Tropical Storm BETA Public Advisory
Another week and another storm in the Caribbean is going to cause havoc for residents. These storms with Greek names are just freaky, though I can assume if you are hit by one its name isn’t very important considering more pressing needs such as food, water, shelter. Anyway, you can track the storm using either ESRI’s storm tracker application or the Hurricane Tracker.
Flickr user supercooper has created his own ArcMap crash dialog.
Actually this Flickr user has some nice looking maps uploaded. Not a bad way to show your portfolio.
Link – Haunted map
Just in time for Halloween, there is a wonderful new Virtual Earth mashup. If you are interested in where haunted buildings are in your area (doesn’t seem to have any haunted places in the Phoenix Metro area), you can give it a quick look. I like the theme that was chosen, very slick if you ask me. Poly9 has created some really impressive mashups with Virtual Earth
_Update_ – link seems to be up and down. Guess this stuff is popular this time of year. Just try later if it doesn’t work.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Wilma using the ESRI hurricane tracker mostly because I have many friends in the Fort Myers, FL area. Anyway I just noticed something on the tracker that made me look twice.
Say hello to Tropical Depression Alpha (hiding off there to the right of the image). So the counter has reset on the storm names. For those who haven’t heard:
In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.
I wonder if this happens again next year if they will start naming the second batch of storm names. Amazing how quickly this has spun out of control. I’ll take the 120 degree days here in the summer over a hurricane, blizzard, earthquake, tsunami anytime. Hopefully when I wake up in the morning not too much damage will have been caused by Wilma. Good luck Florida.
Adobe blogs about it.
Link – Making inroads
Modern mapmaking now starts with GIS data from state or local government that includes way more information than you really want. The task nowadays is to remove the unwanted data from the map to reduce clutter and focus on the desired information. One of the tasks these Illustartor users have is to create linked networks of nodes to create the streets and highways we see on a map.
I’ve had this idea in my head ever since I’ve started posting every GIS blog I’ve found on my blog front page figure out a way to bring them all together so people can follow the GIS blog community without having to visit every site I was thinking this would be a good way to introduce people to new GIS blogs also, rather than just visiting the top 5. Anyway after learning way too much about Python and FreeBSD I’ve finally gotten the script to work.
Anyway, announcing Planet Geospatial.
What is it?
Planet Geospatial aggregates posts from just about every GIS blog I can find that posts regualarly or is important for strategic reasons and serves them in a variety of formats from headlines to full posts and RSS (you can subscribe to Planet Geospatial on its own). The script is set to rebuild the files every hour so posts may not show up instantly. There is a timestamp on the front page that shows last rebuild.
There are still some issues as posts modified will show up again on Planet Geospatial and some feeds created by many of the bloggers don’t validate (I’ve had to escape out of most of them) so many of you might want to validate your RSS feeds.
I’ve probably missed some feeds so please email me with any suggestions or comments about Planet Geospatial.
Update – I didn’t think to offer this, but if you wish to be removed from Planet Spatial, just email me too. I’ll get it out of there ASAP with no questions asked.
Link – Top 10 Most Common Student-Encountered GIS Problems
I have been working with and teaching undergrad and grad students GIS for 4+ years now and have compiled a list of the 10 most frequent problems that they encounter. In my current position, I spend about 15 hours per week holding office hours in the main GIS Lab on campus, where students, staff, and faculty can visit for GIS assistance, and rarely do I have a free moment. (Well, perhaps during intercession.) I often find myself explaining the same concepts and pointing out the same resources over and over again, so I wanted to pull together this list. ESRI ArcGIS is the main software application used on campus and so many of the examples below refer to this application.
I’ve noticed all these while using slave labor (sometimes called interns) on projects. The inability manage project work just kills them as well as making assumptions. I always tell them, just ask as many questions as you like because we’ve got many years of GIS experience here in our little shop and no sense reinventing the wheel.
Link – Peer Support by Blog
Andrew Hallam posted to thank Jithen Singh for letting the world know about a technical paper on ArcGIS server. He also makes the great point of how blogs gave him information that he normally would not have gotten from ESRI because of their confusing support site. While it is true that they have a “Support Notifications” registration site that will send out emails for this kind of information, I’ve noticed that many new documents show up without being included in the weekly email. What needs to happen is RSS feeds for practically ever section of the support site. I should be able to subscribe to the ArcIMS RSS Feed and get all new documents as they appear, not wait until the get included in an email that my Outlook always seems to label as Junk Mail (no matter what I do with its settings). I’ve heard again and again from ESRI staff about how the support site is held together with duct tape, but something has to give and soon over more RSS feeds.
Oh and would someone over at ESRI make Jei some sort of MVP? (or just send him some t shirt that said GIS Geek on it) He’s pretty much deserved some kind of recognition given all he’s done over on the other side of the world.
Link – Driving Directions using Virtual Earth
I just saw this very cool Virtual Earth application appear in my PubSub Virtual Earth feed. According to the programmers blog:
This demo demonstrates how to leverage the MapPoint Web Service (MWS) in order to do driving directions using the current version of VE. The upcoming version of VE will have driving directions built in but meanwhile you can use this application to get routes using the current version
Pretty cool way to fix a problem with Virtual Earth using another Microsoft product. He uses an asp.NET page talks to the MWS that returns XML that is then parsed by the JavaScript using XMLHttpRequest. That my friends is classic AJAX. It works pretty well and beyond the GUI problems that I think Virtual Earth has, this is a cool mashup.
Link – ET GeoWizards LT on ArcScripts
ET GeoWizards LT is a set of data processing functions for ArcGIS presented in a user-friendly, wizard type interface.
ET GeoWizards LT was created as a subset of the free functions of ET GeoWizards (available from http://www.ian-ko.com) and complies with the requirements for posting on ArcScripts:
- It is 100% free.
- It is not a sample or a demo. All 28 functions included are fully functional with no restrictions whatsoever.
How about that!?! Talk about being responsive. Ianko went ahead and changed his extension to be completely free. Frankly I’m very impressed with his responsiveness and it shows how he listens to the GIS community as a whole. No other company has responded in my little blog other than him and it would have been so easy (I wouldn’t have blamed him) to say I’ll remove it when others do.
So go download the updated extension and make sure you check out his website to see what the difference between this LT version and the full version is. Heck why not buy the software anyway and show him that you appreciate his work and his responsiveness.
