Category: Thoughts

Boy that was quick. The EDN that ESRI offered because we are MapObjects developers is on my desk right now. 😀

Richie has a “Getting Started” post on his blog for learning how to use GeoChat. We’ve decided in our company that it will be easier to just install a Jabber Server on our Linux server and use it internally. Hopefully we’ll have time tomorrow to get that working.

To be honest, I never really spent much time looking into GeoTango. I’ve seen their name in many places, but as with Keyhole I didn’t look too hard (note to self, PAY MORE ATTENTION). Anyway Matthew Hurst has posted a comment that he recieved from a GeoTango employee that talks about how GlobeView has evolved and how Microsoft might run with it.

The GlobeView tech will require some work to get it to the level of polish found in Google Earth, but with the resources Microsoft has, it should be a good kick in the pants for Google Earth when it is finally re-released.

So I’m back in work and excited to give GeoChat a try, but I’ve run into a huge roadblock. The TCP/IP port that is required has been blocked. I’ll ask the IT staff to open those ports up, but I guess I could set up a Jabber server inside our firewall for internal use. Richie has posted some more information on his blog you might want to check out. I like how it defaults to the GTalk servers as those are probably the ones that most people will use. I’d give it a shot at home, but all our ArcGIS Desktop licenses have been migrated over to concurrent use and if I use our VPN software it will block port 5222 for “safety” so it really won’t help anyway.

I’m at home today even though my company doesn’t have the day off. Our office is right across the from the Fiesta Bowl and with two teams like Ohio State and Notre Dame, I’m not getting near there with those fans. It seems like I’ve been on vacation for weeks, but the run is over tomorrow. 🙁

They become a smock to paint in…

OK, this isn’t the product that we saw at the User Conference, at least as far as I can tell (I left my laptop at work so I don’t have a copy of ArcGIS to test it on). Rather than being built on MSN Messenger, GeoChat supports Jabber allowing you to use any Jabber server you wish (specifically it uses XMPP protocol which Google Talk among others uses). Since I can’t test it, I’m limited to reading the user guide but it looks very impressive and well integrated into ArcMap. My company has many offices and few people so collaboration between GIS professionals is usually done with Acrobat. GeoChat would surely simplify our workflow so I’m really wanting to try it out (I’ll have to wait until Wednesday as our office is closed on Tuesday due to it being right across the street from the Fiesta Bowl).

First Python and now Jabber. Could ArcIMS 10 be built on Mapserver? 😉

I’ve been sitting on this email from Kevin Martin about an update to the popular Export to KML extension for ArcGIS Desktop.

just wanted to let you know that there is a new version of ExporttoKML available that corrects the problem of displaying extruded polygons in the newest version of Google Earth. The were not displaying correctly due to a change in the KML rules. That’s been fixed, and a couple of other improvements were made.

If you want a simple way to get a shapefile into KML, this is one of the best ways.

You can add me to the list of people who have upgraded to WordPress 2.0. To be honest I was more worried with this upgrade than the previous Movable Type upgrades I’ve done, but it seems to have worked. 🙂

**Update – GeoChat has been released.
**
GeoChat is one of those programs that ESRI has talked about in the past, but then went silent about. The thought among most of us is ESRI abandoned it, but it appears it might be released really soon.

If you’ve missed ESRI’s announcement at the 2005 UC on GeoChat (or just have forgotten), you can check out Richie Carmichael’s blog entry for more information.