Steve’s Little world

With the piping hot SP goodness I know what I am doing today - say hello to my new friend ArcGIS 9.2! And it is a day early!

Two days of fun in a row - first centOS and now 9.2. Yeee haaaa

I used to use e-apps as my old hosting company and I notice they moved from Fedora to centOS. So I go to the centOS home page and realize that is an open source compilation of the source code for Red Hat Enterpise System (RHES). WHOOAAAA NELLLLY. At first I am a bit skeptical, so I go to the IRC channel (#centos on freenode) and start asking around. Lo and behold this really is RHES just rebranded for centOS. Since I have experience adminning RHES machines this makes me very happy. I was thinking of taking ubuntu for a spin but I was also intrigued by Solaris (two fine open source operating systems). But this let’s me use applications that are certitifed for use on RHES as well as all the other applications that have RPM installs. The reason the certified application should work is that centOS is binary compatible with the latest version of RHEL. One developer told me his company uses centOS internally for development but only certifies on RHEL.

Apparently they use yum for the installer making the patching process better than up2date. So for now I am going to be trying it out and see how well it goes.

Can I also use this opportunity to point out how frickin’ awesome BitTorrent is! I go home last night and start up the swarm from a seed at Stanford, and 2 hours later I have pulled down 2.2 gigs of ISOs. My DSL is 3meg down 500k up. I could not even imagine how long this would have taken over plain old http. All hail the collective!

Update so far today:

The installer was easy cheesy, just like on RHES. The machine is an IBM 6229-22U, which means a 2.2 P4 with a nvidia quadro dual head card, and it has 1 gig of Rambus RAM (page 36 on this document). I chose the kitchen sink install (I think they use a tackle box icon) just so I don’t have to mess with installing other packages later. If I was outside a firewall with multiple users I would be more discriminating in the packages I chose to install. But since it is just my dev box I would rather have the package there and not have to go find it.

After reboot everything came up fine and works great. I do need to look at getting yum to work through the proxy server here at work. I changed the config file to use the proxy server but now it is failing on md5 checksums. Time to dig in…

Yippe for me - I have a unix box under my desk again.

Between boondocks, Dilbert, and xkcd my comic needs are met…

While this one is funny please scroll back over the last couple of weeks ’cause they are the awesome.

Ok since I have been tagged by James I will oblige just so I have the opportunity to pass it on…

1. I am a Bass player - classically trained though I also played the bass guitar in a band in High school - yeah battle of the bands and the whole shebang. I was actually pretty good at Classical Bass (stand up 4 string); went to NY All-State Orchestra in 1987. I played up through my Masters but then I had some repetitive stress problems from digitizing too many aerial photos and stopped. I haven’t picked it up in the last 14 years and I miss it sometimes. I used to play everything from Copland and Saint-Saens to Rush, Van Halen, Dixie Dregs, and Aha

2. Crashed my dad’s motorcycle when I was in high school. My Dad took me out for a couple of lessons and I thought I had it under control. One day after school I decide to drive it over to the high school (about 3 miles away). I was ok on the way there because it was all right hand turns but the way back was another story. Laid it out on the first left turn going home with cars coming the other way. Needless to say I was a bit shaken after that and took it really easy getting home. I get to the driveway and start thinking I am OK but of course I hit the one little patch of ice in the driveway and end up in the ditch with the bike on top of me. I was ok but it turned me off from riding.

3. I used my BB gun to shoot 2 birds. I got 2 BB guns when I was about 12 years old. I was given it with the condition that I couldn’t use it to shoot anything living, including friends and little sisters. Well I then proceeded to shoot up the windows on the garage, the back of the old pick up, bottles, and cans. On two occaisions I broke the rules and shot birds, one was a starling and one was a mourning dove. It was odd/sad/disconnected to be standing over the starling as it lay there dying. I am still conflicted about whether I could hunt birds and mammals. I have no problem with fishing but I am not sure how I would do with a deer or another bird.

4. My sinuses are a mess, I once had a hole drilled above my right eye to drain a clogged sinus - betcha just said thanks for oversharing. Greatness has the endoscope picture of the sinus up in her office. The crazy part was the radiologist told my ENT that everything looked fine but because I asked to look at the CAT scan I knew it was totally full.

5. I was voted “best dressed” in high school. I think I am just going to leave it at that.

I now tag - Jeremy, Rob, Matt, Dave, and Jei.

Ok so I am not sure how many of you have heard the song (Cry) or the group (Godley & Creme) but this video still blows me away. Done way before Michael Jackson came along and crapped up the idea with one of his high tech videos, G&C do the face morph with great effect. Besides that I really like this song - worked well for me during my high school years and I still like it now.

Hope you enjoy it…

And then I noticed when the video finished that they have Kate Bush - wowee zowee. This has to be one of my top 20 songs of all time. I don’t really like the video but the song is phenomenal. I like Tori Amos, but as my friend Rob Reed says, she is no Kate Bush. This is definetly a desert island disc.

Even though I am still waiting to use 9.2 it is great to see that Ritchie has updated his geodatabase designer tool for 9.2. I can not say enough good things about this tool. If you are trying to Doc or understand a geodatabase this tool is incredibly handy. And the best part is that since it is on ArcScripts it can be updated as needed. This is just one of the many cool things Ritchie has built for the ArcGIS community. He is also the author of GeoChat and a cool 3 d animation tool. Thanks Ritchie….

Alright I am really steamed about this latest Service Pack fiasco. Why am I being so extreme and calling it a fiasco? Well sit right down and I will tell ya a story.

We use AirPhoto USA for some of our aerial photographs and they have a proprietary format for thier images, like MrSID or ECW. They also make a plugin for ArcGIS so you can look at the images directly in ArcMAP. Well wouldn’t you know there is a bug in 9.2 that prevents the plugin from working (silly us for thinking it might be AirPhoto USA’s fault). ESRI claims the bug will be fixed in SP1. Therefore I can not use 9.2 until SP1 comes out.

Now when this page was posted, oooh say about a week and a half ago, I figured I could plan on getting work done during the lull between Christmas (a non-event for me) and New Years. I arranged my schedule so I could work on some projects that would really benefit from 9.2 during that time. It is at this point in the tale when you say to yourself - WTF was he thinking making work plans based upon a date published by ESRI. And you know in hindsight you are correct but I, being the eternal optomist, wanted to believe, I really did.

And now you know why I am so upset. I mean how hard would it have been to update the page with the list of things fixed like the pages said it would. DO you think they woke up this morning and realized they weren’t going to make their SP date? If not then why not update the page as soon as you realize you are missing the target?

C’mon treat me with more respect than that. If you know you are going to be late for an appt then call ahead and let the people know. Why should I really even think it will be out next week. I say I should say sometime next quarter to be on teh safe side. Didn’t ESRI at one point promise quarterly service packs?

And to top it all of, as of this post they still haven’t updated the original SP announcement page. So I have to find out second hand through a blog post.

[UPDATE: The page has now been officially updated and I can see why it might have taken longer than expected. And you know missing the date could be fine, but my main complaint is that as soon as you know it is going to be late then let people know.]

We have another job opening - contact me at scitronpousty AT gmail dot com if you are interested - and how could you not be? I mean come on - work on spatial problems, hang out with me, live in Sacto, and be easy driving distance to things like this and this.

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Requirements: Bachelor’s in environmental science, geography or related field with 4-7 years of experience working in the GIS field. You have to be able to manage data both for large multi-year projects and small 6-hour projects. Must be expert in ESRI ArGIS products, digitizing, cartographics, and spatial analysis. You should understand the value of standardized procedures and tools for getting work done. You must play well with others and be ready to dig in and get the work done. It would be great if you have used GPS units, especially for natural resource surveying. Experience or understanding of biology, natural resource science, cultural resources, or land use planning is preferred, but not required.

Dave Maguire has a post up where he discusses licensing options for ArcGIS server based products. It is an example of a good blog post – it covers facts, it throws in some of the thinking about the licensing options, and it has the comments open. Thanks Dave…

[UPDATE - some people have pointed out that I probably read the blog post wrong and that you do have to pay for a seperate ADF machine and that machine can be licensed for the ADF alone at 50% of the two socket price. There does not seem to be a discussion of how many CPUs can be on the web server. So really seems to be a reduced price for deploying just the ADF on any machine you want. This price seems a bit steep to me unless this price is for the cheapest of the Server licenses. Anyway, it seems like they went with what would be my third option so now my complaint is just about pricing. ]

That being said I do want to discuss the decision made to license the ADF separately if it is placed on a separate machine from the SOM/SOC. I like that you can deploy the ADF to a 1 socket web serving machine, which feels almost right. Dave is right that server class machines are cheaper now with better horsepower. Because of this fact, organizations that used to put all their apps on one server can now afford to split services, such as web servers separate from DBMS and other Application Servers. This is now standard practice in even some of the smaller consulting, NGO, and government agencies, with the web server going outside the firewall. What the 1 socket policy is saying is that if you want the security of placing your web server in the DMZ go for it.

The other thing being said here is that if you need more than the horsepower of 1 CPU you must also be able to afford a separate $20-40K to license the ADF so now you have to pay to put it on a separate machine.

But the are a couple drawbacks I see here:
1. Most 1 socket machines are not built with redundant power supplies or hardware RAID capabilities.
2. The price for an end user between a 1 socket and 2 socket machine is minimal, so the ability to afford a 2 CPU machine does not mean they have the extra 20-40K to license the ADF.
3. If you want to build in redundancy by putting two 1 socket machines outside the DMZ then you are paying for the extra ADF license.

So while this solution is better than the previously rumored solution – separate license to put the ADF on any separate machine – I do not think it is the right solution.

Given all the great capabilities in the ADF that David mentions I can understand not wanting to give it away to people who don’t buy ArcIMS or ArcGIS Server. For people who don’t want to buy those products make them pay a reduced licensing fee for the ADF. I think you are missing a marketing opportunity by not doing this.

I also think you should allow people to buy ArcGIS server based products to have some limited deployments of the ADF per server product they buy, I don’t know say 4 ADFs per 1 Server. But by default all server products should include at least 1 separate ADF license – If I buy a server product I should be able to put the ADF on 1 separate machine with up to the same number of sockets as my SOM/SOC/Spatial Server machine.

A third option is to license the ADF at a reduced price to current server license holders. Making us pay the $20-40K for just the ADF not only seems ridiculous but also brings up interesting questions. If I buy enterprise server for my SOM/SOC machine do I have to buy enterprise server for the ADF to deploy mobile apps or can I just buy standard? And what about extensions? If I buy them for my SOM/SOC server do I need to buy them for my ADF server?

To sum up –
Good blog post because it was open to discussion and now we can talk about facts rather than rumors
While I think the licensing described in the post is better than what I heard before I think there are still some problems. The model for pricing the deployment of the ADF separately still needs some tuning to bring it in line with the way people work with server based products.

Ok, not a great topic but they do a pretty good job making it funny - in a cheesy kind of way. So to my dear friend Kristian O. - lose the cloth hankerchief….