EDIT: I see SAGNS has updated and improved their website since this article (edited: 15 September 2009) A while back, while working on a rural settlements database, we were asked to consider the SAGNS database as a reference for settlement names. The data that we received was, to put it mildly, very poor. Locations were in the sea, in the northern hemisphere, in South America and for 50% of the database - nowhere at all. added to that, the alphanumeric data was full of mistakes a.....

a bit late, but I read a very interesting article - the anatomy of the twitter attack, outlining exactly how a twitter employee was recently hacked. Baiscally it boils down to the hacker using the Gmail password recovery which emailed the password to that Gmail account users secondary mail account. When requesting the password recovery tool,  Gmail offers a reminder as to which email account it is in the form of *******@h******.com. The hacker then guessed it to be a hotmail.....

We recently had a requirement to provide a layer control with label and colour customisation for a Openlayers based web solution with a Mapserver WMS. As part of this project we were pleasantly surprised as to exactly how customisable Mapserver is through the URL request to the mapserv CGI  (perhaps i shouldn't be surprised!). What we first did is create a database driven layer control, enabling the user to turn layers and labels on or off. The url is .....

We have directly or indirectly been involved in Web based GIS for quite a few years now, and it is quite interesting how the approach has changed over time. The early days saw the reliance on client based plugins and has slowly progressed to no reliance on client side plugins and virtually no reliance on server side solutions. The Past My first attempt at a webGIS was a custom built solution rendering maps in SVG which essentially served as a stepping stone until a reliable c.....