Folks, we’d like to introduce you to a new Lizard. Travis Applegate joined us before the holidays as our inside sales support rep, renewing licenses for our existing customers. He fits right in here — we put him through an ordeal by fire at our holiday white elephant gift exchange and he came through with flying colors — and we think you’ll like him, too.

New Lizard Travis Applegate.

Travis is a Portland native who’s spent some effort trying to find the city that’s the right fit for him. He found Portland a touch confining, while Chicago had a little too much echo (and snow). He settled in Seattle, where he has worked for the Cobalt Group as an order manager, the University of Phoenix as an enrollment counselor, and Seattle Weekly as an account executive. Since the Weekly‘s offices are directly above us (in fact, from a geospatial viewpoint he works in the exact same position in the building as he did before, just fifteen feet lower on the Z axis), we can tease him that coming to us represents a downward move. That’s not the way Travis sees it, though, and we’re glad to have him on our team as he brings enthusiasm and dedication and his sales and other experience to the job.

Travis is big into music in many forms, but in particular live shows and vinyl records. His prize platter is London Calling by The Clash — he would prefer it if it were the UK import first pressing, which it’s not, but since it’s his favorite album in any format he still ranks it at the top. He also loves to dabble with musical instruments and jokes that he has failed to master a great many of them. He also likes to get out into the woods and mountains and other remote places, proximity to which is one reason he cites for having hunkered down here in Seattle, where, in case you haven’t heard, we’re surrounded by mountain ranges, islands, bodies of water, and forests.

Welcome to the team, Travis!

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).