Category: Thoughts

I haven’t seen anyone blog about it, but is anyone going to the Asia-Pacific Conference for ESRI Users?

There has been an interesting thread on the Geowanking email list about GeoChat. I too have been thinking about how we could use GeoChat with clients who don’t have ArcGIS. Maybe in time ESRI will open up GeoChat to allow others to build upon the platform. How nice would it be for a GIS Professional to collaborate with non GIS users running ArcGIS Explorer or Google Earth (heck what about any of the web-based mapping APIs)?

Of course the developer of GeoChat has a blog so any one of us could just ask him huh? 😉

I started filling out the same survey that J Singh blogged about and I’m going to try and read the tea leaves and figure out exactly what ESRI is really asking here. J posted mostly about the DVD questions so I won’t bother with that, but the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension questions got me thinking. The question before talked about the ArcPress which is now available “free” with any ArcView or greater license asks if you actually use it. Seems like a pretty good question. Then the next three talk about the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension; do you have it, do you use it and will you buy it. No other questions about any other extensions. I’m going to read between the lines here (this is partly hope) and guess ESRI is beginning to think that the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension might be best rolled up into the standard ArcGIS deployment, much like ArcPress is (not that too many people care about ArcPress these days). Of course there is no way to really tell that this is the case, but it makes just so much sense from ESRI’s part to include interoperability by default that they really need to just do so (and with an ArcView license).

The next question got me thinking too, do you still use ArcInfo Workstation. Could ESRI be thinking of moving away from Workstation being released beyond 9.x? Pretty good question…

There is new FireFox extension that support GeoLocation. GeoLocateFox put a little icon (grey globe) in the lower right hand side of your firefox browser window. The globe activates when you visit a site that supports GeoLocation (such as this one) When you put your mouse over the icon you get a little map like the one below.

One interesting note about this extension is that is only supports Yahoo! Maps. Here is the explaination from the author.

Currently this extension only supports Yahoo! Maps. The intent is to support multiple mapping providers including Google, but to date only Yahoo! has a terms of use that allow for non-webapplication use. Google explicity prohibits such use right now. They were contacted by me in mid December about this extension, but to date have not replied with permission to include their service. While it may in theory be ok to do considering Firefox is a web browser, and we are not doing anything harmful, I don’t wish to get into any trouble, it’s their API, and I respect that.

Google has said at CES that they plan to work with at least one car maker to try and work Google Earth as an in-car navigation system. Frank over at Google Earth has pretty much said all the reasons why it won’t be happening soon if at all. While I’m sure they could figure out a way to navigate easily with a touch screen rather than a mouse, but that isn’t the biggest problem as I see it. Anyone who has a car with a navigation system knows that the maps they generate are very simple and this is by design. Trying to view a map while traveling 60 MPH is hard enough without having satellite images in the background. These maps are designed to be viewed with a quick glance and I just don’t see how that would be possible with satellite imagery. Of course Google Earth could serve up Google Maps (though they would have to be simplified for ease of use in a car), but then why bother with Google Earth?

What I expect to happen with the future of Navigation is for companies such as XM Radio and Sirius to offer Navigation as part of their service. My wife’s Acura already has both XM Radio and Navigation, so why not combine them? Stream the maps down via their satellites. XM already has begun to roll out such a product (though it isn’t a stand alone product, yet) and since both Sirius and XM have contracts with car manufacturers already, they have a leg up on any companies such as Google, Yahoo and Micosoft who would like to break into that market.

The future of in-car navigation is in XM’s and Sirius’s hands so if GYM want to be part of it, they need to either partner up, or get out the checkbook and buy either one of them.

The Mapdex ArcMap toolbar brings the Mapdex search into ArcMap. I had some time to play with it before I left work for the weekend and it does make finding map services inside ArcMap really easy. I especially like restricting the search to map extents so I can type in very general terms and get quick results. Take a look in the comments for the blog entry as Jeremy was nice enough to include a installer without the .NET framework for those of use who already have it installed. Otherwise you can download it from here.

We’ve set up our own Jabber server and have begun testing GeoChat internally. We did this because our firewall blocked port 5222 and it was much easier than working with the IT staff to open it. Its still too early to give my full opinion on how it works, but I will say it was much easier to collaborate than I thought it would be. If you have a Google Mail account, you can pretty much get this working within 5 minutes. A couple things I wish I could do that don’t seem available yet.

• Change the default colors
• ability to add actual text rather than just “ink” I’m not that good at writing with my mouse
• an eraser to make quick deletions to ink

One thing to keep in mind, I was getting “out of bounds” errors on the ink until I realized that I had to make sure my projection was set in the layer properties. I kind of figured that was the problem, but the error message was a little vague.

click for larger view

OK, Planet Geospatial is working again. It was a pretty easy fix, but I don’t have SSH access at work so I couldn’t get in and see what the problem was. I probably should write out a log file just in case as I had no idea how important Planet Geospatial was (thanks for all the emails and instant messages guys) to the community.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Planet Geospatial is not updating. I can’t SSH into my server right now as that port is blocked, but I’ll try later when I’m not behind a restrictive firewall. I can only assume a feed has caused the script to crash on the update.

I hate our plotter. Its only about 3 years old, but I have so much trouble plotting rasters to it. Basically the only work around is to export to 100dpi jpg and print from Photoshop. We’ve had HP out to see if it is the plotter, but they can’t figure what the problem is other than to say it isn’t with the hardware. I can’t argue with them as I could be our software, but if Acrobat, ArcMap and other similar programs have problems printing large rasters I can only think it is the plotter. We’ve tried every trick I’ve ever known (with ESRI and HP help) and the only way to get it to work is a low res JPG. Oh I would love to be able to just send a E size plot directly from ArcMap with a nice huge aerial in the background and just have it plot. When I first started in GIS many years ago, my job title was plotter operator (basically it was the title of the lowest paying job so paying them to babysit the old plotter wasn’t too expensive) and I feel like I’ve come full circle.

At least CAD drawings fly off of the thing.