I was happy to read to day that CartoDB closed a $23 million Series B financing round. I’ve been impressed with CartoDB since I first saw it in action at FOSS4G in Denver in 2011. I’ve done a few posts on using the platform, which are starting to get long in the tooth but are…
Desktop GIS
I’ve found myself using desktop GIS more and more lately. While I don’t tend to think of myself as an analyst and I’ll never be confused with a cartographer, it is simply not possible to perform GIS software development without making occasional use of desktop GIS. My typical use cases involve data preparation or query…
JS.Geo 2015 Coming in October
Just prior to heading out of town for vacation, I noticed that the JS.Geo 2015 site went live. This year’s event has moved east to Philadelphia and is being held on October 8, 2015. The date is the Thursday before Columbus Day weekend so it will be a great transition into a long weekend, especially…
Using AutomateIt to Manipulate Phone Volume
This post is a little bit off-topic from my typical fare. I recently returned from the Children with Diabetes Friends for Life conference. During one of the lunches, a group of parents at a table were discussing the common difficulty in getting in touch with your child, given that most everyone keeps their mobile phone…
GEOINT 2015 – A Day In My Life
I spent June 24th at the 2015 GEOINT Symposium. Despite having worked in the field and related areas for years, this was my first time attending this event and I was only able to attend for one day. It was a bit of a whirlwind and my impressions were somewhat superficial. I got to catch up…
Maryland Open Data
The most recent meeting of the Maryland Council on Open Data was held on 12 June 2015 at the headquarters of the Maryland Department of Transportation in Hanover, Maryland. I attended in my role as a member of the council. The meetings are now being held quarterly, down from monthly during its first year, so…
Thoughts on HERE
When was the last time you bought a CD? Come to think of it, when was the last time you plugged an iPod into your computer and synced music from iTunes? That’s what I thought. The fact that HERE may be for sale (publicly, which is somewhat unusual in the world of acquisitions) and that…
Square States, PostGIS, and D3
There’s been a lot of attention paid lately to choropleth cartograms using alternate geometries such as squares or hexagons, with good reason. I’m not referring to hex binning per se, although it certainly falls under that umbrella. I am referring to geometric binning such as this, published by the Washington Post: This visualization appeals to me…
Writer’s Block
It’s been an unusually long period of inactivity on the blog. I have been experiencing probably my worst case of writer’s block since I (re)started this blog over eight years ago. It’s not as though I’ve not been working on interesting things. I have been helping implement a data publication system for a large federal…
Thoughts On TUGIS 2015
I spent yesterday at TUGIS, Maryland’s GIS conference. It is an annual, one-day event, held at Towson University. As such, it is a bit of a sprint, especially when bracketed on either end by a double-beltway commute. The day started with the plenary which included a brief talk by Maryland’s Lieutenant Governor Boyd K. Rutherford,…