I made a few updates to a number of pages on the site. The GIS Blogs page is now called Geo Blogs and I added a few more blogs to the list. Also, I made sure the mash-ups available on the map mash-up page all work. I try to keep up with the mash-up examples, but sometimes data sources change and I need to update the code.
Thanks for reading!
Why is it that the only time I have to blog is on Sunday mornings? Here are a few quick geo-items that tickled my fancy from the previous week.
Avid Geo’s October Meetup is right around the corner. The details haven’t been nailed down yet, but the tentative date is October 18th starting at 6:30.
Geo-Details to follow…and check out last month’s meetup now on YouTube.
I use Weather Underground for the my weather needs, especially the handy-dandy web-mapping application for “Is it going to rain on my run?” weather report. Just recently, I was checking the radar before heading out and noticed what appeared to be a technical malfunction, or the opening scenes to an epic movie.
What is happening? Were there massive, freak storms happening throughout the eastern US? No.
What you are probably seeing are radar blobs/radar blooms. It took a couple minutes of Googling, but here is a 2007 article from AccuWeather.com explaining what you see on the map. Apparently I observed a phenomena actually known as Ground Clutter. I’m neither a radar or weather expert so I won’t comment on what is technically happening but it’s still pretty neat to see on a map.
ArcGIS 10.1 has been out for a few months now and I am curious as to what the GIS public thinks of the newest release. I haven’t upgraded any of my Esri products to the newest release yet, and probably won’t for a while, but I want to gauge the public’s reaction to the most recent “dot” release.
If you have any other thoughts or comments on ArcGIS for Desktop (ArcMap), ArcGIS Online, Esri Maps for Excel, or anything else spatial leave a message!
I’ll post the results in a couple weeks.
Here is the awesome, non-scientific, one question survey. Take it!
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Avid Geo September Meet-Up is coming up this week. Check it out…
http://meetu.ps/jLlFg
And, again, I can’t make it. Why am I always busy on the third Thursday of the month…
UPDATE – Guido Stein, leader of the Avid Geo group, sent out an update about this month’s meet-up:
Just wanted to give you a heads up that the meeting is coming up on Thursday and we are going to be hosted by the wonderful people at Applied Geographics also know to me as my company.
This month Lars will be giving us a little demo on basic OSM editing and I will be sharing a little python code for data for geometric manipulation.
We will be trying to record and push this meeting onto youtube at the avidgeo to share the meeting with the rest of the world…
Want more info? Check out (and join) the Avid Geo meet-up group.
Like all of you, I run into the famous (infamous?) Esri error report, more often than I like. Ever wonder what happens when you actually report the error (which I do when I have the patience)? Check this out this blog post from Esri’s Resource Center. One item that I took away from the article is that I need to add more information to my error report than just my frustrated babbling, as Esri’s error reporting algorithms evaluate the available information before it is passed on to the engineers.
If you are a heavy Esri user and run into the error report often you should take the five minutes to read the post.
Avid Geo will be holding it’s monthly meeting for August this coming Thursday at Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge. Unfortunately I can’t make this month’s meeting but it looks to another good one. David Zwarg, from Azavea will be talking about PostGIS raster formats and supporting GDAL drivers. I’ve seen David speak a couple times now and its always about some pretty interesting stuff. So, if you are into PostGIS, GDAL, and like “talking shop” with some people in the know then head over to Cambridge this Thursday!
After a geo-action packed week at the 2012 Esri UC here my top 10 observations that I had written down in my notebook:
Roger Tomlinson and Jack Dangermond during the SAG ceremony. I bet Roger was thinking about the ways he was going to zing Jack during his speech!
Bonus Thoughts – you don’t have to use your ArcGIS Online credits to read these…
Overall, I thought it was a good conference. I did a lot of networking and learned a lot. Like any conference, it is about what you make it. I had a specific agenda that I stuck to and it turned out pretty good.
Were you there? What did you think of the conference? Would you recommend it to your cowokers or others in the geo-professions? Leave a comment!
I had a question the other day about how to incorporate a where statement into a spatial join (STIntersects). Unfortunately, the examples I had previously posted didn’t cover that topic. Well, here is an example of querying two tables, using the geometry data type in each, along with a where statement, to find all results that meet the defined spatial conditions:
select PP.*, SP.* from Populated_Places PP inner join States_Provinces SP with(Index(geom_sidx)) on PP.geom.STIntersects(SP.geom) = 1 where SP.NAME_0 = 'United States of America' and SP.NAME_1 = 'Massachusetts'
Let’s breakdown this query:
This type of query will also work with line or polygon features, as demonstrated in the following picture. In this example I query all the roads that intersect a polygon defined in the where statement. You will notice that I have the spatial results tab open to display the intersecting line features.
This is a pretty simple example, but if you have never worked in this medium it can be a little confusing at first. Have any more spatial sql questions? Let me know. I need to keep sharp.
