Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • Resurrecting Planet Geospatial

    UPDATE:  We have the domain working, you now just need to go to geofeeds.me and you’ll get the same results as below.  The feed is at geofeeds.me/feed.  You don’t need to update anything as the old urls will continue to work.  Full speed ahead, make sure you reach out to Bill or myself if you want your blog, newsletter or other writing added.

    A couple days ago, Bill Dollins reached out to me and had a crazy idea:

    “Forget podcasting. We should resurrect planetgs”

    It took me all of 10 seconds to respond, “Hell yes”. You can read the technical way it was brought back on Bill’s blog:

    So, “Neptune” is born. The name is a nod to what Planet and Venus did/do, while the “N” planet hints at the Node underpinnings. Feel free to check it out. It’s about 50% me and about 50% Cursor. It’s not all the way baked, but good enough to release.

    A lot has changed since I put Planet Geospatial to bed. It’s been 10 years, longer than Planet Geospatial was alive since the python script culled all those Blogger sites and spit out a HTML page and an RSS feed. The world has changed a couple times over, blogs which were falling out of style have started to come back, newsletters are everywhere and Twitter is a cesspool of junk.

    Many of us had Planet Geospatial as our homepage (back when that was a thing) but feel free to grab the new temporary URL https://whale-app-k5eg5.ondigitalocean.app/view and the new feed https://whale-app-k5eg5.ondigitalocean.app/feed. We’re working at getting an easier domain set up because I let PlanetGS.com go many years ago and alas it has been taken.

    I hope this helps many of you start blogging again, we need all the good content to survive the next few years.

  • Cable Management

    One of the best parts of my iPhone 15 Pro is that it has a USB-C port on it. While I appreciate the lightning port, I have just grown so tired of having to manage so many different ports while traveling. Coupled with my iPad having USB-C and my Apple Watch having a USB-C charging cable, I went ahead and got myself an Anker 3 port USB-C charger (which has a USB-A for those times you need one) allowing me to plug in all my devices at night and just use ordinary USB-C cables.

    It is all nice and clean, no longer do I have all different cables for each device. My Kindle is USB-C, my GoPro is USB-C, my battery backup is USB-C and of course my MacBook Pro. I have reduced the cables I travel with because I don’t need one for each device. I do travel with a USB-A to USB-C cable for those times where the airplane doesn’t have USB-C or in an airport or rental car but that tucks away nicely in my travel bag.

    But then I just realized my AirPods Pro case is lightning.

    Now I could buy a USB-C case for said AirPods, but I want to wait until September and see if there is anything new. So trusty old lightning cable goes back in the bad for now.

    Update: I was asked how I charged my AirPods Pro last night, well you can use the Apple Watch charger. Works pretty well but its not a great solution long term.

  • ARC/INFO Manuals

    ARC/INFO Manuals

    If there is one regret in my life, it is that I didn’t steal the ARC/INFO manual binders from one of the jobs I used to use ARC/INFO. I’ve had an eBay search going for years in hope that someone will give them up. I suspect every binder set that still exists will never be given up. It’s like owning a Picasso, you’d never sell it and ask your relatives to bury you with it.

  • Impact of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on Geospatial Innovation

    We were talking (or typing) on Slack last week and I was asked what I thought was the single greatest software innovation while I’ve been working. A ton of things came to mind from from Apple’s HyperCard (more than anything this made me a programmer) and I even wrote a post about it back in 2006. I don’t think anything on that list is technically incorrect, but I wouldn’t put ArcView 3.x in that list anymore.

    BUT, let’s get real here. Each of those software products are amazing in their own right, but I don’t think any of them really moved the needle on spatial like the one I really think impacted the trajectory of what we used to call GIS.

    Microsoft SQL Server 2008

    Now I know what you’re going to say, why isn’t it PostGIS??? Now PostGIS has been clearly the leader since SQL Server 2008 arrived, but I believe it was SQL Server which changed expectations on paying for a geospatial database (Oracle, SDE or others). I mean I used to have Esri SDE on Oracle, I can’t even remember how expensive that was and how buggy it all was. Microsoft even put spatial into their free version.

    I can’t recall the last time I used stand alone SQL Server, mostly my days are PostGIS or some cloud based spatial geodatabase engine. But, the line before SQL Server 2008 and after is clear as day. All of a sudden enterprise grade geodatabase when from niche to normal and spatial ceased to be special. Using Oracle Spatial or Esri ArcSDE always ended with me tossing the server in the trash.

  • 19 Years and 2,362 Posts

    I mean we’ve been saying it since Elon had bought Twitter, but the deed is done.

    The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially adopted X.com for all its core systems. That means typing twitter.com in your browser will now redirect to Elon Musk’s favored domain

    I was talking to a good friend over email last month and he had this to say:

    The fun days of early twitter and before that blogging certainly made our industry more fun — thanks so much for your key role in that. Sadly those days seem to be gone and I don’t know where to find the modern equivalents.

    He is so right, I’m not sure how important my role was in the whole Twitter Geospatial world was, but that grouping we had back then was some of the best sharing of ideas and opinions I’ve ever been part of. I find myself rarely sharing anything spatial on Twitter anymore, mostly it is where I go to complain about the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Lakers or Arizona State Sun Devils. And most of that is just shouting into the abyss. This leaves no space for any outlet of my thought and feelings on spatial and the such.

    Hence I’m back to blogging, I feel like this has always been the best format for longer form thoughts and given I control the content vs some insane emerald mine heir this is better for my sanity. I am laughing at some of your still using RSS readers (heck I’m one) and having this post show up in your feed after many years. Thanks for never unsubscribing and stay tuned!

  • A GIS Degree

    My son decided to change majors from biodesign to GIS. I had a short moment when I almost told him not to bring all this on himself but then thought differently. I could use my years of experience to help him get the perfect degree in GIS and get a great job and still do what he wants.

    He’s one semester into the program so he really hasn’t taken too many classes. There has been the typical Esri, SPSS and Google Maps discussion, but nothing getting into the weeds. Plus he’s taking Geography courses as well so he’s got that going for him. Since he’s at Arizona State University, he’s going through the same program as I did, but it’s a bit different. When I was at ASU, Planning was in the Architectural College. Now it’s tied with Geography in a new School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning.

    I have to be honest, this is smart, I started my GIS career working for a planning department at a large city. The other thing I noticed is a ton of my professors are still teaching. I mean how awesome is that? I suddenly don’t feel so old anymore.

    I’ve stayed out of his classes for the past semester in hopes that he can form his own thoughts on GIS and its applicability. I probably will continue to help him focus on where to spend his electives (more Computer Science and less History of the German Empire 1894-1910). He’s such a smart kid, I know he’s going to do a great job and he was one who spent time in that Esri UC Kids Fair back when I used to go to the User Conference. Now he could be getting paid to use Esri software or whatever tool best accomplishes his goals.

    I plan to show him the Safe FME Minecraft Reader/Writer.

  • GIS and Monitors

    If there is one constant in my GIS career, it is my interest in the monitor I’m using. Since the days of being happy for a “flat screen” Trinitron monitor to now with curved flat screens, so much has changed. My first GIS Analyst position probably had the worst monitor in the history of monitors. I can’t recall the name but it had a refresh rate that was probably comparable what was seen in the 1960s. It didn’t have great color balance either, so I ended up printing out a color swatch pattern from ArcInfo and taped it on my wall so I could know what color was what.

    I stared for years at this monitor. No wonder I need reading glasses now!

    Eventually I moved up in the world where I no longer got hand-me-down hardware and I started to get my first new equipment. The company I worked for at the time shifted between Dell and HP for hardware, but generally it was dual 21″ Trinitron CRTs. For those who are too young to remember, they were the size of a small car and put off enough heat and radiation to probably shorten my life by 10 year. Yet, I could finally count on them being color corrected by hardware/software and not feel like I was color blind.

    It wasn’t sexy but it had a cool look to it. You could drop it flat to write on it like a table.

    Over 11 years ago, I was given a Wacom DTU-2231 to test. You can read more about it on that link but it was quite the monitor. I guess the biggest change between now and then is how little that technology took off. I guess if you asked me right after you read that post in 2010 what we’d be using in 2020, I would have said such technology would be everywhere. Yet we don’t see stylus based monitor much at all.

    These days my primary monitor is a LG UltraFine 24″ 4k. I pair it with another 24″ 4K monitor that I’ve had for years. Off to the other side is a generic Dell 24″ monitor my company provided. I find this setup works well for me, gone are the days where I had ArcCatalog and ArcMap open in two different monitors. Alas two of the monitors are devoted to Outlook and WebEx Teams, just a sign of my current work load.

    I’ve always felt that GIS people care more about monitors than most. A developer might be more interested in a Spotify plugin for their IDE, but a GIS Analyst care most about the biggest, brightest and crispest monitor they can get their hands on. I don’t always use FME Workbench these days, but when I do, it is full screen on the most beautiful monitor I can have. Seems perfect to me.

  • Are Conferences Important Anymore?

    Hey SOTM is going on, didn’t even know. The last SOTM I went to was in 2013 which was a blast. But I have to be honest, not only did this slip my mind, none of my feeds highlighted it to me. Not only that, apparently Esri is having a conference soon. (wait for me to go ask Google when it is) OK, they are having it next week. I used to be the person who went to as much as I could, either through attending or invited to keynote. The last Esri UC I went to was in 2015, 6 years ago. As I said SOTM was in 2013. FOSS4G, 2011. I had to look up, the last conference that had any GIS in it was the 2018 Barcelona Smart City Expo.

    So with the world opening back up, or maybe not given whatever greek letter variant we are dealing with right now, I’ve started to think about what I might want to attend and the subject matter. At the end of the day, I feel like I got more value out of the conversations outside the convention center than inside. So probably where I see a good subset of smart people hanging out. That’s why those old GeoWeb conferences that Ron Lake put on were so amazing. Meeting a ton of smart people and enjoying the conversations, rather than reading Powerpoint slides in a darkly lit room.

    Hopefully we can get back to that, just need to keep my eye out.

  • Unreal and Unity are the new Browsers

    Someone asked me why I hadn’t commented on Cesium and Unreal getting together. Honestly , no reason. This is big news honestly. HERE, where I work, is teaming up with Unity to bring the Unity SDK and the HERE SDK to automotive applications. I talk about how we used Mapbox Unity SDK at Cityzenith (though I have no clue if they still are). Google and Esri have them too. In fact both Unreal and Unity marketplaces are littered with data sources you can plug in.

    HERE Maps with Unity

    This is getting at the core of what these two platforms could be. Back in the day we had two browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. Inside each we had many choices of mapping platforms to use. From Google and Bing to Mapquest and Esri. In the end that competition to make the best API/SDK for a mapping environment drove a ton of innovation. What Google Maps looks like and does in 2021 vs 2005 is amazing.

    This brings up the key as to what I see happening here. We’ll see the mapping companies (or companies that have mapping APIs) deliver key updates to these SDK (which today are pretty limited in scope) because they have to stay relevant. Not that web mapping is going away at any point, but true 3D world and true Digital Twins require power that browsers cannot provide even in 2021. So this rush to become the Google Maps of 3D engines is real and will be fun to watch.

    Interesting in that Google is an also-ran in the 3D engine space, so there is so much opportunity for the players who have invested and continue to invest in these markets without Google throwing unlimited R&D dollars against it. Of course it only takes on press release to change all that so don’t bet against Google.

  • Arrays in GeoJSON

    So my last post was very positive. I figured out how to relate the teams that share a stadium with the stadium itself. This was important because I wanted to eliminate the redundant points that were on top of each other. For those who don’t recall, I have an example in this gist:

    Now I mentioned that there were issues displaying this in GIS applications and was promptly told I was doing this incorrectly:

    If you click on that tweet you’ll see basically that you can’t do it the way I want and I have to go back to the way I was doing it before:

    I had a conversation with Bill Dollins about it and he sums it up susinctly:

    I get it, but “Do it this way because that’s what the software can handle” is an unsatisfying answer.

    So I’m stuck, I honestly don’t care if QGIS can read the data, because it can. It just isn’t optimal. What I do care about is an organized dataset in GeoJSON. So my question that I can’t get a definitive answer, “is the array I have above valid GeoJSON code?”. From what I’ve seen, yes. But nobody wants to go on record as saying absolutely. I could say, hell with it I’m moving forward but I don’t want to go down a dead end road.