I have been spending the past few weeks dealing more with data and mapping than I have in quite a while. It’s given me a chance to regain my footing with map-making, reconnect with some end-user tools like Arc2Earth, and build a little more proficiency with things like GDAL, QGIS, and TileMill. Of course, I’ve…
Tag: Python
Light Housekeeping
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…
A #LazyWeb Compendium of Python Resources for Beginners
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+): Can anyone recommend any good online Python training sources for beginners?…
Personal Geospatial Workflows
I’ve had a couple of people ask me recently about the geospatial tools I use. Year-over-year, that answer changes but here’s how I answer that right now: As a Federal contractor, I spend a lot of time working with the Esri stack during my work day. A few years ago, I added a few open-source…
Cutting Tiles for ArcGIS Server Using TileMill
There’s been a lot of talk about TileMill and CartoCSS lately, with good cause. TileMill makes it very easy generate beautiful map tiles using the Mapnik engine and CartoCSS provides a familiar method to author the cartographic representation of spatial data. As Brian Timoney points out, CartoCSS has the added bonus of making best practices…
Using Dynamic Non-Spatial Data In GeoCommons
In my previous post, I described how I used a Python script to scrape power outage information from a local web site and convert it into an RSS feed. In this post, I’ll show how I used GeoCommons to visualize the changing information over time. The process starts by creating a data set in GeoCommmons…
Prying Data Open
In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, I was trying to get information from my local electric cooperative about outages. There were many (including my neighborhood) and I wanted to see the scale of the problem. It turns out, they have a page with a map that shows current outages by zip code. It’s pretty old-school…
Triggered Notifications Using PostGIS
My project work the last few months has kept me away from a lot of my favorite open-source tools and I was starting to get hives. Specifically, it had been a while since I had worked with PostgreSQL and PostGIS and I was missing the experience, so I dreamed up something to do. I do…
Piling On About Python
First and foremost, I am not a Python expert. I am not even sure I could effectively play one on TV. As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, I am trying to beef up my Python skills. Secondly, what I have to say in this post isn’t particularly original or unique. Others have…
Getting Started With a Python Wrapper For the WeoGeo API
One of my goals for 2011 was to sharpen my Python skills. As if on cue, WeoGeo puts out a Python wrapper for their RESTful API. It can be found here. The good news is that I now have a familiar problem set to sink my teeth into. The bad news (for me) is that…