Geospatial World

Lifelong learning is something I have tried to practice my entire life.  Over the years, this learning has occurred on many different levels and taken many different forms.  Whether it was the formal college/technical school education in my earlier years, or the years I’ve spent in the software industry keeping up with all the latest a greatest technologies, or my recent experiences with online education through SAIT Polytechnic , it has been a fantastic experience. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I was not a great student in High School…  I struggled quite a bit for a variety of reasons including: too many distractions, poor study habits, and a lack of focus ( I was going to be a rock star!  ).  I guess I would consider myself a late bloomer, because it wasn’t until I was a little older (and assumedly more mature, although that is debatable…) that I started to enjoy the ‘learning experience’. This might seem like an odd/off topic compared to my usual ...

Oh those pesky long paths and filenames... It seems I had a brain lock and had forgotten how picky ArcGIS can be with paths and filenames.  I must have been having a bad day, because I can usually sleuth these things out, but alas, it was my IT department that was successful in resolving the problems I was having.  So needless to say, I was a little embarrassed that I missed this obvious one. What were the problems you ask? Well, I found that I could not preview some GRID data in ArcCatalog.  I didn't think that was a big deal as I’ve come across this on occasion and haven’t thought much about it.     That was until I went to add this raster GRID to a map and ArcMap reported 'Invalid raster dataset'  Huh?  What's going on? To make a long story short, the path was too long...  If you create a mapped location to a shorter path and voila!  The preview works and I was able to add the GRID to a map. Now, besides being extremely f...