We do a lot of tiles for various customers at Zekiah. Tiling is as much art as science and sometimes things go wrong so we have a range of utilities that we use to perform various kids of QA. Because the caches can be large, we usually want to perform a visual QA on the static tiles before pushing them up to wherever they are going to live full-time.

In order to facilitate that, I wrote a very simple tile viewer using Node.js and Leaflet. It uses a config file to get everything it needs to operate so we just make our changes there. This application currently only works with Web Mercator tiles but I’m working on adding support for WGS84. It also doesn’t work with ‘compact’ tiles from ArcGIS Server. It obviously requires Node, and it also requires an NPM install of the ‘open’ module to facilitate opening the browser.

Anything else you need to know is in the readme. I hope you find it useful. It can be downloaded here.

When it’s really a desktop application.

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading with conflicted agreement the posts of Brian Timoney and Bill Morris about the nature of geo-portals and what they should or should not be and do. I say that I am in conflicted agreement not because I take any issue with anything they have said. Their posts represent what should be considered best practices in terms of building web mapping applications. In Brian’s posts, the counter-examples he highlights represent some of the worst practices to be avoided.

My conflict arises from the fact that, while I agree with the ideas that Brian and Bill put forward, I find myself working against them in my current work. In my hangout with James Fee a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I am working again (albeit temporarily) in the world of Silverlight. I am supporting a very large, complex Silverlight application that, as one of many functions, includes a mapping module that runs counter to almost every best practice espoused by Brian and Bill. And I am adding to it.

Over on Google+, Diego Guidi let me know that the SharpMap 1.0 Release Candidate has been released. There was a time when I worked with, and wrote about, SharpMap a lot. During that entire time, the stable version of SharpMap sat at some version number that started with “0.9”. The release of a 1.0 candidate is a signal that the project is moving forward.

This is important because there are still an awful lot of .Net developers out there, especially in government shops that made a big Microsoft push in terms of infrastructure and training years ago. Of course, many of those shops are also committed to Esri technologies but SharpMap, while being a fully-functioning mapping/GIS library, also provides easy access to data sources not natively supported by Esri. Additionally, it is very easy to extend to support new or custom data sources and strightforward to get SharpMap to play nicely in traditionally Esri-centric environments.

David Bitner sent out a reminder that Early Bird reagistration for the FOSS4G North America conference closes on 1 April 2013. After that, the price goes up by $50 US. You can register online at EventBrite.

The preliminary program (PDF) for this year’s event looks exceptional, building upon and potentially exceeding the outstanding quality of FOSS4G-NA 2012. I’ll be sorry to miss the conference this year but will be looking forward to its social media exhaust.

_{^{Image by s shepherd schizoform on flickr CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons}}

Just a quick note to tidy up some loose ends related to recent posts…

First, regarding the post ”A #LazyWeb Compendium of Python Resources for Beginners,” the University of South Florida PyBulls Python interest group, as promised, compiled a list of Python resources and posted it on their GitHub page. Thanks to them for their quick response.

Second, following up on the post ”The Best Thing I Saw at TUGIS 2013,” the data and workbooks for Dr. Arthur Lembo’s introduction to open-source GIS have been made available. The data can be found on GitHub and the workbooks can be found on the Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative web site. Many thanks for contributing these resources.

These items are embedded in the comments for their respective posts but I thought it would be useful to call them out more prominently.

I spent the day yesterday at Towson University attending the TUGIS 2013 conference. The new one-day format was a firehose that showcased the diversity of geospatial work occurring across the State of Maryland. The keynote by Learon Dalby was well-received and the content of the conference was generally substantive. While the day was a sprint, there was one workshop that really caught my attention more so than I would have thought from its title.

The photo below shows 40 participants of an “Introduction to Free and Open Source GIS Software” workshop getting hands-on experience with QGIS and PostGIS by working through prepared but realistic scenarios. These scenarios included doing multi-user editing and performing spatial analysis to assess the effects of a potential toxic release over a small town.

The workshop was put together by Dr. Arthur Lembo of Salisbury University and conducted by him and a team of his students, who not only led portions of the workshop but were also stationed around the room to provide guidance to participants. The scenarios were prepared in printed workbooks that the participants were free to take with them, along with information about how to download the tools. All-in-all, I thought the workshop was very well-designed and presented a thorough overview of the capabilities of these two tools.

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading up to the Towson University GIS (TUGIS) conference with 500 or so of my closest Maryland geo-friends. It has been restructured into a one-day event and the program seems to be very content-rich as a result. I am particularly happy to see more open-source content this year. There’s an intro session featuring PostgreSQL, PostGIS, QGIS, and GeoServer presented by Salisbury State University. Salisbury was once known as a bastion of Manifold so they’ve got a long history of thinking outside the Arc. Additionally, there is a session (by Towson University) discussing the use of GDAL, OGR, and Shapely in the development of a spatial service.

One thing I like about regional GIS conferences like this is that they tend to focus more on solutions to real-world problems instead of the latest technological bells and whistles. I spend so much of my time with my head in Federal requirements that it’s nice do a reset and get different perspectives on how geospatial technologies are used. I am particularly interested to hear the keynote from Learon Dalby of Sanborn and formerly of the Arkansas GIO office. I had the pleasure of working with Learon and the AGIO team on a project a couple of years ago and am impressed with what they accomplished.

I appreciate the new format of TUGIS as a one-day event is much easier to fit into the schedule. I’m looking forward to it.

A friend who is in the midst of a career change and moving into the GIS world asked me for some pointers to resources for getting started with Python. I threw the question out to Twitter (with a similar variation also posted to Google+):

I got a couple of requests to summarize any information I received, which seemed reasonable. I got quite a few responses and here are some links:

For various reasons, I can’t attend today’s inaugural FedGeoDay at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC, though I’ll be watching the hashtag with great interest. Jack Flood of Arc2Earth, however, has already posted his slides to SlideShare:

Over the past year, I’ve been involved in searching for GIS analysts a number of times. As a result, I’ve noticed a few patterns:

1. There are a lot of analysts out there looking for jobs. Every time I run an ad, I get at least 100 resumes from people of various levels of experience and education.
2. The vast majority of those that I call to pre-screen have not done any meaningful coding of any kind. This includes Python, which has been shipping with ArcGIS for several versions now.
3. Of those that do have some coding experience, many do not show it on their resumes. I find this particularly interesting as I can’t imagine why a person would choose not to list all relevant skills or experience.

I am very publicly on the record that I think some form of coding skill is essential for any GIS analyst entering the workforce today. My reasoning here is fairly straightforward.

1. The “IS” in “GIS” stands for “information system.” This means “computers.” Actually, according to one of my professors in the late ’80s, an information system doesn’t technically have to involve computers but this is 2013 and even brewing a cup of coffee involves a computer.
2. The “G” in “GIS” stands for “geography.” (Don’t worry, the revelations will keep coming.) Geography is intensely mathematical. I suppose, in the interest of accuracy, I should state that some segments of geography are less mathematical than others but I think it’s safe to say that the elements of the science that are addressed by GIS involve a lot of math. Take, for instance, coordinate reference systems. That one small but important part of geography can separate the wheat from the chaff quickly.
3. Computers use code to do math.

Modern GIS software is complicated and comes with a lot of capability by default. Just look at the default UI for ArcMap or QGIS and you’ll see a lot of tools at your fingertips. In other words, there are a lot of buttons to push. This is fine but I’d wager that these software tools expose less than 10% of their full capability through their default interfaces.