Category: Thoughts

I got a bizarre email from Zillow last week:

Hello ,

Since you claimed your home at , you might like to know you’re part of the DISC neighborhood on Zillow. This is a brand-new feature – literally, we just rolled it out – and we would like to ask your help in getting it started.

By taking part in your Neighborhood Page on Zillow, you can help make Zillow a useful resource for other people like you.

Visit your DEMO Neighborhood Page now!

See you in the neighborhood,

Of course the links didn’t work and my neighborhood “DISC” seemed like a broken email. Now it appears that this email was a mistake and the new Zillow Neighborhood Page is now active. The folks in my neighborhood that registered with Zillow and some bizarre 2000 census information for people to learn about my neighborhood are mashed together with some sort of map. Zillow has written some pretty words about my neighborhood (and probably every other one) to help real estate agents sell their properties. According to Zillow:

Who Lives Here

Movers and Shakers
Mobile suburban couples without kids. More than 50% of these younger married couples have moved in the past five years. They earn comfortable incomes and work in management or professional careers. Some have completed college.

Country Clubbers
Wealthy married couples with children. These affluent families live a very comfortable life in the suburbs. More than 20% have a family income over $125,000. Most have earned a college or graduate school degree, and most own their homes.

Suburban Climbers
Younger suburban singles. Aspiring singles climbing the corporate ladder and calling the suburbs home. Age ranges from mid-20s to mid-40s. Most rent their homes.

People in my neighborhood are also more likely to “Drive to work alone”. Damn, they got me pegged perfectly (except for the part that I am more likely to speak Hindi) Seriously though, what are they going to write in that “who lives here”? I’m pretty sure every category is spun up to make it seem like everyone is living in Beverly Hills.

OK all joking aside, I find this somewhat unnerving. It isn’t that I don’t mind knowing who my neighbors are, its just that I’d rather meet them on the sidewalk and not in some virtual chat room.

There has been an upswing in Manifold comments and it appears that people need to get it out of their system. So rather than every post become Manifold v. XXXXX, post it here.

ArcGIS Online (and since ArcGIS Explorer uses ArcGIS Online as its source) has begun to add better imagery for Europe.

[S]atellite imagery for part of Europe has now been added to ArcGIS Online. This imagery has a resolution of 2.5 meters per pixel and covers most of France and parts of adjacent countries. Look for additional coverage to be published later this summer.

I’ll be honest, I don’t think is as good as I would have expected (at least compared to the imagery we get in the USA), but it is a start. The more that is added will only help make ArcGIS Explorer more useful for everyone.

The easiest way to get a look at this new imagery is to go download ArcGIS Explorer and take it for a spin.

I didn’t see much about this out of the 2007 User Conference, but an updated Technical Article spells it out.

ArcGIS 9.2 Desktop and ArcGIS 9.2 Engine are currently undergoing certification on the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system with the 9.2 SP4 release targeted for October/November, 2007. Please note that this certification will not include any of the ArcGIS 9.2 Server products.

That is news to me. Last I heard 9.3 was going to be the first version certified for Vista. A couple things come to mind here. First, those paying yearly maintenance will have Vista support in 2007 (rather than waiting for 9.3 in 2008) and the server stack will not be seeing Vista support at 9.2. Server support isn’t that big of a deal (at least as far as I can see), but on the desktop Vista support this fall is huge (my company is in the process of updating all our workstations and laptops to Vista soon so this is good news for us.

And of course it appears that the days of MapObjects on Windows is over.

MapObjects Windows 2.4 and MapObjects-Java 2.2 and 2.3 are not supported on the Windows Vista. ESRI is not certifying any new environments for MapObjects-Windows and there are no plans to support Vista with MapObjects-Java.

That is a shame really as MO is one of the best things to come out of ESRI ever (note to self, stop paying ESRI maintenance on MapObjects). Time to move to ArcGIS Engine.

Jeff, one of my coworkers, is working on a rendering in ArcScene for a client. Using ArcGIS with Google SketchUp makes our lives easier, but so does the 3D Warehouse. Jeff found the perfect model to put on our Navy Air Installations renderings.

Godzilla

The search at the 3D Warehouse has become hard to navigate because people tag their models with just about everything (hence this Godzilla model appeared in a search for “Airplane”).

• Mapperz (technically not new as I had removed it by mistake)
• GeoWeb Blog
• Making Maps: DIY Cartography
• GeoMusings (added back in)
• Thinking in GIS – Paolo Corti (again dropped for no reason)

There are quite a few ESRI blogs hosted at ESRI.com but there seems to be no easy way to keep track of them. I would have thought that they would be aggregated with the ESRI Blogs page, but that is even more confusing. Three blogs are list on the right, but none of those appear in the aggregator on the left. The two that appear in the aggregator don’t aren’t in the link list on the right. And I don’t see the ESRI Support Blog listed at all. The whole ESRI Blog page has been kind of hit and miss since it first appeared, but if they could just aggregate all their blogs on that page and list them on the right that would improve it immensely.

Actually adding OMPL might be handy too and a RSS feed for all the ESRI blogs (like how Planet Geospatial does it) should be offered also.

Everything is just fine with RSS

I’ve been trying to update my RSS feeds today (while the wife is outside doing yardwork) to make sure they are all still active. In turn I’ve updated my GIS Links page with the blogs that I am subscribed to. You can also grab the OPML files there if you wish.

I have to give it to Paul, I think this is a risky move. There are so many sessions that I suspect many will give up voting after a while. That said if you are up to the challenge and are going to the FOSS4G, you should probably go vote for what you want to see. So if you want to get into that open source spirit, now is the time.

It seems like there is almost one a month to me. I was looking at mapping all the 4th of July fireworks displays in the valley to see which one we want to go to this year (we’ll probably go to Tempe’s) though where might be the least of our problems. As I was panning around I noticed that the imagery in the Phoenix area has much larger coverage than before. A quick Google search reveals that there was a HUGE update to the imagery for Virtual Earth. In many areas, Virtual Earth has surpassed Google Maps/Earth in the imagery/3D models. I’m actually finding myself using Virtual Earth for my mapping needs these days, rather than Google Maps. I just love saving my points of interest to collections.