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... does it run [on] Linux?

Oh wait, I'm thinking of that other snake.

Another option you may want to look into is working at a supercomputer centre. These are usually (semi-)independent organisations that maintain supercomputers and fast networks, and help scientists use them. Jobs there include technical sysadmin type work maintaining compute clusters, storage arrays, and networking equipment, programming with an emphasis on parallellisation, optimisation and visualisation, as well as more consulting-type work where you advise researchers on how to best use the available facilities to achieve their goals, and gather requirements for the programmers. As a random US example, there's one in Chicago.

As for technical skills, if you're in the geosciences then you'll definitely want to brush up on your knowledge of Geographical Information Systems. ESRI ArcGIS is the big commercial vendor there, but there's also a lot of FOSS GIS software available. Also, some knowledge on geostatistics will help you communicate; some tutorials can be found here.

> I'm interested to learn of other, more portable, GIS Solutions as well.

Have a look at http://www.osgeo.org/
Whatever your needs, they are sure to cover it.

Demo DVD of many of the software projects http://live.osgeo.org/

> I'm interested to learn of other, more portable, GIS Solutions as well.

Have a look at http://www.osgeo.org/
Whatever your needs, they are sure to cover it.

Demo DVD of many of the software projects http://live.osgeo.org/

I have had a fair amount of success using open source GIS tools for one of my side project to create a hunting map book. I am not too sure of how well either one would work for what you are trying to do but I would be surprised if they didn't. The 2 tools I have had the most success with are uDig GIS and GRASS GIS. Both of them will run on Window, Mac OS, or Linux just fine, they all can process shape files, and DB input as well as geo tiff files as well as other file formats. Another popular OS GIS program is Quantum GIS. When I started I found OSGeo4w which had a bunch of open source GIS programs compiled for windows with everything you need and tried out a few of them and found 2 that best suited my needs. At the time I know it included GRASS, uDig, QGIS, and a couple of other ones, you might want to check out OSGeo as well as there may have been other projects that have started or better meet your needs.

Here is an example of some of what I have done. It is a map of the MN deer areas showing the antlerless deer harvest per square mile for each area in relation to all the others during the archery season. This map is a 10 year snapshot where the darker area indicated more deer were taken per square mile.

I have had a fair amount of success using open source GIS tools for one of my side project to create a hunting map book. I am not too sure of how well either one would work for what you are trying to do but I would be surprised if they didn't. The 2 tools I have had the most success with are uDig GIS and GRASS GIS. Both of them will run on Window, Mac OS, or Linux just fine, they all can process shape files, and DB input as well as geo tiff files as well as other file formats. Another popular OS GIS program is Quantum GIS. When I started I found OSGeo4w which had a bunch of open source GIS programs compiled for windows with everything you need and tried out a few of them and found 2 that best suited my needs. At the time I know it included GRASS, uDig, QGIS, and a couple of other ones, you might want to check out OSGeo as well as there may have been other projects that have started or better meet your needs.

Here is an example of some of what I have done. It is a map of the MN deer areas showing the antlerless deer harvest per square mile for each area in relation to all the others during the archery season. This map is a 10 year snapshot where the darker area indicated more deer were taken per square mile.

Run, do not walk, to research the Open Source Geospatial Foundation's offerings. And be aware, neo-geos devote their efforts primarily to PostGIS, which builds on the very capable PostreSQL database, adding in geospatial capabilities that by many accounts rival the best that that Oracle Spatial and MS SQL provide.

As always, there are significant tradeoffs to evaluate in your situation. Be ready to study the many evaluations and comparisons of the various solutions.

Agree full heartily. I am currently trying to create a map book geared for hunting and the outdoors in Minnesota. All of the data is freely available (the state of Minnesota has gigs of info freely available) online from various sources. Also there are open source tools to create impressive maps freely available. Add in a bit of effort and self publishing sites like Lulu.com (anyone know of other good ones I could look into) and as an amateur one can probably become successful. Do I ever expect to become rich off this effort, no. Would I mind if I ended up with enough money from this endeavor to purchase a nice 40 acre plot up in the north woods because of it, not at all. I would love it if I could sell one copy to each deer hunter in Minnesota but I doubt I will ever approach that number.

So why am I doing this? Because I looked at maps geared towards hunters and outdoor people and discovered that most of them completely suck and those that don't suck completely still suck as they have incomplete info or the wrong type of info for what a hunter would care about. Again here I am doing it because I want to have a nice spiral bound map book (saddle stitched or stapled never lays flat) for myself and I find it fun. My test maps that I take hunting and hand out to others in the party have proven incredibly useful in finding public land and knowing what to expect before you get there. I know I will probably sell a few copies, mostly to those in my hunting party but anything beyond that would just be icing on the cake.

You become a butterfly farmer to raise any kind of butterfly you want, rather than just what you already have. Chaos theory is great and all, but embedding infinite complexity into your programs is a good way to fail that ever-upcoming performance review.

This is exactly what I'm referring to. If the grammar isn't readily obvious, can you still write a parser for a language, and do so in a manner that's readable to others?

Last I checked, flex made some pretty large files just to parse out a simple language. How will your coworkers feel about having to maintain a few thousand lines of unnecessary parser code? (Note that this is based on looking at this example.)

What about a network protocol, where the whole structure may not be available at once, and may in fact be larger than your computer's memory can handle?

Sure, you may have learned how lex works, but can you actually apply that to writing a good parser yourself?

Lex, and all compiler theory, is great for compilers. If you have your entire structure in a nice well-defined form, and you're only dealing with a tiny amount of data at a time, compiling practices work fine. Once circumstances get weirder, you need to be able to adapt. Lex doesn't like adapting, and its processes are so abstract as to be ridiculously excessive for most jobs.

As is UMN's MapServer, with a fully open source (GPL-like) license. http://mapserver.org/

For a nice and robust GPL'd mapping client that can pull data from MapServer, as well as many other sources, see QGis. http://www.qgis.org/

For a full-featured GIS agent with GPL'd license that can also pull date from MapServer see GRASS. http://grass.osgeo.org/

Another cool open source geographical application is PostGIS, a spatial data server for PostgreSQL that interfaces with all of the above. http://postgis.refractions.net/

OSSIMPlanet is OSS and it talks to OGC-compliant servers. OMAR is a scalable OGC-compliant WMS. You can build your own Google Earth system with them.

See the OSSIM web site for OSSIM itself and OSSIMPlanet. OMAR is harder to find than OSSIMPlanet. Try here.

Hi there, I am a spatial guy so thought my 0.02 may be worth something. I am not too sure about digitising them, maybe a print shop or as suggested in other posts you could talk to your local university geography department or a government mapping agency

Once they are digital though you need to georeference them. As mentioned in the title of my post, it is easiest to use GIS to do this and you can use QGIS with relative ease. Install it using osgeo4w on windows or the ubuntu ppa for qgis. Alternatively if you have a license then use ArcGIS. If you have a map of the underlying roads for the maps you are digitising then what you do is find points on the roads and match them to points on the scanned images, this provides data for a transformation and will shift the map onto your coordinates.

more information here-
  http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Global_datasets

try GRASS GIS-
  http://grass.osgeo.org/

SRTM visualization tutorial here-
  http://grass.osgeo.org/newsletter/GRASSNews_vol3.pdf

try GRASS GIS-
  http://grass.osgeo.org/

SRTM visualization tutorial here-
  http://grass.osgeo.org/newsletter/GRASSNews_vol3.pdf

check out virtual terrain project http://www.vterrain.org/ or for GIS alternatives to SAGA, OSGeo foundation: http://www.osgeo.org/ GRASS / QGIS worth checking out

A previous poster already mentioned that Google's Picasa is a free and easy tool to add geolocation to the EXIF metadata of photos and then publish them on Google Earth or Google Maps. Of course, there are plenty of other tools to do just that. Examples include this one for the mac, or this other one specifically for iPhoto. You'll get much more photo geocoding tools examples here.

Oh, and by the way, instead of using the Google Maps API to show them on your website, I invite you to try OpenLayers, which does the same thing, except that it's open, supported by the OSGeo and allows you to toggle from Google data to Microsoft or Yahoo or any WMS server easily.

I don't know the answer, but I can direct you to OpenLayers.org and to the Open Source Geospatial foundation to look for answers. I'm interested to the answer because we want to geolocate visitors for slashcode itself, and I copied your question on Slashgeo.org, which may help attract more answers to this /. story.

While your at it, GeoRSS is also open and, in my opinion, the future of RSS. Learn more about it here.

There's Microsoft's Live Local and Yahoo! Maps that are also data-filled. But you're right, data is the next intel inside. You can look at OpenStreetMap, the best open data project amongst the community.