Why isn’t this file in the ESRI geoprocessing help- NAD to WGS geographic projections

The files listed here should be included in the geoprocessing help for geog. transformations. So if you are out there doing a projection from NAD27 to WGS84 and you don’t know which of the 11 or so different transformations to pick please come back to this link to find the link to the help page that links to the word doc that explains why use which transformations. Got it? Good

http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.techArticles.articleShow&d=21327

What does the beginning of freedom look like

Take a look at this image and stand in awe -

This is the beginning of freedom for me. The astute members in the group will notice I am rocking windows in VirtualBox ( a FOSS virtualization application, so this might bring Sean some joy) on my Ubuntu x64 8.10 machine (more to follow on building the machine later). ArcGIS Desktop runs as fast as I would expect on a normal windows box. But you know what this means to me – I don’t have to mess up my registery, I can use rsync natively to sync files among my server and desktop, I am getting closer to running my rig the way I want – FOSS baby.

As for VirtualBox, I can not reccomend it enough – small download, easy to install, runs on windows, linux, mac, and solaris, can host a ton-o-guest type of OSs, easy to run, very lightweight, can run vmware images, has good docs, supported by a large corporation that cares about virtualization, it’s free, and it’s open source.

I can now keep all my ArcGIS + Visual Studio stuff in a virtual machine and not have it bog down my laptop or make my desktop machine windows only. Hip Hip Hooray!

[UPDATE - instructions on moving to vBox 2.1  on Ubuntu 8.1, which among other things support 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts – yeah baby

Where the frick have I been

Greetings all 5 of you who are still following me. I got caught up in the “I really need to write this post and it is important so I better put a lot of effort into it but then I never find the time” trap. So here is the best I can with the time I want to devote to this post.

1. I am no longer the developer evangelist for deCarta. Actually I haven’t been since the end of August. I left not because I didn’t believe the company but it was that my old firm Jones & Stokes (now ICF\Jones & Stokes) made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I loved the work I was doing at deCarta and I loved the product. I helped finish up the mobile API and then helped launch it at Navteq Connections but since them I just a cheerleader on the side.  Most of all though, I really loved the people I worked with (I love you man). They have a great team of people and they have a great product and I am still a big fan. They gave me the space to become more of the person I want to be and I am forever thankful to them and especially my boss Marc.

2. As I stated above I now work, again, for ICF/Jones & Stokes. I am now the Applied Technology Practice Leader and Senior Conservation Biologist and I work out of the San Jose office.  In this new role I work on technology projects, help organize the tech savy people at ICF/J&S, and help to set vision for where our practice goes with technology. We have experience in Microsoft technologies, ESRI, Java, Linux, and FOSS4G. I am grooving on the new work I do and my ability to help set vision in the company. I have been traveling to our regional offices and interacting with the Mothership back in Fairfax.

I enjoy doing a lot of things and so I don’t expect work to fulfill all my career desires nor do I want to pigeon myself into one industry or type of position. I love being a tech evangelist, I love working with tech, I love working on ecological issues, and who knows where life will take me. All I know if I like what I do now and I look forward to whatever is around the bend.

3. I have not been writing for basically that last year for several reasons. There have been personal issues I have been struggling through but I think things are definitely on the upturn. I say “I think” because I have learned to live more in the now and because I want to keep working on the relationships which are important to me. Saying things are good gives a sense of being settled and I am not sure life is ever that way (except when you are dead).

I have also not written much because twitter and facebook have sucked up my writing energy. I have found that tweeting definitely decreases my desire to blog. I am really not that interesting and so most of what I need to say can be done in 140 letters or less. Facebook serves as my social networking outlet and so therefore the blog has suffered.

All of this is to say – I am still here, doing fun stuff and really enjoying life in a way I haven’t in a long long time. I would like to tweet less and blog more on some of the cool stuff  I am doing and some of my thoughts in general. No promises but if you stick around I will try to be more of a presence here.

The music quote of the day comes from the Barenaked Ladies CD, “snacktime” ( a must buy, especially if you have kids) – “When I make mistakes I use a lot of salt ’cause salt makes mistakes taste great”

Could it be true – ArcWeb Services Discontinued?

Little birdies have been telling me that ArcWeb Services is no more – folded into other services and the staff dispersed. There is no more purchase options on their page – only renew. Well, Nature Valley and all you other Arcweb Service customers, I could always recommend another service that is fast, stable, and scalable. You can start for free and then move on to exactly the same API when you are ready to make some bling. Same API whether we host it or if you bring it behind the firewall; novel concept – ain’t it.  If you are interested go ahead and contact me or sales@decarta.com

Has the pendulum begun to swing away from frameworks?

This post is going to talk about using Frameworks (JSF, ASP.NET, Django, Ruby on Rails…) to build web applications and perhaps they have outlived their usefulness in many situations.
I have started to put together a demo server here at deCarta and as part of that I am going to need to write some demos. I know that when I write some MS based demos I will be using ASP.NET since that is was one of the benefits/drawback of MS development – one “blessed” web framework.

It has been a while since I have written some Java web applications and so I thought I would peruse the landscape. I have worked in JSF before but the XML hell that is the configuration files really harshes my mellow. That being said Seam seems to be an interesting framework but there is certainly a steep learning curve and I am still unclear if it runs on Tomcat. I then find Wicket which has no XML config files and everything is done through Java code – which appeals to me. I use an IDE so it can help me avoid doing the mundane and repetitive tasks which are prone to error. Most IDEs have no way to confirm that you don’t have typos in your XML or your XML declares a non-existent class. So Wicket, using nothing but Java code, feels like a step forward… until I look at the amount of code and classes needed just to do a simple form. Feeling undeterred I try to get going and then realize that Wicket documents relies heavily on Maven, and while I have nothing inherently against Maven it is yet another thing I have to learn that I am not in the mood to do now.

Now feeling a bit frustrated I go speak to Geoff and Brent, our web services and JavaScript gurus respectively, to seek words of advice. Turns out they have used Wicket and a bunch of other frameworks and they say, as somewhat devil’s advocates, that frameworks are a waste of time. They now believe that most web apps should be written as Servlets or web services which feed appropriate data to your JavaScript library of choice. I push back a bit and they do concede that for large team projects or repeatable projects a framework makes sense but they also point out that that you spend an inordinate amount of time wrestling with the framework rather than writing code.

And this is the question for the day – has the evolution of web development moved us away from frameworks as the one true way for web developers. All the web languages out there now have their own frameworks, from perl to Ruby to .NET to Java, are they overkill for most projects. Is there where REST and Ajax (and Comet soon enough) have brought us?

When I discovered Struts it was like a ray of light cutting through all the one-off web code I had written. But are we now at a point where the frameworks and the support infrastructure are just too much hassle without enough payoff. I understand sessions are another tricky thing that frameworks help handle but perhaps that is all the frameworks should do. Programming servlets to accept GETs or PUTs and having them spit out XML or JSON is really an order magnitude (WAG ) easier than taking on a framework. It seems some in the Java community are also discussing this issue (look in the middle of the Seam discussion for the grey box which is Matt’s commentary ).

So lazy web what do you think – has the time come to give up on these heavy frameworks and move to something more lightweight – REST services with an AJAX library fronting it? Or is this just a lazy person trying to get out of doing the hard work climbing a learning curve.

For those in the geo community this would like moving from an ESRI ADF or MapGuide to something like OpenLayers + GeoServer’s KML API.

I would really love to get some more data points from the community…

Sad ending and exciting beginnings

As of July 23rd I am no longer gainfully employed by Jones & Stokes. It was a long process that led to this event. The most important driving factor in this chain of events was that my families’ allergies were terrible in the Sacramento valley. Moving from this area couldn’t happen through Jones & Stokes and so I had to look outside.

First question from some people is going to be “How could you leave ecology after all the glowing posts you gave”. I loved the chances I got to do field work and to talk conservation biology shop with my colleagues. The problem was that I was too expensive for my level of expertise in NorCal flora and fauna. While I am good at field work and know a few things about deserts and birds – most of my ecological experience is as a landscape ecologist. My billable rate was too high to really make it feasible for me to get out in the field that often. I would suppose this is actually close to academia, where the higher up the food chain you go the less time you get to spend outside. So in the end I didn’t get to do that much field work.

Some of you may want to know if I left because I didn’t like Jones & Stokes. This is an easy question for me – I can say without hesitation say that I think J&S is one of the best natural resources consulting firms out there. I really liked almost everyone I worked with. They generally treat their employees with respect. The work is, on balance, interesting and ecology in the real world. When I started looking outside J&S I did not even think about working for a different consulting firm.

I think once I realized I couldn’t stay with J&S I started to think what I did and did not like about being in the consulting world. The biggest problem for me was the whole billable hours thang. While my goal was not that high there were several consequences of the system I did not like.

The first problem was that no matter how many hours you worked if you didn’t meet your billable goals it doesn’t matter. So if I was working 60 hours a week trying to roll out a new service or investigating something that had to be done to take our GIS practice to another level, it wouldn’t count. I mean it would count in that my supervisor would note the extra effort, but it was all secondary to making your billable hours goal.

Second, to insure that I had enough billable hours I had to take on more than I could do, thereby insuring that I would have enough hours if a project got halted or changed direction. This was an uncomfortable position for me to be in and I am not sure I could have grown used to it over time. I don’t think any of these things were particular to Jones & Stokes but are more a fact of the consulting business.

The next logical question in the series is – what am I doing now and for that I will tell the name of the company and my position title. I am now the technology evangelist for deCarta in sunny San Jose, CA. There will be a posting in the near future talking about why I chose deCarta, what I will be doing, and my goals. On of the plus side (or the downside for you if you don’t like my writing) is that I will be blogging now as part of my “official” duties. I am really psyched about my new position and I want my next post do it justice. Then again – putting the weight of doing justice on a post is a sure fire way to make it months before it gets written.

I would write more but I am finding it hard to find time to get the thoughts together. We still don’t have a place to live in San Jose or Oakland/Berkley. This lack of a very basic foundation in life – along with trying to get up to speed in a new position, is consuming most of my mental energy. If you know of a nice 3+ bdrm, 2+ bath house that takes dogs in either the willow glen/cambrian area in San Jose or in a nice safe neigborhood in Oakland or Berkely please let me know.

Google serves MS and Yahoo for routing

If you haven’t seen it go do a google route RIGHT NOW! After the route is finished start dragging points in the middle and watch the route recalculate right before your very eyes. Here is a sample if you don’t want to type places in. This has to be one of the best AJAX things I have ever seen.

You wanna start taking bets now on how long until it does traveling salesman type optimizations or tying directly into the traffic feeds or tie ins to google news?

If I were a small or medium business that needed maps and directions with some custom points of interest – I would be knocking in Googles door for an intranet license. How much do you think it would costs to set up this kind of infrastructure for myself and get it to work some time in this century.  Think about the value in this.

Oh yeah, and one more point for all us developer types , the bar has been raised yet again for what users will come to expect as “standard”. I can see the discussion now – “When I move break point in the electrical line around I want to see the power reroute in real time.”

I don’t think I even have to mention what this means for ArcGIS Server w/ network analyst or even on desktop ArcGIS…

Hat tip to Brian Flood for pointing it out. As he said (paraphrasing) – if they can do with web service calls what can they not do?

Can’t we all just get along?

Sitting in a introduction to the OpenSource stack for WhereCamp it was kinda sad how dismissive this crowd can be of all that has come before. I think it is because most of them have not come from GIS they might feel like they have introduced all this new and great stuff. And while I agree they have definetly pushing consumer based mapping light years beyond where it was. Their ability to do this has been made possible through the narrowing of the problem space. Their is still a lot of mapping and “where” that happens outside of this space. I do think the traditional GIS crowd has somewhat brought this on themselves by portraying themselves as the “high priesthood” of GIS and if you don’t do follow along our path and do your time in the Monastarey then you are not worthy.

There could be a lot of synergy here but instead the mistrust and dismissive attitudes on both side really hurts the realm of the possible.
So there is my assessment of the attitude I mentioned in one of my earlier posts…

First note at WhereCamp

Why ESRI is not really talked about:

There a lot of startups – programmers without the background in academic GIS – which is the typical path to ESRI

They are really into LBS – immersive stuff – and ESRI just doesn’t really focus on this stuff. Sure they have a few pages on this but they are not really pushing into this space.

They are almost all web based and as we all know ESRI is having some problems figuring out their strategy in this space.

ESRI is a rather large infrastructure to get up and running to play in the space. Much easier to put XY in a database with some attributes and start playing. Getting the full ESRI stack in place is $ and time intesive – not conducive to playing and rapid developement. Try and rent a cheap hosting server where you can install and get running with ESRI stack quickly.

Hence – I think these kind of conferences will probably not have much ESRI presence – there is little overlap between the audiences…..

SecuriTeam™ – ESRI ArcSDE Buffer Overflow Vulnerability

For all you ArcSDE users out there – a good reason to SP2 for 9.2 users and users of older versions should see the notes at the end…

SecuriTeam™ – ESRI ArcSDE Buffer Overflow Vulnerability