Category: Thoughts

Yea, thanks for all the emails. I’m not sure what Google is up to, but whatever they did caused every Blogger blog to spam Planet Geospatial. It should pass eventually. Right now it doesn’t matter if you use FeedBurner or not as every Blogger feed has been reset for some reason.

We all know the benefits to using clients such as Google Earth over traditional web based mapping systems, but that doesn’t seem to matter much in the real world. I’ve been running up against an IT wall at many companies and organizations to getting Google Earth or even NASA World Wind installed (let along AGX when that arrives in November). Brian Timoney put it very well when he said in the comments over at All Points Blog; “While it certainly would be in my best interest for GE to be ‘the next cool thing’ in IT, my sense is that it’s not going to happen anytime soon given the current licensing for its use in professional environments.”. We work primarily with DoD clients and Google Earth/NASA World Wind or even ArcGIS Explorer penetration is almost non-existent. Sure we find pockets of GE, but generally anything we demo on Google Earth usually gets pushed aside with the realities of the work place.

So what does that mean for us in the long run? Well already we try and serve up KML using Google Maps, but you’ll see very quickly that GMap doesn’t do quite the best just just yet rendering KML. So for now, I think we’ll be putting our efforts into the new ESRI .NET Web ADF (combined with some really cool Virtual Earth stuff) and implement KML only where we see a need. For now, the efforts at getting these clients installed is too great for us to deal with. At least with web based clients I don’t need to worry about installing anything on clients computers.

Adobe Acrobat used to be in the same boat, but now it is almost impossible to find a computer without Acrobat on it. Only time will tell if Google Earth follows that same pattern and if so will it take 5 years for such implementation. Of course if they continue to charge $400, it could be close to never.

The family took a Sunday drive over to the “west side” of Phoenix to look at some artwork that the wife was really interesting in buying. Of course it was in a new area of town that her Acura DVD navigation didn’t have yet. When we got home I logged on to Acura’s website to see if there was an update to our navigation DVD. Of course there was and when I notified Nicky that she could get an updated version she seemed confused. I explained that she had an older version of the navigation DVD and all we had to do is shell out a couple hundred dollars for the new DVD and the world would be happy. She responded that she didn’t care. Flabbergasted I asked how can she drive with an out of date navigation DVD. Her reply? “Because we don’t live there, and our side of town is up to date”.

How can she live knowing her navigation DVD is out of date!?!?!?!?! Sigh, better not fight on this one as it isn’t even my car. (plus she keeps making fun of me for this weekend anyway).

I guess since the previous version just didn’t work, Manifold has released an updated version of their beta toolbar.

There is a new beta release of the Manifold toolbar. See

http://www.manifold.net/toolbar

for the download. Please remember to uninstall the previous version using the Windows Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs applet before installing the new version.

The new version supports the IE 7 beta, automatically detects proxy settings when Virtual Earth modules are used and fixes some miscellaneous bugs. See the URL above for notes.

As I said, I’m not a toolbar users, but to be fair to all those who downloaded the previous version and didn’t get to try it I figured I’d post this update. Manifold users are using words like “fantastic”, “cool” and “fun” to describe the latest version. Personally I just don’t see the need for YAT (yet another toolbar), but I guess some enjoy it.

I’ve noticed that whatever Google is doing, they are screwing up the Planet GS feeds. Even using FeedBurner, the issues still rear their ugly head and the new beta Blogger doesn’t seem to matter at all. Even non Blogger feeds such as The Earth is Square and Ed Parson’s blog are being screwed up by them. I’ve tried everything in my power to get it working, but I’m at a loss. I know it is blogger because of the ASCII errors I’m getting and the simple fact that if I remove every Blogger feed, the darn thing works like a charm.

So if you notice your blog missing from the hourly Planet Geospatial build, thank Blogger. There is not much I can do at this point at least until I find some time to debug some more.

A note from Jared on the status of the migration to the Internet Archive:

I spoke with the guy at the Internet Archive who is supposed to get the data moved over. He unfortunately has been caught up on their September 11th archive project.

When I pushed for a time frame of when he could get the data moved to a real web server he said, “a few days to a week”.

At that point it will basically just be an index page with folders to download the files.

I’ve also started sending them metadata so that they will show up in their website search. On my end, I need to go through all the data and take a better inventory of anything that might be missing.

But my for basic access to the data, my fingers are crossed for within a week.

-jared

Are you kidding me? What is this 1999? Oh but of course as The Earth is Square points out, it all has to do with giving Google the middle finger.

manifold.net recommends use of Microsoft Virtual Earth (the default installation) instead of Google servers for several reasons:

• Virtual Earth has a more even appearance in large scales.
• Virtual Earth does not interrupt service to active users, as Google has been known to do.
• Virtual Earth does not “watermark” images with a disfiguring logo as Google does.
• Virtual Earth has better resolution in many (but not all) locations.
• Microsoft has supported developers working on alternatives to Microsoft’s own geographic browsers.

Rule number one is never cross or speak ill of Manifold.

Rob Elkins writes that he’s liking the sound of these new fancy processors, but I have to ask when is ESRI going to start supporting them with ArcGIS?

Of course the big rumor at the UC was that ESRI was totally rewriting ArcGIS at version 10.0 so maybe this new architecture takes advantage of multi-core and 64-bit. Don’t bother contacting your ESRI rep as I’m sure this is probably 2 years away. In the meantime I guess we can just use Manifold right? (had to get that in before someone commented about it).

We use both, but only because our Creative Studio licenses include GoLive (though I used GoLive Cyberstudio years ago). Well now we can stop paying for that Dreamweaver license. GoLive will still be available as a separate product, but those who have relied on GoLive being part of Creative Studio will need to fork up some more money.

Brian Flood was kind enough to give me a sneak peak at his latest Arc2Earth extension for ArcGIS that takes advantage of Google Earth’s new time-based KML tags. The Arc2Earth implementation of time is pretty slick and you can wait for Brian to post about it as he’s a better showman than I am. (**Update – **Brian has blogged about the release) Anyway I was able to take some GPS sitings of some threatened and endangered species such as the Coastal California gnatcatcher, Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, Least Bell’s Vireo and Arroyo Southwestern Toad data from the coastal areas of San Diego County and animate it right inside Google Earth using the new time controls. We’ve been using ArcReader and Adobe Acrobat in the past because it was the simplest way to get the data to the biologists, but now using Google Earth, the biologists can view the changes in the distribution of species very simply. I took some thinking on how to best organize it for Google Earth, but once I figured that out, it was smooth sailing.

This all brings up something important to ESRI ArcGIS users at 9.2 that I’ve been meaning to post about. Tim Whiteaker over at the University of Texas at Austin has a great walk-though on how to use netCDF with ArcGIS 9.2 including sample data. There are so many ways time animation can add value to your analysis and this fall the tools to accomplish this task are becoming much easier to use.