Surveying, Mapping and GIS

I am actually not afraid to admit I am one who likes Microsoft products, a .NET developer, a Microsoft Registered Partner, a user of MS Office, Project, SQL Server, Exchange and so much more - and one who generally likes their vision and model... but sometimes it seems a juggernaut run amok.

BUT... while I'm on the topic of ranting, yesterday I went out to pick up another laptop, and was amazed to find that all of the local retailers only carry boxes with Vista (and generally some flavor of Vista Home to boot) - and no XP on any of the boxes in stock.

I was one of the Vista beta users, and readily admit I did not have any serious problems with it, but nonetheless am not yet ready to be flung headlong into adopting the new technology for any production machines. And further, I don't want to be bothered with half-crippled "Home" versions of much of anything.

I was happy with the model of shipping machines with XP along with a Vista upgrade certificate, but was surprised to see that this seems to have come to an abrupt end.

The other concurrent Microsoft marketing annoyance I have is that IE 7 is being pushed... hard. It comes up in my Updates list pretty regularly - and this is another key piece of infrastructure that I am just not ready to migrate on.

Don't get me wrong - I am generally on the leading side of the curve when it comes to adopting new technologies, but slooow it down, Microsoft. Given the track record of previous Windows and IE versions, we need time.

One of the stories circulating in the blogosphere is the Microsoft initiative to circulate some Vista-loaded machines to select bloggers - more here:

I Started Something Blog

It's one thing to give out copies of Vista for evaluation - after all I participated in the beta as well - but another to give out fancy $2000 Acer Ferrarri laptops with it. As one might expect, the response has been mixed, but generally not favorable.

Bribery? Unethical? I won't comment on that, as I think such a blanket condemnation would be premature. What might be more interesting is to look at who they selected, and why. I, in particular, would be more interested if it's pursuit of buy-in by outspoken critics, or reward to those troops who supported Microsoft in the past, neutral honest-broker bloggers or a mix of all of these.

The imponderable annoyance du jour: Verizon Online. So we moved across town in anticipation of our pending sale... everything has gone pretty smoothly so far, all things considered. On the 13th, we switched the phone line over to the other house. Same number, same town, just a couple of miles southeast.

Verizon says, 5-8 day wait time to switch the DSL over. What the.... I already have the DSL modem, the account is already set up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.... many reasons why this should be a very simple administrative thing for Verizon.

GRRR.... I tell them that the wait is unacceptable. "Um, sir, that's the ready date that comes up in the system." GRRR... "you can use Verizon Online via dial-up in the meantime for free".

Oh, gee.

Meanwhile, Verizon Online dial-up doesn't recognize my username and password.

Another call to Verizon tech support and they say "Mr. Smith, our records show you don't have dial-up". GRRRR. So they set me up with temporary access.

Temporary access doesn't work either.

Meanwhile, I hook the DSL modem up, and it detects DSL, 864kbps downstream, 150kbps upstream.

BUT, it's unable to logon.

Verizon Online dial-up folks tell me dial-up won't work if this is the case.

Well, anyways, in the meanwhile the Verizon Online DSL folks call and tell us that it won't be ready until the 27th. Yea, half a month. No explanation.... just going to take that long.

Add to this, all of the times I tried dialing up their customer service department and navigating their voice response system - to have it a.) not recognize what I was saying (particularly considering that with as much traveling as I have done, I have as close to a non-accent as is possible in American English), and b.) getting dropped after waiting 5 or more minutes on the call... AND of course, "can you give me the phone number you are calling about" AFTER their system has already confirmed this?

Well, the windows are fogged up from the steam escaping from my ears... Time to grab a cold beer and try to relax.

Some signs that Microsoft is trying to catch up and seeing the importance of geospatial support- Paul Flessner, Microsoft senior Vice President of Data and Storage Platforms touched on it in CRN recently - From the CRN article:

Flessner expanded on the company's data-and-storage vision, saying that the data store of the future must handle sound and graphical data types as well as the more standard relational and non-relational text information.

"We've got to go past words and numbers and get to sounds and sights," he told CRN in an interview Thursday.

One problem is that "pattern matching is not there yet," Flessner said.

Microsoft's plan for a unified store to handle all these data types is still on, but timing is unclear. He expects more and more data--including satellite information-- to flow into stores from sensors and that will enable creation of richer applications.

"You will see an investment in spatial indexing, geometry libraries. I want to do a good job supporting ESRI and other geo-spatial guys and make a good library available so if you can't afford those packages do good spatial analysis without them," Flessner said.

(ESRI is a leading maker of geographic information systems and mapping software.)

When will that happen? The next four to six years, although he'd like to get more done "sooner rather than later."

At PDC last year, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that the "unified store" vision, already promised and late, would come with the next SQL Server or "Katmai" release wave.

I previously posted about my concerns about Mac owners smugly professing to be running a much more secure OS than Windows... My thought being that it wasn't that OSX couldn't be hacked or infected by viruses, but rather that nobody really took the time to try, that it simply wasn't as attractive a target as big and mighty Microsoft's offerings... That it very likely also suffered from its own share of bugs and vulnerabilities (and it does).

Turns out my suspicions have been vindicated - Turns out a "smug Mac owner" put up a server running OSX boldly challenging folks to hack it - and the rest has been ugly. Hacked and defaced within 30 minutes. The tune has been rapidly changing...

My friend Michael Murphy's blog provides a link to a handy calendar of Microsoft MSDN and TechNet webcasts:

http://www.microsoft.com/events/webcasts/calendar/monthview.aspx

This will be a reference I will keep handy...

GeoComm and others are carrying the release from ESRI, about how ArcSDE 9.1 Service Pack 1 now supports SQL Server 2005. That's definitely great news, given some of the momentum that SQL Server 2005 has gained over its predecessor. Some of the other questions are where SQL Server will begin to take up the slack with increasing support for spatial objects. Even bigger question is if IBM will do the same, with DB2. According to some third parties, the newest version of DB2 actually significantly outperforms both Oracle and SQL Server.

With various RDBMS vendors exploring native storage of spatial data, as well as Microsoft pursuing the geospatial domain with experiments like Live Local, things are definitely heating up.

As I have been spending a lot of time in stores of late for the holiday shopping season, the stores abound with all kinds of nifty new widgets and gizmos- one of which is the dashtop moving-map GPS units. These, along with MP3 players still have me puzzled.

I've been a user of PDAs going back to around 1998, where I had an NEC MobilePro 400 running Windows CE. I still have the MobilePro, and loved the wide screen and Pocket Excel and Word, along with the fact that it could take standard AA batteries.

A couple of years later, I got a Philips Nino 510, one of the first Windows CE-based units to come out with a color screen. The trusty Nino lasted me almost 5 years before one fall too many finally caused the screen to go. In fact, though I am hardly a trendsetter, I had been enjoying MP3s and other modern pleasures with my Nino for years before the iPod craze even caught on.

I now run an HP iPAQ rx3115, with integrated Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to serve a wide variety of everyday tasks, including mapping. We have also recently developed an application based on the EPA EnviroMapper family optimized for handheld PDAs, which uses ASP.NET, ArcIMS, ArcWeb Services for base mapping and geocoding, GlobeXplorer imagery, and the EPA EnviroFacts database for facilities data. One of the things that comes to mind is integration of GPS into this type of application.

With the advent of Bluetooth and other technologies, it becomes a no-brainer to integrate GPS into mobile applications. This returns to the original question- the fancy dashtop GPS units selling for $900 at Best Buy and all of those favorite technology haunts. For just over a third of that price, one can equip ones self with a nice PDA, a bluetooth GPS unit and software, and perhaps even an FM transmitter and have a rig that will suit your vehicle for navigation and MP3 entertainment needs, as well as all of the other niceties that a modern PDA provides- email, contacts, calendars, to-do, calculator, Excel, Word, voice recorder, et cetera. For a guy like me who spends many hours on the road (even my regular four-hour ride from Northeastern Pennsylvania to Washington, DC alone).

As a little aside, I am a direct descendant of the man after whom Bluetooth is named- King Harald Blåtand (AD 911-987), son of Gorm the Old. Harald, also known as King Harald I, united Denmark and Norway. Bluetooth technology, spearheaded by several Scandinavian firms, is in turn viewed as a uniter, much as King Harald was. Incidentally, Harald didn't actually have blue teeth, but was indeed rumored to have an affinity for blueberries.

The folks at Technorati have been working toward leveraging the blogging community through the use of tags and aggregation... After playing around a little trying to do the HTML these tags manually, I finally got fed up enough with the tedium to cook up my own little tool. What's more, I'm making it available for anyone else to use.

The app is a simple little .NET application, that on first use creates a little ASCII file, "tags.txt" that you can add your own favorite tag categories to... after adding your tags, press "generate" and it will generate your HTML for you. Additionally, you can add and remove tags using the tool, or if you prefer, import the tags into tags.txt using notepad or a suitable ASCII editor. The tags.txt file will be maintained sorted in alphabetic order, should you want to use other tools with it.

The screenshot to the right shows it in action...

You can download it at the link below... FREE, but remember where you found it...

License terms- I make this available for personal use, but reserve all rights beyond this. I'm no expert on licensing terms, I mainly ask that if you want to to modify or use this app outside of its intended use, drop me a line and we can discuss.

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August 14, 2006 UPDATE: The terragrafix.net server has been
having some issues - I have uploaded a copy of the tool here:

http://www.synergist-tech.com/tools/TechnoratiTagger.zip

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I have to admit I haven't really been following the Microsoft Live buzz... but it looks like, as a few times in the past, the folks at Microsoft have been quietly working away, this time building a lot of web services components, the pieces and parts of which begin to form a seamless and easy-to-use tapestry.

One of these components is Live Local, which is built on Virtual Earth and appears to be using the AJAX / Microsoft ATLAS technology that, with asynchronous JavaScript/JavaScript
XML Web Services similar to Google maps technology has been all the rage lately.

I soon hope to be looking at the APIs, usability and possibilities of these services... looking forward to this as I start playing with Visual Studio .NET 2005 in earnest...

Finally getting a chance to play with Visual Studio .NET 2005. I had loaded up an early beta, and had a limited trial there, but now I have a copy of Visual Studio .NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, and other goodies, thanks to the folks at Microsoft and the recent Launch event.


I've already started working on a tool to help automate some web tasks tonight... looking forward to ripping in to it in more depth.

Still decompressing from the EPA Environmental Symposium in Las Vegas... Red eye back to Dulles yesterday, and drive back to PA, ended up awake for almost 40 hours straight.

A great show, I ended up jumping from one person and conversation to the next, hoarse and out of business cards by day's end, with folks asking plenty of questions about the various projects and applications we were displaying at the show.

MetaCarta
The integration of MetaCarta into Window to My Environment was definitely a major hit. Got a lot of great feedback, with folks plugging in their own ZIP codes and getting document hits back from the MetaCarta appliance for their own neighborhood.
http://www.metacarta.com

Geospatial Metadata / Data / Services Architecture
Another project that sparked plenty of discussion is the Geospatial Metadata, Data and Services Architecture project that I am working on with Wendy Blake-Coleman as EPA's champion, Fred Broome and Phil Magrogan from Lockheed-Martin, Jessica Zichichi from Perot Systems, along with plenty of others who have provided excellent input and support, including Brenda Smith, Dave Catlin, Dave Wolf, and Eugenia Naranjo (EPA), Tim Richards and Qi Dai (CSC), and many others. The As-Is diagram usually quickly sends people fleeing- it is indeed very complex and cumbersome, however that characterization is also true of the real-world situation. We are still ironing out some of the kinks of the To-Be architecture- many functional issues still need to be addressed.

EnviroPDA
This is the mobile mapping application we developed for EPA Office of Environmental Information some time ago, to bring EnviroMapper functionality to a mobile platform. Of course the HP folks were plenty interested, as were the Blackberry folks... by show's end there were versions running on both platforms. Also, plenty of interest within EPA... as usual, just have to find funding and proper homes for these things...

GeoData Service
This is an OGC-compliant Web Feature Service (WFS) that we developed atop an existing Oracle application, to allow users to query and drill down into Oracle facility data directly from ArcGIS desktop. I was pleased to see Sam Bacharach from OGC again, having met him at the Pennsylvania Digital Government Summit earlier in the year. The GeoData service was particularly apt for service in Katrina response, however it revealed some issues with the underlying Oracle infrastructure that still is awaiting redesign.

I'm getting ready to attend the 2005 EPA Environmental Symposium at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. We have booth space, and will also be presenting a new version of Window to My Environment, which incorporates MetaCarta geospatially-enabled search technology. We will also be working with Lockheed-Martin and the ITS-ESE team to demonstrate other emergent technologies, like Nirvana Storage Resource Broker for geo-enabled data fusion and InstaKnow ACE.

Things have been very hectic, trying to get a number of deliverables for this and other projects out the door, but I'm looking forward to it...