Computer scientists and geographers disagree about one of the basic tenants of geography. Rather then decide who is right, as a library GeoTools gives your application a chance to match your users communities expectations.

Editor for Nullsoft Installer Files (NSIS). Has a really simple wizard which lets you create NSIS files extremely easily

Windows pixel editor lets you generate a true multi-resolution .ICON icon file for windows. freeware

Building a raster tile set for the entire world. Observes that for a single layer basemap, many tiles are "empty" (a solid color i.e. water) - but in fact if you separate out your data into multiple layers each of these layers demonstrates some degree of sparseness. Render, store, then composite on the fly. (Composite on the server?)

Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin and MSYS - use this instead of Console or the default cygwin shell

ClipX is a tiny clipboard history manager. It is sweet, it is free, use it.

big list of windows software

URL reference for linking into google maps

Specification for Bing Maps URLs

A number of times before (1, 2) I’ve discussed point clustering maps. I thought it would be useful to present an actual case study of a mobile app* that makes use of clustering to explain why I think the technique has problems from a usability point of view

Free Xml Schema Definition (XSD) diagram viewer for Windows. Allows for XSD visualizations to be exported as images.

MarkdownPad is a full-featured Markdown editor for Windows.

ExploreFS is a tiny plugin (~6KB) that opens a selected file in the folder of the native file manager. It adds "Explore in File System" to the context menu of Eclipse's package explorer, resource navigator, and other views. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are supported.

Capturing JVM- and application-level metrics. So you know what's going on.

Using Windows 7’s Windows XP Mode to Run Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer

"My minority opinion is that a mountain of code is the worst thing that can befall a person, a team, a company. I believe that code weight wrecks projects and companies, that it forces rewrites after a certain size, and that smart teams will do everything in their power to keep their code base from becoming a mountain. Tools or no tools. That's what I believe."

Rules, techniques

e objective of our proposed method is to provide a better label placement strategy to improve the probability that labels are placed in meaningful locations inside all polygons, convex or otherwise, with or without holes. The algorithm we develop uses shape analyses such as compactness, weighted areas, region decompositions, and region skeletons

Leaflet is a modern, lightweight BSD-licensed JavaScript library for making tile-based interactive maps for both desktop and mobile web browsers, developed by CloudMade to form the core of its next generation JavaScript API.

JExplorer provides a convenient Java API for integrating Microsoft Internet Explorer into Java applications as a Java Swing UI component in headless mode, so you can embed it into the UI to manipulate programmatically without specific knowledge of COM or the Microsoft Internet Explorer API.

RXTX binary distribution for 64-bit windows

The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools. This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.

WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

simple webapp for designing pixel patterns - exactly the tool I envisioned for constructing hash patterns for map design

This package provides a general framework for developing spatial indices. Currently it defines generic interfaces, provides simple main memory and disk based storage managers and a robust implementation of an R*-tree, an MVR-tree and a TPR-tree. In addition the library includes a 3-dimensional R-tree visualization plug-in (example image below; requires Java3D runtime). This library is free software published under the GNU Lesser General Public License. You may copy, modify and use freely.

Acetate is a brand-new custom styled map that is designed for visualizing data and reintroduces the idea of a multi-layered basemap. Built into GeoIQ and GeoCommons, Acetate is immediately usable by everyone to easily build compelling maps, an also by developers to mix and share.

a list of highway shields for different locales. Includes particular state specific highway symbols like Kansas's exceptionally ugly yellow sunflower sign

This build environment compiles GDAL and MapServer from the subversion and provide cutting edge binary packages containing the latest fixes until the time when build has started (refer to build log for the details). Only the binaries of the latest successful builds are available to download. Includes build of API bindings for OGR/GDAL

As part of the Java language, the java.lang package is implicitly imported into every Java program. This package's pitfalls surface often, affecting most programmers. This month, I'll discuss the traps lurking in the Runtime.exec() method.

 Many Java™ language methods, such as Thread.sleep() and Object.wait(), throw InterruptedException. You can't ignore it because it's a checked exception, but what should you do with it? In this month's Java theory and practice, concurrency expert Brian Goetz explains what InterruptedException means, why it is thrown, and what you should do when you catch one.

nowCOAST  provides public access to its observations, forecasts, imagery and geo-referenced hyperlink layers via WMS

PDF of presentation from google fellow Jeff Dean on web app performance

Howto guide for read, modify and write XML documents with JAXB 2.1 or 2.2

helpful hints for running Tomcat in a production environment:

complete online book for development with maven

Excellent guide for building up useful project sites by adding the relevant information to your pom file.

Directory of coordinate systems, providing EPSG codes, WKT, and PROJ format specifications

"Almost four years on from Mapping Hacks, the state of web-based mapping is moving within reach of mortals and designers. The one piece of software most directly responsible is Mapnik, Artem Pavlenko's excellent open source rendering library. Despite a not-undeserved reputation for being difficult to install (there are even what appears to be companies offering Mapnik as a service), once you've got it running there's nothing better out there for generating your own web-based slippy maps." some notes on producing high-quality tiled maps. Interested independent of Mapnick

Java API that allows developers to easily monitor production applications. aggregate performance statistics such as hits, execution times (total, average, minimum, maximum, standard deviation), as well as concurrency information such as simultaneous application requests. Useful for web monitoring but also for general runtime statistics as well

Python-based WMS-C/TMS tile caching server, with pluggable caching mechanisms and rendering backends.

WMS tiles cacheimplemented in Java

pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies. In addition to supporting image-based rendering, adds support for vector overlays as well. Extensible layer API for supporting different data source, includes data out of KML and GeoRSS streams.

Javascript reference

Software development Q&A site. Allows you to submit questions to the site, which may then be answered by any user. Covers all technologies. Provides a moderation system where each user has a numeric score indicating "reputation" Allows you to set up tags for topics of interest, topics which you don't wish to see. Clean,simple design. Excellent source for high-quality information, average expertise level significantly higher that sun java forums.

Web service that lets you generate an animated "loading" GIF with the foreground/background color of your choice. Icons have no licensing restrictions. Has a number of different styles and sizes to choose from.

MiGLayout can produce flowing, grid based, absolute (with links), grouped and docking layouts. MiGLayout is created to be to manually coded layouts what Matisse/GroupLayout is to IDE supported visual layouts.

Free set of 60 application icons in 16x16 format. Liberal license agreement for use in commercial applications

Large set of high quality CC-licensed applications available in 16x16 and 10x10

GeoServer is a open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. Supports export with KML

The Grinder is a JavaTM load testing framework that makes it easy to run a distributed test using many load injector machines

NMEA Generator generates the NMEA sentence of the GPS receiver and outputs it in a serial port.

Allows you to create an unlimited number of virtual COM port pairs and use any pair to connect one COM port based application to another. Each COM port pair provides two COM ports. The output to one port is the input from other port and vice versa.

CSS framework - "The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem. Read more."

Metalist of information on typography

HTML reference which is part of their plan to have a full reference on the trinity of web development (HTML/CSS/JavaScript).

Console is a Windows console window enhancement. Console features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles

random blog of interest

random blog of interest

Web visualization toolkit. Simply register, upload your data in tab delimieted form, and then explore various visualization methods.

Silk web icon set, with 1000 icons , including report icons, some new picture icons, some small XHTML/CSS buttons, and some hardware drive icons. Licensed under creative commons

Binary web service protocol for transmitting data structures

DesignGridLayout is a LayoutManager inspired by the use of canonical grids for user interface design. DesignGridLayout works with JDK 1.5 and later.

Basic but detailed introduction to layout using CSS, include the box model and different kinds of positioning

Allows for the dynamic generation of charts through data encoded into the query string

The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written with JavaScript and CSS, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX

A set of plugins, behaviors and widgets, for building event-driven web applications using the bubble-up technique.