Contents tagged with open source
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The world (map) should be free!.
With all of the open source movement going around and new licenses like the creative commons you would have expected someone should be able to grab a simple jpeg or a png of the world map for free, without any licensing issues. Well, I’m not sure when I actually started looking for one, but at some point in time I did, and couldn’t actually find an appropriate map of the world countries that’s free to download and royalty free to use in projects. Sure some of you would say that Bing and Google maps have their own maps and API which is great for some purposes. but just grabbing a simple map world map with countries borders and without any companies watermarks or restrictions is just not available. (and if you do happen to find one , please let me know).
So anyway I’ve decided to play the role of a cartographer and create my own maps and share those with the rest of the world , for free!. the first step was to find a reliable data set of country borders . Took a look in the CIA world Fact book which was good but not enough , took also a look here in this database which seemed very outdated. Eventually, I’ve stumbled upon this marvelous Natural Earth Data website. here is the Natural Earth Data site’s description -
Mapping the world - Community Style.
I had an idea for a cool mashup that included a map , countries coordinates and another secret ingredient. But to my surprise, I couldn't find a free Country to gps coordinates Database. which means that even though Columbus discovered America more than 5 centuries ago there are still some uncharted lands in the virtual world.
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C# / .Net image filters working on linux (and other cross platforms) with Mono
When I published Yael , which is basically a set of .Net open source image filters class library, I tried testing that on several linux platforms using Mono. back than Mono was somewhere around the 1.2 version and trying to run several gdi related core lib calls crashed down Mono. recently , with the announcement of the completion of Mono's 2.0 api I've decided to revisit this test. Another aspect that i've tested didn't go so well so I was a bit pessimistic.