I’d like to introduce you to Jeff Young, LizardTech’s business development manager for geospatial solutions. He joined the LizardTech team this week. 

Jeff will be responsible for expanding our third-party relationships in targeted market segments, including U.S. defense and civilian agencies, state and local governments and commercial markets. Jeff brings more than 30 years of experience to the LizardTech team. Prior to joining us, he held positions in business development, consulting and sales with several geospatial companies, including Leica Geosystems, Space Imaging and Bentley Systems.

In addition to his professional experience in the GIS industry, Jeff sits on the board of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Rocky Mountain Region, as a national director. Jeff earned a BS in geography (cum laude) from Lock Haven State College in Pennsylvania and an MA in geography, specializing in land use analysis and environmental hazards, from Arizona State University.

Jeff lives and works out of Centennial, Colorado, where he loves spending time with his wife Pamela, daughter Kelsey and son Colin. Travel, saltwater fishing, and golf are his other big loves. He has slept in all 50 states of the Union and in 50 countries around the world.

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 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

I’ve been at LizardTech for almost five years now, and one thing that has always been (pleasingly) surprising to me is how much people like the plastic lizards we include with our software and give away at events. These little guys have been all over the world, and are so popular that we order them 50,000 at a time.

Last year at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego we had a contest for you to “Show Us Your Lizards.” It was a great success; the winner brought in 31 unique LizardTech lizards from over the years. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, but the only problem was not everyone knew about it before the show started. Lots of people I spoke to at our booth said “Oh, I wish I would have known. I have dozens of them at home!”

Well, now’s your chance, because we’re doing it again. Take a look at our new contests for this year’s user conference, and show us your lizards this August in San Diego!

This week, LizardTech released the latest version of it’s GeoExpress SDK — a set of C++ libraries designed to make it easy for developers to add MrSID and JPEG 2000 support to their applications. Aside from the usual round of bug fixes and such, the big draw for this release is the number of platforms we’re now (some might say “finally”) supporting:

Windows

• Win32, VC7.1/32-bit
• Win32, VC8/32-bit
• Win32, VC8/64-bit
• Win32, VC9/32-bit
• Win32, VC9/64-bit

Linux

• RHEL3, gcc3.2.3, 32-bit
• RHEL3, gcc3.2.3, 64-bit
• RHEL5, gcc4.1, 32-bit
• RHEL5, gcc4.1, 64-bit

Solaris (SPARC)

• Solaris 8, v11 compiler suite
• Solaris 8, v11 compiler suite (64-bit)

Mac

• Mac OS 10.4 (Darwin8) / Universal (32-bit)
• Mac OS 10.5 (Darwin9) / Universal

That works out to about 13 different build configurations — yow! Remind me sometime to blog about Bob, our automated 24×7 build system…

Oh, and actually there’s one more reason to like this release: the license agreement has been made simpler, shorter, and more friendly to open source developers. While our SDK is not open source, we know a number of open source packages that wish to link it in or redistribute it, and we want to make that as simple as our lawyers will let us.