Category: Thoughts

Well I was trying to fix something that I didn’t understand and totally hosed Planet Geospatial. It will slowly come back online so bear with me.

I sense anger in commentators so maybe it is time for another open thread.

I love it when programs tell you that they CAN’T do something. This was on the difficult operation of File > Exit. You can guess that after clicking OK the program crashed.

I’m sure we can chalk this up to “webmaster error”, but as of this posting, there are no ArcGIS Server posts prior to today. Now is your chance to become ArcGIS Server MVP! 😉

Seriously though, I assume this is a result of creating a new ArcGIS Server forum for the combined ArcGIS Server and ArcSDE and then just removing the old forum from the list. I can’t imagine that everything is lost and I bet you’ll see an ArcGIS Server 9.1 forum appear soon.

As of right now, if you search for any information about ArcGIS Server, you get only the results for 30 posts. That is right, only 30 forum posts exist right now for ArcGIS Server on the support site. People are going to be grumpy.

**Update – **from the comments:

We are working on restoring the old forums threads now and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

**Update 2 – **from the forums:

Hello ArcGIS Server users,

All of the old posts have been republished to our site, and we will be working to fold them into the new structure.

Our apologies for the confusion and any inconvenience caused by these changes.

I’ve been getting a couple of readers panicked that they haven’t received ArcGIS 9.2 yet and there is already a Service Pack on the way. I’ll just repeat here what I’ve been emailing back, I have no idea why you haven’t received your copy yet. The best thing to do is talk to your ESRI sales rep, they’ll know right away where your copy is and might even get it to you faster. Then when it shows up, you too can be excited.

Sean McGinnis posted in my comments that ESRI has released a whitepaper to help with migration of ArcGIS Server products to 9.2. Some points of note are (some of this is rehash if you’ve been following, but just to recap I’ll post the big stuff):

ArcGIS Server now comes in 6 versions depending on functionality:

With the release of 9.2, ArcGIS Server is offered in six new product options distinguished by functionality (Advanced, Standard, and Basic) and by scalability (Enterprise and Workgroup). A description of ArcGIS Server product options is provided as an appendix to this document.

ArcSDE is no longer a stand alone product but part of ArcGIS Server, but basically the licensing hasn’t changed, but your maintenance now is for ArcGIS Server Enterprise Basic:

With the 9.2 release, ArcSDE is included with ArcGIS Server and is no longer sold separately.

ArcIMS continues to be sold, but now ESRI provides the a license of ArcGIS Server Standard Workgroup with it:

ArcIMS will continue to be available as a separate product, and we are providing ArcIMS customers with an equivalent version of ArcGIS Server with their 9.2 maintenance updates.

Now what about that whole ADF issue?

The 9.2 license includes the right for one developer to use the Web ADF/SDK per licensed socket pair.

If you had deployed ArcIMS 9.1 Application Server Connectors or ArcGIS Server 9.1 Web ADF/Runtime on a separate machine you are grandfathered in.

You can only use the additional ArcGIS Server license on the current server hardware as configured for the Application Server Connectors or Web ADF/Runtime deployment at the time ArcGIS Server software is shipped

Deploying additional Web ADF/Runtimes requires an additional license fee.

So if you haven’t deployed on a different server than ArcIMS or ArcGIS Server is running on at the time 9.2 shipped, you’ll have to shell out money for the Web ADF even if you don’t plan to run it on the same server.

Now what about serving up 3D Globes?

The ArcGIS Server 3D extension is included with ArcGIS Server Standard or Advanced to generate globe data cache(s) or publish a globe document as an ArcGIS globe service.

With Standard, you’ll be able to serve up globes, but not perform any analysis on them without buying the 3D extension.

And online editing of GIS datasets?

The editing functionality included with ArcGIS Server is permitted for use only with ArcGIS Server Advanced.

The PDF goes into much greater detail so I encourage everyone to read it so they understand what changes are happening at 9.2 and plan for them.

I’ve decided to just throw everything out and begin with the basics of Manifold. The first thing I think would be to create a simple map. When you open up Manifold 7x you see the following:

The project tab on the right is somewhat like the “Solution Explorer” in Visual Studio, but a little different. You cannot drag and drop files onto project area which to me was quite restricting. I would have loved to just grab a ton of shapefiles and drop them right there, but you have to use a different method to add a shapefile. Manifold calls these datalayers “Drawings”. I won’t get too much into what you can do with drawings as the help does a pretty good job of that, but think of each drawing as a dataset. If you have 20 GIS layers in your project, you’d have at least that many drawings and images (images are rasters in Manifold). Because you can’t drag and drop datasets into Manifold, you have to use the import function.

In this case you see that I choose to import a drawing, but you have other choices too. Now you browse to where you shapefile is located and choose the type of file below. I found this very counter intuitive as I would have though the default would be all possible drawing files rather than having to choose just one. Microsoft Office has an “all files” option and I would have though Manifold would too. So to see shapefiles, you have to choose the type below. One other thing that annoyed me about this import was that it kept dropping me back into My Documents. If all your files are in one directory this isn’t a problem, but after I add a shapefile I have to go back to the import and start all over again. When you find the shapefile you want, you get some options to specify and then it you have your drawing.

You’ll see below how the drawing looks after the shapefile was imported. The toolbars give you access to the colors and other symbology that you might want to set. Repeat these steps for every dataset you want to bring into Manifold.

Now if you want to make a map with these drawings, you create a new map in the project.

You then choose the drawings (or other types) that you want to see in this map, pretty straightforward.

Finally you see your new map showing all the drawing files you selected. Again you make changes to the map by using the toolbars. One thing what was a little counterintuitive was changing the order of the drawings. Those tabs at the bottom can be moved around like the worksheets in Excel. The one to the left is on the “top” and the one on the right is on the “bottom”. Logically I’d say that this should be vertical as every drawing program I know does it this way.

Now to create a “layout” you’ll need to right click on the map you wish to produce and choose “layout”

Again you get to set some options.

And then you get the layout view. The toolbar gives you the option of scalebars, north arrows, graphic lines, text, etc. Then all you have to do is right click and print.

Now I’ll be honest, this have been very difficult for me coming from an Autocad/Arcinfo background. Things are intuitive to me at all. But to be fair, neither was ArcView 2 when it first arrived. With work I’m sure this would all become second nature, but to me I felt like banging my head though my desk. I don’t really care too much about creating printable maps in Manifold as that isn’t what is interesting me. I’m going to start delving deeper into some of the analysis and KML export tools to see what one can do with this product.

DISCLOSURE – This copy of Manifold was provided to me by Manifold for evaluation.

As many can attest, mining is big business in the west. Right in Arizona, we have some of the largest copper mines in the world and one of the largest copper mining companies headquartered here. School children learn about the “5 C’s” of Arizona (Climate, Citrus, Cotton, Cattle and Copper) and it is even included in our state seal (see like little guy on the left mining copper?).

The Environmental Working Group has set up a website devoted to educating people about the affects of mining currently on the western USA and the possible impacts in the future. You can zoom into individual state or mines and see the landscape, current and future mining claims and even get a KML link to view in Google Earth. So you can see the impacts today and possible future impacts to the landscape and environment in the future.

[Pinto Valley Op. (Miami, AZ)

Mines in Google Earth (kml download)

With Uranium mining a hot topic out west, understanding the impacts of such mining is important for all of us. Those who pay are usually the ones who don’t benefit from mining.

Update – Not only Native American’s, but the poor who live in these old mining towns. Would you want to live downstream from this mine? Many times when I go fly fishing in the west I have to wonder what am I wading into when I cross a stream.

My admin has been on my case all week (I’ve been in a foul mood for stupid reasons) about getting into the Christmas spirit. Fine, I got a Christmas tree on my desk now. Ho Ho Ho!

GeoChat for ArcMap has been out for a while and just got updated for ArcGIS 9.2. Hot on the heels of that release comes GeoChat for ArcGIS Explorer. I speculated that it might make sense for Google to add such functionality to Google Earth, but here comes ESRI and GeoChat first to the table. Richie has some great screenshots of GeoChat running on his blog and you can download it here. Now users in different locations can collaborate using a digital globe application. The possibilities are endless here, all you need in a jabber account (like Google Talk) and ArcGIS Explorer (well .NET 2.0 too, but don’t we all have that? 😉 ).