Every other post.
Well, here’s the culmination of a year’s worth of work: my undergrad thesis. I’m releasing it to the public. If you’re to use this within an academic context, you must attribute any usage of this document as per your academic guidelines. If you have commercial interests, feel free to contact me here.
Visualizing Geospatial Metadata (3.65MB PDF)
I typically cannot stand poetry. So funny I’d write one myself about a certain subsect of computer enthusiasts.
We are the knights of the night,
Submerged in the ether of light.
This is our plight,
The unknown our respite.
For we are cursed by the byte,
We few of endless fright.
I’m currently on the fifth floor of the Morrisset Library at the University of Ottawa. It is quarter to one. As in 12:45AM. The funny thing is, I’m surrounded by countless others, all deeply absorbed into their books and laptops. It’s quiet, and so very peaceful. I myself am completing a report that is theoretically due in seven hours.
As I’m about a month away from completing school forever, I’m going to miss these moments of personal zen. Funny how fast life goes by.
Well, I’ve finished the work component of my thesis. I did finally implement a list view mode for the application, which has been added in as a plugin.
Screenshot
You can download the latest version of the program, which includes this demonstrative list view parser, here.
I’ve also managed to write a fair bit of documentation for the program, which you’ll find in the form of about.txt file. They, along with the comments in the code, explain how the program works, and how to write extentions for it.
My last post to this blog was more than a month ago. I do believe this is the longest I’ve ever gone without posting. This absence is also highly reflective of the state of affairs on my end in general.
I’ve been busy. Very, very, busy. In any odd week I would go to school full-time, go to work full-time (45 hours/week), work on completing my thesis, and finish off some work for the Shared World Initiative. Needless to say, Docks has been put on the backburner.
So what’s the thesis about? Well, it focuses on an application I’m designing, with the extremely original name of the “Metadata Parser.” What it does is that it takes GIS XML metadatafiles using the FGDC standard and presents their text-heavy contents in a simple pictographic layout. The idea is that it’s much easier to identify critical characteristics of a metadata file by looking at a few pictures than by sifting through reams of lingo-heavy text.
I coded a tech demo, which parses through single individual files. My hope is to design a second application (or plugin for the first… yes, it supports plugins) to list directories worth of metadata. If you want to try it out, you can download the parser for yourself here (Windows, 8MB.) Sample metadata files are included with the installation.
Screenshots:
In other news, the LCD on my 300MHz laptop had been going wonky for some time. So I got myself an Eee PC last month. Fantastic machines. You can read a review of them that I wrote here.