A round of introductions

[sbecker]

Since there doesn't seem to be any posts yet, I thought I'd kick it
off. How about we all do a round of introductions. Tell us a little
about yourself. I'll go first:

My name is Scott Becker. My specialities are Ruby, Rails, Ajax and the
many other varied technologies that comprise web development.

I work at WeoGeo - http://www.weogeo.com - we're building an online
marketplace for geospatial data products.

Various technologies we are using or have used at one time:
- Ruby on Rails (of course)
- Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3)
- MapServer
- KaMap
- OpenLayers
- GeoKit
- much more

I'll be keeping an eye on this group and look forward to learning from
all of you.

Thanks,
Scott Becker

[sbecker]

[sbecker]

Don't know why that double posted.

I forgot to mention my blog:
http://synthesis.sbecker.net

Something else geo-rubyists might be interested in:

AssetPackager - http://synthesis.sbecker.net/pages/asset_packager

AssetPackager helps Ruby/Rails developers combine and minify their
multitudes
of JavaScript and CSS files into single, concise packages so your site
loads faster.
While broader in scope than the geo world, its especially useful here,
where we
use loads of JavaScript. :)

Thanks,
Scott Becker
Blog: http://synthesis.sbecker.net

[Charlie Savage]

> Since there doesn't seem to be any posts yet, I thought I'd kick it
> off. How about we all do a round of introductions. Tell us a little
> about yourself. I'll go first:

Good idea Scott.

So I'm Charlie Savage. I've done lots of programming over the years -
starting with Assembly, Delphi and then eventually onto dynamic
languages like Ruby.

I started MapBuzz (www.mapbuzz.com), a social mapping site for sharing
information about where you live. We do the Rails thing, PostGis, etc -
so check it out - and I'd love to hear your feedback (positive and
negative).

My contribution to the community is maintaining the Ruby/Python GEOS
bindings (which is what we use instead or GeoRuby) and I did the GDAL
Ruby bindings. We've also made various Rails plugins available for
things like RESTful controllers, content negotiation, and such.

Thanks,

Charlie

[Charlie Savage]

And I forgot my blog - http://cfis.savagexi.com.

Chalrie

[Jason L Perry]

My name is Jason, and I'm a rubyist who works with Scott at WeoGeo.

On Oct 3, 3:29 pm, sbecker <becker.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Since there doesn't seem to be any posts yet, I thought I'd kick it
> off. How about we all do a round of introductions. Tell us a little
> about yourself. I'll go first:
>
> My name is Scott Becker. My specialities are Ruby, Rails, Ajax and the
> many other varied technologies that comprise web development.
>

> I work at WeoGeo -http://www.weogeo.com- we're building an online

[Tyler Erickson]

Another intro...

This is Tyler Erickson. I am a research scientist at the Michigan Tech
Research Institute (www.mtri.org), which is part of Michigan Tech
University, but located on the other end of the state in Ann Arbor,
Michigan. My research interests are in geostatistics (a.k.a.
kriging-type estimators) and analysis of satellite remote sensing
imagery. I also spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out ways to
share spatial and temporal data over the web. I also lead the
MichiganView.org program (part of the larger AmericaView.org program)
which promotes the use of remote sensing technology through education,
technology transfer, and the distribution of freely-distributable remote
sensing datasets.

I use PostGIS, Rails, and GeoRuby, but I'd probably classify myself as a
lurker, rather than a specialist in any of these technologies. And
that's why I'm part of this group, to learn what technologies can be
used for our research projects.

Seems like everyone has a blog, so here is mine...
http://scenicshitters.blogspot.com/

- Tyler

[Ron Phillips]

I'm Ron Phillips. Actually, so are quite a few other people, but I am the one who is the only programmer at the Summit County Engineer's office in Akron, Ohio, U.S.A.

 

My mission is to get all our data tagged with latitudes and longitudes. Everything we do in this office is geolocatable. (Except the rolling stock and the people. We could do them, too, I suppose, but they move around a lot.)

 

I use RoR to put Admin interfaces on data as quickly as possible, sometimes using the scaffolding with very little editing. (I did customize the scaffolding to some extent.)

 

We use Google Maps and Yahoo Maps to allow users to enter and display geographic points without thinking in terms of latitude and longitude. We make the data available as kml so that they can analyze/display the data using Google Earth.

 

We also use Google Earth for entering polylines and polygons, and store them as kml in text fields. It's clunky, but the price is right. I wish there was some smooth way to manipulate Google Earth (or, even better, an open source equivalent) from Ruby (or Rails.)

 

Ron

 

 

> 10/03/2007 3:29 PM >>>

[Donnie Marino]

Hi,

I'm Donnie Marino. I am an engineer at ITT-VIS (www.ittvis.com) in
Boulder, CO working on the ENVI product. I've somehow gone into the
proprietary GIS/RS software world but still maintain a hobbyist's
interest in all things geo/ruby. I have used Ruby to do many things in
the past, including GIS/RS/mapping integration. I'm interested to see
what goes on in this developing space. Look forward to hearing from
all the interesting folks here.

Thanks,
Donnie

[icebreaker]

My name is Ronny Klæboe. I am a researcher working on environmental
impacts from
noise and air pollution. I am in the process of developing some
routines in Ruby as a
replacement for buffer routines for point themes in ArcInfo. The
buffer routines are utilised for defining neighbourhood areas - and we
would like to not be dependent on ArcInfo.

One idea is providing a web service where it is possible to upload a
csv file and get the buffer paths in return.

I started working with Ruby on Rails 3 months ago.

I attended the nice presentation by Rasul and Burgh on Ruby and GIS in
Berlin. I have started to install Postgresql and Postgis, and will
take it from there.

No blog -- yet.

[Charlie Savage]

icebreaker wrote:
> My name is Ronny Klæboe. I am a researcher working on environmental
> impacts from
> noise and air pollution. I am in the process of developing some
> routines in Ruby as a
> replacement for buffer routines for point themes in ArcInfo. The
> buffer routines are utilised for defining neighbourhood areas - and we
> would like to not be dependent on ArcInfo.

Maybe you want to use GEOS? It has Ruby bindings....

Charlie

[pr...@fortiusone.com]

Guess I'm a little late on this one but anyway...

I'm Pramukta Kumar, although I tend to go by 'mookie'. I work at
FortiusOne, making GeoCommons (http://www.geocommons.com). When this
group was created, a few of us were at foss4g talking about an easier
way to do spatial queries within rails. Well anyway I wrote up a
little plugin that's hopefully a good start. figured this crowd might
be interested. You can check it out <a href="http://
www.fortiusforge.com/2007/10/12/rails-plugin-spatial-relationships">here</a>(http://www.fortiusforge.com/2007/10/12/rails-plugin-spatial-relationships).

The README hopefully has enough info to get started.

~mookie

[Xin]

Hi,

My name is Xin Zheng. I'm a Ruby/Rails developer at ZXV Ltd. The
directors of ZXV, Steve Coast and Nick Black have founded/are heavily
involved in OpenStreeMap, Mapstraction and FreeThePostcode. We as a
company started the spatial ad web application Mappam.

I am working on various Rails projects with geospatial
functionalities. Using technologies such as Rails 2.0 pr, REST, KML
and others.

I look forward to getting to know everyone on here, asking questions
and hopefully answering some too.

Cheers,
Xin