Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • ESRI Updates Hurricane Katrina Data Resource Guide

    Link – Hurricane Katrina Data Resource Guide Updated

    ESRI’s guide shows you both free and fee based data resources with Hurrican Katrina information.

  • Taking the easy way

    Over the past years I’ve always customized my blog cascading style sheets because I never really liked the look of the default ones. With Movable Type 3.2, the new stylesheets are much better, even to the point I was going to use them to create my own. Along the way I’ve decided that since I fight CSS all day at work (well maybe that is exaggerated just a little), I really don’t want to bother at home. So I’m going to use the default styles that are available with Movable Type. I’m kind of partial with this one…

  • ESRI Hurricane Maps and Help

    Link – Hurricane Maps and Help

    ESRI has a nice page up where you can volunteer your services to help with the hurricane recovery. Right after disasters happen people always offer up overwhelming support, but months/years down the line their enthusiasm wanes as the story moves off the front page. If you can’t help right now because you don’t have the opportunity, remember that help will be needed for long in the future.

  • Walt’s ArcWeb Mashup is Looking Great

    Link – ArcWeb Public Services – Part 0.3: Something almost usable

    Well, after messing around last night and at lunch today, I have a fairly functional mashup using ESRI’s ArcWeb Public Services and PHP.

    It’s pretty basic, with simple pan and zoom functionality, and a couple of point layers that you can turn on and off.

    Considering you pretty much have to do everything yourself, Walt’s first effort is impressive. Great effort!

    Take a look at his mashup here.

  • Google Earth Overlay of Flooding

    Link – Google Earth New Orleans Overlay

    Another Google Earth overlay from what looks like the Digital Globe satellite image.

    google_earth_no.jpg

  • Andrea Rosso Goes Nuts With Public ArcWeb Services

    Links – Making an ArcWeb Mashup and A simple ArcWeb AJAX map control in PHP

    Reading various news articles about mapping around the web it seems that there is a lot of excitement about what are called ‘mashups’. I have not been able to find a formal definition of this but it seems that this is basically when some sort of useful data is ‘mashed’ on top of some mapping service like Google. This most often seems to be point data like locations of bloggers, or events, etc. but sometimes it’s things like images, etc.

    Andrea gets into a detailed description of how to create your own ArcWeb mashup using Perl. Besides this he also posted an article on how to create a very simple AJAX map control to stick right on your website. Someone at ESRI should like directly to Andrea’s blog from the Public AWS page so people can see this stuff.

  • Dumping Technorati

    I’ve just about had it with Technorati and their servers timing out so I’m moving my tags to Ice Rocket. I made a modification to the Movable Type plug-in that I used to create all the tags at the bottom of my posts to point to Ice Rocket so if anyone else wants to use it can download it here.

    Thanks to George Hotelling for the TechnoratiTags Plug-in which I modified.

  • DigitalGlobe Releases Satellite Imagery of Hurricane Katrina

    Link – Hurricane Katrina Media Gallery

    Looks like DigitalGlobe has Released Satellite Imagery from Hurricane Katrina. The amount of devastation is just unbelievable. I was down there back in June and I hope everyone that I’ve worked with in Gulfport, MS is OK.

  • Walt Eis Starts Creating a PHP ArcWeb Mashup

    Link – ArcWeb Public Services – Part 0.1

    There are several things I still need to figure out, like how to zoom and pan, but my first impressions are pretty positive. I was able to take the data I used for my Google Maps sample project and use it in my ArcWeb sample without too much trouble. As Andrea did, I’m using a simple text file, but will likely end up using a MySQL database for my location data. It seems that not all the map data advertised on ESRI’s sales site is available right now, but my understanding from the FAQs is that more will be available later.

    Looks like people are finally starting to create mashups using Public ArcWeb Services. Walt has made some headway putting points on his map and is now starting to look at creating some more functionality (pan/zoom/etc). I’m sure Walt’s been using it, but anyone who wants to learn more about ArcWeb can take a look at the ArcWeb Online Help or check out the ESRI Support Forums.

    Walt’s ArcWeb demo is located here. Compare this to his previous Google Maps efforts.

  • Stop Putting Commercial Software in ESRI ArcScripts

    Link – Express Data Tools – v9.0

    Can someone at ESRI please clean up the ArcScripts site? Plain as day on the ESRI ArcScripts upload page it says “Not for samples or demos of products sold at Web sites”. There are way too many products that are commercial in there and this latest one takes the cake. 15 days and then you have to buy it, what a joke. If you have to advertise, do it by buying ad space, not polluting the ArcScripts gallery. Geospatial Enterprises is off my list of companies I’ll deal with. XTools Pro 3.0 is also a commercial product that tries to get around by offering some free tools, but it too is just a demo. Someone over at ESRI needs to get serious about cleaning this junk up and off the ArcScripts.

    Better yet dynamite it and offer up something like GotDotNet.com where we can collaborate on tools and scripts for ESRI products. Now that would be useful and commercial products such as XTools Pro and Express Data Tools wouldn’t be on there unless they were released as open source.

    Note: There is a ton more commercial extensions than those two on the site (specifically ET-Geowizards). Just get them all off please.