Steve’s Little world

While I can not make a rabbit appear out of a hat - I can help to get Adobe, Sun, and OpenWave on the same stage to talk about Mobile Spatial App development (Day 2, last session). They get to give short presentations on why their tech is the greatest thing since the Ginsu. From there we are going into QA mode. I have some that I know I want to ask but here is where the internet tubes gets to participate. Send me your questions in advance and I will pick some of the best to be asked of our esteemed panelists. I want this panel to be spicy so let’er rip.

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.

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.

So the other event I will be talking/helping at the Community Day at SAP TechEd ‘07, Las Vegas. The idea is that I will give a short (10-15 minutes) presentation on mapping and using the deCarta API and then we all proceed to hack adding maps to SAP applications. Our javascript api and XML over HTTP services are easy enough that I think having SAP experts with laptops around means we could build some cool applications.

Hats off to James G. and Craig C.  for the invite and if you are not a developer in the deCarta developer zone please sign up before the conference. Since we give out free access to our partner data for your development there is an approval process for signing up. Turnaround on sign up usually takes 12 hours but it might take a day or two.

Please excuse the current experience of the current dev zone, it will be updated to something new and shiny in the next couple of weeks.

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.

I will be going to mashup university and camp next week in sunny Mountain View (I think this camp and university thing is starting to sound a bit cheesy but I don’t have a better suggestion).

If you are going drop me a line.

Quick question for those of you who will be playing along from home - do you want live blogging or would you like not as much blogging but more summary type pieces. I usually do the live blogging as my notes in case I want to go back and read them later. If you have an opinion on the coverage you would like drop a line…

So Jakob Nielsen writes a piece about not wasting time on blogging since it is cheap, commodity, and threatens to ruin your good name. He definitely does a great job poking a stick in the beehive known as the blogging community. Comments like “let them eat cake” have historically been shown to upset people. Here is another objective non-confrontational gem:

You should build a cathedral, because a thousand tents can’t compete with the Notre Dame.

There has been a response by the usual suspects. Of course the champion of blogging chimes in - Scoble . He does a pretty good job ripping on Nielsen, including dissing the aesthetic appeal of his web site. But I think there is even better ripping done by Global Nerdy - with a mildly NSFW picture with some funny photoshopping.

I have to say - nothing new to see hear - same arguments we hear over and over again. I think the truth lays in the middle ground for the two sides. Blogging has done a lot of good in opening the informal lines of communication. Allowing people whose voices who wouldn’t have been heard or noticed before to now be seen. I would agree there is a ton of stuff out there not worth reading but there are also conversations, connections, and knowledge sharing that would not have happened otherwise. On the other hand I still value having a well written white paper as well. It does become tiring bouncing from blog to blog or through google searches to try and find the information I need. A well written white paper/book lets me get an expert opinion that I can sit and read for a longer period of time.
Both forms of communication have their value but they don’t fill the same niche.

I think this discussion follows similar lines as the discussion James and I had the other day. Geocommons will not replace Spatial Analyst in the hands of a person with expertise in spatial statistics. But then again if you want a quick and dirty heat map geocommons fits the bill.

I do not believe blogging or geocommons or open source make anyone an expert. There was a great blurb I saw today about what makes an expert - and one of the big take aways was that it takes a lot of work over a long time period.

In the end it is the right tool/platform/technology/person for the job. Do I need a plumber to come replace the drainage line between my house and the city main - heck yeah and I will certainly pay for that expertise. Do I want to wait and pay for a plumber to come to my house to fix a clogged toilet - no way. Do I want to use blogging to increase conversation and exchange of ideas - you betcha. Do I think a blog piece can replace a well written book to help me deeply understand a topic - no way.

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?

Now this is definitive, witness the RESTlike urls…

http://sucks-rocks.com/rate/GeoServer/MapServer/ArcIMS/ArcGIS+Server/FeatureServer