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With the immense leaps of cheaper data storage, cellular availability, and awareness toward open source components, the options to create workflows that were traditionally commercial can now be accessed for free. One of these great leaps is with field survey tools. Once upon a time (around five years ago) a field surveyor would use sheets of paper in which he would fill out pre-defined questionnaires and would use some expensive GPS device to geo-locate his location or write it down. These days, the same methodology would be used, but the hardware would be comprised of some kind of a tablet or a smartphone. But what about the survey itself? How to create a simple and geographical related survey? Using the next methods I’ve collected more than 700 data points in a four month period using three different surveying tools: PrerequisitesThe matrix of options is endless between the surveyors’ capabilities, the back office tech-knowledge and technology, the equipment to be used etc. So here are (my) ground rules for the mobile form technology: Free – No licensing required. Digital – No paper and handwriting so less data loss. Android based – Cheapest and more varied OS. No coding and developing – So anyone can create a form. Easy to deploy – easy to understand and implement. GNSS integration – so the surveyor wouldn’t need to type his location. Dashboard view – So it’ll be easy to navigate and browse results for the survey manager Stable –Dependable and trustworthy. Offline capabilities – In case we’re going out into the wilds… As appealing as it might seem, I’ve discarded Google’s form option. The problem is that there are surveys that don’t have addresses to which they can relate, and therefore can’t reverse geocode its data. And as it is today there is no option to simply adding your coordinates automatically to a survey. The Free SolutionSo the option that I found was actually a combination between enketo (https://enketo.org/), Ona.io (https://ona.io/), and ODK ( https://opendatakit.org/) It’s not complex as it may seem. Enketo is the form technology. If you’re not a programmer, the easiest way to implement it, is to choose the server side interface technology. That would be ona.io (ona.io is one of the free options available to use with enketo. Formhub for example is also a free to use option.) So, let’s say you want to create a form with some basic functionality, the way to do it will be: Open account at ona.io Create a form. Here’s an example of one you can use: http://tinyurl.com/q9lmfcd Upload it. Done! ou’ll see the web icon lit, and when you’ll press it you’re prompt to enketo – to fill out the details of the form you published. From the example form above, here’s the link: https://mzpli.enketo.org/webform and this is the form itself: Pay attention – the web url, is the link to the form. You can create a barcode from it, email it, add it on your cellular or tablet main screen. It’s that easy. You can even create an apk from it and disguise it as an app (using www.appsgeyser.com for example) The form above is an easy and simple one. You can create powerful varied surveys, with skip options, drop down lists etc. Check out enekto website for more data. For us, GIS specialists, I would like address to two things. First, it’s real easy to just activate the GPS during filling a form. Second, the surveyor has the option to draw a polygon or a line. These two options, makes this platform a powerful tool for GIS professionals who needs to work with non-GIS field surveyors. So why ODK?The only problem with using enketo, is the location precision. ODK lets you get down to 3-5 few meters (depends on your device) If you want to be more accurate, than you’ll need to use another app – ODK (Play store link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.odk.collect.android) After downloading it, you’ll need to configure the source of your form. So for that you’ll need to navigate to “General Settings” and to “Configure platform settings” and fill in the url (https://ona.io/USERNAME) and your user name and password. ODK works offline, and If you control the surveyors devices completely, like if they are designated tablets for work only, you can configure it so things will be lighter and simpler in the workflow. ODK first screen when staring any survey: Dashboard:The manager needs to have the data secured, immediately, and downloadable. The dashboard in Formhub or Ona.io presents options to view the collected surveys – either as tabular data, on a map or browsing pictures collected. You can download the data to excel, csv and even as KML. You can make the form public, upload pictures to it (useful when there’s a need to distinguish between birds or flower species), and there’s even a sms option (in beta). Here’s a sample from the downloadable formats available: source : http://www.gislounge.com/free-field-survey-tools/

The IESG has formally approved the HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications, and they’re on their way to the RFC Editor, where they’ll soon be assigned RFC numbers, go through some editorial processes, and be published. specification can be seen here : HTTP/2 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-17 HPACK https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-header-compression-12 source : https://www.mnot.net/blog/2015/02/18/http2

remember the old glory days, when everything is in rapidshare this is the news from them : RapidShare, one of the first file hosting services on the Internet, is shutting down next month. After March 31, all of its user accounts and data will be deleted. The Switzerland-based service went online in 2002 and saw hundreds of millions of monthly visitors during its glory days a few years ago. Chances are, most of them didn’t come to download the latest Creative Commons-licenced folk album, but unlike Megaupload, RapidShare managed to stay on the right side of the law. The service saw a surge of new users after the Megaupload shutdown in early 2012 and even had to limit download speeds to cope with demand for a while. source : http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/10/rapidshare-shuts-down/

Dear all, if you have some time to spend in crowsourcing for remote sensing analysis in disaster relief, then go to tomnod.com i often participates to tomnod campaigns, and it's really amazing.. The Tomnod mission is to utilize the power of crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images. We created this web app with thousands of volunteers (like you!) in mind. Use our satellite images to explore the Earth, solve real-world problems, and view amazing images of our changing planet. We then compare each team member's findings with another to accurately understand the challenge at hand.

Just saw the news in TeckCrunch. Nadella started to take bold decisions which could surely change Microsoft in near future. Starting from the server side technologies only, maybe in future we will all see a complete bar-free ecosystem for everyone. Read full article http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-takes-net-open-source-and-cross-platform/

PHP 7, a major update to the server-side scripting language due next year, will offer performance improvements and more capabilities, along with deprecation of some existing features. The release will be anchored by performance enhancements derived from the phpng branch of the PHP tree. Officials from PHP tools vendor Zend Technologies discussed the progress of phpng and PHP 7 at the company’s ZendCon conference in Silicon Valley this week. “[The upgrade is] really focused on helping real-world applications perform significantly faster and plus, we’re going to have additional improvements in PHP,” said Zend CEO Andi Gutmans, who has been involved in the ongoing development of PHP. Recent versions of PHP have been part of the 5.x release series, but there will be no PHP 6. “We’re going to skip [version] 6 because years ago, we had plans for a 6 but those plans were very different from what we’re doing now,” Gutmans said. Going right to version 7 avoids confusion. The phpng improvements in version 7 have been focused on areas such as hash tables and memory allocation. A chart on the state of phpng as of this month, presented at the conference, had the technology producing a 35 percent speedup on synthetic tests; 20 to 70 percent performance improvements on real applications, including a 60 percent improvement on WordPress home pages, and better memory consumption for most useful server APIs. The technology supports most PHP extensions bundled into the PHP source distribution and provides speed comparable to the HHVM 3.3.0 open source virtual machine. A PHP developer at the conference expressed optimism about phpng. “Obviously, speed is the most important thing to a Web app or any app in general,” said developer Pete Nystrom, vice president of engineering and co-founder at Classy.org, an online fundraising platform. While recognizing it would be a while before the technology was available in tools, Nystrom understands what's at stake. “Obviously, going into the core and speeding up all these functions that are core to PHP is a massive undertaking and something that’s going to be great for all of us.” Also on tap for PHP is elimination of some existing features. “We’re going to deprecate some old functionality that we think is not that interesting anymore,” Gutmans said. Ext/ereg and ext.mysql are on the deprecation list and have both been replaced by other extensions. Other deprecated features include # style comments in ini files and string category names in setlocale(). source : http://www.infoworld.com/article/2841561/php/php-7-moves-full-speed-ahead.html

Hi all, I have few question,may be not allowed to do so, in this beloved forum.. 1..Can anyone tell me what is the consequences i m gonna face if i use crack software for a research work and wanna publish in a reputed journal? Will i have to face any question like have u used licensed version or not? or any type of query in the near future like this or how much secure is it. In a nutshell what i wanna is: I have crack software that gonna be used in the research work and i not in a state to buy these softs- what upshots gonna happened.... 2..As a newbie, can i publish a research work done by me lonely- i mean only one author, corresponding or first author is me in a high to mid impact-factored journals.Is it the fact is that as neophyte i have to resort to a skilled and high-measured researcher in the author list- is it the fact? Thanks in advance...

The company, which announced in September it would be manufacturing 64-bit ARM processors, demonstrated a prototype of its new processor at a summit for the Open Compute Project (OCP) this week in San Jose, California. The pending AMD ARM processors, which will be under the AMD Opteron A1100 Series (or “A-series”) nameplate, will be manufactured using 28-nanometer fabrication technology. Based on the ARM Cortex A57 core design, the AMD Opteron A1100 Series processors will come in either four- or eight-core configurations, with 64GB DRAM. They will have up to 4MB of shared L2 and 8MB of shared L3 cache, and configurable dual DDR3 or DDR4 memory channels with error correcting code that can run up to 1,866 MT (million transfers) per second. The processors will be built on a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design and will feature eight lanes of PCI-Express Generation 3 I/O, eight Serial ATA 3 ports and two 10 Gigabit ethernet ports. They will also have encryption/decryption and data compression co-processors, and up to four SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMM memory modules. The AMD Opteron A-Series development kit is in effect a sample bare-bones computer running on the ARM processor. It includes a Micro-ATX-sized motherboard, four DIMM slots that can hold up to 128GB of DDR3 DRAM, PCI Express connectors configurable as a single x8 or dual x4 ports, and eight Serial-ATA connectors. On the software side, the development kits will have a Fedora ARM Linux distribution, with device drivers and commonly used Web tier applications such as the Apache Web server, MySQL database engine, and the PHP, Java 7 and Java 8 programming languages. It also includes the standard Linux GNU tool chain for developing applications. It is booted through a standard UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) secure boot environment. source : http://www.pcworld.com/article/2092680/amd-debuts-first-arm-processor.html