Just finished updating my machine to ArcGIS 10. Best part so far is clearly the improved Python integration, instead of VBA.
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Last week I came over Raphaël, a great JavaScript library for vector graphics visualizations, and I started playing around with maps and SVG again. Long time no see!
To bring some map content from ArcMap to Raphaël I used the VBA Macro I wrote 4 years ago in ArcMap. It still does the job and gives me clean vector graphics the way I want them. I couldn’t find a decent SVG export option for QGIS, although there are some efforts to improve that kind of functionality.
AsSVG, a Python geoprocessing script for ArcGIS is pretty good too. It provides some nice export options, such as pick style and data attribute fields, and I actually ended up using it a lot.
However, it’s 2009 and there are other ways available for sharing code then just providing a plain text file. So I ended up wrapping a bitbucket repository around it. Just in case if somebody is interested in working on or improving the script…
…is something you may consider turning off if you’re unhappy with VMware Fusion’s performance.
As for ArcGIS Desktop, it works noticeable faster in VMware Fusion (aff link) if the entire workspace is moved inside the VMware image instead of accessed via “Shared Folders”. ArcMap feels snappier and geoprocessing runs about 35% faster as my quick benchmark showed. Performance issues caused by “Shared Folders” is mentioned at an ESRI Discussion thread too.
My benchmark test was just a geoprocessing task I needed to do for a project, executed in 3 different workspace environments:
#1 – inside the VMware image
#2 – on an external USB harddisk, mounted in Windows
#3 – on an external USB harddisk, mounted in Mac OS X and accessed through VMware Fusion’s Shared Folders feature
The task was to intersect 2 layers, everything done inside a File Geodatabase:
Layer A: 11,932 features (20,4361 vertices)
Layer B: 3,100 features (arcs from point buffering)
The intersect-process returned a 300MB feature class containing 952,265 features and 5,724,810 vertices. Below is the chart showing the time needed to complete the task for each workspace environment.
ArcGIS geoprocessing task performance in different workspace environments
In figures, option #1 took 8 minutes 57 seconds, option #2 9 minutes 3 seconds and option #3 needed 13 minutes 29 seconds to finish.
Clearly, the performance bottleneck in VMware Fusion is “Shared folders”. No doubt, it’s a handy feature and makes file sharing between host and guest-OS very easy, but for performance reasons you better turn it off.
Once in benchmarking-mood I ran the same task with increased memory and 2 CPUs. Out of curiosity, just to see the effect of more memory and CPU power. My standard setting for VMware Fusion is 1 CPU and 512MB RAM allocated to the guest-OS, which turned out to be the best setting for working at decent speeds in both host and guest-OS so far. The result for the same geoprocessing task with 2 CPUs and 1024MB RAM was 8 minutes 17 seconds. Little faster, but, because of experiencing a sluggish host Mac OS X, not worth it.
Despite performance I ran into another problem with “Shared Folders” and File Geodatabases a while ago. Well, I actually never verified that this problem is related to “Shared Folders”: a File Geodatabase corrupted while executing “compact database” in a “Shared Folder” workspace. According to that thread at ESRI it happened on network drives too. However, I experienced it only in “Shared Folders”, not in other workspace environments. Quite annoying bug though.
My favorite ArcMap extension Arc2Earth got updated and brings now rendered OpenStreetMap layers into ArcMap:
Previous versions supported map tile layers import from Virtual Earth, Yahoo! or Ask. Certainly a great feature which allows easy access to good and up-to-date base maps in many regions. The only problem is that without proper licensing it’s not possible to use them for commercial purposes. I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I understand the term commercial purpose, only loading and viewing those layers in ArcMap in a business environment (e.g. at the office) can already result in a license violation. Good license deals might not be such a problem at the enterprise level, for small businesses who need those maps here and there, it is quite often an issue.
Being able to load OpenStreetMap instead of Virtual Earth, etc. into ArcMap removes a lot of those licensing headaches.
OpenStreetMap data can be used freely under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
As long as attribution and share alike work for you, you can basically do whatever you want with OpenStreetMap in ArcMap – copy, distribute, print, derive, etc.
There is a long list of other new features and fixes that come with the latest release of Arc2Earth. OpenLayers as additional viewer for exported map tiles is one of those which caught my attention.
After the upgrade to Mac OS 10.5 I decided not to use Boot Camp any longer and switch entirely to a virtualization solution. Mainly because Boot Camp is limited to the primary (internal) hard drive and occupies a lot of disk space which I want to use for some other things now. A virtual machine I can run from an external hard drive too and move it to wherever I want.
My copy of Parallels Desktop (aff link) transfered the existing Windows XP installation from the Boot Camp partition to a new virtual disk image flawlessly. Problems started later when I tried to start the image for the 2nd time. The disk image apparently corrupted and I had to install everything from scratch again. After hours of Windows and ArcGIS installations, the disk image corrupted again when I tried to restart the virtual machine. I wasn’t able to find out what caused the problem, wasn’t in the mood to spend another couple of hours with basic set ups either and started looking for alternative virtualization solutions.
The next version of Parallels Desktop’s main competitor, VMware Fusion (aff link), is currently in beta and until 2nd Oct 2008 they are offering free beta licenses.
Their website lists all new features and enhancements. From my point of view – not doing any benchmarks, just trying to complete basic ArcGIS tasks in Windows – it feels snappy enough and has useful features like unity mode, snapshots, mirrored and shared folders, which you can add to the virtual machine while it’s running.
I didn’t encounter any problems setting up and running ArcGIS in VMware Fusion. Whereas I didn’t do any geoprocessing tasks yet. Geoprocessing worked well in Parallels and I expect it to do so in VMware Fusion too. If not, I’ll post it here.
However, while working with grids I noticed an issue: my ArcGIS workspace was a subfolder within the mirrored Documents directory in Mac OS X. In that environment, an ESRI grid file I was working with wasn’t fully accessible in ArcGIS. After I copied the entire workspace inside the virtual machine, everything worked fine again. Maybe it’s related to HFS, the Mac OS filesystem.
Steven and Roman brought my attention to Sun’s open source virtualization solution called Virtualbox. I tried that one too – it does a fairly good job, not as advanced as VMware Fusion though, but well documented and highly customizable. If you own a Mac, need Windows (or Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and prefer open source, go with VirtualBox.
Another interesting detail is that VMware Fusion is pretty active on Twitter. At least they are scanning Twitter for Tweets about their products and they even respond to those tweets – clever marketing I guess. Though I don’t how far it goes and if you can use Twitter for quick support questions. Would be very convenient.
More than any marketing leaflet, the Google/ESRI Where 2008 presentation made me curious about the potential of the upcoming ArcGIS Server release.
I find the example shown of the fires in California, where students started locating and pinpointing new fire outbreaks in Google My Maps, very interesting. In the field of spatial planning, stakeholder participation is often a crucial part. Since most projects deal with spatial impacts, using maps and plans is just natural to transport information. Enabling feedback processes directly via easy-to-use map interfaces like Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth could support communication strategies very well I think.
The thing is, our clients, partners and most stakeholders aren’t GIS power users. They are not very familiar with desktop GIS and, for obvious reasons, use map server interfaces only when they are forced to (the “Captive” user base). Anything what helps increasing user experience on interactive maps is just a huge step forward.
Arc2Earth is handy for quick & easy interactive map publishing via Google Maps/Virtual Earth or KML, but the potential of having feedback collected, (geo)processed and instantly returned by a server leaves room for some really great project ideas and use cases.
I guess first I’ll have a look at the GeoServer project and see what I can accomplish with the Open Geo-Stack, before bothering our local ESRI sales people.
Companies who admit failures usually gain credibility.
This isn’t new at 9.2; it’s been like this for a while. Why there isn’t a better error message, I don’t know.
John Doe
ESRI Product Specialist
Anyways, if there would’ve been a better error message, I’d not have gone in circles around the problem for quite a while and finally ending up at the support forums searching for users who experienced the same issue. I hope this error message made it on the task list for 9.3…
As if the ArcGIS SingleUse registration process (hardwarelock > keycode > registration form > email > license file > activation) wasn’t already painful enough…
CNET has an article about virtualization solutions for running Windows on a Mac and posted some benchmark results for the most popular applications: VMware Fusion 1.1 and Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (aff links).
I’m using Parallels Desktop mainly for working with ArcGIS on my MacBook, which works quite well (more info on that). For completing heavy tasks, where I could use some extra spice, I usually restart into BootCamp.
So I found it interesting that Fusion significantly outperforms Parallels. Taking a closer look at the article, things became clearer: Fusion makes use of multiple cores while Parallels only uses one single CPU core. The benchmark limited to only one core shows very similar results.
I suppose Parallels will catch up on that issue and won’t try Fusion, since I think both of them are not quite compatible and I’m really not in the mood of setting up Windows again if something breaks (never change a running system!).
If you’re setting up a new environment for using ArcGIS on a Mac, I’d recommend giving VMware’s Fusion a try.
Who needs ArcGIS Network Analyst and TeleAtlas Multinet when you can ask Google Maps with a few lines of JavaScript?
The new Google Maps feature adds drag&drop to routing: adjust start, end or any point on the route as you like and Google Maps recalculates your route on the fly.
Apart from the amazing usability, I think for small and middle sized companies who are dealing with the traveling salesman problem, the Google Maps routing API is in the meantime quite an interesting option to licensing and maintaining full GIS routing applications and the databases behind.