Open – Beyond Technology

I am currently reading the book “Fierce Conversations” by Susan Scott. I am on hiatus from teaching my leadership course this year, so I am taking the opportunity to refresh my content and my perspectives. The basis of the book is fairly simple:

Our work, our relationships, and our lives succeed or fail one conversation at a time. While no single conversation is guaranteed to transform a company, a relationship, or a life, any single conversation can.

Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time

This has gotten me thinking in general about conversations that have impacted me throughout my career, whether with colleagues, direct reports, supervisors, customers, or mentors.

Recently, I had an interaction on Twitter that got me thinking about a long-ago conversation in a different context that, although I had never thought much about it, had an effect on how I view the role of technology in solving problems. That Twitter interaction is here:

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SharpMap 1.0 RC1 Released

Over on Google+, Diego Guidi let me know that the SharpMap 1.0 Release Candidate has been released. There was a time when I worked with, and wrote about, SharpMap a lot. During that entire time, the stable version of SharpMap sat at some version number that started with “0.9”. The release of a 1.0 candidate is a signal that the project is moving forward.

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Using BruTile and MapsUI to Enable WeoGeo Previews

A few weeks ago, my company announced the availability of the first beta version of WeoGeo Tools for ArcGIS. Unlike the previous version, which opened a separate browser window, this new release allows a user to order a data set from WeoGeo Market or a library from inside ArcMap.

One of the challenges was enabling data set previews. If you browse data sets using the WeoGeo online tool, you can get an idea of what the data set contains by using the data set preview images supplied by the data set provider.

When we developed the first version of WeoGeo Tools for WeoGeo, they used kamap to create preview tiles for data sets. This was accomplished by used either one of two desktop tools: the weoapp (command line) or gWeoApp (GUI). The first version of WeoGeo Tools used the weoapp in the background to create tiles when uploading data.

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