Howard Butler had this problem back in October and now Paul Ramsey seems perplexed by the ESRI licensing agreement. I don’t believe we’ve heard anything back from the last time. If there is anything more confusing that ESRI licensing agreements, I’d like to see it. Our company is run by lawyers and they have trouble understanding some of the statements in the agreements.
Adena wrote an article on all the great Geoblogs out there. I’m honored that she called out Planet Geospatial and my own blog. Of course no good deed can go unpunished as some felt the organization was flawed. I can understand the concern there for all. In my RSS aggregator I just break out the ESRI and Autodesk blogs and then throw everyone into a Geoblog category. Its getting messy so I might have to split some them out into special interests to get better organized. I think though she hit most of the best blogs out there. Heck if yours didn’t make it just start liking to Adena and I’ll bet ya she’ll notice. 😉
I blogged about defining projections of your ArcIMS services and it looks like ESRI has posted an Instructional Series Podcast called “Best Practices: Defining Projection Information for ArcIMS Map Services”. Anyone who manages an ArcIMS implementation and hasn’t set their projections should listen to that podcast as your services will have trouble being consumed by ArcGIS Explorer and ArcMap clients without the projection being set. Direct link to podcast here.
OK before I get into the podcast, will someone over at ESRI put the podcast directory out of its misery? You’d think ESRI would prefer one to permalink to the podcast page, but they use some wacky javascript front end that makes it impossible. Anyway, here is the direct link to the podcast. The timing of this podcast is about 2 weeks late, but if you’ve wanted to know what is new in EDN 9.2, there aren’t two better people than Euan Cameron and Rob Elkins to explain it.
In a twist, Panoramio says their logo has been around since at least October 2005. That would imply that OSGeo’s logo might be based on Panoramio’s?
As I said in the other thread, I’m sure there is no link between the two (no matter how many people wish to draw conclusions to the contrary).
I’m about to get on a plane back to warm Phoenix (I don’t know how you people live with freezing temperatures), and I’m trying to get back on top of my email/rss feeds. I did see that Google created a new category in the table of contents called “Geographic Web” in Google Earth (and turned on by default). The name is a very poor choice, but that is a topic for another day. I’ll admit I never use Panoramio, so this was the first time I’ve seen the logo in months but I did notice that it looked very similar to another logo out there.
Panoramio updated their logo back in October so I’m not sure what the logo looked like before as I can’t find it. Now this could all be a coincidence as the process of developing the logo seems innocuous. One might say it is natural to have a compass with a “geo” site, but the similarity has to make some in the open source community a little disappointed. Of course this is the second time Google Earth has been involved with using a logo similar to OSGeo so maybe deep down everyone just loves it.
Update – There is a similar discussion on Geowanking.
Visnu, a Swivel engineer, wrote the following in the comments of my Swivel post:
actually, for data input and output, we started with an api amazingly. it got to be too unwieldy, especially in the beginning when we were trying all sorts of different ideas. it’ll be back, i promise.
Great news!
OK, it was as simple as ESRI.com overloading my hosted server:
The XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX IP address was firewalled on the server. Most likely there were a high number of connections coming in from this IP and causing load issues on the server. ESRI.com should no longer have any issues reaching the site, I have removed the entry from the firewall.
Who says you can’t compare apples to apples. Sean takes a look at the new MapGuide Demo page and is impressed.
I spent a few minutes trying out the three generic tasks and must say, this is more like it. Autodesk is employing some UI and graphic designers. They haven’t found the sweet spots yet, but are closer than the ADF team.
Steve IM’d me yesterday saying he was impressed with the MapGuide demos. I’ve been playing around with MapGuide and the ArcGIS Web ADF and I feel they are comparable (I wouldn’t call the demo on the AGS blog a true demo in the sense that that the MapGuide site is a demo, but since ESRI does not have a true demo site, this is all we can use). I get more power with AGS and the Web ADF, but at a bigger cost. One just needs to decide what level of functionality you need and go from there. Personally I can’t want until the Dev Summit to see what people are doing with the Web ADF and the tasks you can create.
I’ve been checking out Swivel this morning and I have to say I’m excited. A friend described it best when he said it looks like a YouTube for data. Its so easy to add data and start using it.
Step 1: I loaded the career stats for Orlando Cepeda. I used the web query tool in MS Excel to import the data into a Excel workbook and then saved the data out as a CSV to import into Swivel.
Step 2: You then can preview the data to make sure it imported in correctly.
Step 3: You then can set the field types and unit of measure.
Step 4: Describe the data you have uploaded, where you got it, give it a picture (from Flickr, but you can choose anyplace later)
Step 5: Explore your data that you’ve uploaded
The graphs are not too bad and you can even embed them on your webpage like this:
Of course not everyone enjoys baseball as much as I do, but you can compare any other uploaded data via graph such as Per Capita Income vs. Unleaded Regular Gas Price
I’m as excited about Swivel as I was about Zillow. I can only imagine where this will lead as uploading and working with your data and data of others is just so simple. YouTube for data is right.
