Expeditions

Last week, I finished the 2nd of the Sybase Unwired Server classes. If the product had a icon, I’d post it here. However, I get the feeling that the product team may not be as well organized as needed to tie up loose ends.

The first class was SUP Administration, the second was SUP Application Development. I now find myself deflated, just sitting here, thinking about what to do next. Here are a few hints about how things proceeded:

This thing changes rapidly. I’m talking major… Keeping up is going to be a big priority of yours… Totally nuts… They broke rule number 1 of programming. You design it before you build it…

and so on.

To top things off, SAP just bought a competing product as well. It is called Syclo.

My initial goal is to build a SUP mobile application called a Hybrid Web Container which can operate offline. The key word here is offline.

The HWC is an application that can be built using something close to a wizard to construct screens as well as dragging and dropping buttons and actions on screens to create workflows between many screens. Ideally, you can build an application without coding. This takes the development time down to something quite speedy. The “offline” part of the application would allow me to download a set of data from a server, onto an ultralite database located on the device, so that I could operate on the data while the device was unplugged from the network. Then, when the network connection is restored, the changed data get synchronized back to the server.

Unfortunately, you cannot do this with SUP. The wizard method does not support offline operation, because it does not support the presence of an ultralite database on the device.

So, I am now sitting here thinking…

Wow, I just found a series of 14 BBC videos called The Beauty of Maps. Really nice. I shall spend my next 14 lunches enjoying these presentations.

I like everything about the Charles Copley globe, published in 1852. The style of the time period is good, the colors and detail are good, the land boundary shading is good, everything is good.

The curious thing about the images below, taken from the 1-World Globes web site, is the origin of their globe. I do not know if this is an original globe (probably not judging by the comments and price at $8,500) or if this is a reproduction from Greaves and Thomas, or if it is a globe from some other manufacturer. The copyright for the original work expired long ago, so anyone is free to use it. I would prefer to think it is a Greaves and Thomas Globe, but is really doesn’t matter because at this point, I am just collecting cartography examples.

Interesting. I just noticed something. This globe exhibits the exact problem I am trying to solve. Notice the top image. Do you see the text “GULF OF MEXICO”? The words are split across 2 gores. They are not even. The curve that the words follow is not even from one gore to the next. This is exactly what I am trying to figure out how to avoid.