Category: Thoughts

Just got a confirmation from Websense:

Thank you for writing to Websense.

The site you submitted is a virtually hosted site that was not in our database. However, it shares an IP address with another site in our database which caused an unintended overblock. The site has been reviewed and categorized accordingly:

http://www.planetgs.com/ – Information Technology

Categorization updates should be available in the next scheduled publication of the database. A new database is published every business day, five days a week, Pacific Standard Time.

Thank you for your assistance,

The Websense Database Services Staff
J.B.
Friday, March 30, 2007 3:57:07 PM

So those who are getting the message saying that Planet Geospatial is a sex site, should be seeing GIS soon.

Jeff Harrison of The Carbon Project emailed me and some other folks that CarbonArc Lite is now free. CarbonArc Lite used to cost $495 per seat so this is major shift for The Carbon Project. Simply put, you can use CarbonArc Lite to connect to WMS and WFS services using ArcMap as well as work with GML. All you “executive types” can refer to the pretty brochure to learn more.

Your mileage may very as I was unable to get it to install. I’ll revisit it next week when I have more time to figure out what is going on. Looks like I can’t read the fine print. This version of CarbonArc Lite is only for ArcGIS 9.1 and I’m running 9.2. This won’t be a problem for long because Jeff tells me that a version for 9.2 should arrive in the next few months.

I know, I’ve been claiming that I’ve been working on a better Planet Geospatial than the one that currently exists for quite some time now. Well the good news is that its done and the DNS should be updating as we speak. The older Planet software was dated and couldn’t handle Atom feeds well (which is why half the feeds were a mess). Well I’ve switched to Sam Ruby’s new Planet branch, Planet Venus. I’ve been trying with little success to get running on my existing host (for probably 6 months now) and finally broke down and switched hosts (check out the new improved Planet Geospatial here for sneak peak). Give it some time for the DNS to get updated, probably about 48 hours for everyone to be running the new site. All the old urls should work after this transition and you’ll all be much happier with the result.

Thanks to Sean for helping out with me finding a new host and pestering me about the Atom support.

Expect some issues over the next day.

UPDATE 1 – there seems to be a configuration issue. I’m tracking it down so if you see a page that says “Not application mounted at the root of this domain”, just come back in a while and it will be resolved.

UPDATE 2 – everything appears to be working now. If you still get the old site, just keep checking back…

UPDATE 3 – Looks like Websense has reclassified PlanetGS as “Information Technology” so those who were getting blocked might be able to actually read Planet Geospatial now.

The ESRI Support Center News blog has a screen shot up with the draft look for the new support pages. I’m hopeful the search will be better than it currently is, but I see one change that hasn’t been made yet.

The 3 latest knowledge base entries are nice, but how about instead of linking to the knowledge base as a whole, link to a list of the latest knowledge base articles. If 5 new KB articles go up at one time, you’d miss at least 2 of them unless you knew where to look. This should be the default action for all those “Latest Addition” sections. There is no way to keep track of all the latest KB articles or even patches unless someone posts about there in the forums or on a blog.

Haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but those with the SpaceNavigator and ArcMap 9.2 might want to take a look at the work Jiro Shirota has done.

From the comments:

Demo movie:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8574975852358744167

Driver (dll / tlb)
http://www.simplespatial.net/Downloads/ArcMap3DconnexionDriver.zip

You will need .NET 2.0 runtime.

I went ahead and downloaded the trial for MapDotNet Server 2007 and installed it. The install went well after I installed VS2005 and IIS on my laptop (not sure how that happened). Anyway after opening VS2005, all I had to do was open up one of the templates and run the code.

I’m a little too busy today to get further into the code, but it looks very straitforward and easy to get up and running. The Wiki and forums give some insight of what is possible here. With support for ArcSDE it should be pretty easy to migrate to MapDotNet Server without much difficulty.

Now a couple of people have emailed me asking about price. You can see the costs at the I.S. Consulting website:

MapDotNet Pricing

MapDotNet Developer License $1000 ($US)
MapDotNet Runtime License $3800 ($US)

MapDotNet Maintenance

Maintenance for MapDotNet Runtime licenses is 20% of the retail license cost. The MapDotNet Developer license is always $1000 per year.

MapDotNet Maintenance includes:

• All MapDotNet Upgrades for one year.

• Access to the MapDotNet Support Portal including the Wiki, Forum and Blogs.

MapDotNet Developer Support

Developer Support is now available for MapDotNet customers. Developer Support is for customers that need programming help. No programming task is too difficult for the ISC Development Team. MapDotNet developer support is $200 per hour and is used in 15 minute increments. Support available for purchase at the time of the initial MapDotNet purchase or at crunch time.

I got the final 8 right too. As you can imagine I’m dominating my pool.

And no, it never turns out this way. I’m usually last because I think I know NCAA basketball.

I’ve been reading the MapDotNet Server Blog this morning and it’s an interesting read. One quote that makes you stop and think from the “Do Recent ESRI Survey Results Forecast Trouble?” entry:

We’re tracking the latest development in web based mapping from Microsoft: Virtual Earth. VE makes it too easy for all of these .NET developers to deliver as compared to the ArcGIS platform. Coupled with MapDotNet Server, VE makes a complete, robust and easy to use platform.

As was announced at the Dev Summit, here are the results for the ArcGIS Server Code Challenge.

• First Place – Hussein AlSayegh won a Trimble Recon GPS XB Edition bundled with ArcPad software for his AJAX TOC sample

• Second Place – a Microsoft Xbox 360 went to Ranjit Menon for his sample of persisting and retrieving data using a Server Object Extension

• Third Place – Sasa Ivetic won a Microsoft Zune for his control that sets the scale on a map

• An Honorable Mention went to John Waterman for his SOA example: ArcGIS Explorer and ArcMap Clients

At the .NET SIG, I asked the question about the cost of the licensing and the burden it places on developers. The response from ESRI was expected as we all know their reasons for charging the price, but a couple of people asked me what they can do about it. Well the best thing you can do is complain to ESRI. If they want to charge for another license of ArcGIS Server if you run the ADF on a separate server, then you need to let them know you can’t or won’t pay that. Some wondered why ESRI would bring up that they have large clients who think AGS is TOO INEXPENSIVE when most smaller customers can’t even keep their maintenance costs up to date. We all know that those ESRI customers who pay millions and millions for ESRI software and consulting do get beneficial treatment over those who have a couple licenses (and probably rightly so), but remember together we all add up to a big chunk of ESRI revenue.

All I can say if you are still unhappy with ESRI’s stance on this, just let them know. They listen to comments so if they see that “Cost of Web ADF” is a huge issue for a large number of people, they’ll respond. If the only people they hear are those large organizations saying they feel that ArcGIS Server should be $100k, then they’ll move that way.

ArcGIS costs are coming right at us!