Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • Corporate Blogging – Doing it Right

    Naked Conversations: Chapter 11-Doing it Right

    Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have posted some hints on corporate blogging. This is mostly a follow up to my post last week on ESRI Taking Control of the Conversation. I think everyone can admit that ESRI has made some poor decisions over the past few years (who can forget this one?), but taking an active roll in the blogging community can totally change

    My favorite is “Demonstrate Passion”. If you truly love what you are blogging about, it will come through. Lets face it, there are few companies that are hated as much as Microsoft, but when you read their blogs you begin to understand what they are trying to do (right or wrong) and that is compelling to read. You might still not agree with what they are saying, but at least you can see why they make the decisions they do. The reason I called my other post “Taking Control of the Conversation” is that you need to be proactive in this blogging medium because if you don’t, you’ll end up with with this situation, which is painful for everyone involved.

  • Site Template

    I’m playing around with the template a little bit so I’ve removed some of the links from the side. I’ll put them back as soon as I like the look.

  • Sean Gillies Reviews Web Mapping Illustrated

    Link: Web Mapping Illustrated Reviewed.

    Tyler Mitchell’s Web Mapping Illustrated, published by O’Reilly, could have spared me about a week of hair-pulling back in 2000 when I was just beginning to discover open source GIS software. Our projects are reasonably well documented, and there is an enormous amount of knowledge within the community, but there has never before been a broad and coherent synthesis of that information. Finally, new users can see the entire domain of open source mapping from data creation, to data processing, to digital map. We’ve needed this book for a long time.

    Sean Gillies posts a review of O’Reilly’s book, Web Mapping Illustrated. I liked Sean’s approach to the review and if you are uncertain that the book might interest you, check out his review. I picked it up a couple days ago and even though parts are a little basic, it was a great value to me in learning more about PostGIS and MapServer.

    Web Mapping Illustrated

  • New Title Graphic

    I’ve updated the title graphic (dead link) in preperation of the ESRI User Conference. The SDCC will be rocking about a week from now.

  • Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds in Excel

    I was trying to catch up on some reading this weekend, with all the traveling I’ve done this month my mail pile was beginning to tip over. One article that caught my eye was convert coordinates from decimal to DMS. We’ve all done this one way or another, but getting it done correctly in Excel was something I had never tried. Take a look at the link below to see how to create a formula that will convert decimal to DMS.

    Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds in Excel – via PCMag

  • The gMap Workout Tracker

    Link: Visualize Your Exercise Routes with Google Maps.

    Our implementation loads the XML file (GPS coordinates) and draws a polyline between each point on a small delay to give the animated effect and route taken. We thought it would be cool to spice it up and added some other calculations like total time, total distance, pace, markers at different colored intervals, a loading bar, and stats.

    Quite a big jump from the Gmap Pedometer. I’m just amazed at how quickly programmers have jumped on the Google Maps API. This implementation of the GMap API allows you to import your routes from the GPS unit, but I think that it has hit the wall as far as the API can go. Elevation is very important in these kinds of applications and at least for the time being, GMap API won’t be able to do this. Sportsim still runs circles around gMap Workout tracker, but given how quickly the have caught up it could only be a matter of time before we see a similar program using Google Maps especially since Google has all that terrain data in Google Earth.

  • Sanction your mashups with Google Maps API

    Link: Sanction your mashups with Google Maps API (dead link).

    A few days ago a visitor posted (dead link) a link to a news story about a patent infringement case involving a successful real estate agent making use of a computer mapping system without acquiring a license for it first. The mapping system wasn’t the same as Google Maps but does hold a patent and royalties are owed for those who profit from it. In the story it states that “an average residential real estate agent may owe royalties of as much as $50,000 before the company’s patent expires in 2008.” The case raises some important questions when considering the possible actions that could be taken for those not making use of a sanctioned API (such as the Google Maps API), thereby licensing the application or mashup you are creating.

    A good lesson to anyone thinking about using the Google Maps API in their applications. As the dust begins to settle on the Google Maps API, people are beginning to think about the implications of a “free” API. As I’ve said before, they’ll eventually either want to pay for a license to use one or go open source. Another great reason to open the ArcWeb Services API to these people as when they need to have a deployment license, they won’t have to learn a new API.

    I doubt ESRI could have ever generated the press Google has for web mapping, but they might as well take advantage of it.

  • Jithen Singh to Present ArcGIS Server Implementation at ESRI UC

    Link: ArcGIS Server User Conference Presentation

    This year at the user conference, we will be doing a presentation on our recently completed project for New Zealand Post (http://www.nzpost.co.nz). Was a full ArcGIS Server implementation with ArcSDE and Oracle backend. We put in alot of hard work in getting this project completed in the time frame, but the end result was amazing.

    GIS Case Studies and Best Practices: New Zealand Post Enhancing Postal Address Quality Through Spatial Technology

    Thursday, July 28 3:30pm 5:00pm Marina Salon G, Marriott Hotel, Level 3, South Tower”

    Sounds interesting, I’ll try to go.

  • Jason Wants to Know how to get Shapefile Points into Google Earth

    Link: Shapefile points to GPX in Google Earth.

    I managed to get a long list of ESRI ArcGIS shapefile points converted into the free version of Google Earth.

    It was more of a work-around than any brilliance on my part. If you could think of an easier way to do it, I’m all ears.

    Has anyone developed an easy way to do this?

  • Developer Training – EDN

    The EDN website has recently been updated to include information on recommended training courses offered by ESRI. This is a great site to find out what instructor lead training is offered for the different products that make up the EDN subscription..

    Rise and Shout

    A nice new feature of EDN is now the ability to find out what recommended training courses ESRI think would be beneficial in successfully programming with their different tools. Rob, I don’t see any ArcWeb Services training courses. How cool would it be if there was a free one to get people started?