Steve’s Little world

So I do a buffer off of 11,227 features and of course I can’t choose dissolve in the buffer procedure otherwise it crashes. I check the geometry several times to make sure it is clean and it is fine (according to GP). My buffer completes and then I decide to dissolve as a seperate process. I am using a PGDB and I compress it first and then check the geometry one more time and then fire off:

Executing (Dissolve_3): Dissolve crlf2mi C:\data\newModels\geodatabase\scratch.mdb\crlf2midiss # # MULTI_PART
Start Time: Mon Oct 30 13:25:39 2006
Sorting Geometries…
Dissolving Geometries…
Error in executing function
Failed to execute (Dissolve_3).
End Time: Mon Oct 30 20:08:30 2006 (Elapsed Time: 6 hours 42 minutes 51 seconds)
DO YOU SEE THAT TIME! I sat there without using my machine for most of the afternoon (because I don’t want to have someone tell me that I was using memory that GP needed). I left it running over night and that is what greeted me this morning. I kept checking to make sure my PGDB was well below 2 gigs and it never got close. Thank goodness I had other work to do yesterday afternoon on another computer, but I am PO’ed. Can someone please tell me how GP is the way forward? Oh yeah, and just for kicks GP doesn’t release the memory it was consuming so I am left with 1.7gigs being used.

And now what do I do? Export to coverage and use ArcInfo - I am sure that will work but can anybody else besides me see how lame that is?

OK and on that note I am off to try and actually get something to work…

Ed walks into my office and asks if there is a way to get a listing of the files in a directory so he can put it into a spreadsheet. Seeing as how Windows is targeted to the GUI I suggest a quick print screen. He then explains that he wants the listing as data, not as a printout on the screen. I know telling Ed to download cygwin is not going to cut it so I start to tell him there is no hope. But then all the scripting I had to do to admin several Windows labs come back to me and I work out doing this:

dir /OG > listing.txt 

which sorts the directories first and then the files and puts it into a text file, listing.txt. The contents of this file can then be placed in excel and quickly parsed using text to column. I know there is probably some sort of perl script or something I could write to do this (I can already see the Java code in my head) but this was beyond Ed and I didn’t have the time to write it for him. So there you have a simple way to turn a directory listing into data. I am sure most of you knew this but it serves as a good reminder to myself.

When I click on links in the ArcGIS desktop help system it crashes ArcMap or ArcCatalog. What kind of messed up dependency is going on here that reading help can crash the software. I am sure this is some IE, COM, mumbo jumbo spec blah blah blah - but all I know is it makes my day that much grumpier. There you have it.

Alright so you want to make some contours of your DEM and you are using ArcGIS 9.1 SP 2. You go to the spatial analyst menu and choose surface analysis and then contour and then, voila, you have locked up ArcGIS. So then you think - GP will solve this like it has on so many other occasions and suprise suprise you get this helpful error message:

Executing (Contour_1): Contour elev10m C:\data\\newModels\geodatabase\scratch.mdb\elev10countour 4 0 1
Start Time: Tue Oct 24 14:29:56 2006

An error was encountered while executing Contour.
(”esriGeoAnalyst.GridEngine”) Error in executing grid expression
Failed to execute (Contour_1).
End Time: Tue Oct 24 14:31:56 2006 (Elapsed Time: 2 minutes 0 seconds)

And you think the helpful part was that it chose to throw the error message after 2 minutes rather than 10 minutes later. Then you start to sweat a bit and wrack your brains, resist the urge to spark up AV3.3 and remember the raster calculator.

You enter:

C:\temp\countours.shp = contours([hcpnccp10m], interval, 5)

and holy cow you actually have a countour coverage.

My Question ™ in this exercise is what is the difference in algorithms or routines between raster calculator (RC) and GP? I consistently get RC to work when GP fails. My sneaking suspicion is that RC is using something from Workstation while GP is using gerbils and bubble gum. Perhaps ESRI should make it easier to script RC.

update (20 minutes later): It seems the error may have been that I was asking GP to make a geodb bigger than 2 gigs which is a no-no. I am not sure if this is why since the error message from GP tells me nothing that helps tell me where to go next. But I could get GP to work by having it write to a shapefile and a grid contour of 6 rather than 4. So for now I take back some of the bad things I said about GP. But still in general RC just seems more rock solid than GP.

When you see this:

Executing (Buffer_9): Buffer serpcreek C:\data\newModels\geodatabase\scratch.mdb\serpcreek25ft “25 Feet” FULL ROUND ALL #
Start Time: Mon Oct 23 10:32:20 2006
Failed sending the dataset deleted notification to a workspace extension. [Survey Database]
The table was not found.
The Microsoft Jet database engine cannot find the input table or query ‘SDB_FCConn’. Make sure it exists and that its name is spelled correctly.
Failed to execute (Buffer_9).
End Time: Mon Oct 23 10:32:22 2006 (Elapsed Time: 2.00 seconds)

It actually means there is probably a geometry error in your original dataset. Before you run repair geometry I reccomend quitting ArcMap and compacting the geodatabase. Oh yeah and one last thing, until you are rolling with 9.2 make sure you run repair geometry more than once since running it once is not enough.

Our firm is looking to hire a new GIS practice leader. There is a lot of potential in this position. You get to manage and interact with a great bunch of people, set vision for GIS at a rather large firm, and be an all around cool cat. Drop me a line if you are interested or want to talk about the positions more (email or gtalk to scitronpousty AT gmail dot com). Full ad listing follows…