thoughts on spatial tools and practices
Okay, there’s nothing terribly surprising about ESRI’s announcement regarding MapObjects in this technical article. I would have been more surprised if they had announced that it would be supported or that there would be another version or something like that. In truth, I haven’t touched MapObjects in years. It was dead to me even if … Read more
I hope everyone has a safe and happy 4th.
These are pretty fun times to be working in GIS. There’s an explosion of new technologies across the whole spectrum and integration possibilities are seemingly boundless. Back when I got started, ESRI and Intergaph were duking it out and others, like MapInfo, were out there on the periphery also. GRASS was flying the OS banner … Read more
A while back, I was working on a project that required us to rotate a polygon around a base point and do a spatial query to analyze some underlying demographic data. I was working in ArcObjects and could find no intrinsic way to do what I needed to do so I wrote the following routine. … Read more
It’s been a while since I’ve posted and things have been busy. Soccer season has ended, the kids have finished school and I’ve finished up at my client site and moved back to the office. Among the many things I’ve been working on, I’ve started building an open-source GIS stack. It’s not entirely open-source since … Read more
As discussed in my previous post, I’m trying to beef up the spatial reference support in zigGIS. I am doing this mainly to introduce support for user-defined spatial references. It pretty much boils down to querying the the appropriate SR from the PostGIS spatial_ref_sys table and applying the value of the srtext column to create … Read more
This post updates this post and this one. One of our beloved 5 users ;-), James, pointed out recently that zigGIS still has issues with user-defined coordinate systems. Alas, this is true. When we implemented support for on-the-fly “reprojection,” we limited it to the standard EPSG SRIDs supported by both PostGIS and ArcGIS. This was … Read more
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything technical. Work has been a little crazy and I’m not willing to carve into time with the family to keep other stuff moving. As a result a few things have been sitting for a while but I’ve been able to get around to two things. First, … Read more
Hokie Nation has invited everyone to wear their school colors today as a show of solidarity. I will. You should, too. I work with a lot of VT grads. I have seen that their lifelong identification with VT rivals that of Notre Dame alumni. So, from this Retreiver to all of Hokie Nation: My prayers … Read more
I’ve become very enamoured of the new VE-based map display at weather.com. For example, here’s my location. My wife had to drive out to Ohio yesterday and, with the big storm moving across the country, I’ve been spending more time at weather.com than usual. Anyway, one of the most useful features of the display, from … Read more