Box Shaped World

Box Shaped World

NoSQL - the next step in GIS?
Hopefully I won't make this posting too rambling.  Full Disclosure:  I am not a database expert of any kind.  For the most part, all GISers are probably familiar enough with what a database, or more specifically a Relational Databa...

Camels
Well, the final report on the Camel project has officially been released. Here is a link where you can download it. There is a separate report (54) for the stuff I worked on. THis was incorporated into chapter 11 of the main report. Essentially i...

Annotation Groups
I'm working on a series of maps of differing scales and different labels.  In my head I'm thinking, I'll just do one map, use bookmarks for each individual map, and annotation groups with zoom scales set.  That way I could just ...

VBA and ArcGIS 10
I just saw a note about VBA in regards to ArcGIS 10.  Apparently it is still available, but requires a separate install and (free) license file.  So you've still got one more version to use your vba scripts, but essentially it isn't...

Service Areas
Back in Colorado for the week.  Then headed to the AAG Conference in Las Vegas next week.  Before I left, I needed to create some Service Areas using Network Analyst.  It didn't need to be exact but more of a visual example.&nbs...

Crowdsourcing
I would have probably given up this topic by now, but I was listening to the excellent Digital Planet the other day when it came up again.  It was an interesting take on it.  They are using volunteers ("non-experts") to classify a...

MapInfo MapCad 9.5
I thought I should post a little more about MapCAD than just "I Couldn't get it to install." If you are using 9.5 you should definitely download MapCAD. It will give you more data editing control than previously, as well as speed ...

Book Recommendation
A colleague let me glance over this book by Chang. I have to say it is one of the better introductory GIS texts I have seen. I've owned a few. The one for my undergrad courses was weak, but in fairness it was one of the least expensive textboo...

GIS Porn
Just saw these new videos about the upcoming release of ArcGIS 10.  I have to say, I dig the look of the new layout, way to join 2005 ESRI.  Way better than MapInfo and Manifold's 1996 designed on sandpaper layouts.  But seriously...

More ArcScene Stuff
So, I spent all that time setting up the repair data source code, and then discovered that by right-clicking on the layer, going to Data --> Repair Data Source, ArcWhatever fixes all the ones that were in the same folder. Same problem with the ba...

Speaking of software...
That never changes its interface. Just received an announcement from Clark Labs. They just released the latest incarnation of IDRISI software called Taiga. If you are looking for a low cost Image processing software, or raster based GIS, this shou...

Add tickmarks to the horizontal
I needed to add a bunch of tick marks to a line in a layout in ArcGIS. I am not aware of a built-in tool to do this, so I created my own. It is just for the horizontal, but may be modified for the vertical. I made it fairly generic so that the inp...

Find values in one table that are missing in another table MapInfo
Took me a little while to find an example of this, so I thought I would add one to the "interweb" to help other people. One part of MapInfo that is extremely powerful is the SQL functionality. It isn't comprehensive, but there are a n...

Spatialite
I've noticed more and more people talking about SQLite and in particular Spatialite.  This is typically surrounded by talk about the hopeful end of shapefiles as a defacto exchange format.  I suppose the success of shapefiles has mostl...

GIS Stack Exchange
I suggest you go over to this site to help build a GIS stack exchange similar to Stack Overlow, but dedicated solely to GIS.  Should be a very valuable resource.

GIS Jobs and Blog News
While I hope that you are not one of the thousands/tens of thousands of people that have lost their job in the last year, I thought I would post this on here. It's hard to tell what it is really like in the U.S. being in Australia, and Darwin for...

SQL Server 2008 Express
I've finally gotten a chance to play around with SQL Server 2008 express edition. In case you haven't heard 2008 introduced native spatial support. I'm not sure how the internals store spatial data but you can add geometry (or geography)...

Good to know
Just wanted to thank Hampden GIS/IT for a very valuable MapInfo tip. As I've said a few times, I'm not a fan of workspaces, but there is something you can do with a workspace that you can't with any other proprietary program file I'v...

Phew....
Just had a heart-attack but now I'm ok.  I have a map in ArcGIS that uses several joins to link up by statistical boundaries with the data stored in a DBF file.  I realized I was using the wrong score, and needed to update it.  Ra...

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