Author: James

It seems like there is almost one a month to me. I was looking at mapping all the 4th of July fireworks displays in the valley to see which one we want to go to this year (we’ll probably go to Tempe’s) though where might be the least of our problems. As I was panning around I noticed that the imagery in the Phoenix area has much larger coverage than before. A quick Google search reveals that there was a HUGE update to the imagery for Virtual Earth. In many areas, Virtual Earth has surpassed Google Maps/Earth in the imagery/3D models. I’m actually finding myself using Virtual Earth for my mapping needs these days, rather than Google Maps. I just love saving my points of interest to collections.

I have to give it to Paul, I think this is a risky move. There are so many sessions that I suspect many will give up voting after a while. That said if you are up to the challenge and are going to the FOSS4G, you should probably go vote for what you want to see. So if you want to get into that open source spirit, now is the time.

I’ve been trying to update my RSS feeds today (while the wife is outside doing yardwork) to make sure they are all still active. In turn I’ve updated my GIS Links page with the blogs that I am subscribed to. You can also grab the OPML files there if you wish.

The Slashgeo.org project has come to an end. Or at least in serious hiatus until the context significantly evolves. Over the last two years, Slashgeo has been a source of enjoyment and stress. As much as it has been fun, it slowly became more of a responsibility then a rewarding project.

Slashgeo’s Site Closing or in Indefinite Hiatus. Thank you.

Best of luck to Alex in whatever he does.

Worried with what to replace your SlashGeo bookmark with? Well why not check out the GeoWeb Blog. GeoWeb 2007 is July 23-27th so if you are going or just want to keep track of what will be going on you’ll want to pay attention.

What a morning… We come in to the office to smoke and the smell of burning electronics. Our huge A/C unit had died a horrible death… With no A/C, working in a glass building with no insulation (but its a hip/cool looking building and THAT is what matters), horrible smell and servers screaming for cool air, it might be time to cut my losses and go home. No VPN since we’ll probably have to shut the servers down despite the portable A/C unit on them since they are too hot.

And the National Weather Service isn’t helping!

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ 354 AM MST MON JUL 2 2007

HOTTEST WEATHER OF THE YEAR EXPECTED BY TUESDAY AND THE FOURTH OF JULY.

…HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 10 AM THIS MORNING TO 8 PM MST THIS EVENING..
…EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH IN EFFECT FROM TUESDAY MORNING THROUGH TUESDAY EVENING..

Why does this never happen on Fridays? 😉

That was an email I got last night from a reader. They like all of us were amazed at what she was seeing. The solution is not that hard to imagine though. Most of the problem we run into is processing power and bandwidth. None of us can afford the server farms and the racks and racks of servers that Google can deploy. But that isn’t a problem. If I were ESRI, I’d be looking at allowing their customers/clients to use Amazon Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for hosting and processing. The cost of such services is amazingly low and you can take advantage of Amazon’s infrastructure to offload some of the processing on it. Sure it won’t be “Google Fast”, but it will get you as close as you can get without being at Google.

The day I can spend an hour fighting Google Maps to get a route that covers all lower 48 states is the day I’m finally a Google Maps convert. Typing in city name is for wimps. Dragging that blue line all over the country, now that is GIS baby!

Sure it isn’t efficient, but the Google servers are slow and I gotta get back to work. Now all they need is save to KML.

Frank has the info on how to create KML (append &output=kml to the end of the permalink), but my 48 state route doesn’t seem to work.

OK, well maybe not on the Simpsons… But if I was, this is how I’d look.

Love the Simpsons Movie Avatar Generator….

I got an email from someone who likes Planet Geospatial, but wants to know when and what feeds I add so they can update their feed reader. I used to have a change log, but that got a little behind so I figure I’ll just blog when I add feeds. The 5 6 latest feeds I’ve added to Planet Geospatial are:

1. Fiducial Marks
2. Lin.ear th.inking
3. Urban Mapping Blog
4. Geospatial Semantic Web Blog
5. sauerkraut
6. map butcher