Archive for the ‘rants’ Category

The Shapefile 2.0 manifesto

Posted on March 1st, 2009 by Alex Willmer

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are by their nature data driven. The data comes in a wide variety of raster and vector formats. Rasters hold raw, continuous data recorded striaght from the real world. An example is Satellite/aerial imagery, this is a commonly held in an open format with broad support, such as GeoTIFF [...]

Fitts’ Law and Minimalism vs GTK+ and Qt

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by Alex Willmer

It all started with the Pidgin chat window, which is surrounded by several pixels of padding. To my eyes the padding doesn’t achieve anything, it just wastes space and detracts from the clean, minimalist lines of the Buddy List. After much fumbling, I managed to change it in the Pidgin source code . Bug 6987 [...]

@Programmers of web forum/blog software

Posted on June 25th, 2008 by Alex Willmer

Dear web 2.0 coolios,
Please stop writing comment systems with half-assed threading. I understand you had to replace all those icky newsgroups on usenet, but you could have done a better job.
Take a look at Google Groups, Gmane. See how all those conversations are nicely grouped together? See how nobody is writing @previous_author? Please sort it [...]