Last year we helped solutions provider Smartronix address some image delivery pains that their customer, the Air Force Special Operations Command, was experiencing. The AFSOC need to process huge amounts of satellite and aerial imagery quickly, store it efficiently, and access it instantly in common geospatial applications and viewers. In particular, they wanted to store terabytes of raw imagery in an Oracle database and view it via both MapViewer and ArcIMS.

Smartronix asked if we could make that happen. We said “Yes we can.”

We’re pretty excited about this “win” because it’s a high profile example of an Express Suite workflow.  Express Suite comprises all three of LizardTech’s major geospatial software products, GeoExpress for image manipulation and compression to industry standard formats, Spatial Express for storing compressed images in an Oracle database, and Express Server for serving out those images via the fastest and most stable delivery technology available.

We worked hard to make all three products interoperate seamlessly with each other and with common GIS software, so it’s great to see the trio succeed on the road.  

Read the entire Smartronix-AFSOC case study on the Express Suite “Customers” page on our website.

It is an oft-invoked stereotype that engineers prefer to work alone in dark caves, and there’s certainly some truth there. Here at LizardTech, for example, each development team member works in a well-ventillated but cozy and earthy burrow that our ops team constructed to individual specifications out of papier-mache. Some of these workspaces have convincing stalactites, or narrow entrances lined with lichens. A few are strewn with bones.*

But in mass emergences similar to those of the 13- and 17-year cicada, engineers periodically gather together in high-energy events called “code sprints”, which last several days and whose purpose is to resolve bugs, churn out new code, share information and ideas, and dispatch untold wedges of pizza. Ethnologists now suspect that a form of socialization is also carried on.

In March, LizardTech will be cosponsoring such an event in Toronto hosted by OSGeo. A couple of lizards will be attending and will work on GDAL/MrSID performance issues. Please consider joining us there!

*By contrast, our sales team is housed in a single, large spherical room partially filled with rubber balls and water toys.

Seriously, image of New Mexico’s Lechuguilla Cave courtesy of Wikipedia.

The night the first snow fell, back on the 19th of December, we Lizards had our annual holiday party at McCormick and Schmick’s on First Avenue, right around the corner from our building. The food was great, and a greater percentage of us were able to make it than in the past few years.

We used to have karaoke at our holiday shindigs, but we went through a corporate phase of imagining that we were more dignified than to stand up in somebody’s restaurant and bellow like water buffalo in the ears of the dining public. We grew out of it, though, and this year we said “we’re bringing noisy back.” We rented a machine, and for a monitor, Pooya managed to wrangle a TV the size of a small hotel into his Forenza.

It’s surprising the number of Lizards who were willing to sing on a full stomach. I was going to post the little movie I took of Skiff’s startling rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”, but a horsehead showed up on my chair at work recently, which I took to mean that I should reconsider.

The world will have to wait.

The “Call for Presentations and Workshops” for GeoWeb 2009 has just been announced. The theme of this year’s conference is “Cityscapes”: the geography of urban environments, BIM-CAD-GIS convergence, 3D modeling.

LizardTech has been fortunate to be involved with this conference for a number of years now, and so we’re once again looking forward to July and another fun week with our neighbors to the north.

The State of New Jersey’s 2007 orthoimagery is now available for download from the New Jersey Geographic Information Network’s newly-designed NJ Information Warehouse, which uses LizardTech’s Express Server to serve all compressed orthoimagery layers.

The imagery is available in both MrSID format (compressed 8-bit, 3-band, RGB natural color, 5000′ by 5000′ tiles) and JPEG 2000 format (compressed 8-bit, 4-band RGB plus infrared, 5000′ by 5000′ tiles). The site looks great and is easy to use, and we’re pretty proud of the way Express Server performs on it.

You can add the WMS layer of New Jersey’s 2007 orthoimagery into any application supporting WMS by entering the following URL:

http://njwebmap.state.nj.us/njorthos