It’s time again to get into calendar-making mode. A new call for maps was issued over on GeoHipster for the 2017 calendar. We had a lot of fun last year seeing the creativity from the worldwide geospatial community and we are looking forward to this year’s batch of maps. We also learned a lot from the…
Other People’s Code
It’s something of a running joke that, you hand existing code to a developer, that developer will stay up all night completely re-writing it. I wish I could say it was completely a joke but, not only have I seen it happen numerous times, I’ve done it. Counter-intuitively, some developers find it easier to use an…
Personal Geospatial Workflows, July 2016 Edition
It’s hard to believe, but I last touched upon this topic over two years ago, when my family and I were living in our between-houses rental. One of the goals I had when building our current house was to create a space where I could more effectively work from home. To that end, I have…
CartoDB Is Now CARTO
The company formerly known as CartoDB announced today that it is rebranding to the name CARTO. This change is intended to indicate a stronger focus on enabling location intelligence and analytics within its platform by adding new tool designed to allow data analysts to analyze, visualize, and publish without the in-depth knowledge of SQL, CSS,…
Publishing GeoPackage to GeoServer Using QGIS
Recently, I had the occasion to attempt to generate an OGC GeoPackage from QGIS and publish it using GeoServer. The use case was fairly straightforward. I had been given data in GML format and needed to publish it. For many valid reasons (such as lack of spatial indexing), GeoServer does not natively support publishing GML…
Esri User Conference 2016
Aside from a day at the Esri Federal GIS Conference, I’ve been laying fairly low from geo industry events for about the past year. There’s no single reason for that; it’s been more that a combination of things like work deadlines or family happenings have taken priority over conflicting conferences and events. I’ve generally been…
Revisiting Two Old Friends: ArcGIS and PostGIS
Back in the dark old days of ArcSDE, when it first started to support PostgreSQL/PostGIS as a back-end data store, I did a series of posts about how to work with it. Of course, working with PostGIS in ArcGIS was a theme of the early days of this blog, through my association with zigGIS. Although it’s…
A Week in the Life of a Geotech Omnivore
Consulting is enjoyable due to the variety, but it would be fun to help build a platform. — Bill Dollins (@billdollins) May 2, 2016 Earlier this week, I posted the above tweet. To explain the variety I referred to, here is a partial list, in no particular order, of the tools I’ve worked with in the…
Client Certificates In a Desktop Application
Lately, I’ve been working on a project that involved retrofitting authentication via client certificates, similar to CAC/PIV smart card authentication, into an existing set of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) web services and a desktop (yes, desktop) client application that was designed to interact with them. The first part was pretty easy to figure out; the…
The Consultant’s Dilemma
I’ve worked as a consultant for my entire career, and one of the most rewarding aspects of it is the variety of projects you get exposed to. I’ve gotten to meet and work with great people over the years and have also gotten to work with a lot of emerging technology. In that regard, it’s…