[Mapserver-west] Tyler Mitchell - British Columbia, Canada

[Tyler Mitchell]

Thanks so much for stopping by - all the email has been a joy to read.  Mishtu 
and I worked hard to collect as many names and emails as we could to invite 
folks to this list - feel free to pass along the subscription information to 
anyone else that might be interested.

We put this list together to help get some deeper discussion and introductions 
going.  So far, so good.  Why am I here?  I'm in between developers and 
end-users of open source GIS in general, and MapServer specifically.  It's 
great to see so much going on in both fronts.  I've been 'into' the 
technologies for 5 or 6 years.  My interest came out of being frustrated.  
After 3 years at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario I moved as far 
west as I could - and I haven't left yet.  There must have been something in 
the air blowing up to Thunder Bay from Minnesota :)  At that time I had been 
introduced to Eppl7 (I just mention that for any nostalgia it brings up for 
other readers).

I worked for a forestry consulting company in central B.C. but got frustrated 
because I couldn't bring any of the tools home to use.  I wanted to help map 
a local bible camp and do other fun stuff in my off-hours, but wasn't able to 
because of the licensing constraints of proprietary-ware.  

The last 7 years I worked for a lumber company (http://lignum.com -- R.I.P.) 
where I was starting to implement free alternatives.  We did some MapServer 
projects and helped fund some driver development.  Now I'm back working for 
another forestry consulting company where we are starting to provide 
web-mapping services to clients (among many other things).

I've become an avid user and advocate for open source GIS products.  I 
regularly use the GDAL/OGR (http://gdal.org) command line utilities for 
converting data between formats, etc.  I've been under cover for almost a 
year, hiding from the main mailing list while writing a book about these 
technologies/tools.  It is almost done, then I'll have a life again!

I'm specifically interested in following, supporting and testing the 
development of mapping frameworks.  By framework I mean stuff like:
- FIST: http://datashare.gis.unbc.ca/fist/
- Chameleon: http://chameleon.maptools.org/
- MapBender: http://www.mapbender.org/

I helped develop MapItOut's restaurant tool: http://mapitout.com/restaurants 
(using Chameleon).  I have a couple apps available, they are both (to use L. 
Prevett's term) 'ugly but useful'.  

Global mapping site - a collection of as many global layers I could find, 
Landsat layer is particularly nice.  Most are remote layers connected through 
WMS protocols.  All layers are available for you to use via WMS as well.  
http://spatialguru.com/maps/apps/global .

On-the-fly projection testing tool.  I developed this site to help me make 
figures for my chapter on map projections.  It's NOT a production site and is 
an experiment, but I share it because it was fun to make.  It is actually 
just a single Python script, running via mod_python and Python MapScript.  
http://spatialguru.com/projmap.

Anyway, enough about me.  I've about 10hours north of the U.S. border, but am 
in Vancouver every couple months, so I'll be sure to catch as many of your 
guys down there as possible next time.  I work for http://timberline.ca and 
can arrange meeting space (8th and Oak) if we ever need it.

That's all for now.  I'll go back to enjoy reading your bio's...