Does Vendor Lock-In Increase Health-Care Costs?

Today is World Diabetes Day. I am a parent of a child with Type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile diabetes). As such, my child is dependent upon insulin and will be until a cure is found. I am using my blog today to discuss the issue of interoperability (or lack thereof) of medical devices.

gvSIG 1.9 Released

Just ahead of the gvSIG conference in Valencia, version 1.9 has been released. gvSIG is an open-source desktop GIS developed in Java. The new features in 1.9 are summarized here.

Some of the new features, including SLD import/export, are pretty interesting. gvSIG seems to be flourishing a bit under the wing of OSGEO. It’s a tool that I have gone back to periodically over the years, and I’ll probably take a deeper dive this time given some of the new features. I suggest giving gvSIG a go if you haven’t tried it.

UPDATE: The gvSIG download site seems to be having some serious bandwidth issues.

What Is This “GIS” Of Which You Speak?

Don Meltz has kicked off the most recent round of discussion about the nature/state of “GIS” (I put that in quotes since I am the one who declared it a myth). James and Sean also weighed with their thoughts on the subject. Like it or not, they are right. The technology that has for years been labeled as “GIS” and segmented (somewhat artificially) from the rest of the IT industry is, with increasing speed, being integrated into the tapestry of mainstream IT. This trend is not only something that I think is irreversible and good, it is something that I have been actively working toward for my entire career.

Twitter Shows Blitz

This past weekend, NFL Sunday to be specific, I was the victim of a TV/internet outage due to a mistake made by a technician while they did some work at the junction box shared by my next-door neighbor and I. As a result, I was unable to watch my beloved Washington NFL franchise hobble to another almost-loss so I had to find another way to keep tabs on the game. Since my internet service was also down, that left me with my BlackBerry Tour as my sole means of connectivity.

I initially started off on the ESPN site, trying to keep track of the action. Finding this unsatisfactory, I switched to MSNBC with the auto-refresh set to 30 seconds. I quickly realized that the information I was getting was woefully behind and quite inadequate. Then I had a different idea.

ESRI Javascript API 1.5 Released

ESRI has released version 1.5 of the ArcGIS Server Javascript API. You can see what’s new here.

I am most excited about SSL access but that’s just me.