Greetings List Lurkers,
I want to nominate Nick's comments below as the official report for the
meeting last night. Any seconds?
Kindest Regards,
Flint
On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Nick Floersch wrote:
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:31:33 -0400
From: Nick Floersch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Meeting Last Night
Just a quick thanks to all who contributed to our meeting last night - I
personally found both topics interesting and useful.
The OpenStreetMap presentation was really quite excellent - it was nice
to have a highly organized and focused discussion topic like that. Given
my daily work with maps and GIS and such, the topic was even more
relevant than just as an interesting geek project - I see the real world
applications of data like that every day. The comment that if anyone
made maps of Barre, nobody else would care, because Barre is a slum (or
something to that effect) ... not really true, as it turns out. Barre is
a place with a lot of problems, and some of them are related to
chemical/pollutant spills/plumes/leaks that not only mean there will be
remediation necessary for a given area or property, but for nearby
properties as well. My company has -paid- people to get data for Barre
just so we can plan remediation efforts. Having up-to-date basemap data
such as that provided by OpenStreetMap, for free, is useful just about
anywhere! Furthermore, while it would seem that data collected by the
government about public areas or public knowledge - say parcel data for
a county, or accurate street data for New York city, would be easy to
get, it is in fact severely difficult. In New York, Nassau county
requires you to bypass reels and reels of red-tape to get parcel data
... for the county, from the county. It is f*cked up. And then the
office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination in New
York, after 9/11, locked down tons of seemingly public and generally
useful data, such as their up-to-date roads data, for fear that it could
be used by terrorists. My company has been working with New York for the
past two years on a project that required us to collect data like this
from all over that State, and we ran into many roadblocks accessing this
seemingly public and free data. OpenStreetMap would be a very viable
answer once the state of NY has been properly cleaned up in the OSM
database.
On the virtualization side... Virtual Box seems nice, but what does it
offer that VMWare does not offer, aside from a lower price? Any
particular features? Performance? Does it run on more platforms than
Linux, Mac, and Windows? Is there a server version of Virtual Box so I
could build a VB machine on my workstation, and then deploy it to my VB
server? On the other hand, Xen did appear to be highly interesting ...
eschewing the traditional GUI is nice, but I'm curious if Xen has a web
GUI like VMWare Server v2? Is it entirely CLI based? I don't have a
problem with a CLI, but other people in my IT group would prefer a GUI
... so while it might mean better job security for me to setup the VMs
in Xen if there was only a CLI, it wouldn't be all that nice to my
buddies who don't have a CLI inclination.
Again, thanks to all - it was a good meeting!
-Nick
---
Nicholas Floersch (pr. Floor-sh)
Stone Environmental, Inc.
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Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
17 Averill Street
Barre, VT
05641
http://www.bosivt.org
http://www.flint.com/home
skype: flintinfotech
Work: (202) 537-0480
Fax: (703) 852-7089
Consilium
gratuitum .~.
valet /V\
quanti /( )\
numerantur ^^-^^
