Category: Thoughts

I hope everyone is having a happy New Year’s day. I personally can’t wait for the year to unfold. Considering how great 2008 was for geospatial technology, 2009 is sure to amaze us all.

Bill Dollins likes SpatiaLite and he’s been blogging about it and he isn’t the only one either. How long to someone gets this running on Android or the iPhone (which both already run SQLite)?

So reading the MapDotNet Blog and how UX Studio can load shapefiles (and SDE) into SQL Server 2008 I thought I give it a spin. You have to download the whole UX platform to get UX Studio so make sure that you do a custom install so that you only get UX Studio (rather than the whole SDK and Web Services). To load data into SQL Server 2008 is very simple, all you need to do is start up UX Studio and add a shapefile to the project. Then right click on the shapefile in the data sources panel and select “Export Data”. You’ll get a dialog that looks like this:

When you click start the file is converted from shapefile to SQL Server 2008 table. A quick look at the table in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio shows the whole file uploaded perfectly. What a quick and easy way to convert your shapefiles (and SDE layers) to SQL Server 2008.

Success!

So there you go, loading data into SQL Server 2008 requires only the free UX Studio. Nice!

I remember years ago having ArcInfo Workstation send emails when it was finished processing and I’ve always thought the next logical step was having it send a text message to my cell phone. Rafa Gutierrez looked at Twitter for alerts and posted instructions as to how to get your ArcMap Model to send you a tweet when it is finished running. I’d probably set up a separate private Twitter account so that people can’t see what I’m doing or that I’d spam followers with my overlay analysis.

Letting ArcMap send you tweets

Connor is counting the presents under the tree and I’m getting ready to watch the Hawaii Bowl. It looks like we are going to have a wet Christmas (our version of a white Christmas) so maybe we’ll all hop in the car and drive up to the mountains to enjoy the snow.

I hope everyone who has read my blog this year has a truly Merry Christmas.

There is more going on with OpenLayers and the ESRI REST API than you probably know (I keep finding more and more that I didn’t know about every day). As more people start using OpenLayers with the ESRI ArcGIS Server we’ll hopefully get it integrated into the OpenLayer code. For now you can grab some of the code from the OpenLayer Wiki and start using OpenLayers with your ArcGIS Server applications. People are doing amazing things with OpenLayers including this example with ArcGIS Server?(which doesn’t use the REST API, but it is still wonderful) from the Long Island Index.

Wouldn’t the ESRI JavaScript API page look better with OpenLayers?

**Update **(12-24-2008): OpenLayers now has some case studies online as well.

Looks like user presentations are a go at the 2009 ESRI Dev Summit.

At this point, it looks like we’re going to have about 10-15 scheduled slots. The capacity of the room will be between 50 and 70, so it should end up being a more interactive experience if you want it to be. This room will be part of the “Showcase” area, which is the central hub of the event. Then in the weeks leading up to the DevSummit, registered attendees will be able to vote so that particularly popular sessions can be moved into larger capacity rooms.

So get your presentation figured out and submit it. You have until February 9th to get it in.

Remember OAM? People sort of remember the project and then they can’t figure out what happened to it. Well Christopher Schmidt, fresh off the reboot of SpatialReference.org, is trying to energize the community again. Even the Wikipedia entry needs work.

The data owner says Go Away!

The Yahoo! Brickhouse closing put some projects in jeopardy, but apparently Fire Eagle is “alive and well”.

Rest assured that whilst Brickhouse may be gone, Fire Eagle itself lives and thrives within the Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group. Fire Eagle has been, and will continue to be, a core component of Yahoo’s Geo Technology and User Location strategies and we’re committed to developing features, applications and support without interruption.

Fire Eagle and Pipes are two of Yahoo!’s better projects and hopefully the problems at Yahoo! won’t hurt their development.

My wife always complains that she can’t buy me any books because I buy them before she even hears of them. Well if she wants to surprise me this year, she can take a look at the kite aerial photography gift guide over at MAKE.

I’ll only have to wait for some wind to take up to date aerial photography of areas I’m working on. Heck and you can take it all on the road with you and amaze your friends.

Even back in 1750 Ben Franklin was an avid kite aerial photographer