Author: James

I love baseball, I admit it. I subscribe to MLB.tv to catch as many games as I can. My favorite “computer related book” is Baseball Hacks. In the spirit of that, I present the United Countries of Baseball Map.

via Strange Maps

Richie Carmichael has updated his ArcGIS Diagrammer 9.2 Beta to improve performance and better handle UNICODE characters in the XML.

While many of us have been using FWTools on USB memory sticks, I noticed that there is now a script on the GDAL website that allows you to use FWTools on your USB Stick without having to install anything.

setfw_portable.cmd allows one to use fwtools for windows from a usb drive without installing anything on the host computer. It is non-invasive and won’t make any changes to the system registry or windows system directories or anything like that.

Now it was possible to do this without the script, but it sure does simplify it.

The GIS blog sewing circle churns away

**Update – **The service pack 3 has been pulled. Updates will be up later on Friday.

As promised by ESRI, the Service Packs are out.

ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 3
ArcIMS 9.2 Service Pack 3
ArcSDE 9.2 Service Pack 3

The one person who I should have contacted about the previous post wasn’t consulted before blogging. A bounced back email isn’t a confirmation no matter how many people say he’s leaving. I should have waited for an “official” email from him before posting that he was leaving. I apologize to David and any problems I have caused him. He’s always been helpful to me and my blog so of all the people at ESRI I should have confirmed it with him directly.

The word is out and David Maguire is leaving ESRI. I emailed David asking him about the rumor, but he email bounced back so I assumed he was gone. David emailed me letting me know that he is not leaving ESRI.

I was surprised as anyone to be honest, but at least we got to the bottom of the story here.

I saw the news that Adobe announced the shipping of ColdFusion 8 today. I remember when ArcIMS 3 arrived, ColdFusion was the way that almost everyone developed ArcIMS sites. I recall at one of the sessions at the UC I was the only person who asked about the ActiveX controls and no one at the ESRI table could answer the question. As time went on though, Java and ActiveX (and later .NET) became the primary development options and now the ColdFusion folks are unable to get answers from the ESRI folks.

Anyway, is anyone still developing their ArcIMS sites in ColdFusion? It looks like CF8 integrates with .NET so there might be some way to use the .NET WebADF (disclaimer, I have no idea what I’m talking about here). I know I’ve seen some really impressive stuff even today in ColdFusion, but I haven’t seen much talk about it lately. With such focus on the WebADF, I have to wonder if we’ve seen the last of ESRI supporting ColdFusion directly.

ArcView was available as an option for EDN, but now ArcInfo and ArcEditor are now available (at added cost) to the EDN subscriber. I’m not sure at all why they never offered ArcInfo and ArcEditor as how the heck could a developer load data into ArcSDE without either license (beyond the command line tools).

What I’d like to see is a “EDN Universal” subscription where all ArcGIS Desktop licenses and extensions are included in addition to the server tools. That way any developer of desktop solutions can have access to the licenses. Of course this will cost more, but I think very helpful to the ESRI developer community.

Remus Lupin wants to develop ArcGIS Desktop applications

Richie Carmichael released ArcGIS Diagrammer 9.2 (beta) and it is very impressive. I’ve used Geodatabase Diagrammer in the past with Visio to create such graphics, but this new ArcGIS Diagrammer will simplify the process. ArcGIS Diagrammer is a visual editor for ESRI’s Xml Workspace Document that is created out of ArcCatalog. You can graphically manipulate the geodatabase schema in a GUI application that is best described as a cross between Visual Studio 2005 and Visio. I tried to load up the whole schema for SDSFIE 2.5, but alas I didn’t have enough memory (or patience) on my laptop to let it complete. Simple geodatabases though are a breeze to edit and analyze. Anyone who manages data with the ESRI Geodatabase will want to check this tool out.