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.
Link – Mapdex in GoogleEarth
Thanks to encouragement from Stefan at Ogle Earth I have started working toward enabling ArcIMS servers indexed on Mapdex to be used in Google Earth via a network link/KML Ground Overlay script. It is actually pretty easy to convert an ArcIMS service into a KML network link. I will talk about it more in the next couple of days.
What a great resource! Kudos to Jeremy for doing this. The easier it is for GIS data to get out to the public the more useful it will be.
Update – Looks like Stefan is happy. 🙂
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.
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.
Link – Storm Tracker
I had been meaning to blog about the ArcWeb Services Hurricane Tracker, but I got sidetracked at work. How come no one at ESRI blogged it either? In fact, ESRI had a whole site up running with it. Of course no RSS feed means many missed it.
Update – Ray Carnes notes in my comments that it did get released on the RSS feed today. Looks like my reader didn’t pick it up till tonight. Still would have been nice to know about it sooner, but at least they tried. I’ll keep an eye out because it looks like ever more storms are on the way.
For those not familiar with the term “NIMBY” look here
Link – EarthHack.net via Ogle Earth
Who gave Google the right to web publish photographs of my backyard so detailed that you can see the details of my landscaping? Or which side of the driveway I park my car on?
Yes, I know these photos have been available for a long time from Keyhole, and Yes, I know that they currently don’t need my permission to publish these images. But at what point should we collectively be able to assert control over these images? In the past the idea of spying on individuals from space has not been a credible threat, but if the resolution of the available images improves at even a linear rate then within a few years you’ll progress from being able to find my backyard, to being able to find the grill in my backyard, to being able to see what’s on the grill in my backyard. And that cannot be permitted.
If this lack of control goes unchallenged then the inevitable result of improving camera resolution, increasing frequency of satellite passes and improving data compression and transmission rates will be effective quasi-real-time space surveillance on an individual basis.
How can that possibly be left unchallenged?
So I am proposing a two pronged approach to defeating this hijacking of our collective privacy; first, establish that Google/Keyhole has the capability to modify individual images on request; secondly, create a legal requirement for them to do so. These are concurrent activities, and the first one begins today.
Sigh, I’m almost willing to chip in some money to buy this guy some tin foil. How long will it take for people to actually realize that Google isn’t taking these pictures?
Link – Hurricane Katrina Approaching the Gulf Coast
A huge 250meter pixel (6200×8000) jpg satellite image (metadata here) of Hurricane Katrina off the coast of Louisiana/Mississippi. You can also download a world file from the site to add this to your ArcGIS Desktop session.
Link – VBA code for Google Earth KML paths
ArcObjects VBA code to take a feature layer, split it up into line segments, and then generate a valid KML file. It’s pretty basic, and you have to hard code some values, but it does the job. It will work with either lines or polygons, and it shouldn’t matter whether it’s a shapefile or a coverage. Just make sure that your layer is projected into lat/long first.
Looks like Jim’s code is now on ArcScripts.
Link – Google Is an Advertising Company
If Google has a platform, it’s an advertising platform, not a developer platform. I’m not even saying Google should have a developer platform, I’m just saying they don’t. Any software that uses Google as a back-end for web search could be modified to use Yahoo or MSN by changing a few lines of code. Google Desktop might be popular, but it’s nowhere near as cool as Yahoo Widgets (a.k.a. Konfabulator) in terms of acting as a developer platform.
A good assessment of what Google is. For all those thinking Google Earth is the next GIS platform, think again. Google only views it as a way to push ads on to your desktop.
Here’s a quick and dirty comparison of ESRI’s ArcWeb Public Services and the Google Maps API. Both are free to use and offer developers a way to display geographic data via the Web.
Walt has a nice quick look at the features of both ArcWeb Services and the Google Maps API. In response to Walt’s comment:
Anyone with space on a cheap shared host can use Google’s API, but without SOAP services it’s difficult to use ESRI’s product.
He should have a look at Andrea Rosso’s blog where he shows you how to use PHP and Perl with ArcWeb Services and Sean Gillies’s post on using Python with ArcWeb Services. Of course it is still SOAP, but almost any website hosting service gives you access to Perl, PHP or Python.
