Steve’s Little world

Just wanted to clarify what happened last night – you might have thought that was an earthquake but no it was

THE HAPPY AWESOME POWER OF OUR NEW DEVZONE GOING LIVE!!

That’s right, we went live with the new devZone last night.

I had a great team that made it all happen. Be sure to look for new features and content over the coming weeks.

Here is a list of some of the “features” in the upgrade…

-    You now have the ability to control which mailings you get from deCarta (a.k.a. no more spam). Under your account preference (top right of the page has the line to preferences) you can select only those mailings you wish to receive.
-    RSS and email notification for forum postings
-    We have condensed the number of forums and we have started a read-only forum for administrative postings
-    Forums support sticky posts which will contain some of the most common information pertaining to that forum
-    A renewed focus by deCarta on forum participation
-    A new “getting started” section
-    The FAQ is now a wiki allowing registered developers to add and edit content
-    There are deCarta Casts; screencasts demonstrating different aspects of working deCarta technology. Right now we have deCarta Casts on our deCarta Web Services with more to follow in the future.
-    The Web Services XML testing application has been upgraded and is now live on the devZone, The applications store use your Web Services username and password so you no longer have to type them in to use these services
-    The JavaScript examples and documentation are also live on the devZone, no need to download and configure locally. You can view the samples and the JavaScript doc all live from the devZone.
-    We have placed the product manuals on the devZone so you no longer need the CD or FTP site to get to documentation with the shipping product. Right now it is only for Web Services but we will be shortly adding more content.

Go ahead and poke around the site and try out the new features. We have setup a forum just for devZone issues so go ahead and place any comments, suggestions, or bugs you find.  As always feel free to write me directly with your questions and concerns.

We now return to our regularly scheduled devCon work (after a short break for TRICK OR TREATING - yeah baby!!)

If you were thinking about attending our devCon and wanted to stay at the Hayes Mansion, the lock-in rates end tomorrow. The digs are sweet but there are also a ton-o-fun things to do in the area and Santa Cruz is only 25 minutes away by car. Come on Sunday and make it a vaca.

If you have been following my tweets you will notice I have been spending a lot of time on the devCon lately. We have started going through dry runs of the talks and they are really kicking ass! If you had any questions about using deCarta tech this would be your chance to check it out. The sessions cover everything from our data model to our javscript api to our embedded navigation software to our server products. Some compatriots and I have also started to put our workshop together on using deCarta tech with JavaScript and then with Java and .NET.

If you have any questions or concerns about the conference be sure to contact me scitronpousty At decarta com.

And for all you faithful blog readers I am going to run a little social media special - if you are going to send 2 or more people to the devCon send me a shoutout and I will hook you up with a discount code.

Not updating too much but you can see it here….

http://twitter.com/TheSteve0

This art installation is awesome! Hat tip to San Jose Merc for pointing it out

I imported some data from the MAGIC server at UCONN into PostGIS. Unfortunately it did not recognize the projection in the prj file or shp2pgsql does use the projection information associated with the shapefile. [UPDATE: bitner just helped me see what was right in front of my eyes the whole time - shp2pgsql has a -s flag to specify the SRID. Live and learn] When I imported the data it has a SRID (projection identifier) of -1. I hopped on the IRC channel and the good folks helped me figure out all the places I need to update the information and now for my own benefit I am going to write it out here. My table name is leach (from the leachate data) and the geometry column is titled: the_geom.

There are 3 places that store the SRID for the dataset.
1. In the geometry column:

2. As a constraint on the table for the geometry column:

3. In the geometry_columns system table:

So we need to update all of these to the correct projection SRID (in this case CT State Plane NAD 83 Feet) which for PostGIS is SRID 2234. I will defer to another day how you figure out which SRID you need.
Here are the statements to carry it out:

1. Drop the constraint otherwise you can’t do any changes on the leach table:
ALTER TABLE leach DROP CONSTRAINT “enforce_srid_the_geom” RESTRICT;

2. Alter the geometry column to incorporate the new SRID:
UPDATE leach SET the_geom = ST_SetSRID(the_geom, 2234);

3. Reapply the contstraint on the geometry:
ALTER TABLE leach ADD CONSTRAINT “enforce_srid_the_geom” CHECK (SRID(the_geom)=2234);

4. Update the geometry column table to have the right SRID:
UPDATE geometry_columns SET SRID=2234 WHERE f_table_name=’leach’;

And now you should be good to go. Thanks again to bitner and hobu in the IRC channel and this discussion post from the PostGIS-user forum.

As a feature request - perhaps someone could write the pgsql to do all these steps at once and bundle it in the product. [UPDATE 2 - of course after writing this post I come across this method: UpdateGeometrySRID([<schema_name>], <table_name>, <column_name>, <srid&gt - which Updates the SRID of all features in a geometry column updating constraints and reference in geometry_columns. /me tries to remove egg from face]  Or perhaps the shp2pgsql needs to do a better job importing the projection info if there is a .prj file present - though I suspect this would be a much trickier problem.

While the talk was small I think we had a good time. It was really interesting talking to the SAP faithful. Thanks to James for the invite - like I told him - it was all about the journey for me