Category: Thoughts

Worried with what to replace your SlashGeo bookmark with? Well why not check out the GeoWeb Blog. GeoWeb 2007 is July 23-27th so if you are going or just want to keep track of what will be going on you’ll want to pay attention.

The Slashgeo.org project has come to an end. Or at least in serious hiatus until the context significantly evolves. Over the last two years, Slashgeo has been a source of enjoyment and stress. As much as it has been fun, it slowly became more of a responsibility then a rewarding project.

Slashgeo’s Site Closing or in Indefinite Hiatus. Thank you.

Best of luck to Alex in whatever he does.

What a morning… We come in to the office to smoke and the smell of burning electronics. Our huge A/C unit had died a horrible death… With no A/C, working in a glass building with no insulation (but its a hip/cool looking building and THAT is what matters), horrible smell and servers screaming for cool air, it might be time to cut my losses and go home. No VPN since we’ll probably have to shut the servers down despite the portable A/C unit on them since they are too hot.

And the National Weather Service isn’t helping!

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ 354 AM MST MON JUL 2 2007

HOTTEST WEATHER OF THE YEAR EXPECTED BY TUESDAY AND THE FOURTH OF JULY.

…HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 10 AM THIS MORNING TO 8 PM MST THIS EVENING..
…EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH IN EFFECT FROM TUESDAY MORNING THROUGH TUESDAY EVENING..

Why does this never happen on Fridays? 😉

That was an email I got last night from a reader. They like all of us were amazed at what she was seeing. The solution is not that hard to imagine though. Most of the problem we run into is processing power and bandwidth. None of us can afford the server farms and the racks and racks of servers that Google can deploy. But that isn’t a problem. If I were ESRI, I’d be looking at allowing their customers/clients to use Amazon Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for hosting and processing. The cost of such services is amazingly low and you can take advantage of Amazon’s infrastructure to offload some of the processing on it. Sure it won’t be “Google Fast”, but it will get you as close as you can get without being at Google.

The day I can spend an hour fighting Google Maps to get a route that covers all lower 48 states is the day I’m finally a Google Maps convert. Typing in city name is for wimps. Dragging that blue line all over the country, now that is GIS baby!

Sure it isn’t efficient, but the Google servers are slow and I gotta get back to work. Now all they need is save to KML.

Frank has the info on how to create KML (append &output=kml to the end of the permalink), but my 48 state route doesn’t seem to work.

There is somewhat of an announcement on the ArcGIS Explorer Blog about the next release of ArcGIS Explorer.

In the Showcase and at the sessions we were using both the currently available public download (Build 380) and also showing one of the more recent software builds (Build 392) to highlight some of the new features that you can look forward to in the next release. This upcoming release of Explorer will continue to evolve for a few more weeks and will be delivered sometime in July.

Not much there, but I assume some better KML support (2.0/2.1?) and maybe some increase in speed. I’d love to roll out some AGX applications internally at my company, but I’m sticking with the .NET Web ADF for now.

** Mechagodzilla is better than old AGX Godzilla **

I got an email from someone who likes Planet Geospatial, but wants to know when and what feeds I add so they can update their feed reader. I used to have a change log, but that got a little behind so I figure I’ll just blog when I add feeds. The 5 6 latest feeds I’ve added to Planet Geospatial are:

1. Fiducial Marks
2. Lin.ear th.inking
3. Urban Mapping Blog
4. Geospatial Semantic Web Blog
5. sauerkraut
6. map butcher

OK, well maybe not on the Simpsons… But if I was, this is how I’d look.

Love the Simpsons Movie Avatar Generator….

OK, so most of us have their inetpub directories at “c:inetpub”, but not all. I’m one of those people. For reasons I cannot recall, my inetpub directory is on my “d:” drive. But that isn’t a problem is it? Well if you try and install either ArcGIS Server or ArcIMS 9.2 you’ll notice that ESRI assumes that everyone has their inetpub directory at “c:”. I figured this out after a couple minutes of a blank ArcGIS Server Manager page. I went into IIS Manager and noticed that Manager was pointing to “d:InetpubwwwrootArcGISManager” which of course didn’t exist. The post install was nice enough to create “c:InetpubwwwrootArcGISManager” but that isn’t where my inetpub directory is located.

So I went back into the GIS Server Post Install just to double check and make sure that I didn’t miss something.

And the Install Summary doesn’t reveal much.

GIS Server Post Install Summary

Input config file: C:Documents and SettingsFeeMy Documentsagspostinstall.xml

Configure as server object manager.
Configure as server object container.

ArcGIS SOM account: ArcGISSOM
ArcGIS SOC account: ArcGISSOC
ArcGIS WebServices account: ArcGISWebServices

Server directories:
Output directory: c:arcgisserverarcgisoutput
Cache directory: c:arcgisserverarcgiscache
Jobs directory: c:arcgisserverarcgisjobs

Virtual directories:
Output virtual directory: http://localhost/arcgisoutput
Cache virtual directory: http://localhost/arcgiscache
Jobs virtual directory: http://localhost/arcgisjobs

And heaven forbid if you try and install to a computer that doesn’t have a “c:” drive. Anyway, this probably needs to be address at some point. So if this happens to you, just copy the “c:InetpubwwwrootArcGIS” folder to your IIS drive.

**Update: **JT points out a KB article that explains the why and how to fix the issue. Yea, its a huge PITA.

**Update 2: **Word from ESRI is that this will be fixed at the next release.

So what was the story on the Thursday night party being in a parking lot? I’m looking at some uploaded photos in Flickr and it looks bizzare compared to previous years. Did the “American Road Trip” theme result in putting the party in a parking lot or did the theme come about because it was in a parking lot.