Shaun McDonald’s Blog

As part of my recent job search I setup a few job alerts. One of which was with the keyword OpenStreetMap on CWJobs. I wasn’t expecting there to be anything coming up.

Out of the blue a job alert did appear, and it sounds rather interesting, though I have just started a new job at Headshift.

It is for a three month contract, and is asking for some quite high requirements, such as requiring to be security cleared; experienced using Ordnance Survey data; OpenLayer; Python; and optionally Mapnik; OpenStreetMap and QGIS. Based on the job description, I’m speculating that it is a contract for some government job. I’ll let you readers to speculate about the details of the job in the comments.

See a PDF of the Job Advert: 20091214-OpenStreetMap GIS Developer – CWJobs.co.uk

On a side note, I found that putting my CV on CWJobs yielded quite a high number of recruiters phoning, however the recruiters seem to all be chasing for candidates for the same handful of jobs. My current job was found through the help of the wonderful people who use twitter and directly talking to the potential employer.

This blog post is only relevant if you are on Snow Leopard, have a 64-bit Intel Mac, and need to install ImageMagick.

There are many Ruby on Rails projects out there that have some form image manipulation, thus use ImageMagick for that. Up until recently it was a real pain to install, with some huge list of library dependancies that need to be downloaded, compiled and installed. The ImageMagick project is now supplying a Intel 64-bit binary, specifically for Snow Leopard user so that they don’t need to install from source.

Another nice little tips that I learned for installing gems that have native extentions, is that you can put the ARCHFLAGS environment variable into your ~/.profile so that you don’t have to manually set it (and then wonder why the gem doesn’t compile elsewhere). You need to add:

export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"