Category: Thoughts

I’ve been behind today, but seeing an ESRI press release (yes I was happy to see a PR) about an out of print book being released as a new edition is exciting.

A new edition of renowned Swiss cartographer Eduard Imhof’s classic Cartographic Relief Presentation will be released by ESRI Press in June, showcasing the skillful draftsmanship, artistry, and science that went into his relief maps.

Last published 25 years ago and difficult to find since going out of print, this book will continue to instruct and inspire cartographers, geographers, geographic information system (GIS) mapmakers and cartographic scholars and students in the 21st century.

…

The 1982 edition of Cartographic Relief Presentation was expensive and had a limited press run that made it a rare find in recent years, leaving cartographers and other map aficionados scouring bookstores and checking Internet sites to try to locate copies of a book they consider a masterpiece.

The new volume is affordable, and faithful to the original editions. ESRI Press retained Imhof’s valuable insights and teachings, only editing the text for clarity and consistency and making minor wording and punctuation changes. The color and black and white graphics were reproduced as they appeared in the 1982 English language edition, which was translated from Imhof’s 1965 German language version, Kartographische Gel?ndedarstellung.

I’ve never seen the book personally, but I know many a conversation over lunch that someone has mentioned reading the book before. Now it won’t be out until late June (even after the UC), but I’m buying my copy right now. I looked into buying a used copy for a friend and they were going for over $300 at the time (I can’t even find a copy for sale right now).

If you receive the email subscription to Planet Geospatial, you’ll need to update your email again. I’ve tried to work with FeedBurner to recover the email subscription list, but they can’t do that.

So, if you want to renew your Planet Geospatial email subscription (there were about 400 of you), you’ll need to sign up again.

Subscribe to Planet Geospatial by Email

Note: You won’t have to update your email subscription to my blog as that didn’t get “deleted”, just the Planet Geospatial email list.

Something has happened at Feedburner and the PlanetGS RSS feed has been deleted. They are working at bringing it back, but I’m not too hopeful that they’ll get it straitened out. The smart thing to do is just use the native Atom feed below.

http://www.planetgs.com/atom.xml

No sooner than I posted the screenshots of MetaCarta on a stick, did I get an email from an ArcGIS user asking how they heck do they get to “install” and play with such a tool. Well as luck would have it, ESRI took care of the hardest part of running MetaCarta Labs on a stick on windows, installing Python. Plus, you don’t have to install a thing so if your IT staff has you workstation locked down tight, you can still play with the tools. The 5 step process is below:

Grab your USB memory stick (you’ll need about 10 megs free)

Then download the zip version of MetaCarta Labs on a stick and extract it on to your USB stick (or anywhere on your hard drive if you wish).

Navigate to the “labs-on-a-stick-0.5” folder and find the “http_server.py” file and double click on it

After a couple seconds you should see the http server come up inside your command window.

Next all you have to do is follow the directions and navigate to http://localhost:8080/ and view the demos and watch any of the videos.

And of course you can check out FeatureServer, running right there on your USB memory stick.

As Lefty points out, thank ESRI for installing Python for you.

What can I say, pretty sweet! Running it is simple as pie.

Sure, LiveCDs are fun, but running applications on a flash usb memory stick is where its at.

MetaCarta Labs has assembled a collection of demos which can be run with no external dependancies. With a MetaCarta Labs USB stick, you simply insert the USB drive into the USB port, and double click the ‘run’ script for your platform to start up a local web server.

The web server is Python-based, and Python is included for Windows, where it is not typically installed by default.

Not a bad way to check out the new FeatureServer without having to install anything. Of course you’ll have to build it yourself, but that’s half the fun isn’t it? A preliminary download is available on the page.

Christopher Schmidt set up an IRC channel and we’ve started talking shop. I’ve put the coordinates on the Planet Geospatial page, but you can grab them here if you wish.

Planet Geospatial IRC
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #planetgeospatial

Update – Christopher has a web based IRC client for those who can’t install or use IRC on their workstations.

A couple folks asked if I was going to the UC this year so I figured I’d post my plans.

I’m not planning on going; I’ve got my complementary pass, but I’m June is the worst time for me between workload and moving into the new house (not to mention a wedding I have to attend in Laguna Niguel, CA the week before). So you’ll have to enjoy the festival without me. I’ll just watch from my couch. The Dev Summit is better anyway…

Well the results are in and posted over at the ESRI Support Blog.

we’re going to focus on the Search Results (because you really really want improvement there), and RSS Feeds. Why RSS Feeds? Because they’re relatively straightforward to implement, and it makes good sense to have them: if we (as a Community) are going to be making improvements to various Support Center content, RSS feeds can help everyone become aware of that improved content.

Cool, those were my two big ones.

A minor changes to ArcGIS Online is happening today.

On May 23, 2007, the services on ArcGIS Online will be organized into a basic folder structure. This change will help make ArcGIS Online services easier to locate when you add them to your maps and globes. You will need to update the service reference information in any existing maps, globes, and Web applications that use the affected services.

Not all services will be removed from the root (and as of this post they haven’t removed any yet, just duplicated them into the new folders). Of course this means you’ll have to update your links to the new files and ESRI has posted instructions (strangely as a news item and not a KB or technical article) on the ArcGIS Online site about how to do this.