Category: Thoughts

Peter’s blogging about desktop GIS choices on the Macintosh. He’s taking QGIS, uDig and Thuban for a spin. Many associate only the old ArcView 3.0 on Classic MacOS as the only desktop GIS choice, but as you can see there are even better choices than ArcView on the Macintosh. I’m interesting in reading what he finds out.

I was cleaning out my desk preparing for a move downstairs (doesn’t sound too positive does it, but we are turning my office into a conference room) and I saw a disk for ArcVoyager. Bet some of you might remember that name, I sure had forgotten about it though. Take a look at this great screen shot that ESRI has on the ArcVoyager page (I’m still amazed at how many MS Windows 3.11 screen shots ESRI has still posted on their website and marketing materials).

Anyway, does ESRI still support this program? I mean even though the web page does say, “ArcVoyager was built so that little support would be necessary.” I’m guessing that at some level ESRI is still pushing ArcVoyager.

Of course finding this ArcVoyager disk isn’t as cool as the PC ARC/INFO floppy disk that reader Mapperz emailed me. I have a PC ARC/INFO 3.5.1 CD-ROM disk that I haven’t used in years, but that doesn’t beat 3.5” floppy PC ARC/INFO.

I’ve got 3 Vox invites for anyone who wants them. For those who don’t know, Vox is Six Apart’s new “personal blogging service; sort of an adult MySpace/LiveJournal/Typepad combo (if that makes any sense). Just post in this thread and make sure the email field is correct (the email field is hidden to all except me).

I haven’t seen any mention, but maybe I’m not paying attention in the right places.

Wow, take a look at that sponsor list. I haven’t been to the website in quite some time as I’ve never had plans to go (though give how hot it has been this summer maybe that would have been a good idea). Seems like every important geospatial company seems to be there.

I’ve a little behind in my reading, so I was happy to catch this news from Jeffrey Friedl’s blog:

“I’ve finally finished the writing and production of the Third Edition of my book, Mastering Regular Expressions (published by O’Reilly Media). I’d been working on it since the early fall, and finished the day before my travels started earlier this month.

This third edition is 58 pages longer than the second edition, and now reaches 542 pages in length. The main changes from the second edition are a new, 48-page chapter on PHP, and a rewritten/expanded Java chapter taking into account the many java.until.regex changes between Java 1.4 and Java 1.5/Java 1.6.

I have to admit, I do own both first and second editions of Jeffrey’s book and I’m going to be getting his third edition too.

Many times we all see people using GIS in a way to make a point. We all know maps lie so that is why special interest groups take to maps more than any other format. I happened to see a link on Ogle Earth showing the worst gerrymandered districts in the U.S. Congress. I’m not saying that this information is not useful, but when you add a statement like this on your readme it shows either you are uninformed or you have an ulterior motive.

“We leave it open as a challenge to the GIS community to come up with some algorithm for creating districts that is both “fair” and which cannot be misused by politicians.”

OK, I can’t speak to other states, but Arizona has an Independent Redistricting Commission made up of five members: two Democrats, two Republicans, and one Independent. They look at many factors and try and eliminate gerrymandered districts. OK so why did they end up with Arizona Congressional District 2? Well there was a huge feud between the Navajo and Hopi tribes about representation and the Hopi Tribe was worried about being canceled out by the larger Navajo tribe in Washington (there is much history here between the two tribes so you might want to read up a little on that to see what this is such a big deal here in Arizona). So that is why you have the second district running all the way around the mollogon rim to get to the Hopi Reservation (take a look at this map on the Hopi visitor page. Now you see what that district includes). Beyond that issue, you also have to deal with a very urban state. Most of the population of Arizona is in the large cities of Phoenix and Tucson so you have to work around including millions of acres that have almost no population with those compact highly populated counties of Maricopa and Pima.

The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission is tasked with creating competitive districts so in a state like Arizona, you’ll end up with districts that will have a little gerrymandering in them to try and capture equal votes. Sure that doesn’t explain district 2, but as I said the Hopi/Navajo feud is a very big deal. Oh and guess what? The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission uses GIS to distribute the district boundaries in a fair method and provides Shapefiles and even Maptitude files for citizens to review.

You can bash the legislative districts all you want and I’ll agree there are some really bad ones out there, but to blindly include Arizona’s Second District and claim that the citizens of Arizona don’t understand the issue is an insult to everything we have done here. The citizens of Arizona voted for Proposition 106 in the 2000 General Election for the purpose of creating competitive districts. I have to question the motives of the creator of this Google Earth KML when the call out a district in a state that has voted for an independent redistricting commission. Either they don’t have a clue about what they are talking about or they have an ulterior motive beyond fair districting.

Lets take one quick look at the Arizona Congressional District Map.

Knowing what you now know about the Hopi/Navajo issues, I think you’d say that the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission did a very good job, don’t you?

Update – Thanks to b99 in the comments of this post for finding the actual 2006 Georgia redistricting plan which as you can see is very different from the one presented in the Google Earth KML. Yet another nail in the coffin of this KML exercise.

Is it just me or is the Plenary Session at the 2005 UC a little lite on the future road map of ArcGIS and ESRI? Sure we have Jack’s GIS vision leading off as usual, but then there is only 90 minutes after where Jack and the ESRI staff will be demoing ArcGIS and other ESRI products. Seems like only a couple years ago where they’d spend much more time showing the road map and those cool unrealistic products (anyone remember the wearable computer from a couple years ago). Now we have Jack’s vision and then a couple product demos. Maybe this stuff used to impress me more, but I used to get excited to see these Plenary sessions, maybe this one will be as good as some of the older one’s, but I’m just not feeling it this year. With 9.2 arriving this fall, I guess I was expecting more from ESRI as far as promoting. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Chad Zimmerman pointed me to the new release of Dapple. I have to say, I am impressed. Here Geosoft took the open source code of NASA World Wind and modified it to better meet the needs of their users. I mean you could create your own Geographic Exploration System (GES) from scratch, but it makes much more business sense to take an existing open source GES and modify it for your own needs and in turn improve the whole open source project as a whole. One could work within the Google Earth universe, but that limits you as to what you can do on the client side. At some point ESRI will release ArcGIS Explorer and its API, but you still don’t have the kind of control over the project as you would with an open source GES such as NASA World Wind.

Well back to Dapple, the GUI seems definitely inspired by Google Earth which is a good thing to make users feel at home. No matter how pretty the NASA World Wind interface looks, I know that many are scared off from the non-Windows appearance that it gives off. I like how the table of contents of the map services is laid out, how easy it is to set transparency. I was creating pretty cool maps in no time. The improved WMS support gives you so much more ability to overlay map services that you can find on the Internet. I’d like to see some ArcIMS support as I’d still wager that ArcIMS dominates the web mapping field (at least in the areas I’m familiar with, I don’t get to Canada too much).

I’m going to spend some time this week checking out Dapple and see what it can do. I’ll probably also take a look at SERVIR-VIZ which was posted in the comments of this blog. The only drawback I see is that it requires you to uninstall any previous SERVIR-VIZ (not a problem) or NASA World Wind (big problem) on your computer.

Well that might be a big title for this post, but I was talking with some folks over the weekend about software you’ve used or software that has really influenced your life. I think many people say Google Earth has changed how they view data, but for me it really wasn’t that impressive since Google Earth is more of a validation of what we’ve done over the years than a life changer. So they pushed, what has changed your life if Google Earth isn’t it. I needed to think about it somewhat so you can consider this my reply to that question (in order of importance).

1. Apple HyperCard – I really wasn’t into programming when I was younger. I spent most of my time away from computers and out playing sports. That is until I found HyperCard. OK, HyperCard is more scripting than pure programming, but it got me interested. From there I moved into Pascal and down the line into VB/C++ and .NET. Actually if you think about HyperCard, it is sort of like how the world wide web became. Hyperlinks take you to new cards, scripts run in the background. Way before its time.
2. ArcInfo – Wow, you’d think it would be #1, but without HyperCard, I’m not sure I’d be where I am today. That said, I still remember the day I first saw someone create a map in ArcInfo and how quickly they were able to make changes vs my “traditional” methods. I love it all, from ArcEdit (no so much ArcPlot) to GRID and TIN. I’m sure I’d be a city planner right now (not that there is anything wrong with that) and not a GIS developer if I had not seen ArcInfo.
3. BBEdit – I graduated college really before web development took off (I was more of a Gopher/Veronica user), but once it did I quickly discovered BBEdit. I’m still a registered user even though I currently don’t have a Mac in my position. When that 17” MacBook Pro shows up, BBEdit will be the first program loaded up. We all have our favorite text editors and this is mine
4. Aldus/Macromedia Freehand – Before ArcInfo, I used to use Freehand for my cartography. I never was very into pen and paper cartography and I was much better as smudging my work than making it look good. With Freehand I could scan in maps and digitize, work to scale and pretty much everything I do these days with ArcMap (well of course there was no database on the back end). I stopped using Freehand around 1998 when the company I was working for forced us to start using Illustrator. I still use Adobe Illustrator to this day, but it was Freehand that got me thinking about digital mapping.
5. ArcView 3.x – I’m not sure GIS would have the penetration it has today if ArcView 3.x didn’t come along with Avenue. ArcView was installed anywhere and everywhere. It was used as an Internet Map Server, replacement for ArcInfo and just about everything in between. A good Avenue programmer could make ArcView 3.x do things that used to take programmers that cost 10 times as much to accomplish. Of course you have to wonder given its large install base, how many copies were actually purchased. Missed revenue perhaps? Maybe not considering how locked into ESRI software many companies and organizations are these days. Might not have happened without ArcView 3.x. Our company spent many years developing customized ArcView projects and extensions. It was a very good business to be in back then.

What about other important software? Well programs like WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and others did affect me, but I’m not sure they were as “life changing” as the ones listed above. I’m sure I’m missing one or two that are just as important as those I’ve listed (I did spend a year of my life playing MacBolo in college).

A couple of you have emailed me asking how the heck to they figure out if they have Service Pack 2 installed. Most people seem to make a quick check of the program “About Box” to see what version they have:

Well anyone who has ever taken a look knows that ESRI software doesn’t report the service pack (though ArcView sort of reports that it has the 3.2a “update” installed). ESRI is nice enough to have a “Service Pack Finder” tool available on their support site that identifies what version you have installed and if there is an update.

Now as to why they do it this way, I’m not really sure. I suppose it is for customer support, but you’d think they could put the Service Pack number next to the build number.