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MESSAGE TO ESRI regarding ArcGIS Desktop.
When I have to restart your software after crashes (which is very often), allow me to recover the work I was doing. Don't make me do a "save" every 5 minutes. Geez! "vi" got that capability around 1975, are your programmers still living in the 20th century?
Please make the cancel button work. Having to wait a few minutes wondering if the task will ever terminate, and then using Windows Task Manager is not good. Make the button work EVERYWHERE.
Hire an intern. Give him/her the task of making all your programs accept filenames that are longer than 13 characters. How much could that cost?
Please have the intern make all the tools pay attention to the "Environment" settings. Having some tools use them and some not is really stupid.
When you are thinking of doing a release, compare it with previous versions. If it is slower or less reliable, fix it before release. Stop doing releases before the product is stable.
I just found out that expressions in "Map Algebra" have to have spaces around the operators. This is so funny! It is the only time I have seen a requirement for whitespace anywhere like this. Wait, did you have an intern write that parser? Maybe you should pull the interns off the design of production code and have them fix bugs instead?
ESRI, you get away with a LOT because most of your customers are not programmers and don't realize how easy many of these bugs would be to fix. It amounts to "customer abuse".
If you were open source, all these problems would be fixed in about a day.
People say that Microsoft is closed source because the code is so ugly... I can't imagine how hacked up the ESRI code must be.
Short Term Memory
17-Nov-2010
Installed an OCZ RevoDrive and WDC Caviar Black in Raven, to make it fast enough to do geoprocessing in my spare time. SSD optimizations
- Web Maps the way I want them ---> GeoApt Spatial Data Browser --> QGIS
- Benton county topo map for Garmin handhelds - processing DEM and LiDAR data. See Making your own Garmin GPS maps
- FoxtrotGPS - Learning OpenStreetMap! Wow, it's fun.
- House gets new doors - 1 down, 7 to go; mmm love that plaster dust
- APRS tracker
- Magnavox 9212 - just got one, now I need to build a cable for it.
- 8track building kernel for C7 + Lilliput DisplayLink monitor
- Yaris#Sound Dampening - ordered materials, arrival Nov 18
Long Term Memory
17 June 2010
I have been doing a lot of Windows programming, not really by choice. Today I have to try to make an Access database work properly. Why does Access still exist?
I am eating lunch, and I have a nice apple.
The apple reminds me of Microsoft.
A nice old lady holds one out to me and says "eat this pretty apple deary!"
It's all shiny and pretty on the outside but after I bite into I realized it was just polish and inside it's old and rotten, like Access. The Microsoft apple puts me to sleep for 20 years and I dream that this is the latest technology.
Then I wake up and discover that while I slumbered in ignorance and bliss, the world has been taken over by penguins.
It's a much richer world. I was sleeping in a walled garden owned by a miserable witch who tried to fool me into thinking it was a place of wonder.
-- May 2010 gpsd on Mac PyQt on the Mac Just can't seem to get excited about PyQt but I did give it a chance.
16-Jan-2010 Alfresco building for Debian 64-bit. 01-Nov-2010 I need to revisit Alfresco, it still seems like a good idea for AlseaGeo.
05 Jan 2010 Low-cost RTK
21-Dec-2009 Debian Live, Walltop
30-Oct-09 GIS on the Macintosh
24-Oct-09 I got a nice new 13" MacBook Pro today, first Mac I have owned since the Mac IICX. She is named Stellar after Stellar's Jay.
24-Jun-09 Another thing to look at .. tools for ArcView http://www.ian-ko.com/
03-Feb-2009 Idea of the day, create an equivalent to openstreetmap for personal weather stations. Or even better, find one that already exists.
30 Jan 09 Now using Google Sitesearch for this site, which integrates quite well with the Mediawiki software.
26 Jan 09 I bought a month worth of T-Mobile data access for $20 from eBay so I am spending some time with the Openmoko Neo FreeRunner that I got last summer. It was fun, but the month ended and the rate went to $157. Ha ha! Good bye data access
20 Jan 09 Doing a bit of Microchip PIC programming.
03 Sept 08 Developing cross-platform GUI applications with Python and QT4: PyQt The longer I work with Python, the more I like it. but QT? Meh.
Feb 17 2008 Streaming media servers
Dec 24 2007 Cool link of the day http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/spo/livecamera.html
Ubuntu on Toshiba Magnia SG20 -- Otter -- I still fire up the SG20 once in a while when I get email requests for help.
Radio
Jan 11 2007 - Lots of snow here last night! I am walking to work. I will carry my new radio. The Radio Page
No more paper
Jan 2007-- 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. Continued in No more paper
Jan 2009-- Update. Still don't have a working scanner. The Canoscan FB630 that a friend gave me never worked right. It is now in the junk pile.
Feb 2009 - Got a scanner off the local Craig's List. HP 3970 Works great.
Nov 2010 - I see the scanner every day. It's usually peeking out from a pile of paper.
Maps!
Making your own Garmin GPS maps
Google Maps support has been added to this wiki. (2 June 08)
Corvallis
Girls On The Run
CARDV Run/Walk
South Corvallis
City of Corvallis Parks
Airport area maps for Paul
Evanite Fiber Corp area
Coastal Oregon
I've been preparing maps for my personal use on trips to Coastal Oregon. 5 maps here so far.
Oregon Cascades
Just one so far. More to come. Oregon Cascades
Sonoma county: Not online right now, maps of the 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
New ESRI Services
GeoDa - An Introduction to Spatial Data Analysis
Cartographic Connections video
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
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
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?
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
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.
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
Magnavox GPS reference station (MX-9212 aka "The Blue Box")
GPS mission planning software
Making your own Garmin GPS maps
Transferring GPS data
GPS receivers Some that I own, some that I am interested in.
GPS Protocols
GPS simulators
GPS Links I find interesting at the moment:
La Cima ActiveX protocols for Garmin, etc.
GPS workflow National Park Service 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...
Misc Electronics
M-audio Microtrack Digital audio recorder
Wireless
Elkhorn Slough Wireless Project Spring 2003 CSU Monterey Bay project
Web site content management
Mediawiki
I am currently using the stable version of Mediawiki which is the software used for the Wikipedia.
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.
Speeding up mediawiki
...and slimming it down. When I had my own computer on the Internet I had no constraints. Now I either choose a slow virtual CPU at tektonic.net or a fast but CPU cycle limited server at Hostmonster.com. If I use too many cycles at Hostmonster they cut off access from the outside world for 5 minutes. VERY ugly.
I tried to put caching onto mediawiki that will stop it from being a resource hog. Nothing seemed to help.
Choices
Built-in mediawiki caching -- since I am getting kicked out regularly I can assume this one is not good enough for my purposes.
memcached -- cache access to database
eAccelerator (http://eaccelerator.net/) -- precompile php code
squid -- caches html accesses. I read this suggestion on a hostmonster forum. Sean Kelly suggests that Varnish is the way to go.
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...
Google pays my phone bill.
If you want to talk to me, click on this button and enter your phone number then Google Voice will phone you. Answer the call and wait while Google Voice phones me and connects our calls together. If you call me from a land line, you won't have to pay for the call. Since Google does not charge me for the service, I don't have to pay either.
My incoming calls come to me via Gizmo so I don't have to pay for any phone line to receive calls. I used a VOIP service for outgoing calls for a year or so but find that using Google for outgoing calls works fine too.
If you can call Gizmo phones directly my number is 747-235-5752 My Google voice number is 541-368-7383.
