Make Smarter - PGCon, Google Earth Trek, and More

PGCon - the PostgreSQL Conference - wrapped up in May, and they’ve posted many of their session online for free, including slide shows and videos. The links are in the notes for each session/tutorial. The videos are hosted on FOSSLC, and include such sessions as Spatial Analysis with PostGIS and OpenStreetMap with Postgres. The player at FOSSLC is really cool - it shows the slide show and the video in sync along with a timeline. If you haven’t visited FOSSLC before, they have a lot of great make smarter materials for just about anything open source. Thanks to the PGCon folks for making this material available.

The Google Earth Blog links to a nifty site designed to teach you about known exoplanets. It uses the Google Earth plugin, but the site is done up as a Star Trek LCARS interface. A regular site about exoplanets wouldn’t have stayed in my browser for longer than it takes me to hit the back button, but I spent a while playing on this one.

Mark Brown links to a free SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit, which includes a Spatial Types Demo. If you are a SQL Server 2008 dev or you’re heading that way, you might want to give it a look. If your workplace is lagging behind a few versions in the database department, you can grab SQL Server 2008 Express to try the new features.

Finally, here’s something really useless - my OpenGIS presentation to our local GIS User Group*. I went with a minimalist slide show, which means you kind of had to be there. I did put some speaker notes on the full version if you click through to it. But the pictures are fun.

*If a Linux User Group is a LUG, is a GIS User Group a GUG?