My family (Donna, Ian, and Maya) and I were fortunate to spend two weeks in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. We spent the first week at the Hotel Sotavento on Playa De Ropa and the second week at the Hotel Krystal on the beach at Ixtapa.

This image of our trip in ArcMap will open a new tab or window.

Our first week we swam and snorkeled at both the beach and pool, went fishing and caught a fairly large needle fish, which strongly resembles a barracuda, and snorkeled again at a nearby reef. Ian and I sailed on a Hobi Cat in very strong winds. The kids also climbed and explored on large rocks off the beach. Body surfing and boogie boarding were a big part of our beach experience here. Donna and Maya perfected their surfing techniques.

Up the beach at Ixtapa, the hotel was a more “American style” resort with lots of snowbirds escaping winter in the upper Midwest. The surf was a lot higher at this beach so boogie boarding was more dangerous. On our last day the waves approached twelve feet high and they closed the beach.

A highlight was our day trip to Isla de Ixtapa. We enjoyed fantastic snorkeling at three different beaches. Ian spotted a small moray eel in the sandy swimming beach and we followed it for some time with masks on. He and I also made a jungle trip to the top of the island, following the trails of small deer and rabbits. Our afternoon ceviche lunch - fish or shrimp cocktail “cooked” in lime juice and served in a dish with salsa and other goodies - was interrupted by a dozen sting rays jumping three to four feet out of the water in choreographed lines as if herding fish.

Stopping at a wildlife sanctuary back on the mainland we photographed huge crocodiles and turtles as well as birds and iguanas.

In town we got a good look at the street life of Zihuatanejo, where people live a lot differently than they do at home. The kids got to see how food and transportation are handled in countries that do things differently than ours. We hope to return in the future and explore some of the volcanoes that are just inland from the beach resorts.

Several of us Engineering Lizards walked up to the Convention Center on Tuesday to show support for the hardworking Sales and Marketing Lizards who were manning our booth and to have a look around. The first thing I noticed was what a blue conference it was. Every booth and banner seemed to be a cool cerulean, with the single, vibrant and very red exception of Oracle’s digs.

The theme of this year’s GITA conference was “Infrastructure Solutions”, so there were a lot of “geospatial solutions” companies offering data integration software and services. I saw the word “conflation” so many times I looked it up later.

Crowlike, I’m drawn to the shiniest objects in a given environment, so I ended up spending the most time with the very amiable representatives from an Italian company called Abaco. My eye was caught by a CAD image of the Duomo in Milan spinning in 3-D on their monitor. Abaco was showing off its DbMAP® Web 3D product, a set of tools for building three-dimensional representations using existing bidimensional GIS data.

The thing that arrested my gaze was that when the perspective dropped down into a piazza and you were looking at the sides of the buildings, the facades were correct, peeling paint and all. Not like other products I’ve seen where the elevation view is blank grey or the roof of a building dribbles over its flank like a Dali clock. I asked how this was possible, and they showed me how they manually grabbed image data from oblique aerial photos and applied it to the raised buildings in the 3-D creation, skewing and stretching via what I assume to be complex algorithms (the kind we in the imaging industry bench-press every day before breakfast).

Seeing this, my first thought was, wow, that might be fine for a hilltop village like Civita di Bagnoreggio, but adding a facade to each building by hand would be untenable for Rome, let alone some sprawling city like Phoenix. It was explained to me that in the suburbs, you would apply facades randomly from a palette—only in familiar areas like the downtown or famous landmarks would you apply the actual facade. Fair enough.

Still, invoking the adage that the coolest stuff is seldom the most useful stuff, my second thought was, who would be going to so much trouble creating virtual land- or cityscapes that they would need such a tool? Tourism boards, for one, I was told, and though the sales guy listed other customers of theirs, I didn’t catch those because the bubble above my head filled up with an image of how perfect such models would be for the website of any municipality that relied on tourism for its economy.

The other coolest thing was at our own booth, where Lizards Jim and Robert showed me the HistoricAerials.com website, which uses our Express Server software to deliver aerial image datasets spanning decades and enables viewers to toggle between years at any given location.

In my hometown of Bellevue, WA, for example, I could zoom into any spot in the city the way it was in 1964, then click to the years 1968, 1980, 1990, 1998, 2000 or 2006, seeing the city develop before my eyes. And with the haunting “dissolve” feature enabled, each year gave slowly away to the inexorable erosion of time as the next year in the set gradually supplanted it. The images above show the effects of nearly half a century on one piece of earth.

I doubt the product spec ever called out “haunting” as an intended feature, but I’ll tell you this: I stayed up late that night toggling between 2006 and 1964 and watched farmhouses in the center of town giving way to Bellevue Square Mall, and Uncle Harold’s hobby shop, where I got my first bike, dissolving beneath a mayhem of skyscrapers.

Bellevue images courtesy of HistoricAerials.com. Duomo image courtesy of Abaco Group.

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.

I recently got back from a short vacation with friends and family in Hawaii. Although I’ve been part of the LizardTech Engineering team for many years, I’m relatively new to the geospatial industry, so you’ll forgive me if wax a little misty here.

One of the things that made this trip particularly memorable for me was geocaching all over the Big Island.

My wife and I found one cache that brought us through an ancient petroglyph site. Others of us found a cache placed by a 6th grade class near a 100-foot seawall. There were others… all of them at sites conveniently close to us but uncrowded and beautiful. I’m grateful to the locals who posted these, becoming private tour guides and sharing their intimate knowledge of beautiful places close to their homes and their hearts.

I’m continually struck by how small a place the world has become. From our living room at home, we get online and look at the road from the airport to the rental home we’ll be staying in. The aerial image shows the roadway, the round-abouts, the beach, the pool and the rooftop over our suite. When we arrive in Hawaii - 2000 miles from home - we walk, for the first time, through a brush trail looking for a 10-inch package and find it as easily as (well, with no more frustration than) if it were a box of Christmas lights in the garage.

This is just the fun side of it, but “better living through geospatial technology” is a worthy goal and we at LizardTech are proud to pursue it.