Just a note to let folks know that LizardTech will be hosting a party at GameWorks in conjunction with GITA’s Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference 31 taking place in Seattle March 9 - 12. It’s our way of saying “Welcome to our town”.

The party is from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 11. We’ve reserved space on the second floor near the bar. LizardTech will provide food, two drink tickets per person and game cards for those interested in a little sport.

GameWorks is at 1511 Seventh Avenue, kittycorner from the Washington State Convention Center.

So after you’ve visited us at Booth #321 at the show on Tuesday, head on over to GameWorks and loosen your floor badge with the Lizards. We look forward to seeing you there.

If you were to look under the hood of GeoExpress 7 – and the rest of our products – you’d find that LizardTech, like a lot of other companies in our industry, relies on open source software. In our case, we’re experts in compression and wavelets and geospatial imaging, and so we spend a lot of our R&D dollars in those areas. But for the stuff we’re not experts in – like reading the GeoTIFF format, parsing XML, and handling projection systems – we find better value relying on open source solutions.

As someone once said, though, “the gift economy ain’t free”: there’s a moral imperative to give something back.

Since Michael P. Gerlek has already blogged about the second birthday of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), I thought I’d mention that in addition to his day job running part of our engineering team, Michael helps support the open source community by serving as editor for the monthly “Open Sources” column in GeoConnexion magazine.

Under the auspices of OSGeo, he has worked with many of the leaders of the open source geo world to shepherd nine 1000-word articles into print so far, with several more queued up for future issues.

The following links open PDFs.

#1 – Welcome to Open Sources by Michael P. Gerlek

#2 – The OSSIM Project by Mark Lucas

#3 – BigTIFF by Frank Warmerdam

#4 – A Virtuous Circle of Collaboration by Chris Holmes

#5 – The Gift Economy Ain’t Free by Howard Butler and Chris Schmidt

#6 – Open Layers and TileCache by Schuyler Erle

#7 – MapBender by Arnulf Christl

#8 – GRASS by Malte Halbey-Martin (to appear in the March issue)

#9 – MapServer by Steve Lime (to appear in the April issue)

LizardTech is happy to be able to be a sponsor of OSGeo and support its staff on projects like this.

To celebrate the release of GeoExpress 7 - the strongest and best received version ever of our flagship product - the Engineering team took a snow day.

A few weeks ago, we had been all set to execute our original plan - an overnight at Scottish Lakes in the North Cascades - but the passes had closed the morning of the Big Day.

Disappointed (and better educated about avalanches) but not deterred, we decided to reschedule. It was difficult to find two days and a night that would work for all eleven of us the first time, and for our second “assault”, we had to settle for a day trip and even then, only nine of us made it into the caravan.

So last Friday we set out with two GPS units, three cars and enough walkie-talkies that each of us got at LEAST one.

At Snoqualmie Summit we split up for skiing, snowboarding and snowshoeing. Look at us (see photo above), all full of energy and confidence, unsuspecting of the horrors that lay ahead.

Actually, it was sunny and warm the whole day. The torrential downpour that soaked Seattle for most of the day only arrived after we had loaded up and were heading down the hill for a sumptuous repast at Thai Ginger in Factoria.

A good time was had by all and there were no injuries - which was good, because “return with no broken limbs” was called out in the spec for this project.

Top photo courtesy of Jeffrey Salazar.

GeoExpress 7 was released this past January, and despite the fact that it has met with enthusiastic approval by users and reviewers, it is a product made by humans, and humans on a tight schedule at that. One of the things we were dissatisfied with even as ‘Geo 7′ went out the door was that in one of the new features - publishing images directly to Express Server from GeoExpress - the application appears to hang.

It doesn’t really hang, but the progress meter reaches 100% and then nothing happens for a while.

What’s going on here is that once the images have been uploaded, Express Server then ports them to their specified target. That can take some time. In publishing really large images or lots of small ones, it can be a really long time.

The fix for the misalignment in the meter is not a fully known entity, but it looks like this is a server-side issue, something we’d need to address with a future release of Express Server. In the meantime we decided to add a message in Geo 7 to the effect that ‘Please wait…Express Server is still working’, but in the attempt to do this we found that it involved some incompatibilities with the way we present other messages. We could find no way to do the right thing in the time we had left.

We momentarily considered some inelegant hacks, but because this didn’t appear to be a dealbreaker, better sense prevailed. We’re tracking the issue and we wrote a knowledge base article about it, which basically says what I’ve told you here. That KB article will be updated when there’s more to tell.

For now, be aware that the extra time after the progress meter shows completion may be as much as 30% of the original upload time.

Optimizing is a trick we wish all users of GeoExpress knew about. If you have files in MrSID Generation 3 (MG3) format, and they were originally encoded as “optimizable” (it’s the default, so chances are good that they were), you can perform additional compression and a number of other operations on them without having to decode and reencode them.

Why is that useful? Not having to decode (i.e. bring the image out of wavelet space) has two advantages:

• Optimizing is much faster than encoding
• Optimize operations are free (if you’re using a data cartridge, they don’t charge against it)

Loading Images and Accessing Options
Among the six tabs on the Job list is one called Optimize (shown at right). You may have noticed this tab before and never felt like venturing into it. We urge you to gird up thy loins and use it. Images you want to optimize are staged on this tab.

After you load an image into the Optimize tab (and make sure it’s selected), you can access options in one of three ways:

• Right-click on the filename in the job list and choose Optimize Options… from the context menu.
• Choose Encode Options… from the Options menu.
• Click the More Optimize Options… button on the Properties tab.

In each case, a dialog box appears that has tabs for Input, Output, Optimize Settings, and Advanced Settings.

Basic optimization settings
On the Optimize Settings tab (shown below) you can specify additional compression by ratio or by target file size, and you can resample (reduce the dimensions) by factors of 2.

The options for compression based on encoding ratio and target file size are pretty self-explanatory. If you need to fit particular images on a CD, compress by target file size to make sure you stay under the limit. If you want your images to be uniformly compressed to a fifth of their current size, set a ratio of 20:1.

Resampling in GeoExpress means changing the resolution of an image. For example, if your image measures 1000 x 1000 and you resample by a factor of 2, the result will be a 500 x 500 image. Resampling is achieved by discarding zoom levels; thus, the number of zoom levels in the image (remember, MrSID is inherently multiresolutional) determines the factors available in the drop-down.

Advanced optimization settings
The Advanced Settings tab (shown below) gives you the following additional options, which are described further on:

• Frequency balance
• Sharpness
• One-pass or two-pass optimizer
• Optimizable
• Use temp file

Frequency Balance - This determines the emphasis given to edges and flat areas in color and grayscale images. Set frequency balance lower for images requiring precise edge definition. If precise edges are not as important as consistency in flat color areas, use a higher setting. Range of acceptable values is 0.0 - 10.0. Default is 2.

Sharpness - This determines the sharpness of boundaries between different areas of an image. Use a lower setting for images with large amounts of textured area (where color or intensity changes are occurring throughout a region, rather than just at a boundary). Use a higher setting for images with little textured area. Range of acceptable values is 0.0 - 1.0. Default is 0.0.

1-Pass or 2-Pass Optimizer - This option is only available for MrSID Generation 3 (MG3) images. The 1-pass and 2-pass optimizer parameters affect encode performance and memory usage. Although not as fast as the 1-pass optimizer, the 2-pass optimizer (used by default) requires much less memory because it splits the encode operation into two passes. This is required on very large files. Encoding with the 1-Pass Optimizer is faster but requires that the entire image be loaded into memory. If sufficient RAM is not available for the image selected, the encode job will fail.

The 2-Pass Optimizer is automatically used for Area of Interest encoding even if this checkbox has not been selected.

Note that the “Estimated Memory Usage” is only displayed when the 2-pass optimizer is used (look on the Properties tab or on the Advanced Settings tab of the Encode Options dialog box).

Optimizable - Select the Optimizable checkbox if you want the output MG3 file to be optimizable later on. By default this checkbox is selected.

Use Temp File - A temp file can be used to store necessary statistical data about the image data during processing. If your image is very large this can help alleviate the memory burden on a given job.

Let us know whether or not you find the optimization functionality useful and how you think it could be better.