James Fee GIS Blog

Congratulations to Matt Giger for pushing out EarthBrowser 3.0. I have been following Matt’s triumphs and struggles on his blog as he’s worked at getting the latest EarthBrowser release out on his blog. I was more than happy to purchase a license and I encourage everyone else to do the same as well. [...]

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A thread has developed on the OSGeo email list (out of an “open source career” post in fact) asking how one can perform the same tasks using open source software as they do with ESRI.
Paul Ramsey as usual writes a spot on response to the question:
My general synopsis: for server-side, for scriptability, for automation, for [...]

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I’ll be back hopefully next week.

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I’m sure most ESRI customers received the following email from ESRI regarding the Oracle 10.2.0.4 patch and ArcSDE:
If you are a user of the ArcGIS Server 9.2 ST_GEOMETRY data type with Oracle, we would like to make you aware of the following issue:
The recently released Oracle patch version 10.2.0.4 may make unexpected changes to the [...]

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Brian Flood has apparently been busy.
Now that Google Earth 4.3 is officially out the door, I wanted to share another product that we’ve been working on. It started out as the framework for a standalone version of Arc2Earth but it quickly became apparent that the core functionality would be very beneficial to [...]

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Non-Google Fanboy Look at Google Earth 4.3
Google Earth really is starting to remind me more and more of the AOL of the early 90’s. Loaded with tons of crap you have to wade through to find the good stuff.
While pretty, 4.3 is a performance dog. Of course all the other digital globes are [...]

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Peter Batty announced on his blog that whereyougonnabe has entered beta. If you have a Facebook profile and want to give it a spin, you can do so right here. If the word whereyougonnabe makes no sense to you whatsoever, just head over to Peter’s blog and check out some of the videos [...]

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KML, the HTML of geographic content

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OK, the MSR MapCruncher team has contacted me with some clarification as to the difference between the versions and what that means for the future:
You are correct that one reason there are two versions is licensing. The other reason is branding and support: the VE team has quality standards and wants to ensure they don’t [...]

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Steve Lombardi and Chris Pendleton have both blogged about the new release of Microsoft Virtual Earth (and Live Maps). Steve sums it up:
This ended up being a much bigger release than originally planned including three full sprints of development. As always the changes visible in the user interface only scratch the surface of the [...]

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Niall Kennedy has written an excellent overview of Google App Engine from aimed at developers. Well worth the read.

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Microsoft Virtual Earth - MapCruncher has its own webpage and a commercial license so commercial users can now use the product. You can download the MapCruncher beta here.
What is weird is that I’ve got both the MSR MapCruncher and the new Virtual Earth MapCruncher installed now and they both seem to be the same [...]

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Dave Smith has been blogging about the issues with ST_Geometry on Oracle 10g.
Recently two ESRI customers have reported problems to ESRI Technical Support after upgrading to Oracle 10.2.0.4. The Oracle upgrade appears to be deleting some schema elements we require for the spatial type (ST_GEOMETRY). Uninstalling the upgrade to restore the prior version of Oracle [...]

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I’ve blogged about Amazon Web Services and how one can leverage those services to develop scaleable applications, but now Google has gotten into the act. Google App Engine will let you to develop scaleable web applications using the same Google technology that powers their own web applications such as Google Maps and Gmail. [...]

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I’m sure you’ve all seen news that 3Dconnexion released their new SpaceNavigator for Notebooks today and I’m not going to waste your time with another review of how “life changing” it is to find crap in Google Earth. I did receive a review unit from 3Dconnexion with the idea that I would look at [...]

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Of course most everyone knows that OGR supports reading ArcSDE features, but writing wasn’t available. Well Hobu has the great news that he is looking for testers of OGR write for ArcSDE. This is great news for anyone who has ArcSDE and wants to use it with the many software applications/servers that user [...]

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For those of you who didn’t get to see Build 600 in person at the Business Partner or Developer Summit this March, the ArcGIS Explorer team has posted a screenshot with the new “ribbon” interface. It does look really nice and the usability is much improved.

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Dave Bouwman has written up a follow-up to his question at the Dev Summit closing session about ESRI overselling ArcGIS Server.
One issue I seem to run into a lot is the gap between client expectations of ArcGIS Server, and the reality. Although I did bring this up at the closing session of the Developer Summit, [...]

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