I went ahead and updated QGIS on my USB flash drive to 0.8 without any hassle. Of course you wouldn’t want to run your production QGIS off of any flash drive, but I can tell you that having a GIS system in your pocket comes in handy. If I could only get FWTools to run better I would add that to my flash drive too (I have 1.0.0a7 running, but its too much of a hassle right now to really work with it so I probably won’t update it to 1.05 anytime soon).
I was looking though some old marketing materials and found a video of an ArcView project we did back in 1999-2000. I’m laughing as I look at it, partly because we’ve come such a long way and partly because I remember all the hacks we had to perform (making those tabs appear was an amazing pain in the ass). I showed it to the primary Avenue programmer and he just wanted to walk out the door. I’m guessing he didn’t want to remember the pain that project caused him. If you look at the toolbar, you’ll see a little “zipper icon” that people named the zipper tool. If I remember correctly it took the area out of the polygons and updated the area field in the back end database. We always had to remind people to “run the zipper tool” after updating any layers. Ah those were the days.
Well the day is finally upon us. The ArcGIS 9.2 Pre-release / Beta 2 will ship out tomorrow, July 7th to all Beta sites according to an ESRI email. The fine print kinda makes me scratch my head as to how we’ll be testing this stuff, but at least we’ll have something to play with before the User Conference.
I don’t really visit Channel 9 anymore because of all the Microsoft fanboys roaming the forums, but the videos are still valuable. Take this Windows Presentation Foundation – Everywhere video that Scoble recorded with Mike Harsh, a program manager on the WPF team. As I watched the video I could only think of how ESRI might extend the .NET Framework (assuming we ever get to see it 😉 ) in the future. Lack of 3D support at least in the first version of WPFE is a little disappointing, but knowing that we can support other platforms and still use portions of WPF is comforting.
I was talking to a reader via IM and they liked my little KML/Google Maps “mashup”, but they wondered how quickly it would become out of date. Well I have no plans to update it so I’m sure it will become quite dated given the growth of Chandler.
If I was going to maintain such a site and I wasn’t being fed the data by Chandler directly (either officially or unofficially), I’d probably just scrape the webpage and generate my own KML on the fly. I figure it would be a good time to plug two of my favorite books on that subject right now. Of course Spidering Hacks by O’Reilly and my personal favorite Baseball Hacks by O’Reilly(any book that combines baseball with web technology gets my vote). Actually Baseball Hacks is the greatest book to ever come out of O’Reilly and I’m not just saying that because I love baseball.
A week doesn’t go by where someone doesn’t IM or email me with that question. So many people want to create mashups that they put the cart in front of the horse and don’t have any idea what to create. For every great mashup I see on Google Maps Mania there are probably 15 that come up in my RSS aggregator that I just wonder why did that person bother. I joke many times on this blog about “push pin mapping”, but used correctly it is a very powerful tool. The problem with many of these mashups in Google Maps (and others) is that they are stuck in your web browser. I can’t integrate them into other software packages. Simple is good, but there comes a time where you need to break out of this simple mindset and gain a larger audience.
When Google announced that Google Maps would now support KML/KMZ a light bulb appeared over my head. Why not mash the power of KML and Google Earth with Google Maps. Rather than using the Google Maps API to create your mashup, use KML so that you can allow people to view your data in Google Earth, ArcGIS and other platforms. But you can still offer that Google Maps front end for those who don’t want or have those software packages on their computer.
OK, but what about ideas? Well if you can’t find any good mashup ideas then I’d say don’t bother. Still you can find tons of websites that scream create me. One that I’ve used over the past few years is the City of Chandler Zoning Cases website. Chandler has been one of the fastest growing cities in the United States over the past 15 years (25% growth in the last 4 years) so there are tons of zoning cases going on. Chandler smartly put a url on their zoning signs so you can check out details of the zoning case without having to visit the city or any zoning meetings. Anyway you visit the Chandler Zoning Cases website and you are presented with a classic 1998 website with a scroll box listing of the current zoning cases and a map that you can’t click on. I won’t criticize the website as I’m sure it is done this way to make it easier to update (for the sake of all I hope that is the case), but it is screaming for so much more. When ArcWeb Explorer Javascript API came out, I created a small mashup, but never took it any farther.
Well putting these zoning cases into KML is just as easy as updating that webpage, probably much easier. I even created small little zoning signs to replace the default placemarks (you really get to know those orange zoning signs in Chandler). Then I created a network link so that the KML could be updated on the server and people wouldn’t have to re-download the KML (yea this is all old stuff for most of you). Anyway, here is the KML 
of that old fashioned Zoning Cases website. One could easily add more information to the info balloons about the zoning cases beyond the URL link to the PDF on Chandler’s website that I added. Now users of the data can interact with it, rather than just download the PDF and scroll to the vicinity map. Add polygons to show the parcels that are affected and you’ll have as good a tool as the GIS tech that created the vicinity map.
Also, as I said earlier, you can now use Google Maps to view the KML so users of the website can still take advantage of the data. In time Google plans to better support KML with Google Maps so I can envision a website that loads Google Maps, but has a link to the KML file for those who want to view in Google Earth.
Is this a mashup? Who the heck knows anymore what that definition is. Is has almost lost its meaning, but anytime you can take data and make it much easier to for your users to interact with, you can see the power in these tools. Data isn’t meant to be guarded by some Oracle Database Administrator (thats something in my past I still need to let go of), but given out to everyone to use.
Update – oh one more thought. If you use XML to store your markers in Google Maps, why not just create a KML and serve that up instead? KML is so much more valuable to the average user than strait XML is. Actually it wouldn’t be very hard to do this right now, maybe something for my next vacation.
I was going through my RSS feeds today and noticed that QGIS 0.8 Preview 1 was released and is available for download. At least for me QGIS 0.8 is exciting because of the increased GRASS support as well as many other great new features.
Oh and it looks like they updated their webpage too.
Great job everyone, lets see what we can do with July.
Last month was the warmest June ever, with an average mean temperature of 94.6 degrees, almost 5 degrees above the normal mean of 89.8 and almost a full degree higher than the previous warmest June, 93.8 in 1990.
Time to move my retirement investment into antiperspirant.
Seems like our buddy GISDirtbag has decided that he’s had it with SlashGeo and wants it removed from PlanetGS. I removed SlashGeo many months ago due to some users complaining that it isn’t a blog. In the end I added it back in mostly due to the promise that they would have more original content. Whether that is the case or not, I’m not getting involved with policing PlanetGS. If the is a blog that goes off topic or ceases regular publication I’ll remove it, but as long as posts are geospatially related I’m not going to remove anyone. Defining what is a blog is hard enough so I’m going to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion.
OK, now that is settled I can rant about Wikipedia. I’m not shocked to see that ssomeone would add their own site to an alleged encyclopedia article since Wikipedia is all about self promotion and not about accuracy. I could go on and on with examples as to why Wikipedia is worthless, but I’m sure you’ve all heard the arguments before. Frankly any encyclopedia that allows people to advertise on an article webpage isn’t reliable at all, especially when those adding the links are personally involved.
The GIS Wikipedia article is such a mess I wouldn’t direct anyone there in the first place even if I trusted the sources. A couple years back I tried to correct an article about a topic I am very familiar with and had to battle some loser who had way too much time on their hands over the content. Wikipedia is a place where the most persistent people with the most time to waste control what is said. I’ve washed my hands of Wikipedia and everyone else should too. Take the List of GIS software page. Look at the descriptions of the software, they read like ads for their respective programs, but there are some much worse than others. Take a look at KMLer indented under ESRI as if it is associated with them. Heck click on the link and you get an ad for KMLer right inside Wikipedia. What a freaking joke of an encyclopedia that has ads. I guess users are supposed to alert the powers that be at Wikipedia, but why should we help them if they can’t stop people from staking out claims to articles that they aren’t authorities on, let along people spaming their websites and software themselves in alleged articles.
Side note, KMLer is the king of spammers. When I posted an article on Arc2Earth, a whole bunch of comments showed up claiming that Arc2Earth was a waste of money and KMLer could do more and was free. I spend the better part of a week battling those KMLer folks trying to keep their comments off the site.
Anyway, I honestly don’t care if anyone fixes the GIS articles on Wikipedia as they are of no value anyway. GIS.com is more trustworthy than Wikipedia and that is saying something. And spamming Wikipedia with links to your own website or product is slimy to be the least. Either your product/website is strong enough to stand on its own and will get added into Wikipedia on its own merit, or you need to work harder at making your product/website better.
Hmm EDN is still down this morning.
EDN’s Documentation Library has become valuable to me and I’m glad that I bookmarked at least the ArcIMS AXL documentation. I was really looking for ArcSDE, but at least the URL was logical so I was able to interpolate it.
