Geospatial World

I haven’t done much, actually nothing, in the way of development over the last year at SRK.  Last week at the ESRI UC there was an awful lot of talk about Python , and ArcPy .  I didn’t actually attend any ArcPy sessions, other than watching a bit of one demo in the showcase area.  However, one of my colleagues did take in an ArcPy session and was quite excited about, and what it has to offer. I have done a considerable amount a VBA in the Autodesk products, and moved onto the .NET world when VBA was deprecated.  I do not consider my self a ‘heads-down’ developer, but more of a hacker/compiler/scripter, and I was not one of those people that could not leave VBA behind and complained to anyone who would listen that ESRI, Autodesk, <insert any company name licensing VBA), and Microsoft were pure evil for moving on from VBA.  There are a MANY reasons why it was time to move, the biggest being 64bit, but I’m not getting into that here. Where am I going with this you ask? Well, my

Well, I’m back at home after a very early Saturday morning flight out of San Diego.  It always seems like a good idea to book these early flights to get home in good time, but I sure wasn’t thinking that when my alarm went off at 3:45am Saturday morning… Friday was the final day at the ESRI UC, and I attended what turned out to be an ad-hoc combined session including: ‘Working with ArcGIS Online’ , and ‘Authoring and Using Great Web Maps’ .  These sessions were combined, and moved to a larger room, due to the standing room only offerings of these same sessions earlier in the week.  The session provided some useful information on the ArcGIS online offerings including ArcGIS Online for Organizations which looks very interesting. Following this morning session was our SRK GIS meeting.  This meeting was one of the primary reasons for us attending the ESRI UC, and this meeting was an opportunity for us to gather and discuss a number of items wrt GIS within SRK.  We had a great meeting

A couple days of very good sessions here in San Diego. The ArcGIS Server Performance and Scalabilty sessions yesterday provided valuable info wrt to testing and optimizing large scale implementations. Today I've taken in a couple JavaScript API sessions, and a Web Editing session. I've been extremely impressed by how the ESRI Showcase area is setup in the exhibit hall. There are islands, and areas to sit down with a computer and discuss and try out every piece of technology available with ESRI personnel. You can also book a time or drop in to discuss your techical issues with the Tech Support team! On the downside, its disappointing that coffee isn't even provided first thing in the morning... Good thing there are an abundance of 'insert well known brand here' coffee kiosks in the convention center.

So imagine my complete and utter surprise when I walked into the SDCC , where I thought I was going to know no-one except my SRK colleagues that I had yet to meet, and the first person I see is a fellow AU presenter Gordon Luckett of Arrow Geomatics ! It is truly bizarre that in a sea of over 13,000 people, that I just happened to walk in that particular entrance, and Gord happened to be standing right there... All I can muster is bizarre !!!! I was great to catch up with Gord, and I'm sure we'll cross paths this week. Anywho... As I mentioned previously , today was the Plenary Sessions to kick off the conference. Jack Dangermond discussed his GIS Vision for the coming year, and years, followed by various technical demonstrations. Highlights of the sessions included: ArcGIS innovations including new features of the upcoming 10.1 ArcGIS Online improvements 64 bit support Improved LiDAR support Geodatabase administration tools I managed to track down my SRK colleagues and fi

Well it's funny how almost 3 months can get away from a person... Oh well, as I've said in the past, life gets in the way... I am excited to currently be in San Diego where I will be attending the 2011 edition of the annual ESRI User Conference this week. ESRI UC is truly an international conference with over 13,000 attendees from over 120 countries around the world . Tomorrow kicks off with the Plenary sessions, and then followed up with a few days of a wide range of sessions including: technical workshops, Special Interest Group meetings, vendor presentations, and much more. We (SRK Consulting) are also using this event an opportunity for some of the GIS leaders within our organization to gather and have a discussion on a wide variety of topics WRT GIS within SRK. I'm really looking forward to meeting ,and learning from, all of my colleagues from around the world in attendance.

I know, I know... it's been a while... no excuses other than, 'life'. So, over the last number of days I've been noticing my ArcGIS locking up when I would goto print. Now, if this happening once in a while I probably wouldn't have given it much thought, however, this seemed to be happening quite frequently as of late. I would usually just kill the arcmap process, and try again. The last couple of times this occured, I happened to notice (before I ended task) that my Google Chrome browser would locked up as well when the print was executed from ArcGIS. Odd... oh well, kill both processes, and re-try. This last time I noticed that during this 'lock-up' in ArcGIS, if I killed the Chrome process, voila, the print dialog would appear. Ok... now this tells me there is a direct link between the two. A quick Google search, and it appears I'm not the only one experiencing this. I will continue to do some more troubleshooting and see if this can be resolved. Unti

As far as GIS/CAD integration goes, I have long stated you should choose the best tool for the job you are trying to do. As such, I have held the belief that if you are doing pure vector data creation/design work, a 'CAD' tool is probably better suited, and vice versa, if you are performing spatial analysis, high end cartographic output a 'GIS' tool is probably your tool of choice. Over the last number of years I've been talking about how the lines are being blurred between these two camps based on recent advancements in many software tools. One tool that I've found to be extremely powerful in the Arc* products is the Trace command, and I have to admit that some of my beliefs are being challenged a little in light of some recent work I've been doing. For example, let's say I'm working on a watershed analysis, and creating boundaries to represent the watershed. Now I'm not talking about an automated analysis procedure here, I'm taking about

I'm currently in Yellowknife, NT, and I've always wanted to get up here, but I must say, that I was hoping to do this in the summer sometime, as I hear it is beautiful up there. I guess the only bonus is that it is currently colder here at home, than it is up there! :-) Regardless, this should be a great trip and I'm really looking forward to it. The purpose of this trip is to go onsite and see first hand one of the projects I am working on, and to get some 'face time' with other people involved in this project. The project is a 'Freeze Optimization Study' which is part of the larger Giant Mine remediation plan . The main goal of the FOS is to study different ground freezing technologies. For those that do not know, Giant Mine is located in Yellowknife, NT and it produced gold from 1948 to 1999. The remediation project contains many facets including: The clean-up of the surface project Stabilization and securing of the underground project The maintenanc

I've noticed a little 'gotcha' with the new Mosaic to New Raster command in ArcGIS 10... I do like the new quasi background processing in ArcGIS 10, but the indicator in the status bar seems a little quirky at times, and during a long running process like the Mosaic to New Raster command it seems particularly problematic. Fyi, James Fee's GIS Blog also talks about some of the UI quirks in ArcGIS 10. When the command is running, the progress indicator starts up, but then it will just go blank for long periods of time. Is the process completed? Is it still working? Well, it turns out that it is indeed still working away in the background, however, there is no visual indication of this. If you watch close, you might notice every once in a while you will see the progress indicator start scrolling again for a couple seconds, but then will disappear again? Finally, after some time, which will depend on the size of raster data you are mosaicing, the completed message wil

I just realized I neglected to mention a very important key item in my original post on ArcGIS Query Layers . 2 words… READ-ONLY Yes, unfortunately, these Query Layers are read-only, and I don’t just mean the geometries are read-only, even the attribute data is read-only. Maybe in ArcGIS 11 these will be fully accessible and editable? One can hope! Until next time, Take care Warren M

I just thought of something… My recent post is reason #149 to make the move to an enterprise spatial database (or at least a geodatabase) if you’re working heavily in the ESRI world… Until next time, Take care Warren M

Last week the GISCI had a press release announcing: GISCI Invites Comment on Proposed Examination Requirement From the GISCI website: “After much consideration and deliberation, the GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) invites you to review a proposal to update requirements for GIS Professional (GISP) certification.  Key among the proposed updates is the addition of a required examination.” This press release is inviting people to comment on the proposal to update the GISP requirements to include a required examination. Now, anyone that is already a GISP, or has considered becoming a GISP, or has followed the GISP saga, is probably well aware of the numerous debates on the many social networking sites with respect to ‘what’ being a GISP really means.  I have contributed to many of those discussions, and don’t intend to re-start or re-hash the details here.  All I’m going to say is, if you have an opinion on this topic, don’t sit back, go make your voice heard and get inv

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 ranting's you say, b

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 frustrating, this was a time