Grich's World of GIS

2006-04-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

James Fee noted this NASA program that competes with Google Earth.

Many of our clients can't use Google Earth because of its license and I'm sure others will begin to run into that problem. World Wind might just be the solution and we'll see how well it handles Shapefiles.

I noted on the World Wind website that they are using USGS Quads for the United States, which might put them a leg up on Google, with gets pretty fuzzy in rural areas. I'm downloading it now and am going to try it out.

2006-04-02T00:33:00.000-08:00

James Fee picked up on my rant about the Developer's conference. I was stating my angst about the conference's thrust into .NET with nary a session discussing ArcObjects issues. I had a hard time following stuff.
Anyway, James agreed that there is going to be a significant market that still uses VB6 for a while, but I noted in the comments that many people are chiding us VB6 users, saying that we all need to move on or be left behind to dwell with the 'saurs.

I'm actually pretty resolved that I'll need to upgrade my programming knowledge. But as someone coming from the Geography side of life, as opposed to a programmer that got dropped into the GIS world, learning new programming languages isn't something that comes as easily for me. And I'm sure I'm not alone there. I started my career with my geography degree editing data and performing geo-analysis. Programming AML was simple enough. Learning VB was only part of my job, but VB isn't that difficult of a language to understand.

ESRI Developer Conference

2006-03-20T19:05:00.000-08:00

OK, the weekend is over. I say that as the conference was Friday and Saturday and felt like I was using my weekend up for it, but there you go.
Since it was the first conference of it's kind ever, it was pretty small, in the sense that we are all used to the masses as the San Diego International User conference with its teeming thousands. There were about 700 or 800 people attending total, which must have included the ESRI personnel. ESRI staff seemed to outnumber the attendees at times. I think the ratio must have been 1 ESRI person for every 3 attendees, and they were pretty much always accessible. Which is not true of the San Diego convention. I got all my questions answered before lunch.
Well, most of them. One thing about this conference is that you don't have a slew of people trying to break into the field or trying to make contacts, sell stuff, and the like. These are all programmers, not in the custom or mood to make lots of new friends or shmooze. I saw lots of people with blinders on. But there were friendly folks and certainly if I took the time to talk to someone there was conversation to be had.

Overall the sessions were pretty good, and depending on what you came for, the information for once was not at all too shallow. Some sessions were indeed over my head, as I am not well versed in C sharp or .NET. The conference seems to follow the ESRI vision of distributed GIS and web applications. Not entirely, but when in doubt that's what I began to expect. ESRI, as well as Microsoft, seems to be pulling us tooth and nail into the .NET environment whether we like it or not. If there was a coding example, it was in .NET. Or Java. Or C++. Although they say that ESRI will support VB6 into the foreseeable future, I think that I am going to have to learn other languages just so I can keep up with any examples they use in the future.
Unlike other conferences, there were no vendor booths. This was strange at first, until I realized that all the vendors are here, but are here as attendees. No one is here trying to find a service or application, they are here to learn how to build them.

Instead of vendor booths there was a new event during lunches and after the Friday sessions that I really did like. Birds of a Feather meetings is what they were called. They were more like round table discussions with about 20 or so people, and it was much more dynamic and interesting than most of what you get in the lecture rooms.
I went to two of these. One was Unit Testing, put on by Dave Bouwman of Sanborn. It was pretty good, although I didn't have much to contribute. Most of the guys there were seasoned programmers who write huge programs that make testing small parts of them incredibly difficult. But they are continuing the discussion over at ArcDeveloper.net going forward, and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
The other one was Migrating from VB6 to VB.NET, which was the most helpful and informative session in the entire two days for me. ESRI staff were there to provide tips on what you'll need to watch out for, and we were given the opportunity to ask lots of questions.
One thing of note with .NET is that it has a wrapper that enables you to use COM objects, which is the only way you can work with ArcObjects at all. That causes programs to slow down if they have to make lots of repetitive calls to arcobjects, like in loops. The ESRI guys were actually recommending that we use VB6 custom code to wrap up loops and call those libraries from .NET applications. I asked when he thought ESRI would get around to changing over all the COM objects to the .NET framework and he replied that it wouldn't be for several years. At least 5 or 6. So we're going to be stuck in this VB6-.NET transition world for quite some time.

Dave Bouwman has a few posts about his experience there. I agree with what he was saying about the "coarse grained objects" mantra for the most part. I thought it was interesting given the crowd. Having said that, I think that I will find myself using those objects from time to time, as programming is only part of my job and sometimes I just need to move on knowing that the underlying code is fairly sound.
He is right about the ESRI persons spending too much time on 9.2, if nothing else because it caused them to spend too much time showing off Visual Studio 8, which we won't really be able to take advantage of until version 9.2 comes out. Which is when again? Anyone want to place bets that it won't happen until the end of the year?

In his last post Dave also brings up what I was feeling the entire time I was there. Sure I liked seeing the new stuff and the things that .NET can do, but there was a serious lack of information and support for those of us who are working with ArcObjects. VB6 folks. It's not going away, and VBA isn't going away either, even when people flip the switch over to .NET, VBA will still be the macro language.

James Fee at Spatially Adjusted posted about it here, here, here, here and here.
A couple of things about what James is saying that I feel the need to comment on. One is that his sense after the first day was that the people there were really in to .NET and how popular it was. True the sessions were packed, but those of us who are straight ArcObjects programmers for in-house applications didn't have much choice. There were very few sessions geared to helping us RIGHT NOW, and I think that ESRI needs to understand that. I didn't get to go to the closing session, but James commented on it.

At the closing session, Brian Goldin went over the some of the concerns that attendees had from the 2 day Developer Summit and it sounds like that ESRI is listening and wants feedback on how to change the event for the better next year. Generally people wanted an extra day, more technical talk and less marketing (Q&A sessions should be longer) and keeping the summit separate from both the Business Partner Conference and the User Conference. Quite a few people have said that they won't attend the UC this year because the Developer Summit was so much more valuable to them. In fact ESRI is looking at allowing ESRI customers with complimentary passes to the User Conference; apply those to the Developer Summit.

Sweet. An extra day and we can use our complimentary pass for the Dev summit! That's going to be tres useful next year. I'm glad they made that an issue.

The Sopranos and Google maps

2006-03-02T17:14:00.000-08:00

The NY Times noted that Google teamed up with HBO to provide maps and imagery for their website promoting the show’s return. I’m not a Soprano fan, nor do I get cable. But it’s always fun when GIS pokes it’s nose out in the world where everyone can see it.

Apparently, the site has an interactive map of New Jersey highlighting important points from recent shows. Very interesting use of internet mapping and Flash technology.

Where 2.0

2006-02-23T21:51:00.000-08:00

As if there weren't already too many conferences for GIS professionals out there, here's another one in San Jose on June 13-14th.

Everything happens somewhere. With open source and free web mapping tools like Ka-Map and Google Maps, we finally have a way to display location information. At last year's Where 2.0, we put the spotlight on the grassroots developers building mash-ups on platforms from Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google. This year we'll look at the latest developments in those platforms as well as the latest startups, civic projects, and labs experiments built on them.

In addition you'll find source mapping tools, open standards for data and location web services, and sensors for obtaining location data. We'll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mash-ups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial.

Who Should Attend?

Decision makers, infrastructure players and entrepreneurs in the mobile, location-sensing, mapping and geospatial fields will mix with IT executives, top-level product and marketing managers, investors and inventive hackers across a broad spectrum of industries.

Arc to Google

2006-02-13T18:44:00.000-08:00

This guy built a pretty nifty program that exports to Google from Arc. He's charging for it, and I know that there are free samples at ESRI that do this to a limited extent, so I would imagine that your $100 buys you lots of bells and whistles, or at least makes the process seamless.

Programming tips

2006-02-13T18:40:00.000-08:00

Dave Bouwman is starting this great series on coding practices. He's a GIS programmer, so this stuff should be applicable to all GIS guys programming in whatever language. His first example is in .NET. Should be good for all the amateur GIS guys out there who only customize for themselves or other co-workers, not for a living.

DeLorme Easter Eggs

2005-09-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

While trolling through the DeLorme gazetteer for the state of Washington, I noticed something strange. I was looking at the possible hiking opporunities north of Mt. Saint Helens, when I happened upon a symbol that didn't occur in the legend at the front of the atlas.
It looked to me like a very furry person with mucho oversized bare feet. I thought to myself, Hmmm, Bigfoot? (actually, in truth he looks more like Captain Caveman).

I did a google on this and came up with this site. It appears that there is some sort of goofy erroneous picture in every atlas that DeLorme makes. In Oregon it's a covered wagon. In Northern California it's a wine bottle pouring into a glass. In Idaho it's a picture of Evel Knievel in his rocket car jumping over the snake river. In New Mexico there's an alien head down near Roswell. These things look just like the symbols for fish or boat launch or trailhead or something like that, so they're hard to see.
I also can't vouch for the older atlases, as this one was published in the last couple of years.
Have fun looking for them.

GIS Aid for Katrina

2005-09-05T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here is a way for Geographic Information professionals (of which I am one) to help out with the disaster in the south in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Now, before you wonder what the heck a small niche of computer professionals can do, GIS is used extensively in emergency situations, like forest fires and other natural disasters, to help aid workers analyze what happened and how to best reach people in need. They take advantage of satellite and air photography to make quick maps of the areas affected for use by emergency agencies and aid crews.

For example, GIS professionals could get satellite shots that provide the location of standing water, and use existing parcel data analyze who's houses and what buildings are under water and get a list of those people. Maps of standing water crossed with information on what was not covered as of last week, coupled with data on where the largest concentrations of people are will help emergency operations prioritize. The list of things to do with this technology in support of catastrophe is endless.

There is an organization called GISCorps, which is under the umbrella of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA).

Here’s their tag:

GISCorps coordinates short term, volunteer GIS services to underprivileged communities worldwide. Our volunteers' services help improve the quality of life. They support humanitarian relief, environmental analysis, economic development, community planning and sustainable development, GIS implementation and management, local capacity enhancement, aboriginal issues, health and education.

In October 2003, URISA's Board of Directors unanimously endorsed the GISCorps as an initiative under URISA's auspices. GISCorps is run by a Core Committee of 6 individuals who meet monthly. As of July 12th 2005, GISCorps has over 270 experienced volunteers. They reside in 35 different countries over the five continents. The US volunteers come from 36 different states. They are looking to provide GIS services such as: performing needs assessment and strategic planning, conducting technical workshops, database modeling, disaster management, and remote sensing, etc.

The GISCorps has been working around the clock to evaluate and make available its volunteers to several agencies working on the Indian Ocean Tragedy. Click for details on our current efforts.

The volunteers usually work from their home or office. They perform analysis and produce maps for projects in areas of the world that would otherwise not have the funding to perform such analysis. Their first project was to plan for sustainable development in the Sacred Valley in Peru.

Other projects have included support for the Andaman islands of India, which were hit hard by the Tsunami, and projects in Afghanistan.

The Corps are drumming up support for 20 volunteers to work in the Mississippi Emergency Operations Center in Jackson, MS.

Census Bureau Data

2005-07-06T16:23:00.000-07:00

The last issue of ArcNews (ESRI's corporate newspaper) had an article about the US Census FactFinder website. It looked pretty cool so I gave it a once over.
Now, the information at the beginning is pretty cool. Right away you can get census data for your town, county, zip or whatever. But the mapping is not nearly as cool as it looks on the screen.
I definitely think that the process that brings you to a complete map could be more intuitive, but it's not, and it took me a while to figure out where the custom maps were at.
Don't look to the article, it won't tell you. However the snapshot of the website in the article did help, because the site has a header with one of those "You are here" locators.
In the end, I did make a map of the ratio of men to women in my zip code. But the interface doesn't look like it does in the snapshot in the article.
So what's up B of Census?

Micro Satellites

2005-06-25T23:15:00.000-07:00

Micro Satellites are small commercial satellites, made for smaller, third world countries that can't afford their own satellite program or one of those big mambo satellites that takes detailed, multi spectral images of the world every 12 hours.
There was an article Imaging Notes, but they don't have this month's articles up yet. I don't know when they do; probably when the next issue comes out, right?
From the beginning, Surrey Space Technologies, Limited (SSTL) has struck out on a very different course from those (larger satellite) companies, successfully marketing its concept of an inexpensive Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) to Algeria, Nigeria, and Turkey. Together with the U.K. owned Topsat smallsat, these four satellites can image the entire world every day in three spectral bands at 32 meter resolution.
But that's not all.
Part of SSTL's success is its provision of considerable technological know-how to these countries. Technicians from the customer countries work alongside SSTL engineers, learning how to build and operate smallsats, to operate the control software and systems and to use the data for applications in their counties.
Very interesting. SSTL, as well as the other company currently competing with them, SunSpace in South Africa.
SunSpace is an interesting story, as the satellite and space profession and academic world was doing well before apartheid ended. The connections to the old government have, politically, made continuing efforts difficult.

Defense uses 3D modeling.

2005-05-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

The defense department is testing technology that allows the first soldiers to enter a city to map it with 3d technology and send that 3d map, buildings, streets and all, back to headquarters.

Imagine if the first soldiers to enter an enemy city could map it street by street, recording every window and doorway of the urban battlefield in an accurate 3D model that could instantly be relayed to their comrades at base - and updated in near-real time. Thanks to funding from the U.S. military and cooperation from the Virginia engineering firm SET Associates (Science, Engineering, Technology), engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have found a way to do just that.

Imagine, instant mapping of terrain.

GITA

2005-05-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

There are many technical and professional organizations that service the GIS and Photogrametry industry. The most notable being ASPRS and URISA. I just encountered another today in GITA. No, that's not Bhagavad-Gita (which is the divine word of Krishna). That's Geospatial Information and Technology Association.
I have always wondered if there is any difference in belonging to any of these organizations, but I think the difference here is that this is a general GIS related professional organization, whereas URISA is more Urban and government oriented and ASPRS is more for photogrametrists. Although both those other organizations have been around longer and are chock full of GIS people.
GITA is positioning itself to offer contacts and resources for the GIS professional. The membership is pretty simple, just $95.
ASPRS is $105 and URISA is $150.
Members will, apparently, have access to an e-list of other members and get helpful tips on how to do stuff. As a tech working with ESRI products I don't think that will help me much more than the esri-lists.

Guess I should be thankful there are just three to pick from.

State Mottos

2005-04-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Well, not really. But much more accurate.
Here are my favorites:
Colorado: If you don't ski, don't bother.
Kansas: First of the rectangle states.
Oregon: Spotted Owl...It's what's for dinner.
Rhode Island: We're not REALLY an island.
Tennessee: Home of the Al Gore invention museum.
Washington: Our governor can out-fraud your governor.
DC: Home of the work-free drug place.

More of Images

2005-03-16T21:13:00.000-08:00

Done with the first day. Looking at the documentation I can tell you who is involved with this class. Robin Weeks is the Research assistant Professor of the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the Univ of Washington. He has told us he moved on (private world), but is still doing this class. Duncan Munro is an IT professional of Watershed Management division of Seattle Public Utilities. They are the teachers. They are also both British. They are image scientists, though, and are teaching this like a crash course in remote sensing. It's really good so far.
That's not to say that there haven't been sleepy moments. There was an hour where Duncan was droning on about project design and planning. There was some big spreadsheet he made in excell. That's all I remember.
Other than that we have been playing with ENVI. It's a pretty fun program, and very fast, although I don't know how big the images we are using are compared to what you would be using in actual practice.
We did exercises with some multispectral Landsat data. We had 6 bands (three bands of IR) and used several analysis tools to compare the bands and find out which ones (and which combinations of bands) identified certain types of vegitation, or lack of. We also discussed some of the limitations.
One of the limitations was that the automated classifications didn't do a great job of figuring out patterns in the images. They did alright, but missed variations caused by shading in high topography areas. They also clumped too much. We ended up doing a better job doing it manually (supervised classification) using scattergrams.
It's really neet seeing how land patterns look when looking at the whole spectra. For instance, heavy vegitation has a curve that rises in the green spectrum, falls again and then rises in the near infrared before falling. ENVI allows you to see a full spectrum curve for each pixle you select. It's really interesting.

Seminar report

2005-03-16T13:33:00.000-08:00

I'm at this little paid seminar put on by the University of Washington called Images to Information. This is intended to be a "continuing education" deal. The class is actually taught by a couple of guys from industry who use imagery (or are photogrametrists), but I think they have been in education and research in the past. I.E. it's not an industry show or some sort of product demo. It's a real class. Very good so far.
We are using ENVI image processing software. I'll talk more about that too.

Google Maps

2005-03-04T09:16:00.000-08:00

If you haven't tried the new Google Maps site, try it. It has many advantages over it's main competitors, MapQuest, and slightly better than MapPoint from Microsoft, in that it's much faster and the graphics are much better. I would be far more comfortable giving a map to someone for directions to my house or something with this one than with the old Mapquest roads as centerline maps. The Address finder is also very fast (just type the address in the search text box above the map).
The one disadvantage is that there is far less data on the Google maps. Fewer points of interest, and some cities in MapQuest do not show up in the Google maps.
HOWEVER, having said that, you can google anything, and locations of whatever you are looking for will show up in the map extent. My office mate and I tried to enter "Brewpubs" in the search engine and the locations of many of the brew pubs in downtown Portland showed up in the map extent. Cool.

Map of Iraqi elections

2005-02-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

Great map from Patrick Raffini showing Iraq election results in each region.

Geography Bee

2005-02-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

The National Geographic Geography Bee is starting up again. The qualifying rounds will be taking place all over, and the national competition will be on May 24-25. Follow along at their website. Take the on-line Bee quiz.

GIS User's Best of the Year

2005-02-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

GIS User, which I have linked on the left, mostly regurgitates industry news and press releases. But that's not all it does and here are some of the better articles and services that they covered this last year, picked by the editor:
Geobase. If you are interested in geomatics initiatives in Canada, where GIS all started in the 60s.
A look at the design process at getting a map of Canada on the new $100 bill.
A guide to getting free USGS data.
A great article on how students used GIS to study cemetaries. The field of NecroGeography.
The roll of geospatial portals and infrastructure.
Also an article on Presidential election mapping resources.
Check it out.

Sacramento ESRI Regional Conference

2005-01-31T09:50:00.000-08:00

One of our field guys went to the regional conference that ESRI puts on for the California/Hawaii/Nevada region. It was in Sacramento this year, January 25-27, and according to him will be in Hawaii next year. I'll have to be lobbying for that trip.
Here's the text of his report:

As usual the conference started out with the ESRI staff talking about the path forward as well as highlighting the improvements in the latest version of the software. Clint Brown was the keynote speaker and gave a good talk about the philosophy of ESRI and how they see the future of GIS. Here are some of the items and thoughts he mentioned in his talk that I thought were interesting:

-The top 3 fastest growing technologies emerging in the next decade are – Biotech, Nanotech, and Geotech. Good job security for us.

-They see a merging of the business and scientific GIS utilizing a wide range of computing architecture: from super GIS computers at the USGS to the simple GIS map downloadable to picture phones.

-Then there was talk of this vision of a “Federated GIS “; a global system ESRI envisioned were everyone would be able to share GIS data via the Internet all over the world. I immediately felt like I was watching a Star Trek episode being incorporated into the federation. Was I at the Starfleet Academy? Could have used that transporter from Fort Bragg to Sacramento!

-Clint also reemphasized that ESRI will continue to focus on improving the quality of the current product vs. trying to expand.

-There were over 800 bugs addressed since v 9.0 and service pack 3 will be available spring 05. Shortly followed by v 9.1, then by the end of summer v 9.2.

-In the coming versions the tools for an Arc View license will be expanded as well as previous separate extensions incorporated in to the Arc Info license like Arc Scan and Maplex

The sessions and presentations I felt were of better quality than San Diego. But there was considerably less of them, but the ones that were there I was interested in anyway. It seemed there were more high level ESRI people giving the talks verses the tech support person. It was also a lot smaller with only 20 – 30 audience members and it was more comfortable to ask questions.

Geoprocessing Session:

-The ability to save a personalized tool box in the Normal.mxt verses stuck to a map project.

- Cool ways to record a processing history and a historical catalog of errors. I would not use it too much but it was nice to see that it could be done like the old days of saving command line stuff to a historical file.

GPS Session:

-Did not really cover much and reemphasized to some of the newbies that GPS should only be used as a tool and sometimes there are days and situations where base data can be more accurate and manual data entry would be better.

-ESRI.com/arcpad

-Off set option Mike Johnson was looking for was a popular request ESRI has had and should be incorporated in version 7.0 hopefully available by the end of 2005.

Editing Tips and Trick Session:

-The coolest thing was the Magnifying window, did not know that existed.

-Space bar to suspend snapping temporarily - already used that one.

-A lot of hot keys for editing I forgot about or did not realize existed, there is a 3-page tip sheet in the help outlining all of these, useful.

Presentation outlining some lesser-known tools:

-In 9.0 the MXD Dr is in Programs>ArcGIS>Developer Tools>MXD DR and is not license dependent.

-Locate Lat Long dll downloadable from the web site. It has a little interface that allows user to input a coordinate and then it places a text dot on the map to locate the point.

THE DOCTORS OFFICE - Questions I got answered or a creative work around from my “list”. Once again I impressed the developers with the number of issues and things I found the software could not do. One of the top developers even offered to set up a job interview if I was interested. Told her I would rather live in Fort Bragg than Redlands, then the lady behind me agreed.

1)Add default scale to drop down list – a dll downloadable from the web site called Imperial Map Scale, very cool!

2)Set the default decimal places in the scale text not to be 6 places after the decimal every time. – to make a custom scale text in the style manager and set the decimal places there, but have to have that style added to the MXD.

3)Multiple queries (Name, by method, by total acres) in ArcMap – toolbox>statistics>frequency. ArcInfo license only, excellent

4)Have the color chart show a number rather than an obscure name – copy and paste the color chart into a custom style color set and rename or number however.

5)Don’t have a new layer automatically added to a legend – under the items tab in the legend uncheck the option.

The developer folks were very interested in some of the other issues I brought up that could not be answered. They wanted me to email multiple people with some of the requests. It was defiantly a different attitude than San Diego, much more personal and I felt that they were really listening to me verses trying to figure out where the party was going to be that night.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the conference. Lunches were terrible though, would have rather paid less to go and be responsible for my own lunch. The venders section was pretty small only about 5 or 6 of them, which was fine with me. The map gallery was also slim and most were from the water reclamation people in the central valley. I was disappointed that I did not know anyone there, and did not see anyone I wanted to meet from some of the committees I was apart of last year. I was also one of the few from “private” industry, but Joe warned me about that. A lot of government folks! I would defiantly go to this conference again. Next year they are having the Regional Conference for the first time in Honolulu. Maybe I can find a way to justify that trip.

Map Point Blows It

2005-01-27T16:56:00.000-08:00

There has been a story circulating among some blogs about certain bugs in Microsofts Map Point. Map point is a route finder that competes with MapQuest and the like.
Here is an article detailing one such bug. Apparently if you try to get the quickest route from Haugesund and Trondheim, both in Norway, the suggested quickest route is a 1,685 mile journey through Belgium, England, France, Germany and Sweden.
Nice.
I'm going to assume here that MapPoint doesn't necessarily have a bug, but is working with incomplete data. I've often had problems with MapQuests router, usually because the data is incomplete or in error (saying there are freeway exit ramps where there are none).
Still, it's worth checking out the graphic showing the error. It's hard to believe until you see it.

GIS-like software

2005-01-26T09:52:00.000-08:00

GIS News also has a couple of posts talking about new software plugins and programs that view GIS data.
MapPublisher6.1 is an Adobe Illustrator plug-in that allows you to view GIS data in Adobe. This can be handy, as Illustrator is a great place to make graphics and can probably render some very nice maps, but with ESRI products you can make your map there and export to PDF, so not sure what this would be giving you as an added benefit.

Shape Viewer is a free program that can view shapefiles. As ESRI has a free product called ArcExplorer that allows you to view shapefiles and other GIS data (even on-line) I don't see the value here either.

GIS helping Tsunami effort

2005-01-26T09:04:00.000-08:00

Don't mean to make that title sound like a press release, but it kind of does. GIS News Blog posted that ESRI has their tech support staff available 24 hours a day for people working on tsunami releaf efforts, and indeed is providing many services for the releif. They have special codes that you can get if you are working on related projects. I assume that this helps those in time zones across the world, who are working while we are sleeping.
If you'll excuse me from being political, this is part of how America helps with the world. We have been critisized for not, as a government, giving as much money as some other countries like Germany and Australia. But as opposed to higher taxed societies, the United States relies on private industry and private individual effort as well as the government, and in the world there is no equal. ESRI is just another example of private industry giving a little extra during this disaster.

Also, I found this great tsunami satelite image gallery from Digital Globe. Lots of before and after shots.

UPDATE: FAO (Food and Agriculture Org of the UN) has an interesting website devoted to mapping resources, including data, and satalite images, of the tsunami affected areas. They also have digital atlases available for a small fee, including lots of maps and before/after satalite images. Some interactive maps on line too. Check it out.

All things GIS

2005-01-26T08:38:00.000-08:00

I thought I would post a more general message. I don't intend for this to be an ArcInfo bitch session, contrary to my post below. Some posts may be like that, but I also want to post on interesting things happening in the GIS world, talk about different software (for my edification, as i don't know much outside the ESRI world), and blog report from events that I attend.
I don't attend many events during the year, and tend not to stray far from home when I do. The sole exception there is the ESRI conference in San Diego every year.

I will be attending the Images to Information seminar in Seattle in March. I'll try to post from Seattle, but if I can't get the legistics right it might just be a summary after the fact.

I also want to keep the links section updated with GIS companies and GIS Blogs (if there are any). I've got the major players, such as ESRI, Intergraph, MapInfo, Smallworld, and others.

Who I am: Richard L'Esperance
I'm currently a GIS analyst at the Campbell Group, a timber management company in Portland Oregon. I got a Geography degree from Portand State Univ in 1995 and have worked GIS ever since. I enjoy GIS, but mostly I enjoy geography and maps (not necessarily making them, but enjoying them). I do a variety of things for the company; support for field employees, overlay analysis, data management, and programming with VB.

ArcCatalog Hell

2005-01-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

Ok, if you are getting this kind of behavior, you are not alone.
If you make changes to feature classes in ArcCatalog or ArcMap, they may not register with the other product until you exit the program and re-enter it.
Mostly this was happening when I made a schema change using SQL Enterprise tools on SDE Feature Classes. Yes, this is not an ESRI product I use to change the schema, but you cannot easily change the attribute structure of a feature class with ArcCatalog. Catalog only allows you to add and subtract fields, but not where you want them to go. If you add a field it automatically goes to the bottom of the field list.
So in 8.3, I would turn versioning off (trying to make a schema change on a versioned class: forget it) and use Enterprise manager (SQL Server) to make the attribute column changes.
But in 9.0 you can't even do that anymore, unless you remember to make the change in the sde_column_registry table (new in 9.0).
ESRI states that you can make schema changes by exporting to XML and editing the XML file, then re-importing. Have you ever done this? Yes it works, and isn't that incredibly hard to figure out, but having to export your data and then re-import it seems a might barbaric just for adjusting an attribute.
Will ESRI please address this!

Anyway, today I made a change IN ARC CATALOG, deleting a column out of a feature class in SDE. ArcMap didn't recognize the change (actually what I got was an error when I tried to identify a polygon in that layer). I removed the layer from ArcMap and re-added from Catalog. Same problem. I shut down catalog, started it again; same problem.
I had to shut ArcMap down in order for ArcMap to recognize that I had deleted a field with ArcCatalog.
This is an increasingly anoying problem.

Esri Programming blues

2005-01-13T16:43:00.000-08:00

I just have to vent here. I have had it with ESRI's documentation for ArcObjects. Many objects have no significant document page on the online help. The pages are just place holders for more documentation on the object. It's really all very useless.
I am stuck on using the new geoprocessing functionality. Like Union, Intersect etc...
The docs say that all you have to do is create a dispatch object and that object has all the functions on it.
But it doesn't work with SDE layers for some reason. There are exmples a-plenty for shapefiles and personal geodatabases, but none for SDE. Nothing on ESRI's support website. Nothing on the ESRI-L. I feel like I'm out in the cold on this one.

Blog about GIS

2005-01-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

As traditional, this first post is the introduction to the blog. I have created this site to post on all things GIS. Some of it will be interesting developments in the GIS world. Other things may just be bitches about GIS, namely ESRI's ArcGIS suite of products.
Don't get me wrong about that either. I think ArcGIS is the most powerful and most flexible of all GISs. But with that great power and flexibility they have cut a few corners and there are also lots of things that leave me frustrated and stuck.
I'll try and get this so that there are comments, or something. I don't know how to do that yet, but I desire it, because in this industry you need feedback, and in order to make this site helpful to me (and to you) feedback and different points of view are important.
I would like to post things on other GISs too, but don't know much about microstation, Intergraph and the like. Hopefully my experience here will broaden that horizon as well.

Last year I started a temporary blog to blog the ESRI conference, probably the biggest conference of GIS users in the world. That blog is now gone. I'll use this blog to do that this year.
Salutations.
Rich...