Author: James

I’m heading out first thing tomorrow to visit the in-laws in Prue, OK. We’ll be visiting my wife’s Grandmother’s farm (yes that is a dirt road in front of it). Its been pretty cold there so I’m a little nervous as I don’t have the proper clothing (I had a jacket on today here in Tempe and the high is about 75F) as it will be 36F there tomorrow. Anyway I won’t be around for the rest of the week/weekend as I’m not even bothering to bring my laptop (their phone line dates from the Truman Administration and last time I was there I could not get a signal on my Verizon Wireless PC Card (Analog only in the area). At least there will be good eating (not too healthy, but bacon is part of every meal). Try and not go too nuts in that Manifold comments ok? 😉

Ever use the georeference toolbar to register a raster image in ArcMap? I think most of us have used it in our lives and a small change in how 9.2 handles it might cause problems with users still using ArcGIS 9.1.

ArcGIS 9.2 no longer will write a tfw (world file) after georeferencing. Instead ArcGIS 9.2 will only write a .aux.xml file, which contains the referencing data. So why is this a MAJOR problem?

ArcGIS 9.1 cannot read the reference data from the .aux.xml file. For some reason ESRI Developers decided that this was not a needed feature (even though all their documentation (even 9.2 documentation) says that a world file would be created.)

The good news is that this issue will be addressed at the first Service Pack (I was worried that there wouldn’t be anything to put in that first service pack myself)

Art Haddad emailed me tonight to let me know the ArcGIS Server Development Blog is up and in business. Jeremy Bartley is already blogging away (and using Kansas as an example). I think this is the first “official” non-marketing blog at ESRI. Great job guys!

Update 1 –Look, an actual ArcGIS Server demo application!

Ed Parsons posts that he has decided to leave the Ordnance Survey. No word yet from where he is headed, but I wish him all the luck. His blog has always been a great read and taught me much about how technology has changed the Ordnance Survey (I could never get Charles Babbage out of my mind).

Paul has been thinking about the announcement that ESRI would allow ArcSDE to use PostgreSQL and has up with a pretty good argument on why ESRI should make PostGIS the default spatial type.

One of the interesting nuggets to come out of the ESRI User Conference this year was the news that ESRI was going to support ArcSDE on PostgreSQL “sometime soon”. Which, to PostGIS people like ourselves suggests the question: “implemented how?”

If it was up to me, I’d tell ESRI to fly Paul out to Redlands and get ArcSDE running on PostgreSQL immediately. I’ve got a dying Oracle 8i installation that would love to be running PostgreSQL.

It looks like for some reason that my host is blocking IP address including ESRI. Believe me it isn’t intentional and we are working on figuring out what the problem is. This includes both http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com and http://www.planetgs.com as they are hosting on the same server.

I see Ask.com and Citysearch (both owned by IAC) have released a new mapping tool today. I see tons of potential here because now Ask could have the best local content of any mapping service out there, but in the end I doubt it will get much traction. When you have to compete against Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! it is hard not to bet against them.

Is Ask.com a stronger brand than CitySearch? I would have thought that putting this tool inside Citysearch would be the more logical place. At least we can see IAC trying to get some synergy here between all their brands (such as Evite and Ticketmaster).

Matt has some issues with both Manifold itself and the quality of its online help (or lack there of; love the redirect to an IP address on the forums, quite professional).

The reason we bought Manifold was to have a GIS in which to create nice maps of our large datasets in an easy way and serve them out to the web. While there were plenty of warnings that Manifold’s website was full of hyperbole & BS, I choose not to heed them.

Matt concludes that open source GIS (uDig/QGIS/Mapserver/MapGuide) might be a better choice in the long run for most users looking to escape the ESRI stack. This probably regulates Manifold to an Opera like status among GIS users. A fanatical fan base, decent product, but an also ran in the marketplace.

As Kirk noticed yesterday and Rob posted about today, the docs are now online at EDN for 9.2.

Also only 109 days left until the 2007 ESRI Developer Summit in Palm Springs. I’ll be there.

I’m heading out for the day so now posts probably until Monday. Until then I’m sure some of you have some things to get off your chest about ArcGIS 9.2, ArcGIS Explorer, Jay Cutler and the contradiction of using open source geo-servers with closed clients.