Author: James

For those who haven’t seen, the QGIS team has a blog called QGIS Ramblings.

I’d respond on AllpointsBlog.com, but Adena is still trying to figure out why I can’t post there. Guess I’m just a spammer Adena!

You have to leave it to James Fee AKA Lefty AKA Anonymous to divert traffic from this website and milk the conversation for more ad click pennies!

Honestly James, when you can claim and rightly so to a certain degree, that Archive.org archives snapshots of “what people were doing (with their websites) in the past” (your words), surely WHOIS can also help find that. Try this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whois). I am sorry to see that you have little idea of how websites are registered- maybe website hosting is not your thing. Anyways, there is little need to “take pride in the fact that a Google search for ‘adjusted’ results in my blog as the top result” (your words and your need for an ego massage!). Why? Because a more likely reason is the relative number of websites with ‘adjusted’ either in the name or title.

Given what you reveal about your old-school knowledge of the internet, try being “with it” (your words) and some “spatial readjustment” (my words).

But glad to see you finally agreeing with us and beginning to appreciate the poly-centric “yada yada” (your words): “…there are tons of people who have no clue who the heck I am or even that I have a blog. I might have lots of readers in our little circle, but in the grand scheme of GIS as a whole I’m not even a blip on the screen” (your words).

And to think of it, I didn’t even know your blog until last week.

So please get back to this website, away from your spin zone and the comforts of your coterie and please don’t hide behind a pseudo name to post your reply. Thanks James Fee AKA Lefty AKA Anonymous AKA
aggregating-since-whenever.

Lorrie

7 Lorriana on 2006-08-04 12:28 (Reply)

Actually I have no response, I just wanted to make sure the world got to see this unstable comment. As Steve would say, “Don’t feed the troll!” Maybe it is a good thing I can’t post on AllPointsBlog right now.

I get this email from time to time from a blogger who’s says their feed isn’t being displayed correctly in Planet Geospatial. Before they even tell me the feed, I pretty much know what they are talking about:

Any time a blog that is running on Blogger posts an image, it gets screwed up by Planet Geospatial. My RSS parser cannot handle how the “non-standard” Blogger Atom feed displays images, so you end up with the picture above. There are two ways to fix this. First you can move off of blogger and on to a better blog platform (WordPress.com, Typepad, Vox) or provide a FeedBurner feed that fixes the problem. Glen moved his AnyGeo blog back to blogger but I didn’t really care even though the Opera blog platform had good RSS support because he offered a FeedBurner feed. You’ll see his posts from blogger render perfectly.

So if you are using Blogger, do yourself a favor and offer up a FeedBurner feed. Plus if you ever do move off of Blogger, no one will have to resubscribe to you feed because you can just update FeedBurner yourself.

I posted last week on the ESRI campus map being the inverse of GIS and sent a trackback to the ESRI UC blog (I usually don’t send trackbacks) as a sort of test to see if ESRI would let it fly. Well it sure did and not only that it got a response.

Way cool!

Then I read the response. 🙁

The ESRI Virtual Tour was designed to be a simple drawing with interactive elements. We wanted it to be artistic, informative, and easy to use, and we felt that Flash was the appropriate tool for the job.

So by this definition, ESRI does not make any web-based mapping tools that are artistic, informative and easy to use. Heck of a conclusion, but basically that is what the ESRI UC blog is saying. Sometimes it is better think before writing something.

Really given those parameters, there is no reason that ArcWeb Services or ArcGIS Server couldn’t make beautiful maps that are easy to use. Someone needs to show the marketing team what people are doing with ESRI software. I’m actually flabbergasted that ESRI didn’t take this opportunity to use ArcWeb Explorer for such a tour. Of course another conclusion one could make is that the marketing team and the web team didn’t want to involve the ArcWeb or ArcGIS teams in such a project. You know, marketing knows better….

Yea well they were wrong on this. The whole point of such a tool is to show not only that the ESRI campus is a wonderful place to work, but ESRI actually uses the tools they create for their own benefit. Instead the result is the feeling that you can’t create beautiful maps with ESRI products and ESRI doesn’t believe in their own tools enough to use them.

Of course the wording might signify that it might take until 9.3/10.0 for this to happen, but I’ll keep my hopes up. 9.2 should be out in October so maybe next spring around the Dev Summit we’ll be on PostgreSQL? Dominic Stubbins actually read the UC Q&A ESRI posted about the pre-conference survey (I admit it, I didn’t feel like reading it) and found something very interesting.

I discovered this little gem in the Q and A section that seems to have been overlooked in all the Server discussion. It seems that ESRI will be supporting an open source DBMS in the form of PostGreSQL, this support is currently in testing and due for release sometime after the initial 9.2 release. You can read about it at the Q&A section under the Geodatabase and ArcSDE section (Q11).

Yep, there it is. I usually ask this question every year, but this year I didn’t for some reason and maybe that is all it took. Back at the Dev Summit, I asked this question to the ArcSDE devs and they said there were no plans (I assume they lied through their teeth since other folks at ESRI had already confirmed to me what the Q&A states back in Jan/Feb. Now that the cat is out of the bag, we can now start bugging the ArcSDE folks about PostgreSQL support at the UC. I’m very happy about this as the cost of implementing SDE has gone down exponentially. Any bets who will be the first person to ask where is MySQL support? (Hobu?)

Just in time for the ESRI UC, it appears that the ArcWeb Explorer Javascript API is out of beta. The documentation of this API is probably the best work I’ve seen ever come out of ESRI.

Plus the ArcWeb Explorer itself has a new “Reports” tab that allows you to run simple reports and save them out as PDF, XML or Excel.

There is also a new “Data Maps” option under Map Types that gives you access to census data and also gives you the ability to add a legend to the map.

Finally the print function gives you a real high quality print. Check out the PDF of the map above. The only issue I see with the print is the legend looks a little low res.

The only problem I still see with ArcWeb Explorer is that it is very slow compared to competing services. I like the API a ton, but it just runs too slowly on our network to use in the real world. Maybe in time that will be resolved, but ArcWeb Explorer has become quite the impressive web application.

Thanks to Sean Gillies for pointing out this Open Source GIS San Diego Gathering planned during the ESRI UC. It will be Tuesday, August 8th 2006, 6:30pm to 9:00pm at the Visualization Lab, San Diego State University.

Open Source GIS San Diego Gathering (OSG-SD) –
Tuesday, August 8th, 6:30pm

You are cordially invited to an Open Source GIS
gathering in San Diego.

WHEN: Tuesday, August 8th 2006, 6:30pm to
9:00pm

WHERE: Visualization Lab, San Diego State University (
http://citi.sdsu.edu/ )

WHY: To introduce geospatial
professionals to free open source complements to
commercial GIS software

More has been posted at the UMN Mapserver website so get some more info if you are thinking about going. Of course SDSU isn’t exactly downtown, but with the Trolley now going out beyond SDSU you don’t have to drive at all from downtown San Diego.

This is the perfect opportunity to learn more about open source GIS while on vacation (I mean at the ESRI UC). Hey free pizza and soda!

Make sure you RSVP to Dana Nibby (danaspatial {at} yahoo.com) and let them know you are attending. I’m going to do it right now.

Interesting post just came over the Geowanking email list:

“FYI..

It appears that Google licensed ALL of DigitalGlobe’s imagery on an exclusive basis for online presentation. So if i wanted to do something on a website, with DigitalGlobe’s hi-res imagery, for example if the Google Maps framework isn’t flexible enough, i cannot legally go around Google to license the image myself! I can imagine why Google did this – to prevent Microsoft,Mapquest etc. from licensing the same imagery in their webmapping frameworks – but the net effect is that ordinary people, NGOs and small companies are also cut off.

This seems to skirt the edge of ‘do no evil’.”

Even more interesting is that DigitalGlobe has directed Ben to GeoEye for imagery but he’s stuck because of cloud coverage.

I’ve been getting quite a bit of email and IM traffic over what I like and what I don’t like. Mostly it is in regards to what I post on this blog. As a public service message I thought I’d like to list what I don’t like. Feel free to print this list out and attach it to your workstation so you’ll know what side of any discussion I’ll be on.

• ESRI
• ArcGIS
• ArcView
• ArcEditor
• ArcView 3.x
• ArcObjects
• ArcIMS
• ArcGIS Server
• ArcGIS Explorer
• ArcPad
• ArcReader
• ArcPublisher
• ESRI Image Server
• ESRI Developer Network
• ArcWeb
• ArcGlobe
• ArcScene
• ArcMap
• ArcCatalog
• ArcScan
• Autodesk
• AutoCAD
• Autodesk MapGuide
• MapInfo
• UMN MapServer
• Anything open source
• Perl
• O’Reilly Publishing
• GDAL
• GRASS
• QGIS
• uDIG
• MapGuide Open Source
• Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Microsoft MapPoint
• Google Earth
• KML
• Google Maps
• Java
• Python
• Ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Linux
• PostGIS
• SlashGeo
• Podcasts
• Robert Scoble
• NASA World Wind
• Cold Fusion
• Canadians
• Wikipedia
• ArcScripts
• SketchUp
• ATOM
• GML
• Clowns
• Programmers
• Sun Microsystems
• Dell
• HP
• Apple
• Avenue
• MapObjects
• MapQuest
• AOL

The list is by no means complete, but I got tired of typing at the 66th thing I hate. Now we have posted proof that I don’t like {blank} so feel free to share that with your friends. 🙂

OK, thanks to GeoMullah the UC geoblogger meetup is all set.

Place: Mister Tiki Mai Tai Lounge
801 5th Ave, San Diego, CA
(619) 233-1183

Time: 8pm, 9 August

Just let GeoMullah know that you are coming either by posting here or on his blog. If you geoblog or read geoblogs come by and hang out with other geogeeks. We had a blast last year and I’m sure we’ll have one this year. Heck you don’t even need to be at the ESRI UC to come by.