Category: Thoughts

I’ve gotten a couple emails from people insisting that I’m wrong and Virtual Earth is the most impressive online mapping service available. My point was not that the update wasn’t good for some people, just that you have to take these updates with a grain of salt. I mean who cares that you can see some ferris wheel in the UK if you still have crappy imagery in major metropolitan areas?

It is good marketing to prove zoom into an interesting area and show off the great update, but if the majority of the product is still way behind the curve then why waste money on making a ferris wheel crisp? I don’t really care that Phoenix doesn’t have the birds eye view, but without timely imagery why would I use Virtual Earth in any product? (They can’t even spell Veterans Way correctly in the example above next to my office)

I do love the navigation of Virtual Earth vs Google or any other mapping product, but I didn’t use VE before this update and I’m sure not going to use it after. What sucks is even NASA World Wind is behind Google Earth in Phoenix so I’ve put that aside also.

I’ve seen a whole lot of spin in the blogs about how great the “new” Live Local release is. Oh BTW, would Microsoft please buy http://live.local.com as I can’t seem to type it the other way around. Anyway, Tempe is still having to use this horrible B&W imagery rather than the nice color imagery that Ask, Google and ESRI provide. Actually Ask has the most up to date imagery in the Phoenix area, but the service is so slow that I can’t use it. Maybe with Google opening up an office in Tempe, we’ll get as good looking data as they have in Mountain View.

In the end B&W imagery for the 5th largest city in the United States is an embarrassment for Microsoft and Virtual Earth/Live Local.

I’ve been building a Mosaic inside SDE from over 300 individual rasters which of course takes some time. When I came in this morning I saw that ArcCatalog had crashed (no surprise) while running the Mosaic command. I kinda figured it was just trying to do too much at one time so I went ahead and decided to add the rasters in batches. Well when I ran the first batch ArcCatalog threw this error:

Underlying DBMS error[ORA-00001: unique constraint (LAKEHURST.SDE_BLK_57_UK) violated]

A quick search on ESRI’s support site came up with this Technical Article; Error: Underlying DBMS error

“This error occurs when the sequence that generates new values for the ID column of SDE.GDB_OBJECTCLASSES becomes out of sync with the values already in that column. This situation does not occur under normal circumstances, but possible causes include improper use of the Oracle import function, an Oracle shutdown during an ArcGIS transaction, or manual manipulation of the ArcSDE metadata tables.”

The solution in the article worked and we are back in business, but none of the causes listed by ESRI happened. Guess they should append “ArcCatalog crashes” to then end. Still it feels kind of sloppy to manually edit SDE tables like this, but what else can you do?

I’ve been playing around with the new ArcWeb Explorer API and I’m starting to get a handle on all the functionality. My son liked this one the best. I’d like to grab geotagged photos from flicker and plot them on a map. I’ve got loads to do before that becomes a reality (I’m way behind geotagging my photos in Flickr), but I’ve faked it well on my computer. Too bad the imagery around Disneyland looks crappy otherwise I’d zoom in more.

I love support websites where you can see a link to drivers right on the front page. You don’t have to dig through links to find what you are looking for. Usually 2 clicks and you are downloading your file. That brings me to ESRI…

I had installed ArcGIS 9.2 Beta 2 on my laptop to give it a little test run on some projects we are working on and when finished I uninstalled it and went back to ArcGIS 9.1. Today I saw that ESRI released a patch for issues with Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and when to download it (right on the front page of ESRI supports site). Anyway on running the patch I was informed that I didn’t have Service Pack 1 installed so I went to download it.

Downloads > Patches and Service Packs > ArcInfo Desktop > Scroll Down 10 files > Click on link to Service Pack 1

Maybe I’m being hypersensitive but that is way too many clicks and scrolls to get to what is probably a very important file for ArcGIS 9.1 (Desktop, Server, IMS, SDE, etc…). I won’t even go into having to choose between the link for ArcInfo Desktop and ArcView (You’d think there would be one for ArcGIS Desktop, no?) but the Service Pack 1 should be on the Downloads page or at least the Patches and Service Packs page. Heck it is even buried in the middle of all the ArcInfo Desktop patches and service packs.

I guess complaining about the ESRI Support website is what we ESRI users do, and I assume they are going to wait for 9.2 before updating the thing, but having some critical downloads prominently displayed would be a good thing to do today.

Looks like over the weekend ESRI pushed the ArcWeb Explorer Javascript API out and integrated it into the ArcWeb Labs section. Once you register you’ll get access to the best “Quick-Start Guide” that ESRI has ever produced. This new Flash Javascript API should make it much easier for people to take advantage of ArcWeb as you don’t even have to have a clue what SOAP or REST are. Just copy and past some code from the guide and you’ll have your maps. I’m wondering why ESRI doesn’t have an ArcWeb Explorer contest up and running yet as it would probably get people looking at this new API. Heck you’d think some ArcWeb credits or even a copy of ArcView would get people moving.

Update: I’ve played a little with it during lunch and its pretty easy to get points plotted on the map (actually very easy). I’ve got to play a little more with getting the widgets to show up better but that will have to wait as I’ve got to get back to billable work. 🙂

I noticed that CH2M Hill has a “blog” for their ESS team.

http://www.enterprisespatialsolutions.com/

They even have an RSS feed, but it seems to be much more of a marketing effort than what most of us would call a real blog. Maybe in time we’ll hear more from the developers and team members and less from the marketing folks.

Remember when I made a big fuss about all these fancy 3D models not being important to GIS professionals? Well I still believe that, but I’m sitting here right now working on getting fancier looking models of buildings for a couple of our 3D GIS marketing demonstrations I’ll be doing next month. I’ll see how good some of these models look in ArcScene and maybe they’ll tie together everything, or they’ll just make my life much more complicated. 😀

I’ve finally decided that the most important feature of ArcGIS 9.2 Desktop will be the ability to calculate area from right inside the table view (forget all that dumb VBA code). I was playing with 9.2 a couple weeks ago and used that feature all the time, but now that I’ve moved back to 9.1, I so miss it. Calculating Area (or length) seems like it should have been implemented back in 8.x but now that it is almost here, all is forgiven.

Did anyone else notice this last week?

Looks like ESRI has posted the ArcWeb Explorer Javascript API but not linked to it from other parts of the ArcWeb website. I’m sure this isn’t the official release, but I guess it can’t hurt to take a look. It was pretty easy to create some simple maps using the simple Javascript API and maybe with I’m done working through my inbox I’ll take a closer look.