You can’t trust proprietary software

September 14th, 2023

Unity announced pricing changes and a new runtime fee, which is already causing tremendous backlash. This is a reminder that you cannot trust proprietary software and that your business is tied to the whims of the company behind it. Why take such risk? Game developers should consider Godot for their next project.

Right To Repair

October 6th, 2020

I sincerely look forward to see more states and countries bringing forward right to repair laws. If you bought something, you should own it. I didn’t realize how bad this has gotten, until I tried to replace the batteries on both my Kindle and Google Pixel. It’s clear these people DO NOT want you to open these things up. My god. Took me a good hour to change the Kindle battery. Took me FOUR hours to pry open the Google […]

Hello, UAV4GEO

December 31st, 2019

Drone mapping has been the focus of my work for the past few years. For 2020 I’m planning to increase this focus with the development of DroneDB, which I have hopes will replace the (clunky) workflows around aerial data management. For this reason I’ve adopted a new name for all drone tech related business activities (and hopefully put an end on the “how do you spell Masserano?”). Say hello to UAV4GEO. Website: https://uav4geo.com

Running multiple SSL web service containers on the same host using HAProxy

October 10th, 2019

Scenario: Multiple containers running a web service over SSL (with their own certificates) Different web domains for each service Single machine and single public IP How to make both services work on the same machine? I couldn’t find easy instructions on how to get this done, but a bit of research and trial and error led me to HAProxy. The setup is pretty simple: Setup DNS A records to point to the machine for both domains Start the containers using […]

Highlights from Oculus Connect

September 26th, 2019

Prediction: VR will take-off within 10 years.

WebODM 1.0 Released

June 9th, 2019

On August 8th 2016, almost three years ago, the WebODM project was started. The goal was to bring a friendly user interface to OpenDroneMap, which at the time worked only via command line and had a bare-bone UI via NodeODM which lacked things like user authentication, map previews, 3D model display, etc. Yesterday I merged the entwine branch which upgrades the 3D model display to support EPT and the new features of Potree 1.6. The release is mostly symbolical, as […]

The SIFT patent has almost expired

April 4th, 2019

Correction from 10/9/2019: I thought the patent had expired this year, due to the confusion on the Priority Date vs. Filing Date. The patent is still in effect, and is set to expire March of 2020. As of March 7th of next year, the SIFT patent will expire in the U.S. U.S. patents are valid for 20 years from the earliest filing date, but can be extended to 21 years if a Priority Date is used, and SIFT (US6711293B1) was […]

OpenDroneMap Article in Italian

March 2nd, 2019

Great article about ODM. We REALLY need to start translating / localizing the software in other languages.

The Free Rider Problem

November 30th, 2018

The Free Rider Problem applies to free and open source software really well. If you’re a maintainer, read it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

Open Source Software and the Constructal Law, or why the FOSS is strong

June 16th, 2018

For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it. (Adrian Bejan) If you’ve never heard of the Constructal Law, a good place to start is Wikipedia. While we can criticize at length its universal validity as a “law”, there’s some pretty good evidence that it applies well to human-made processes and designs. And software is a human-made design. How […]