Author: James

Shaan Hurley points to a new geospatial IT blog over at Autodesk. Between the Poles is written by Autodesk’s Geoff Zeiss.

Subscribed and added to Planet Geospatial.

Slowly but surely ArcWeb is beginning to filter out into the world. Check out this web developer for Crossroads Community Church plotting addresses on an ArcWeb map using the REST API.

It is good to see people starting to blog about using Public ArcWeb Services.

Now that USB flash memory drives are so large and so cheap, we can start running programs off of them. We’ve seen that you can run Firefox and Thunderbird (among many others) on these drives, but many don’t know you can also run desktop GIS software on it. Head over to QGIS, download the latest version and install it. Then navigate to the QGIS folder (on windows this would be c:/Program Files/Quantum GIS) and copy it to your flash drive (You’ll need about 80 MB free). Anytime you need GIS, you’ll only have to whip out your memory stick and plug it in. Then just browse for the “qgis.exe” and you’ll be set.

Looks like the Where 2.0 Conference is open for registration. The early bird price is quite a discount over the “normal” price so you probably won’t want to procrastinate too much if you want to go. If you look at the graphic on the left side of the page, you can just make out the word “ESRI”. Good to see ESRI get some press at this conference. I’m sure we’ll see plenty of Flash/SVG mapping which I’m really begin to see gain traction in this space.

It wouldn’t be February in Tempe unless we knew Spring Training and the Cactus League was starting up. In the spirit of the season, I walked down to the local Borders bookstore to take a look at the new Baseball Hacks book from O’Reilly. I just can’t get enough baseball stats and this book really gets into it with MySQL and even Perl examples. One part that is missing is mapping. I thumbed through the index looking for any examples and all I found were two references to Google Maps and Google Earth on how to get pictures of your favorite stadiums out of both. I ended up not buying it, but I’ll probably head back down later this week and pick it up after I find any Borders or Barnes & Noble coupons. OK, someone just burnt popcorn in our office and I can’t stand the smell. I took the opportunity to go out and buy a copy of Baseball Hacks. 🙂

Still I wish I had some time because I think this would be a great opportunity to try out some of the new web mapping APIs out there, specifically the new Yahoo! Maps beta or most likely ArcWeb 2006. I’d love to plot baseball statistics on a map and I have been looking for a reason to get involved with ArcWeb 2006.

SharpMap 0.9 beta 1 is out and available to download. The SharpMap engine is written in C# on the .NET 2.0 framework and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. I’ve looked at SharpMap before, but I’ve never really had any opportunity to really play with it as I wasn’t running .NET 2.0 yet (I had my reasons). Anyway, now that I am using .NET 2.0, I will probably give SharpMap a shot and see what it can do for us. Check out the forums to catch up on SharpMap or read Morten Nielsen’s article on The Code Project about how to create a ASP.NET 2.0 map yourself. I’m always glad to see some great .NET solutions to mapping out there.

OK, here is the scoop on the ArcGIS Explorer domain name. It is a test to if it is blocked by your firewall because of the work “sex” in the url. I’m guessing that if they are testing it, it probably is being block and we can probably assume that it won’t be the official domain.

Has anyone looked at trying IronPython with the ArcGIS Server .NET Framework yet? I’m guessing it should work in theory, but I guess you just never know. Aaron Marten has a good post on getting IronPython integrated into VS 2005 IDE. With IronPython in Visual Studio, it is intriguing to think of the possibilities out there considering ESRI’s move into Python on Desktop.

Not sure if anyone else noticed this, but the ESRI RSS feed had an interesting item last night.

In preparation for the ArcGIS Explorer community portal, we would like you to test www.arcgisexplorer.com by clicking on the link. If it doesn’t work from behind your organization’s firewall, please e-mail info@esri.com with ‘Test Failed’ in the subject. Thank you for your help.

Doesn’t work for me, but it might signify that ArcGIS Explorer is about ready to go public beta. Then again it could be a mistake.

Brian points to a podcast with Mansour Raad, Andy Gup, and James Killick. The podcast is only about 15 minutes so it is a quick listen as to what ESRI is doing with Flash. We knew a little about the what ESRI was going to let us do with Flash from the ArcWeb Explorer JavaScript API (well at least the news that there is one 🙂 ). But it looks like there is so much more. For starters, programmers will be able to use both JavaScript and Actionscript with their applications and it seems that Flex is also part of the story which some bloggers guessed.

Beyond all this Flash talk that some might not be too interested in, I got something else out of the conversation. Most web mapping applications server up rasters which requires you to request a new image every time you make a change on the map. Years ago we had looked at using Java to serve up vectors, but it was so much slower than the image services out of ArcIMS that we killed it. With Flash and SVG we are getting the tools to move back to vectors for much of our mapping which should help us create better/quicker application that immerse the user more. The possibilities of Flash really begins to come out when you start thinking about how you embed video and other content right inside your maps, rather than pop-up windows that we used to have to use. I’m really beginning to see how Flash can totally change how we go about designing web mapping applications in the future.

On top of all that, there was even mention of a demo that ESRI has using Breeze to allow people to collaborate over the web with a map, think about that!