Author: James

I’ve been letting Planet Geospatial (PGS) sit for the past month just to see how its doing. There was an issue with some WordPress blogs not showing up, but that seems to have passed and everything is smooth. One issue I’ve started to notice is that there are way too many blogs in it. This is probably a good thing as it proves that the Geospatial blogging community has grown to the point that moderation is required.

I’ve been clearing out blogs that don’t post so all the ones in there right have have at least one post in the past month (or are important enough to be included for other reasons). There are 75 blogs in the aggregator right now and I’d like to cut that in half (I think too much noise hurts the value of PGS).

Without going into specifics, what blogs do you guys think should be included and which ones might be best left off? You don’t need to point to a specific blog that should or shouldn’t be included, but I’d like to know what makes PGS valuable to you.

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.