[mapserver-users] TopoZone, MapServer, and me

[Steve Lime]

Congrats Ed, sounds like you've moved on to an equally interesting topic from TopoZone. Glad to hear
TopoZone lives on in some shape or form. I'm sure I speak for all community members when I say 
thanks for all your help over the years. We'll have to find a new performance, data optimization, 
projection and raster guru. ;-) 

I hope you'll be back since you still owe me real graticule support... Best of luck!

Steve

>>> Ed McNierney <ed at mcnierney.com> 09/13/08 7:45 PM >>>
Folks -

Old-timers may have noticed that I've been relatively quiet on this list for the last few months.  Newer folks might only have seen the improvement <g>.  I am about to sign off - at least temporarily - as I will no longer be an active MapServer user or developer.

My TopoZone business was acquired by Demand Media, the parent company of trails.com, in June, 2007.  I worked with trails.com to integrate our technology into theirs (they were already using a very similar MapServer-based system) and completed that work last April.  As of April, 2008 we closed down the former TopoZone servers and office.  It was great to work with the trails.com team, but it made little sense to keep a teeny satellite team out in Massachusetts (they're based in Seattle).

I took a little time off to do a few things on my to-do list.  As of last Monday I've started a new position as VP of Software Development for the One Laptop Per Child Foundation in Cambridge, MA, building low-cost laptops for children around the world with lots of cool applications on them.  This is keeping me pretty busy with a rather massive open source development project with a team of great people scattered around the globe.  I'll be busy doing that work and won't really have the time to help out here (until I start needing more maps...)

Thanks to all the present and former members of this list who've helped me a lot with MapServer (and GDAL, and PROJ, etc.) and to those of you I've actually met in person at our conferences both pre- and post-OSGeo.  If I can be of any assistance to any of you, please let me know - thanks!

    - Ed

Ed McNierney
205 Indian Hill Road
Groton, MA  01450
ed at mcnierney.com
+1 (978) 761-0049