NYGeog

Geography, GIS, Geospatial, NYC, etc.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

DGN to Geodatabase warning!!! Beware of Modelspace

If your DGN's have multiple model spaces you cannot use the Import from CAD tool in GIS. You must save as, or export from Microstation to DXF which then creates one DXF for each modelspace in the DGN. This is a bummer. But after getting the DGN linework and working with one of our Microstation guru's I found that you can batch convert DGN's making this whole process much less time-consuming. Now if only I had my modelbuilder DXF to File GDB, select centerlines and ROW impacts tool set up so folder structures would be intuitively created...

And how come there's no organizational structure level lower than the feature dataset, such as a feature subdataset or something?

Thursday, October 22, 2009

.dbf's not supported in Microsoft Excel 2007

Just upgraded to Microsoft 2007 at work and was amazed to find out that Excel no longer supports .dbf's. It's well documented here at the GIS at Vassar blog.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Mac Mini Server and other Apple updates


A few posts back I mentioned how people were setting up Mac Mini's as web servers and now with the latest round of updates with Apple, Apple is marketing the Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server.

Check out the Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server.

CNET Review

and the new Apple Mouse is pretty cool too. Oh and Apple updated the iMac too.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

ESRI: Make a Map

Here's a sample map from ESRI's Make a Map portal

Thursday, October 8, 2009

FX Ruby (can't get configured on Snow Leopard) & Parcels in Google Maps

After two weeks and countless emails and web searches I've given up trying to configure FXRuby on Snow Leopard and the good folks at Pragmatic Programmers have agreed to let me return and trade-in my book. I'll probably get something on Python or maybe hold on to it until FXRuby is supported for Snow Leopard.


Google Maps Tax Parcels
From Entchev

Google launched a massive map data update today, plus a number of other changes. On the data front -- parcel data are now available for some areas in the US (more on that later). Also available are "more detailed natural features like parks and water bodies, and new base map data types like bike paths and university campus maps." There is also a new feature on Google Maps that allows users to report map data problems and send feedback directly to Google. Which brings me back to the data -- "Google has decided to stop using Tele Atlas map data for the U.S. Google will now use its own map data." At this point it is unclear what the source of Google's "own" data is, and what happens to the user-generated updates.

Browsing the New Jersey map, I found that parcel data is available for some counties (Mercer, Ocean) and not for others (Middlesex, Passaic). These cursory findings did not match my (quite accurate) inventory of GIS parcel data availability in NJ. Developing...


View Larger Map

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Moving on to FXRuby

Finished my first book on programming Ruby (author Chris Pine). It was all command line programming and before I move on to Ruby on Rails I'm going to tackle the desktop GUI first with FXRuby and maybe think about getting PickAxe for more reference. Here's what FXRuby is:

'FXRuby is a library for developing powerful and sophisticated cross-platform graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for your Ruby applications. It’s based on the FOX Toolkit, a popular open source C++ library developed by Jeroen van der Zijp. What that means for you as an application developer is that you’re able to write code in the Ruby programming language that you already know and love, while at the same time taking advantage of the performance and functionality of a featureful, highly optimized C++ toolkit.
Projects Using FXRuby

Projects using FXRuby include:

* BeERP is a commercial ERP built entirely with the FXRuby library.
* Discretizer is an interactive mesh creation tool. It can be used to create geometry and meshes for three dimensional flow simulations (CFD).
* foxGUIb is an interactive gui builder and codegenerator for FXRuby. This tool makes it easy to quickly build complex and good looking graphical user interfaces for Ruby.
* FXRI is a FXRuby Interface to RI that supports search-on-typing. FXRI is a small little program that tries to provide the desired information as fast as possible.
* fxtwitter is a simple Twitter client written in Ruby.
* FreeRIDE is an IDE for the Ruby programming language.

If your project uses FXRuby for its user interface, and you’d like to see it listed here, please send me an e-mail with the information.

© 2008 Lyle Johnson'