Setting LM_LICENSE_FILE Environment Variable for ENVI/IDL 4.8 on Pre-Lion MacOS

To set an environment variable for ENVI/IDL on a pre-Lion MacOS System, I would recommend using the environment.plist file. This persists through whatever shells you have installed as well as in X Windows (and therefore when you double-click the ENVI executable from the MacOS GUI). I did not find any correct documentation for doing this from ITT or NASA.

1. Install the software
3. Define the environment variable in the file ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
----- Open the Terminal
----- You will probably have to create the directory ... mkdir ~/.MacOSX)
----- ... and the file vi ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

Paste the following into vi in Insert mode (press i) and save (:x) ... if you have more than one environment variable, make sure to add another key/string pair ... make sure you subsistute PORT and HOST below

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?--><!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>LM_LICENSE_FILE</key>
   <string>PORT@HOST</string>
</dict>
</plist><plist version="1.0"><dict></dict>
</plist>

4. Close terminal

You should now be able to use ENVI/IDL.

Openlayers Geoserver WMS Caching with GWC

Now that Geowebcache is integrated with Geoserver and WMS (among other OGC service types), map tile-caching is supposed to be really simple. I found this not to be the case. Among other challenges, document is lacking or blatantly wrong. Here are a couple key concepts that I learned the hard way:

Use the demo from the Geowebcache section (http://localhost:8080/geoserver/gwc/demo) NOT the regular OL "Layer Preview" which does not use the correct gridset parameters (nice demo, eh?)


Issues I was having with labeling and tiles are mostly solved by creating a database view from the centroids of polygons to be labeled and label these instead, and include in a layer group.

Don't use the "Recycle Tiles" option ... especially if you don't have native JAI. This causes a memory leak and subsequently causes the server to crawl/crash after X requests. Also you probably shouldn't tweak max render time/memory unless you have to (despite documentation saying that this helps performance ... would this be helpful at another time? I don't know).

Despite documentation saying to use the wms endpoint and that no special endpoint is needed ... a special endpoint is needed ... it's of this format http://host:8080/geoserver/gwc/service/wms

The gridset scheme is static and opaque, unless a custom config file is created. The documentation gives the impression that the integration of WMS/GWC creates arbitrary gridsets given wms grid request characteristics. One could could create their own geowebcache.xml (saved to GEOSERVER/webapps/WEB-INF/geowebcache.xml ... though there is some confusion about that). See more about geowebcache, the gridset schema, and geowebcache.xml here

Don't pass anything on the wms request that you don't have to! Forums and documentation say that you need to pass things like tilesOrigin, which will cause the request to fail most of the time.

GWC saves tiles to your data directory under the gwc folder. You should check here to make sure tiling is working.