Technology

The IBM 029 Card Punch

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The IBM 029 Card Punch

Lines of code longer than 80 characters drive me crazy. I appreciate that this is pedantic. I’ve seen people on the internet make good arguments for why the 80-character limit ought to be respected even on our modern Retina-display screens, but those arguments hardly justify the visceral hatred I feel for even that one protruding 81st character.

There was once a golden era in which it was basically impossible to go over the 80-character limit. The 80-character limit was a physical reality, because there was no 81st column for an 81st character to fit in. Any programmers attempting to name a function something horrendously long and awful would discover, in a moment of delicious, slow-dawning horror, that there literally isn’t room for their whole declaration.

OpenStreetMap is Having a Moment – by Joe Morrison – A Closer Look with Joe Morrison

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OpenStreetMap is Having a Moment – by Joe Morrison – A Closer Look with Joe Morrison

The open secret Jennings filled me in on is that OpenStreetMap (OSM) is now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world’s largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written.

The four companies in the inner circle— Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft— have a combined market capitalization of over six trillion dollars.? In almost every other setting, they are mortal enemies fighting expensive digital wars of attrition. Yet they now find themselves eagerly investing in and collaborating on OSM at an unprecedented scale (more on the scale later).

Using the Graphical Modeler in QGIS 3.0

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While I've written a handful of plugins in the past for QGIS, I've always wanted to learn about the graphical modeler which is a lot easier than writing all the Python by hand, especially creating the dialogs and setting up the methods yourself.