My presentation submission is accepted: I am going to Sydney, Australia for FOSS4G

Logo of the FOSS4G 2009, Sydney, Australia

Last Monday, on the 20th of July, I got an email from the organisation comitee of the annual FOSS4G conference stating that my submitted talk was accepted.
I am proud to have the opportunity to share my thoughts on “Comparing apples and oranges: Uncovering the mystery of component selection in WebGIS projects”. The talk will mainly deal with uncertainty when faced with technologigal decisions concerning component selection for WebGIS projects.
This years FOSS4G takes place in Sydney, Australia from 20th to 23rd of October. I eagerly anticipate meeting with many of the big players in the Free and OpenSource GIS Community.
After the conference is over, I want to stay for vacation in Australia and explore the eastern coast… staring out of the window to see the cloudy Bonn, I really wish I was there already.

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A commandline-preciousness for converting filename encoding in Linux: convmv

I want to share a very usefull Linux software I discovered yesterday: convmv. This tool converts filenames from one encoding to another… and it does it well.
I was facing warnings from my Ubuntu filesystem when viewing the contents of a folder I just copied there. The contents of that particular folder were various pictures of various sources. And apparently different filename-encodings were used: Ubuntu complained “(ungültige Kodierung)” (that is german for illegal encoding) on files with german umlauts that originally came from some sort of Windows operating system. I guessed that these filenames were encoded in cp1252.
I wanted to have a tool to do the filename conversion for me, and faintly remembered stumbling on such a software once. Google helped and with a quick

sudo apt-get install convmv

I was ready to check if convmv did the job for my situation. I issued a

convmv -f cp1252 -t utf8 *

in the folder containing the file with illegal encoding and … yes: works like a charm. Actually the above command will only print out a list of conversions that would be done, no actual mv command is executed. If you like what you see, you can actually execute the recoding using:

convmv -f cp1252 -t utf8 --notest *

This a very nice tool and it absolutely saved my day.