Kris Law @greylaw89@qoto.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting

Huh, didn't really realize this was a thing, make sense though. Its pretty cool from a censorship evasion standpoint, although it seems the consolidation of the internet is having some ill effects between certain governments and major providers.

Another day, another hard to pronounce chemical that poses risks to you:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-water-foreverchemicals/u-s-drinking-water-widely-contaminated-with-forever-chemicals-report-idUSKBN1ZL0F8

I see all this zero day stuff about IE, they can't fix it, it's actively exploited, they are frantically working on a patch, etc... And the first thing I think is: You deserve it. If you aren't someone who is too old to understand better (the only place I'll cut you slack) and you still use IE, then your organization needs to feel pain until you are forced to actually upgrade to a different browser.

It's not acceptable to think some crappy 90s to early 2000s webpage you built internally will work forever, anymore than you can drive your car for 900000 miles and not expect problems. You've had plenty of opportunities, and you failed to actually upgrade because your company is so paralyzed with bureaucracy or cheapness to develop anything new. At a certain point, your business or agency needs to fail, because while fires are bad and no one likes them, they are also a natural process whereby mountains of decaying trash gets removed.

Very happy to see OpenStreetMap is active on Mastodon!

For reference to my friends in Qoto, OpenStreetMap is a reservior of high quality street data for use in various applications. Its one of the best examples of an open source community managed GIS project.

https://en.osm.town/explore

Here is a link to their Mastodon page, which until a couple of seconds ago I didn't realize existed.

For the science of Sociology, should the findings and recommendations of these scientists be given the same weight in the decision making process of political bodies as Physics or climate change scientists? Should it be more? Less?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging

One day. One day I won't be too retarded to understand this. It accomplishes quite an amazing feat - creating interpolated data on the edges of a map where you have none, based on what is surrounding it. Not a perfect solution, but one that has some amazing potential applications, not just in GIS.

A couple of other notes -
+ Its atrocious to not handle the case that both comparison sets are the same - in which case one can go from n ^ 2 to n / 2, where n is the number of geometries to compare.

+ Warn. Warn about many, many things. Its not that its "wrong", just that the user (which might well be me, doesn't have a clue what they are actually doing)

+ Find some way of avoiding loading everything in memory. This is an underlying QGIS issue... it seems that opening up an .getFeatures() method corrupts another that is still open before.

https://github.com/greylaw89

Not a Git master yet, but here is my GitHub, where I will be posting my generally hacky and work in progress QGIS tools.

Currently working on my Near Matrix tool. Near has a long and sordid history in GIS as being the trolliest tool to paywall in Esri's ArcGIS. (although Erase can give it a run for its money sometimes).

Near, for reference, merely takes a set of geometries and compares it to another set of geometries (I'll go into more detail on other posts) finding the shortest distance between them.

QGIS has a couple of built in routes one can go down on this path, one of which is the "Nearest Neighbor Analysis", which does exactly this - but only for points, not lines or polygons, which limits its helpfulness.

Another route would be to use its GRASS module plug ins, one of which is v.distance. These are excellent tools, but you really need to pay attention to the input and outputs. They tend to be a bit "clunky" from my experience.

Instead, I'm building my own, which does what I need, as well as something extra that none of these tools does in a manner I appreciate - visually generate the line between the two geometries in question.

I wouldn't be supervised if QGIS has this natively soon (after all, all I am doing is using the underlying methods the main developers have exposed) but until its available in LTS I'll keep using this one.

Some things still left to do:
+ Better handle geographic coordinates (if these come in, the distances will be functionally useless, better either use some insane math or error out to the user)
+ Better handle NULL geometries (these are not going to play well with anything)
+ Create another field and dump the unit in them. (Experience with GIS tells me that a free floating "distance" double field will eventually be sent to someone with no idea if it is in feet or meters)
+ Create some fancy pants SVG icon for it, so I can get away with not useing the default.
+ Actually learn Git so I'm not constantly deleting / reuploading to the web interface

Going to try Soylent again... last time it didn't end well. Its been a few years, so here is hoping that they fixed whatever caused that.