Frank's Home Page

Who

I’m database centric, a UNIX advocate, an open source fan, and dabble in geographic information systems for fun. Nearly all my development is under Linux in either C or PHP. The command line is a favorite tool and while my editor of choice is emacs, the IDE NetBeans is a good tool also.

Applications

I’m interested in geographic information systems (GIS). Basically it’s computerized map making. I’ve been playing around with Google Map’s javascript interface. It displays maps, satellite images and both. You can add your own overlays of points or tracks. Then you can scroll around and zoom.

I’m an avid cyclist and irregular member of the Bike/PAC, the
Cincinnati Bicycle Pedestrian advisor committee. I mapped recent
bicycle crashes in Cincinnati.

I’ve run a web site which I’ve pompously called CincyBackpackers.com to track my outdoor adventures. It uses PostgreSQL as the database along with a bunch of other web technologies like PHP, XML and javascript. Here’s a map of a trip I did on the Appalachian Trail’s 100 Mile Wilderness in Maine.

I prefer PHP over other web scripting languages. Usually there’s no special configuration required as Apache supports PHP out of the box. It runs equally well on Linux and Windows/XP. In fact there’s a nice package for windows called XAMP which is a preconfigured web server and database in a box for XP. The language it self is much like PERL and C so the learning curve isn’t so steep. Finally there’s a vast amount of predefined applications and tools like Wordpress for blogging.

My favorite geographic information system is Quantum GIS. The later versions of QGIS  are quite nice. It supports many data formats, has functionality similar to Arc/Info without the exhorbitant license fees. It also supports GPS and has hard copy output. Here’s a QGIS sample map of the confluence of the Little Miami and Ohio Rivers.

My contibutions to open source include enhancements to Dlgvu and my own source forge project quadjoin. The GIS application Dlgvu, is a viewer for digital line graphs. In dlgvu because all the data are represented as vectors. This means that unlike raster data it scales well. I modifed Dlgvu it to display labels, print the scale bar on hard copy and write selected points to a file. Gregg Townsend kind enough to name me as a contributor. Here’s a Dlgvu sample map of the confluence of the Little Miami and Ohio Rivers.

For background maps USGS DRGs (aka scanned in maps) are quite nice. One drawback with many of these packages is that USGS DRGs usually have a margin so they don’t display seamlessly. I couldn’t find any simple open source utilities that address these so I wrote a utility called Quadjoin and submitted it to SourceForge. Scroll to the bottom of the quadjoin page to see some examples. BTW, there’s a rather complete set of free, DRGs at libremap.org.