Blog

So I figure I’d fire up another browser window and search another city and was stopped in my tracks.

That red text is a little hard to read IMO.

ESRI has updated their “ArcGIS Product Life Cycle” to indicate that the current release of ArcGIS (the one we all have in our production environments) is now in extended support. It isn’t that big of a difference between extended and general support, but the timing of this is a little weird. Even in ESRI’s product life cycle description it says:

For example, ArcGIS 8.2 transitioned to the Extended Support Phase 3 months after ArcGIS 8.3 started shipping. The 3 months overlap takes into account the shipping time for a new release. It takes about 3 months for the majority of our users worldwide to receive a new release.

You’d think they’d hold off for a couple months, but then they’d have to certify 9.1 on Vista and I don’t think they wanted to do that.

ESRI will not certify new environments for products in this Extended Support phase. If an existing customer is contemplating migrating their environment then they should also consider an ESRI product migration as appropriate.

I think this is a little cheap of ESRI as many users won’t upgrade to 9.2 right away and who knows if any of them might have to run 9.1 on Vista because of their internal company policies. So if that new laptop your company just got you runs Vista only, then you might not be able to run ArcGIS 9.1 even if you don’t get your shipment of ArcGIS 9.2 until months later.

Jei has his own theory as to the why on his blog, but my mind says it is all about Microsoft Vista. Jei might be right, but the only big difference between the two service levels is the “new environment certification”:

when a major new release of an operating system, database, or web server is released during the General Availability phase of an ESRI product, ESRI will test this new environment with the General Availability release and provide test result information on its Online Support Center.

Moving 9.1 to extended support means they can ignore certifying ArcGIS 9.1 on Vista and for many companies that is enough not to run 9.1 on Vista (even if you can).

Well isn’t that some good news. We’ve all been talking ourselves into a depressing spiral, but maybe some nice Web ADF stuff is around the corner. Art Haddad has got the news on his blog plus some ArcGIS Server Web ADF tips and tricks. I’m sure all this .NET stuff is getting Sean all excited.

Yep it happens like clockwork, Blogger feeds are again polluting Planet Geospatial. But it isn’t just Planet Geospatial. I got the same spamming in my RSS aggregator (FeedDemon).

I’ve been telling everyone that the new Planet Geospatial built on SimplePie will resolve the problems I’ve been having, but it gets spammed by Blogger too. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that the problem isn’t SimplePie or the current Universal Feed Parser (though the new SimplePie based PlanetGS is really nice for other reasons), but Blogger itself. Plus, it doesn’t matter if you use the new “beta” Blogger version or the older version.

So what is the best solution? Having people use Feedburner doesn’t work, the new */rss.xml feed does the same thing and even the latest feed parsers have the problem. As much as I liked reading up on all of Paul Ramsey’s posts from the past 2 years (I’m not picking on you Paul, you just got lucky I guess), this should probably stop one way or another. I’ve been ignoring it because I don’t really use Planet GS as my primary blog source, but I see that many of you do and I’m reading you loud and clear. You’d all rather have a cleaner Planet GS page (without all that non-standard blogger html code that shows up) without any of these feeds. Now is the time to speak up as to how you feel. I don’t want to be the gatekeeper of who gets in or gets kicked out of Planet GS, but I think the Blogger issue has come to a head.

Plus there are some great free blogging platforms that run rings around Blogger and don’t cause these problem. (If you’d all just move over to WordPress.com this would resolve itself).

Just as I was trying to show a client how well ArcWeb Explorer works, I’m greeted with this error on the ArcWeb website.

To which my client says “You want me to use this?”. Guess not.

Chad writes that World Wind 1.4 RC1 is now available to those who enjoy living on the edge.

There is a non-installer version of World Wind 1.4 RC1 ready for testing and bug finding. Download and install directions can be found on this wiki page.

If you find any bugs PLEASE post them on the wiki page under the 1.4 Bugs section, this will help get a final version of 1.4 out that much faster.

Note that 1.4 NEEDS the .Net 2.0 files. 1.3.6 is the version that will still use the .Net 1.1 files.

I’m heading over there right now to download.

Since it worked well last week, I’ll open things back up this week as well.

Anything you want to talk about or get off your chest is fair game. Lets try and keep the attacks to a minimum (though I’m sure anyone who wants to profess their love of Manifold would be welcome).

Avencia released a whitepaper that measured the gerrymandering of local and federal electoral districts across the U.S., using some software that they sell. I read it and it is pretty professional, but it brings me back to my point about not fulling researching the problem of gerrymandering. As I’ve said before, there are special cases that create some of these districts and to claim that one is worse over another, just because it is spatially significant. Now don’t get me wrong, I think GIS is the perfect tool for such research, but it shouldn’t be the only tool.

Anyway I’ve put the press release and whitepaper up in case anyone wants to read it.

**Update – **Robert Cheetham @ Avencia was kind enough to email me and let me know that I overlooked an important part of the whitepaper in that it does note that there are “legitimate reasons why districts end up with some convoluted shapes”. Also at the end of the report, Avencia notes (emphasis is mine):

The gerrymandering index described in this white paper attempts to quantify the extent to which a local or federal district may be gerrymandered, based on its level of compactness and that of its city or state. Because of the combined impacts of political boundaries and physical geography, other factors may be taken into consideration when looking into a particular district, such as shape, contiguity and respect for political subdivisions. Nonetheless, compactness measures are a reliable indicator that gerrymandering is likely and point the way to districts worthy of higher scrutiny.

As long as people go that extra step to analyze why districts end up like this, then we are on to something.

Update 2 –Avencia made a small update to the whitepaper clarifying the Arizona 2nd District. I’ve put the revised PDF here. I don’t ever recall seeing Avencia before (my bad), but they seem to do some pretty interesting work.

I never want to see another Butterfinger ever again. Connor had a great time though and that is all that matters.

Connor as a Green Power Ranger

Jared was kind enough to email me, letting me know that the Libre Map Project is now online. You can search geonames (placenames, geographic features, etc.) and it will return the appropriate DRG to download or you can get a listing of all the DRGs for each state. Great work Jared and thanks for cutting out the middleman.