I never found the right word which describes my job position best. Nor could I tell the difference between GIS analyst and specialist. After reading Glenn’s listing on GIS job titles I suppose I’m a mixture of a specialist and manager, doing some coordinative tasks to keep GIS running in our company.
Monthly Archive for July, 2006
It must be the heat wave, otherwise I can’t explain why today I had to accomplish some very unusual, not to say weird, GIS tasks.
One part of our work here is to collect and synchronize data from various regional or federal institutions and produce a national view of certain spatial planning related topics. The bandwidth of responds to our data requests is pretty broad: it reaches from colorful word or excel tables to every digital image format (particularly when it comes to geographic data and maps) you can imagine. GIS compatible data is unfortunately the big exception. The worst, and in the year 2006 still existing, answer you can get is “I send you the data by fax, ok?”.
Adobe Illustrator to ArcMap
During the last days we received some maps done in Adobe Illustrator. For some reasons GIS was ignored and the whole mapping was done exclusively by vector graphic editing. For print-only maps it was ok and we could add the delivered Illustrator files to our graphic outputs. But we needed the data in our Mapserver too.
The workaround I found was to export the features (points and polygons) from Adobe Illustrator to AutoCAD Interchange file (dxf) and then import this AutoCAD files into ArcMap. The import/export allows you to take over the layer information (the graphic elements were organized and grouped into different layers) as attribute like in any other dxf. Completely missing is of course a coordinate system. Once I had all the elements loaded into ArcMap I used the Spatial Adjustment tools to shift the former graphic elements to their right geographic location within my chosen coordinate system. To successfully complete the spatial adjustment you need to know the exact location (e.g. some graphic lines represent a known street network) of at least a few graphic features.
Of course you won’t achieve sub-meter accuracy by this method, but for a first rough import step it was ok. Further spatial adjustments along with other editing steps (such as adding attributes) need to be done on the imported data in order to ensure a certain quality level.
Coordinate system?
Another data set which was meant to be added to the Illustrator data was stored within an Excel table. First I thought great, somebody who understands my needs: the last two columns represented coordinate pairs. Fantastic! I’ll be done in 10 minutes. After the X/Y-import the data just didn’t want to match any coordinate system I knew. Whatever projection parameter I modified, the data just slipped around on my map, always slightly off my existing data (the position of some features was known). It took me the whole morning to figure out what was wrong with the coordinate pairs: every third coordinate pair applied to another coordinate system. I’ve never seen such a data compilation before. After splitting everything up, defining the right coordinate system for each pair and putting them together again I could add this data my maps.
If today’s data struggle wasn’t enough, my PC was behaving sluggish and unmotivated all day long. Must be the heat or a signal to go home now.
What a honest world we’re living in: the Austrian catholic church holds shares on the gambling monopoly here. I wonder how gambling and catholic faith match, since there is this story about a guy freakin’ out in the temple of Jerusalem 2000 years ago…
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Maybe I’m completely wrong but is it possible that after upgrading to Mac OS 10.4.7 my Wi-Fi (Airport) is not working properly anymore?
Last week I ran into problems while uploading some picture to Flickr. Once the process was completed all of my uploaded images were full of weird distortions like colored stripes, shifted image parts or just where half grey. Nothing helped: I tried to reduce image size, changed the image format and uploaded them with different tools (iPhoto plugin, browser and uploadr), no luck.
Finally I emailed the Flickr support team (which is very responsive!) and they told me that it seems to be a connection issue where the end of my uploaded image is being truncated due to slow connections.
So I did 2 more tests, hoping that I’m able to track down the problem:
- upload by email – success, no image distortions
- shut down airport and connect via a good old cable to the router – success, no image distortions
and a final 3rd one:
- turn on airport and unplug the cable – failure, broken image online
Conclusio
I’m no network specialist nor do I know too many details about how Mac OS X works inside. But I do know that after I upgraded to Mac OS 10.4.7 I wasn’t any longer able to successfully upload my images up to Flickr.
It’s annoying, that’s all. It’s not a crucial issue as long as it only affects image upload to Flickr (even if it bothers me a lot that I’m not able to upload and participate easily on Flickr… hmm… maybe I should talk to someone professional why some Flickr-abstinence makes me nervous, but that’s probably another story…).
MacFixIt has already a collection of workarounds for many (!) issues caused by 10.4.7, but apparently not for my little Airport problem. Basically is my MacBook’s Airport working, except this annoying truncated image upload problem (and I’m not thinking of reseting all my favorite/recent networks because of that bug!).
Update #1
I was wrong, this bug isn’t the result of 10.4.7. A MacBook running 10.4.6 had the same problem with the picture upload to Flickr. It must be a malfuntion of my router (Netgear WGT624 v3). I doubt it’s an Airport problem because I was able to successfully upload images logged into other Wi-Fi’s…
It was only a matter of time until the first bash Zidane games would appear on the internet. I didn’t like the ending of yesterday’s World Cup finals at all. First, Zidane’s attack on Materazzi (for whatever reason) and secondly, a world championship must not end with a penalty shoot-out, it’s disappointing.
Some might go out and play Minigolf on their free weekends, I stay at home and fiddle around with some geo things on my new MacBook.
As result of this afternoon I got ESRI’s ArcGIS up and running on Mac OS X. Of course with a little help of a virtual Windows installation in the background.
What needs to be done?
Well, first I had to decide which virtualization software I want to use. Basically I had a closer look at Apple’s Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (aff link). Whereas Boot Camp doesn’t count as virtualization tool, it just enables booting and running Windows on any Intel Mac. That was mainly the reason why I didn’t go with Boot Camp. Every time you need Windows-only software you’ll have to restart your machine. In the case of ArcGIS I’m not planning to use it on a 10 hrs/day basis on the laptop, it’s just an “emergency” installation, to edit and modify some minor things on the way or to use it for presentation and demo purposes. So in the end I downloaded and installed Parallels Desktop.
There are of course some other tools available, like Virtual PC for instance, but after a quick research on some reviews I decided to focus on Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop for my purposes.
What about perfomance?
Actually I was positively surprised by ArcGIS’s performance in Parallels Desktop. I expected it to be sluggish and painfully slow, but it wasn’t at all. To complete basic tasks and do some map editing it’s quite ok and usable. The main limitations are RAM and video card. On Parallels Desktop you allocate a certain amount of RAM to your Windows installation, 512MB in my case. I think you can only allocate the half of your built-in RAM as maximum.
The video card is another major drawback: Windows sees a virtual graphic card with only 8MB of VRAM available. Not too much if you’re planning to do some 3D visualization (which I won’t). However, I’m wondering how ArcGIS Explorer (3D!) is performing under this conditions since there won’t be a Mac version.
A Windows installation enabled by Boot Camp accesses all of your RAM, makes use of your video card instead of emulating its own and the processor isn’t occupied with Mac OS X tasks while you are working in Windows. There are good chances that ArcGIS will act somewhat faster too.
Something else?
No luck with GPS so far. The Garmin GPSmap 60C is recognized by Windows but not by MapSource. I wish Garmin would fix their USB issue and come up with some Mac support. It can’t be that hard, other devices seem to work just fine.
Along with Apple’s switch to Intel it’s now easier than ever before to use Windows-only applications (like most GIS and GPS software) on Mac OS X. There are various virtualization products available which deliver good Windows perfomances. Using Boot Camp even gives you the full perfomance of your machine, considering some missing hardware drivers (Boot Camp is still beta). Let’s see in August what comes with Mac OS 10.5 out of the pipe.
No luck for me yesterday: Germany destroyed my bet on Argentina as the next soccer world champion. But after a day in black I just saw a great Zinedine Zidane kicking out Brasil. Would be fantastic if France would win the world cup in his last match!