Author: James

We’ve set up our own Jabber server and have begun testing GeoChat internally. We did this because our firewall blocked port 5222 and it was much easier than working with the IT staff to open it. Its still too early to give my full opinion on how it works, but I will say it was much easier to collaborate than I thought it would be. If you have a Google Mail account, you can pretty much get this working within 5 minutes. A couple things I wish I could do that don’t seem available yet.

• Change the default colors
• ability to add actual text rather than just “ink” I’m not that good at writing with my mouse
• an eraser to make quick deletions to ink

One thing to keep in mind, I was getting “out of bounds” errors on the ink until I realized that I had to make sure my projection was set in the layer properties. I kind of figured that was the problem, but the error message was a little vague.

click for larger view

Boy that was quick. The EDN that ESRI offered because we are MapObjects developers is on my desk right now. 😀

I hate our plotter. Its only about 3 years old, but I have so much trouble plotting rasters to it. Basically the only work around is to export to 100dpi jpg and print from Photoshop. We’ve had HP out to see if it is the plotter, but they can’t figure what the problem is other than to say it isn’t with the hardware. I can’t argue with them as I could be our software, but if Acrobat, ArcMap and other similar programs have problems printing large rasters I can only think it is the plotter. We’ve tried every trick I’ve ever known (with ESRI and HP help) and the only way to get it to work is a low res JPG. Oh I would love to be able to just send a E size plot directly from ArcMap with a nice huge aerial in the background and just have it plot. When I first started in GIS many years ago, my job title was plotter operator (basically it was the title of the lowest paying job so paying them to babysit the old plotter wasn’t too expensive) and I feel like I’ve come full circle.

At least CAD drawings fly off of the thing.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Planet Geospatial is not updating. I can’t SSH into my server right now as that port is blocked, but I’ll try later when I’m not behind a restrictive firewall. I can only assume a feed has caused the script to crash on the update.

Richie has a “Getting Started” post on his blog for learning how to use GeoChat. We’ve decided in our company that it will be easier to just install a Jabber Server on our Linux server and use it internally. Hopefully we’ll have time tomorrow to get that working.

To be honest, I never really spent much time looking into GeoTango. I’ve seen their name in many places, but as with Keyhole I didn’t look too hard (note to self, PAY MORE ATTENTION). Anyway Matthew Hurst has posted a comment that he recieved from a GeoTango employee that talks about how GlobeView has evolved and how Microsoft might run with it.

The GlobeView tech will require some work to get it to the level of polish found in Google Earth, but with the resources Microsoft has, it should be a good kick in the pants for Google Earth when it is finally re-released.

So I’m back in work and excited to give GeoChat a try, but I’ve run into a huge roadblock. The TCP/IP port that is required has been blocked. I’ll ask the IT staff to open those ports up, but I guess I could set up a Jabber server inside our firewall for internal use. Richie has posted some more information on his blog you might want to check out. I like how it defaults to the GTalk servers as those are probably the ones that most people will use. I’d give it a shot at home, but all our ArcGIS Desktop licenses have been migrated over to concurrent use and if I use our VPN software it will block port 5222 for “safety” so it really won’t help anyway.

I’m at home today even though my company doesn’t have the day off. Our office is right across the from the Fiesta Bowl and with two teams like Ohio State and Notre Dame, I’m not getting near there with those fans. It seems like I’ve been on vacation for weeks, but the run is over tomorrow. 🙁

You can add me to the list of people who have upgraded to WordPress 2.0. To be honest I was more worried with this upgrade than the previous Movable Type upgrades I’ve done, but it seems to have worked. 🙂

I’ve been sitting on this email from Kevin Martin about an update to the popular Export to KML extension for ArcGIS Desktop.

just wanted to let you know that there is a new version of ExporttoKML available that corrects the problem of displaying extruded polygons in the newest version of Google Earth. The were not displaying correctly due to a change in the KML rules. That’s been fixed, and a couple of other improvements were made.

If you want a simple way to get a shapefile into KML, this is one of the best ways.