times 2 750GB samsung spinpoints and 2 ASUS motherboards. I hope this setup will be more quiet than my current server and at least as energy efficient.

seeing everything twice

Now I’ve to go to the store to get a CD so I can burn a AMD64 Ubuntu 8.04 CD and start installing.

For the new EduGIS webmapping client we are using mapbuilder 1.5, openlayers 2.6 and TileCache 2.0.1. We have around 30 layers containing data for the Netherlands. To seed the tilecache for these layers takes quite some time, especially if you do not give the proper bounding box.

Tilecache_seed.py, the simple seeding client that comes with TileCache, takes the following parameters:

tilecache_seed.py <url> <layer> [<zoom start> <zoom stop> [<bbox>]]


The url parameter apparently doesn’t matter, it just uses local python. The layer is the layer you want to seed. Optionally you can limit the number of zoomlevels which you want to tile and the bbox of the area to be tiled. If you leave these out it will default to the entire world and all zoomlevels.

For .nl in google-projection I’ve used these parameters:

python.exe tilecache_seed.py "http://url.to.tilecache/TileCache.py?" layer 1 18 "350988,6571138,827965,7133714"

This will generate 2870400 tiles on zoomlevel 18 and it takes some time (think days). It is probably more useful to seed until level 17 or maybe even 16 and tile everything else on the fly.

Yesterday was the dutch (mini) conference on open source geospatial software, organized by osgeo.nl. I was too late to join the technical workshops, but the talks turned out to be fun as well. The different talks mainly showed of projects which somehow worked with open source. The most interesting talk for me was probably the one by Dirk Frigne of DFC. He showed of Majas, a new application they have been developing for the past two years. Majas is a browser based vector editor (amongst others) which supports snapping etc. They started developing it before OpenLayers existed and are now considering to write OpenLayers into Majas as their map renderer.

Apart from having good vector editing capabilities it has a nice architecture which resembles Mapbuilders MVC. From what I’ve seen it has the potential to become a widget framework around OpenLayers, what Mapbuilder tried to become and mapfish is currently trying. In Capetown they will talk further on integrating with OpenLayers, so to be continued.

There was an interesting discussion on what it meant to ‘do’ open source. Just using it was found to be not enough, you need to contribute your code and preferably also make the source code of your project available. The discussion went on for a while on whether or not we needed more legislation to force open source into the public sector. (Bad idea IMHO) At the end there was a smart remark on the sorry state of OSS, we are needing/using legislation to get people to use open source software. The guy stated that we needed to work on our marketing, so people want to use it, I totally agree on that!

My bags and me have arrived home again (already a week ago). My house was nice and clean and most of my plants were dead and burned (!?). The next day I had to work and after two days I went on a short holiday again to hike a bit in Holland. It is a hard life.

After the trek we woke up bright and early, around 11 am. We enjoyed a hearty breakfast, looked across the street and noticed mountainbikes for rent. Having walked enough for the rest of our holiday we decided to hire a bike and cycle to the batcave. It is located a few kilometres  outside Pokhara. On our way there we realised that outside Pokhara means also above Pokhara. It was already midday, so we cycled very slowly uphill. The batcave is called so because of the tens of thousands of bats that live there. It has a large entrance and a very narrow exit. There is probably exactly one way how a human body can get through this exit and you need to plan several moves in advance otherwise you get stuck. Wearing flipflops didn’t make navigating the slippery cave easier either. Still it was fun even though there were ‘only’ a few hundred bats due to the hot weather. Outside again, the thunderclouds were gathering above the other side of the lake.We raced downhill passing cars left and right. Still we didn’t make it in time, in the last street thick raindrops were falling, penetrating cloths at impact. We returned the bikes and hurried to our regular seats at the veranda. Within minutes the rain turned into a mini-monsoon. The entire public life came to a standstill. The taxi drivers, which were always present in the street, had taken shelter into one car. When one of the hotel employees needed a taxi, the drivers just ignored him to prevent having to get out into the rain. A few hours later the rain slackened a bit and life resumed again. We left our spot as well to play a bit of pool and have our last evening at the lake. The next day we set of to Kathmandu. To break the long journey we spent a night in Bandipur a medieval village in the hills about halfway Kathmandu.

View on Bandipur

Once in Thamel we found the Van Wingerden family busy preparing for Janna’s 2nd birthday. The next morning the lady’s were going to have a party and the men set of for some serious mountain biking. The Kathmandu valley is surrounded by steep 2000m high hills. We left early to be at the top of one of those hills before it got too hot. Since there are no dedicated bicycle paths, let alone ATB trails we had to navigate the main roads. Cycling here is similar to dodging tourist in central Amsterdam, except that the pedestrians are reinforced by cars and buses. The average speed of 30kph is easily reached, so we were passing them left, right front and back.

Once we left the city the traffic decreased, so did the road quality, to the point that ‘off road’ was better than ‘on road’. After breakfast at the highest point we left the tarmac road for a steep rock and sand road. Going downhill is so much more fun than going uphill. Bouncing over rocks and sliding through gravel we raced down until Erni hit a big rock. He is the experienced mountain biker so he had made sure that we had the necessary equipment to fix tires. Still somehow he was the only one who got a flat tire (twice). This didn’t stop us from racing down again at the edge of control. After a while we reached a village and the road became less steep and properly paved. This meant that we had to look out for traffic as well as potholes. We raced a few motorbikes for a while, winning down hill, losing uphill again, until we reached the flat valley floor.

Erni fixing his tire.

We had planned our route in a way that we could stop at Boudha. This is the religious centre for Tibetans and other Buddhists in Nepal. Unfortunately for us the streets leading to the main complex are potholed, dusty and filled with traffic and fumes. It was already past noon and very hot. Totally dirty, with our lungs filled with dust we looked up Erni’s favourite rooftop restaurant and just enjoyed the view and quenched our thirst. The last bit home was another dodge the traffic ride. In general our bikes were quicker than all other other traffic. This made us wonder why there were so few. The government is subsidizing fuel, so it is cheap, but the government can’t afford it any more. This results in a fuel crises and huge queues for fuel stations (as in a few blocks of parked cars and bikes!). This combined with the fact that cars and motorbikes are expensive it would make sense to go by bike. But then again, this is our western efficiency minded logic talking. Tomorrow we begin our trip back home and leave the Nepali with the Nepali problems. *snif*

This is about a tenth of the entire queue.