James Fee GIS Blog

I love using Virtual Earth because the imagery is so great compared to Google’s (at least in the areas I’m interested in). The reason why is the UltraCamX imagery that Microsoft uses. LiveSide.net has a small window into the UltraCam and how impressive its results are.

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Gizmodo and Engadget both have articles on this LCD touch screen and both show a picture of Google Earth being demonstrated.

If you look past the cute girl, you can see Google Earth
52-inch Multi-touch Screen - World’s Largest Multi-touch Display
LG.Philips LCD’s 52-inch multi-touch panel for public and interactive displays is not only the world’s largest, it [...]

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Sure you can use the Xbox360 controller, or the 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator to navigate the 3D Virtual Earth globe, but anyone can do that. The real fun is using your Wii Remote to control the 3D Globe.
Video: Wiimote Interface for Virtual Earth

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The biggest excuse I hear time and time again for not using open source geospatial tools is that they are too confusing to use. Take GDAL/OGR for example, the webpage probably scares off most users because of the lack of examples of how to use both toolsets. But the tools themselves are so [...]

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Thanks to Paul Ramsey, Bill Dollins, Morten Nielsen and others, Microsoft has said that they plan to implement longitude-latitude ordering in WKB and WKT for both the geography and geometry types. Bill put it best IMO as to why this change needed to happen with SQL Server 2008.
For me, the issue is consistency. Regardless [...]

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I’ll be busy with my new Nintendo Wii today (and probably the rest of the week). I’m already getting beaten at EA Playground and Donkey Kong Blast, but holding my own at MLB Power Pros and Carnival Games. It wasn’t all Wii though for me. The wife did get me something I [...]

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Its been a cold and blistery day here in Tempe, Arizona (well by Tempe standards at least) so I’m ready to get the fire burning and the Kahlua hot chocolate flowing. My son Connor has been bouncing off the walls full of Christmas candy and cookies and the anticipation that Santa is on his [...]

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TileCache 2.0 has been released with support for ArcIMS AXL requests. This should be of great interest to users of ArcIMS who want to create a tile cache. If you have a server that can run Python CGI and has write access to the hard drive and an ArcIMS Web Service, you can [...]

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MapGameDay.com has a new section called the Travel Map. The section contains conference and team road game data collected for regular season games from the 1998 through the 2007 NCAA Football schedule. As you might guess, any conference with a team in Hawaii would probably lead the rankings in miles traveled and the WAC [...]

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The ArcGIS Explorer Blog just announced that AGX build 440 is available:
The ArcGIS Explorer Team is pleased to announce that today, at approximately 1:58 p.m. PST, the newest version of ArcGIS Explorer - Explorer 440 - was released.
If the ESRI servers are your home servers, you’ll be notified that there is a new version available [...]

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PostgreSQL is about to get really integrated into ArcGIS workflows in 2008. First off we have ArcGIS Server Enterprise (ArcSDE) which will support PostgreSQL (ESRI and PostGIS data types) and now we have zigGIS 2.0 which will support PostGIS/PostgreSQL without the need for the traditional “ArcSDE” connection.
First and foremost, the zigGIS codebase will remain [...]

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OK, so here is what is happening at 9.3 with ArcSDE.

ArcSDE finally rides into the sunset. Even though technically ArcSDE has been replaced at 9.2, it was still a separate product. Now at 9.3 it will become fully integrated into ArcGIS Server. ArcGIS Server Enterprise will be the “traditional” ArcSDE level where [...]

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Amazon SimpleDB is on its way and it may just change how you use databases with your web applications (or even desktop apps). SimpleDB is a web service that leverages Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 to store, process and query datasets. Currently most if not all of us use a RDBMS such as [...]

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Announced earlier this month and talked about for at least a year (I think they mentioned this at the 2007 Dev Summit), ESRI is moving away from socket licensing to using the number of cores on the server.
Through November 30, 2007, ESRI licensed server software based primarily on the number of physical sockets on the [...]

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The news this morning out of the UK is that Microsoft has agreed to buy Multimap for approximately £50 million $50M (updated from earlier number).
Multimap owns a maps website aimed at consumers that attracted more than 4 million unique users in the UK last month, according to Nielsen NetRatings, the market researchers.
The figures place the [...]

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I’m traveling this week so its seems like a great time to have another open thread. Enjoy…..

The Editor is out this week

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Good news for those who want to take advantage of SQL Server 2008 Spatial and ArcGIS.
ESRI’s ArcGIS 9.3 software, the next scheduled release of ESRI’s ArcGIS suite, will take full advantage of the new spatial technology in the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008. With the November SQL Server 2008 community technology preview (CTP), Microsoft [...]

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It amazes me that this attitude still exists. Given all that we’ve learned over the past few years you’d think those “in power” would get the fundamental change that has happened. The geospatial revolution doesn’t need folks with that attitude, it will just pass them by. Planet Geospatial is full of blogs [...]

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Time for all us geospatial folks to get together and vote for one of our own. Take a look at the videos for all the Amazon Start-Up Challenge and vote for your favorite (which I assume for most of us will be WeoGeo). Vote early and vote often. It would be great [...]

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Rob Elkins says that there will be some complimentary pre-conference seminars at the 2008 ESRI Developer Summit next year. I have to say this is probably a good idea as many of the folks I talked to at the Dev Summit last year were well over their heads as many of the sessions are [...]

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