Blog

I’ll be heading off this week to give a keynote at the 2011 Nebraska GIS/LIS Biennial Symposium. I’m pretty sure I’ve never keynoted a biennial symposium (sounds serious doesn’t it?) so it should be a first for me. I think we are going to try and have drinks with a couple of folks from the Omaha area one of the nights I’m there so let me know if you are up for it.

Looks like the Storm Chasers are just down the road from the hotel so maybe I’ll try and make a game while I’m there. I’m already listening to the Counting Crows to see what Omaha is all about.

I’m indebted to my blog readership for many reasons and high-quality blog comments are near the top. There have been some great discussions on this blog over the years and I’ve learned a ton from those who took the time to add their thoughts. I used to think blogging and comments went hand in hand, but these days the conversation happens on Facebook and Twitter.

The conversation has died down on this blog, it took 3 years to get 10,000 comments and since then only 4,000 have been posted. It just isn’t my blog, you see it everywhere. Facebook and Twitter have enabled people to talk directly to each other over their social networks rather than trying to do so on a blog comment thread.

Thus with this post, I’ve disabled comments and say thanks for the memories. I’ll still be blogging, but if you want to engage me, you know where to find me. On Facebook or Twitter.

GRASS GIS 6.4.1 released

GRASS 6.4 brings a number of exciting enhancements to the GIS. Our new wxPython graphical user interface (wxGUI) is debuted, Python is now a fully supported scripting language, and for the first time since its inception with a port from the VAX 11/780 in 1983, GRASS runs natively also on a non-UNIX based platform: MS-Windows.

I know right, you thought the same thing I did. If only you had known in 1983 that there was a VAX port think of where you’d be today.

Cue the dramatic prairie dog!

File Geodatabase API – 4 platform final release set for mid-May

… we’ve received a lot of feedback from everyone wanting 64-bit Linux and we’ve made faster progress than we’d expected on the 64-bit Linux port, so we’ve decided to delay the initial release a few weeks and have a single release that supports all 4 platforms. Bazaam!

Cool, now all I have to do is find a customer that actually wants data delivered in the File Geodatabase format. Kablooey!

Yup, the book we have all been waiting for is just about here. Next Wednesday PostGIS in Action will hit the shelves. I’ve been reviewing it over the last year or so and let me just say it is full of awesome. I can’t say enough that everyone who uses or wants to use PostGIS needs to get this.

I’m totally all over the eBook next week…

I’ve been talking quite a bit about using ArcPy and Python as a means to go back to using the command line for GIS analysis. You get such a better understanding as to what you are doing with the geospatial analysis functions when you type them in manually rather than using a wizard.

There are other ways to do this though. Darren Cope has a short blog post on using OGR for clipping GIS data files. Simple and sweet!

It’s just that easy, and best of all it just works when all other methods fail!

That’s just it though, command line usually works when GUI’s fail. The logical outcome is stop using the darn GUI!

MLB Opening Day Scoreboard

Put me in coach, I’m ready to play!

RRW is reporting that sources say Data.gov and other open gov sites could be turned off.

Today the Sunlight Foundation and Federal News Radio reported that the public projects Data.gov, USASpending.gov, Apps.gov/now, IT Dashboard and paymentaccuracy.gov as well as a number of internal government sites including Performance.gov, FedSpace and many of the efforts related the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort would be taken offline in coming weeks due to budget cuts by Congress.

So the spring of open data websites has hit the autumn of budget cuts. Don’t worry about bigger budget issues as our government is totally on top of things. Remain calm, all is well…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Simple wins out every time. Case in point, working with demographic information. Sure you can spin it up all up in a spatial database, analyse it with R and then output some pretty PDFs. Or just roll it all in to Google Fusion Tables and output this beautiful thing.

WNYC 2010 Census Maps

John Keefe shows how he did it. Spoiler alert!

Using Google Fusion Tables made it super easy to manage, map and serve up a lot of data. And the FT feedback team was fantastic about responding to questions and glitches I encountered along the way.

So another year has gone by and we need yet another meme to wrap our hands around. Strait from the NeoGeography crew, we’ve got something new we can play with.

NoGIS

As with anything, everyone is quick to say we’ve all been doing this since the 1960’s so ignore it and move on unless you’ve got one of the following to accomplish:

1. Give talk at some 2.0 conference, NoGIS will put fannies in the seats.
2. Want to write a book; clearly we need textbooks on the subject.
3. Need differentiator between your product and ArcSDE/PostGIS/SQL Server/Oracle Spatial
4. Just like to shoot the shit about crap

The NoGIS Club line forms at the right folks.

The NoGIS Club is forming, no Esri allowed!