Export WordPress Posts to PDF
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
4h ago
I’ve been working a project recently to investigate training an LLM (LocalGPT, in this case) to help analyze a document library. (More on that in the future.) For ingest, it handles PDF files really well. I needed some well-known (by me) content to kick the tires for initial prototyping so I decided to dump all the posts from this blog to PDF. It turns out that wasn’t an exceptionally easy thing to do. Although there were several WordPress plug-ins that purported to be able to do it for a small fee, I felt like it should fairly straightforward to do with some Python. It was. I’ve posted the co ..read more
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In HIFLD, a Lesson
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
1M ago
I spent the past couple of days at the Esri Federal GIS Conference, still referred to by many as the “FedUC,” in Washington, DC. The primary reason I went was to attend some customer meetings. The FedUC draws many people (6,000 in this year’s case) from around the country and it’s a convenient place to do in-person meetings in today’s mostly-remote world. I didn’t attend many sessions, but one that caught my eye was an update on the status of the Geospatial Management Office (GMO) at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). While I never worked with the GMO, I worked with adjacent organiz ..read more
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This Consulting Life, Part 1 – Calendar Management
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
2M ago
Approximately one year ago, I started independent consulting in earnest. I had spent six years at my previous role and had a number of systems and routines in place to manage my day and help productivity. Those all had to be re-examined. This post will be the first in an occasional series where I break the fourth wall and discuss issues related to my consulting and how I’ve dealt with them. I started this blog back in 2006 to post code snippets and such in the hopes that they could help someone else. In that same spirit, I’ll discuss day-to-day issues related to the practice of consulting In m ..read more
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Simpler Goals
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
2M ago
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. They are usually motivated by well-intentioned, but often misguided, factors and are typically designed to fail. That said, the annual passage of January 1 is a good milestone for assessing goals for the coming year. A lot of the work winds down between mid-December and January 1, so that time period offers a bit more opportunity to reflect. I typically want my New Year’s goals to be focused more on self-improvement or habit-building. In recent years, I have found that the opposite of SMART (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, time-based) g ..read more
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Station Identification 2024
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
3M ago
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2024! It’s been a few years since I’ve done one of these, but I’ve been posting more actively in recent months, which has attracted attention from sales and marketing types. Blogging in 2024 is different than it was in 2006, for sure. This is the geoMusings blog. It represents by personal thoughts, observations, and work related to geospatial tools, technologies, and practices. It documents my personal career journey in the geospatial community from 2006 to the present. This site is not a content marketing site. I do not entertain requests by outside authors to do gu ..read more
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The One About Friends
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
3M ago
I was having a conversation a few weeks ago, discussing, among other things, the value of time – its management, its conservation, how it is the one strategic asset that matters above all others. During that part of the conversation, it occurred to me that if time is the asset, then people and relationships are its currency. What I mean by that is that time is the most well-spent, having the highest and most satisfying return when it is spent with people and furthering relationships with them. That statement includes relationships in all spheres of life, but the remainder of this post will mos ..read more
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Using pg_webhooks with n8n – A Simple Example
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
3M ago
I’ve been integrating pg_webhooks into some project work lately. Conversely, I have not been using n8n much, but a vendor rep used it in a demo of some workflow automation capabilities for a platform one of my customers is using. I had dabbled with it about two years ago but haven’t done much with it since. One thing that I have been lax about is building some practical examples of how to use pg_webhooks, and I thought n8n could be the basis of such an example. It is a platform in the IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) class of tools. It is built with Node and Javascript, which I like a ..read more
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How Do I Write?
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
3M ago
This question comes up more frequently than I would expect. I’ve been writing here since 2006 and this blog is a good map of my professional journey over that time. Most often, when people ask me the titular question, they are wondering how I can keep this up for so long. Less frequently, the question is about my process – how I go from a concept to a fully-formed post. I was asked this again recently. I’m not sure my response was satisfactory, but it was accurate. If you stop by my office, there is one thing you won’t find – lots of notes with partial concepts or a bunch of WordPress drafts w ..read more
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A Grudging Thanks to Tests
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
4M ago
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa Jimmy Buffet, “Fruitcakes,” 1994 I hate writing tests. With the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. Tests are good and necessary for quality software. Automating tests is the core of any CI/CD pipeline worthy of the name. I am well-versed in the value of tests and testing. I hate writing tests. With the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. Yet, I sit here grateful that I wrote tests eight years ago. Or, more accurately, a lead engineer rode herd on me and every other engineer – junior and senior – to ensure that we all wrote tests. I am grateful becau ..read more
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Window Functions and PostGIS
geoMusings Blog
by Bill Dollins
5M ago
FOSS4G North America was an opportunity for me to reconnect with both community and technology. I enjoyed being able to both learn new things and refresh my skills with technologies such as PostGIS. I was reflecting on how, a couple weeks prior to the conference, I introduced the concept of PostgreSQL window functions to a junior team member in a different context. I have used them quite a bit in both PostgreSQL and BigQuery and FOSS4G got me thinking about their applicability in a spatial context. I have previously discussed them in terms of specific use cases, but they are a powerful tool th ..read more
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