Geospatial World

Well here we are at Thursday and I'm finally getting to a post. It's been a whirlwind 4 days.  The plenary session on Monday was another good start to the UC.  This year's theme is: Applying Geography Everywhere.  Jack Dangermond kicked off the day with some highlights and trends in GIS.  A number of presentations followed and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is doing some cool stuff on the 3D stove of things.  The upcoming mobile apps: WorkForce and Navigator, look impressive. The highlights for me in the afternoon were Dr. Bruce Aylward from the World Health Organization who gave another very compelling talk.  Last year he talked on the work being done to eradicate polio globally.  This year his talk was on the recent ebola outbreak, and it was an amazing talk.  I was also surprised at Governor Martin O’Malley's talk.  He provided some interesting insights into his time as the mayor of Baltimore and Governor of Maryland and some of the things he

A _very_ early start this morning as I'm enroute to San Diego to take in the annual worldwide gathering of gis/geo geeks, more commonly known as the ESRI User Conference.  It's always fun to take in the event, along with over 10k other attendees, to see what's new and usually more accurately, what is 'coming'.  The content of the conference is extremely varied with hundreds of sessions and talks in a plethora of tracks and topics. Things for me will kick off with the Mining group social on Sunday evening followed by the Plenary session on Monday. In addition to the conference itself, it will be nice to catch up with other GIS folks from other SRK global offices. I'm not promosing anything, but I am going to try to make some updates on the goings on at the conference so stay tuned. Photo 1 : The North Saskatchewan river on takeoff just out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan . The smoke has cleared from the many forest fires in the north and a beautiful morning is shap

A new record!  Almost a year and a half between posts! I didn't say it was a good record... At any rate, here's a little tip I just stumbled across for working more efficiently with ArcGIS Collector .  We have put together a few Collector apps for some clients as of late, and in many cases the data collection is happening offline, and without accurate GPS location information. The new and improved offline collection features, including the ability to collect related data while offline, is incredibly slick.  For example, it is now possible to take 'instrument readings' in a disconnected environment, like say when you're 1 km underground where a GPS signal is a little hard to come by... Sorry, got a little sidetracked, back to the issue at hand.  Something that has annoyed me with the data collection is that Collector is always trying to use your GPS location to help you with the data collection.  But when you're in these disconnected environments this fea

It's no secret that I've griped and complained about many of ArcGIS's quirks that seem stuck or rooted in the 80's ...  One would think I wouldn't be surprised anymore when I come across such silly issues... But I am. The latest 'undocumented feature' I've discovered is that the Field Calculator will fail if there is forward slash ( '\' ) in the Layer name. ArcGIS 11 can't come soon enough.

Well, again, it has been quite sometime since my last post, and alot has happened... I had an extremely busy summer and fall.  A colleague and I spent a good part of our summer and fall  (on our own time and dime) working on an initiative that we feel will be a huge benefit to our organization.  It is very exciting and I am getting a chance to combine two of my passions, all things mapping and RC Flying! Check out what we've been working on:  http://maps.srk.com/uas

Whoa... 2 posts within 2 months...  I'm on a roll baby...   :-) In today's episode I want to document what I've discovered with the following lovely error when attempting to create a Map Package: I've had this very insightful (hint:sarcasm) message box pop-up a number of times when trying to create a Map Package.  After much copying/pasting, renaming, re-connecting data sources I finally figured out what the problem was in this particular instance. This particular map had some DWG files connected to the map, and some of these DWG names contained a special character "#", and also contained extra 'dots' in the name to delimit a date.  For example: Name#-2013.04.09.dwg In my testing and trials, removing the '#' symbol did not resolve the issue, and it wasn't until I removed the extra 'dots' in the name that I was finally able to successfully generate the package.  Further testing revealed that the '#' symbol