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I am using this site to track various interests and projects, but if you want to, you are free to add content and comment on anything you see here. To make comments, use the "Discuss this page" link at the bottom of each page.

--Brian Wilson 18:50, 28 November 2005 (PST)

No more paper

I just decided I am really tired of filing all the bits of paper that collect in piles around here every year around 'tax time'. Also, I don't want to own a file cabinet anymore. It's heavy and bulky.

Capturing documents

First I need to get the docs into the computer. This includes anything paper that I want to file. Receipts, bills, articles torn from magazines, notes to myself.

The computer aka "the doc server" needs bullet-proof and secure backups, so I need some way to encrypt the docs and ship them off somewhere. Only critical docs need this treatment. I think I can afford slightly less bullet proof backups for my photo and music collections.

Digital docs

I can already access many personal docs online.

I have to do this in a timely way though. they don't all archive everything forever. Plus I want them all accessible in one system.

I need to program the doc server to grab every relevant personal doc and archive it. This means bank and credit card records, and bills from various entities like the power company and the phone company.

I'd like to stash email in this server, too.

Paper to image

Flatbed scanner - Yep, I have one of these somewhere. I need to drag it out of the closet. If things go well I will probably want to trade it in for one with a feeder on it.

Digital camera - it's been suggested that you can use a camera and tripod. My eyesight is not that good. It might be useful to consider its ability to capture other things than paper docs. Also I'd like to store photos.

Photographic images

(and movies, I suppose)

Thinking along the same lines, I'd also like to store...

Audio data

Let's get rid of the CD collection, too.

Image to words

OCR via Tesseract My idea is not to make a perfect readable copy of the original but just to be able to grab keywords for indexing.

Storing documents

I don't want things to be stored in a hierarchy or a taxonomy or anything ending in the letter 'y'. I want it all in a pile, just like I do with paper. Then I want to be able search through the pile. The difference is that I want to be able to do the searching MUCH MUCH FASTER.

So I want at least the metadata stored in a SQL database. The docs themselves can be stored in BLOBS or files. I don't care as long as I can still get at them in 10 or 20 years when I need them. I think files would be best.

Indexing documents

Fine, so the metadata can live in a database. I need to decide what the best way to access the data is.

This journey started when I ran across the announcement for a release of phpMyArchive so I better check it out. This project has some very good ideas about making data storage and indexing.

I remember evaluating Swish-E so I will look at it again too. Swish-E indexes text docs.

I also played with MnoGoSearch for a while. It indexes documents and puts the index into a database. For articles it could go like this: Scan article. Attach title to it. OCR it. Then run indexer on it.

Maps!

Corvallis: City of Corvallis Parks
Airport area maps for Paul

Coastal Oregon: I've been preparing maps for my personal use on trips to Coastal Oregon. 5 maps here so far.

Sonoma county: CDS Wireless Network I plan on putting these static maps into Mapserver any day now...

Cartography

To learn more than you could want to know about color and shading on maps, visit these sites.

http://www.reliefshading.com/ has articles by Bill Patterson of the National Park Service on producing 2d and 3D maps using natural colors.

http://shadedrelief.com/ has lots of information on shading techniques and very interesting articles about cartographers.

GIS

GeoDa - An Introduction to Spatial Data Analysis

Cartographic Connections video

http://www.gisjobs.com/

http://www.gjc.org/

Software

The FreeGIS site http://www.freegis.org/ has the largest collection of freely available GIS/CGPS software. But the collection is not inclusive because policy prohibits them from listing free but protected commercial software. So for example, Trimble's free mission planning program is not available there.

GISuser has a collection of free tools.

From email: Since 1997, I have implemented sets of Java, Web & Wireless GIS tools. Most of them are free to use. If you are interested, please visit http://www.jshape.com for more information. -- Shiuh-Lin Lee

ERmapper
MapWindow GIS

gvSIG is a tool oriented to manage geographic information. It is characterized by a user-friendly interface, with quick access to the most common raster and vector formats. In the same view it includes local as well as remote data through a WMS or WFS source.

Forestry GIS (fGIS™) is a compact but robust shapefile editing program, digitizer and GIS data query tool for Windows®

GMT = Generic Mapping Tools: http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/

Visualization

OpenDX

Vis5D+

Commercial server software

Alta4 Imagemapper and GPS Photomapper imapemapper example see City of Newberg too.

Mobile GIS Software

BBBike
ESRI ArcPad
GiMoDig
GPSDrive
Hoko

Mobile Geographics mapping and navigation for PDAs (This site is PalmOS oriented)

Elkhorn Slough Wireless Project Spring 2003 CSU Monterey Bay project

Clipping orthophotos Process used in CDS Wireless project

I want documentation on every possible available addon and tool for ArcMap!! I suppose the closest thing today is the http://support.esri.com/ knowledge base. I ran across the GPS stuff today in 9.1 ArcInfo.

Refractions developed PostGIS
Manifold GIS software
Remote sensing
GRASS Open source GIS software

Fuzzy GIS

Fuzzy thoughts -or- Who gets to decide where the shoreline is, and why isn't it fuzzy?

For georeferencing historical maps, can we use a fuzzy confidence overlay to indicate what areas of the map look good spatially and what ones don't?

GIS-based fuzzy c-Means clustering analysis of urban public transit network service: The Nanjing City case study

Integrating exploration dataset in GIS using fuzzy inference modeling

Projects

ArcGIS A few ArcObjects notes at the moment.
Geodatabases
Mapserver iMap
ArcIMS + ColdFusion
ArcPad including notes on PDAs

Fusebox

Geocalendar

GoogleEarth

Programming for GIS

Software development

Web-based map viewers: Feature list for mapserver viewers
Test projects: 1. SWF viewer 2. Orthoviewer See also Flash support in Mapserver

Using ArcMap as a front end to ArcIMS and/or Mapserver

ArcMap to ArcIMS: Jeroen Ticheler's script MXDtoAXL downloaded from http://arcscripts.esri.com/ -- this works quite well but breaks if version > 9.0 (There is another MXD converter on arcscripts by Mark Andrews. He provides only a snipped of VB and no instructions. Since we are not ArcObjects geniuses, Kevin and I are sticking to Veroen's program.)

ArcMap to Mapserver Still looking into this. On possibility is avein. See also this page.

Here is the ArcXML Programmer's Reference Guide. To tweak ArcIMS servers and viewers you really need to know ArcXML. It's used for ArcPad configuration too.

AJAX and AFLAX

Server side vs client side user interfaces for web mapping It's not really a matter of 'versus' rather than 'where do we draw the line?' Some things HAVE to be on the client. Others can be implemented in either place.

For significant work such as editting and updating we still need a desktop app. Web mapping should be used more for display and simple analysis, with a desktop app communicating with central data stores as the model for editting and advanced spatial analysis.

GPS

General GPS project notes Magnavox GPS reference station (MX-9212 aka "The Blue Box")

GPS on Bicycles

GPS and the PocketPC

GPS mission planning software
Making your own Garmin GPS maps
Transferring GPS data

GPS modules
GPS Protocols
GPS simulators

GPS Links I find interesting at the moment:

GPS workflow NPS page
GpPaSsion reviews and forums
TravelbyGPS
GPS Photo-Link

Solar/Alternative Energy

Solar CREEK -- "Clean Renewable Energy for Everyone's Kids."

Monitoring solar installations

Weather

Doing something about the weather data loggers, xml, web sites...

Yellowstone Weatherstation

Misc Electronics

Thermostats

M-audio Microtrack Digital audio recorder

Wireless

WRT54GS project

Tangent Unplugged

Web site content management

Mediawiki

I am currently using the stable version of Mediawiki which is the software used for the Wikipedia. At home I am running the development version downloaded from CVS.

Reasons I like Mediawiki: It is easy to install. It is easy to customize. It is easy to learn. It is very well supported and has a large user community.

Update. I have been using Mediawiki for over a year now. I have deployed it at work, at home, at my ISP, and for pedalwiki.ihpva.org and solarcreek,org. I like it. I use it for site management, and I document all my work in wikis now. No more lost scraps of paper or random txt files scattered all over creation.

But there are things it does not do well, so I am back looking at Drupal now for ihpva.org main page.

Mediawiki extensions

There are maps in the Wikipedia, so I should really look at the wikimedia extensions for GIS and maps first.

Gallery2 is an image gallery that has been integrated successfully with both Drupal and Mediawiki, which makes it potentially very useful to me.

Drupal

For a while I was convinced Drupal was the best CMS so I started writing this Beginner's guide for Drupal. I stopped working on it when I quit using Drupal. (Which was almost immediately...) I am leaving the page here because I might revisit it at any moment.

(and that moment is NOW. Brian Wilson 07:03, 13 March 2006 (PST))

Other

I might revisit Zope and Plone instead. The only reason I am interested in plone right now is because of plonemap. The plonemap server seems to be down right now so I can't even research it. (29-Nov-2005) Later for this...

The clickshift.com domain has been transferred to a new owner;
my old content is now at www.wildsong.biz; please update your bookmarks. Thanks--

Brian Wilson 17:57, 7 January 2006 (PST)