At this year’s Esri User Conference we asked our customers, who love our plastic lizards almost as much as they love our software products, to submit a story either about their experience with GeoExpress or about lizards — live or plastic — and we’d pick a winning story from each pile. We got a lot of amazing stories.

Okay, Tyrannosaurus is not a lizard in the scientific sense, and none of the stories were about T. Rex.

Thank you to everyone who participated.The authors of the two stories we selected as our favorites each win an iPad.

With a classic narrative of struggle and triumph that we never get tired of, Matthew Woodworth of TranSystems in Kansas City, Missouri writes:

My organization deals with fairly large amounts of raster data, and a very small storage budget.  About 2 years ago we were confronted with the situation that, not only had our server dedicated to store our raster data become completely full, but we had nearly 1Tb of GeoTIFF data provided by a client sitting on an external hard drive and nowhere to store it on the network. 

We looked at quite a few options to fix the issue including expanding our network storage, when we came across GeoExpress by LizardTech. My IT department was very impressed at the idea of compressing existing data to reduce storage space and I, being the GIS department head for my organization, had used MrSID files for years and loved the idea of not being forced to store my data offline.

We decided to purchase GeoExpress Unlimited and have never regretted it. I went from exceeding my server capacity by 25% to having nearly 65% free space afterwards without losing any information. As of the date of this letter I have not quite utilized 50% of my capacity after over a year’s worth of adding data.

Thank you LizardTech.

And from Thomas Hardy’s own Wessex region in England, Andy Nicholson of Wessex Water in Bath asks the thrilling question:

My GeoExpress Lizards – Thiefs in the Night or Innocent Bystanders?

Every quarter we complete MrSID conversions for distribution across the GIS fileservers. Last year in the office not only did we notice we were getting older – our recollection of the required settings for MrSID file creation had got so bad they had to be written down – but we also started to doubt our own sanity. It all started when someone left a Mars bar on my desk. The next morning we all noticed it showed signs of being nibbled by some small creature. We also noticed that the two LizardTech lizards that sit atop my screen – one green the other green and orange – had swapped sides.

For several days we observed they moved sides and each tasty treat we left for the “thief in the night” was nibbled or eaten completely. It was time to catch the culprits “red clawed”. We positioned a web cam to capture the crime scene. For a couple of nights nothing, then one night much to our relief we caught the thief in action:

In flagrante delicto.

The LizardTech lizards were proven innocent. Mind you, to this day we don’t know how the lizards changed sides on top of my screen.

Congratulations to Andy and Matthew. And again, thanks to all who sent us stories. We’ll see you again at next year’s user conference if not sooner!

LizardTech is moving toward more frequent releases and a bit more of an agile development schedule. We decided we could use a dedicated engineering manager to focus on the issues inherent in quicker turnaround and we found that person in Rich Estrin.

Bringing software products to market.

Rich is a guy who’d rather be developing software products than talking about himself and having his picture taken, but we did get some info out of him so that you’ll have some conversational hooks to engage him with when you start seeing him in the LizardTech booth at trade shows.

For one thing, he’s a vintner. That’s right, he and his wife are winemakers. They own a fully functional and licensed winery and run the cellars out of the basement of their home in Issaquah, where they live with their two kids. Their first commercially available red will be released at the end of this year.

The Grape Whisperer.

Rich brings over 17 years of commercial software development experience to LizardTech, with the last twelve years increasingly focused on leading software teams and projects. He has worked with a broad range of technologies and domains from enterprise life science research software to desktop business software. Rich earned a BA in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

This week LizardTech attended the ASPRS 2011 Annual Conference. Every year the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing holds its conference in a different city and this year it was held in fabulous Milwaukee. In case you’ve never heard of it, it is a great little city with the best beer (which is saying something since I am not a lover of beer to begin with) about an hour north of Chicago.

New Glarus Spotted Cow beer.

Arriving well into the double digits of the evening we got the car and headed to the hotel. Driving through town late gave the false impression that Milwaukee is a quiet little town with little action…au contraire! It is a busy college town full of great restaurants and lots of friendly folks.

Bright and early Monday morning LizardTech sales engineer Robert Parker, LizardTech business development manager and ASPRS boardmember Jeff Young and myself hosted a four-hour User Group meeting. We had a steady flow throughout the morning of new and long standing MrSID format users, a great way to start the week.

Tuesday was a lively day on the tradeshow floor in our booth. Past ASPRS conferences have been relatively slow but not this year. The exhibits were hoppin’ with customers; one booth even had a magician.

The famous Wisconsin cheese curd. You often find families of them huddled in newspaper cones like this one.

Wednesday LizardTech product manager Jon Skiffington gave a presentation on MG4 compression for LiDAR. It was well attended and there were great customer questions and feedback.

That afternoon, Robert and I had the pleasure of a two-hour drive to Madison to meet with a small group at a Wisconsin government agency. They are starting to work with more lidar imagery and may have a use for LizardTech’s LiDAR Compressor software in the near future. More importantly, they have decades of MrSID imagery that needs to be served out. LizardTech’s Express Server image serving software would be a natural fit so Robert demonstrated its installation and ease of use. Now if only the state purse were bottomless…

The “Ladybug Building” on N. Water near E. Michigan.

Thursday was the final day of the conference and it was only a half day. The majority of the LizardTech crew flew out Thursday. I, however, wasn’t flying out until Friday morning so this gave me some time to get to know Milwaukee a little more intimately. First on the agenda, find some lunch. 

After consulting Yelp! on my newly acquired iPhone 4 (it really will change your life) I settled on Oscar’s Pub & Grill. It was a 2.2 mile walk from the hotel and after a week of cheese soup, beer, and giant pretzels (Milwaukee has a large German population and apparently giant Costco pretzels are a popular German food — who knew?) I figured it would do me good to ditch the car. 

Potawatomi Casino you owe me $20.

Oscar’s ended up being in the industrial part of town, not much to see except factory buildings and large garages. But the Potawatomi Casino was on the route, which came in handy on my way back because they have public restrooms….and now 20 of my hard earned dollars.

Over lunch the bartender was telling me about the best coffee in Milwaukee at Alterra Coffee Roasters. So I went on a wild goose chase, on foot, to find this great coffee. En route I ended up at the Milwaukee Art Museum down on Lake Michigan. Entry is free the first Thursday of every month and what do you know?…it just happened to be the first Thursday of the month. They currently have a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit going on through May 15th. The building itself was a beautiful sight with walls of windows so patrons enjoy a great view of Lake Michigan and as a big FLW fan, that exhibit was the cherry on top. I hit a lovely trail along Lake Michigan and headed back to the hotel.

MAM has FLW!

Well, five hours (and 22,200 steps, according to my pedometer) later I arrived at the hotel hungry, tired, wet (got rained on just a little) and feeling pretty good about Milwaukee. I never did find the Alterra Coffee Roasters establishment on my journeys but was pleased to see they had a little set-up right in the middle of the airport after I got through security and the coffee was pretty good, for Milwaukee. It sure beats Starbucks anyway. 

Well done, dairy state, I can’t wait to come back.

Fellow LizardTech developer Kirk and I just got back from the third annual OSGeo Code Sprint; this time in Montreal, Canada. Daniel Morissette did a great job of organizing this event and has already posted an excellent review of the sprint (here) including pictures (here), so I’ll simply add that that it was great fun to meet personally with the guys who build great libraries like PostGIS, libLAS/libPC and GDAL.

Kirk and I worked on adding MG4 (MrSID Generation 4) support to the new libPC. The “PC” stands for “point cloud”. libPC is the next evolution of libLAS and aims to be the GDAL of point cloud formats. We didn’t finish, but once this work is done it will enable decode support in libPC for compressed LiDAR data in MrSID format. For more info, see http://libpc.org/notes/goals.html.

Fun fact:  The pronunciation of GDAL is the subject of some disagreement. It seems obvious to me and Kirk that “GeeDAL” is correct (like “Vi”, the editor or “Unix”, the OS).  I was amused to hear that in French-speaking Montreal it’s sometimes “J’DAL.” For reasons that are not clear to me some of the inner circle (Frank W and Hobu) usually pronounce it “GuuDAL.”

Enjoying a break after sprinting. Image courtesy of OSGeo Code Sprint 2011.

On a more serious note, much of the GIS industry’s foundation code depends on some of these libraries. That’s good for all of us: quality libraries allow us all to write valuable applications quickly with high confidence in the underlying stability and reliability. They allow us to focus on what we’re good at and (hopefully) what is important to our users. That’s really valuable and it doesn’t cost very much to give a little back.

1. If you work around a limitation, return the patch to the community. You don’t need to be a committer, just send it in. It’s in everyone’s interest to consider your patch.
2. If you can’t work around it, offer to pay the community to fix it. Some of these guys make a living doing this and our experience is that the costs are often quite reasonable.
3. Consider direct financial support of key projects and/or the OSGeo Foundation (http://www.osgeo.org).

The venerable Smith Tower, built in 1914 by manufacturer Lyman Cornelius Smith, is just a few blocks away from the LizardTech offices. Despite this proximity, none of us on the Dev team had ever been to the observation deck on the tower’s 35th floor, which we felt was pathetic. To rectify the situation, we went on a field trip over there today and got a big eyeful of panorama.

It was quite an experience. There are other observation spots around downtown. The most famous one is the Space Needle at the other end of the city. Most tourists go there instead. It’s a humdinger of a view, but the Needle is pretty removed from the downtown core, so that it seems a little like you’re looking at an effervescent photograph. There’s also an observation deck on the 76th floor of the Columbia Tower, Seattle’s tallest building (the curvy black one). I’ve never visited that viewpoint but I’ve seen the view from “43″ and even from half the building’s height, the city looks flat. You can’t discern any topography. It looks like you’re staring down at an aerial photo.

I thought the Smith Tower was just right. It’s pretty close to the downtown high-rises, so you get a sense of being “among” the tall buildings, but it’s posted almost like a sentinel at the southern edge of the downtown grid, so that views to the east, south and west are expansive. Also, the observation deck is only a little over 500 feet high. You can see a lot of detail in the buildings below and you still get the sense that Seattle is built on hills. We’re thinking of moving our offices. (Jealous? Here’s the link to our careers page: Jobs at LizardTech.)

I thought I’d share with you just a few of the many photographs we took.

A tall drink of water. The observation deck rings the top of the tower. Photo copyright Matt Fleagle.

This is the motor that works elevator #6. Note the famed Otis name. Photo by Walter Wittel, licensed via Creative Commons as noted below.*

Engineers drawing inspiration 500 feet above the city. From left, Walter, John, Michael, Glen, Mike, Kirk. Somehow, Chris got lost. Photo copyright Matt Fleagle.

The downtown core, with some of our old favorite buildings nestled among the newer giants. Photo copyright Matt Fleagle.

Ah, there’s Chris! And John, and the hands of Glen (we think) in the middle. They’re looking east over First Hill here. Photo by Walter Wittel, licensed via Creative Commons as noted below.*

Looking south to the historic King Street Station and to Quest and Safeco ball fields. Photo copyright Matt Fleagle.

*Image by Walter Wittel licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.