James Fee GIS Blog

Brian Flood has blogged about his latest project, Arc2Earth Cloud Services.  A2ECS (what is one more acronym among friends?) is yet another service that will be competing for our GIS dollar.  We’ve seen the WeoGeo/Safe announcement, ESRI is thinking about hosted services and now Brian brings his cutting edge A2E services forward.  Competition will only [...]

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ESRI has posted the results from the 2008 ESRI Q&A and most of it isn’t news, but a couple things caught my eye…

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Tim Sinnott’s video of the Radiohead LIDAR was interesting to me for two reasons.  First off it was nice to see LIDAR being used in what I suppose is mainstream media and the second is the thought that Thom Yorke would stand there and let a laser hit their face for what must  have been [...]

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So what does it actually mean?  Adding Virtual Earth tiles to ArcGIS Desktop/Explorer?  First off, this isn’t a free service.  The ArcGIS Online Premium Service: Virtual Earth Maps Collection will cost you.  How much?  Not a clue.  I’m sure it will be at a price point that will make some jaws drop and others will [...]

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I blogged about my concern that Microsoft wasn’t supporting SketchUp files in trueSpace last week and I said I’d report back on what I learned.
As long as you have Google SketchUp Pro, the process is really easy. I opened a model in Google SketchUp Pro and exported as a 3ds Max file. But [...]

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I’m normally not a big blogger of press releases, but I know the crowd that reads this blog will be very interested.  I’ll follow up more later today with some thoughts about what this might mean for all of us.
Microsoft Virtual Earth to Be Offered With ESRI’s ArcGIS Online Services

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The time has come for Mapbuilder to retire.  Look for OpenLayers to benefit greatly with more focus on it.  Should be really interesting moving forward.

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It looks like the Virtual Earth ASP.NET control has finally been released.  Now no longer .NET developers have to worry about their JavaScript and can focus on pure .NET.  Combined with other .NET technology we could see some very immersive Virtual Earth solutions integrated into existing .NET code.

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First off, I had an absolute blast.  The city, the venue and the people have all been just wonderful to experience.  Right now especially it is very interesting because the GeoWeb is finally being implemented in larger scales and we are beginning to see the results of those who work hard at trying to realize the promise [...]

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Chris Pendleton notes on his blog that Microsoft has released trueSpace for Virtual Earth 3D for free.  I think most of us thought this would be the eventual result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Caligari so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
I’ll be honest in that I’ve never used Caligari tools, only SketchUp and [...]

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I’m leaving the oppressive heat of Tempe, AZ for the Pacific Northwest and GeoWeb 2008 this morning.  I really can’t recall the last time I looked more forward to a conference than this one, should be a real blast.  It has been years since I’ve been back to Vancouver.

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Regina Obe has developed a table to compare the new SQL Server 2008 with PostgreSQL/PostGIS (with MySQL thrown in there to boot).  The table does a wonderful job showing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of all three relational databases.

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ESRI has released ArcGIS 9.2 SP6. All those who are unlucky enough to be working though the weekend can get ahead of the rest of us who will spend out Monday morning downloading and installing SP6 on our our workstations.
Me?  I’ll be on the couch all weekend watching the British Open.

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Paul Bissett has some great news on Safe Software entering a partnership with WeoGeo.  This is great for users who have looked at the superb FME Server and wondered how the heck could they actually use it.  WeoGeo gets that into the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and users benefit by being able to [...]

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Isaac Kunen blog’s about the first spatial whitepaper Microsoft has released.
Introduction to Spatial Coordinate Systems: Flat Maps for a Round Planet
Says Isaac: “This paper is a bit of an odd duck: it isn’t SQL Server, or even Microsoft specific in any way. It’s just a little introduction to the use of spatial data.” [...]

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I was wondering just this week the purpose of ESRI’s EDN site now that they’ve got the Resource Centers online. The ArcObjects Development Blog has some of the thinking behind why EDN is just a placeholder now:
Feedback from the user community, as well as our own technology development goals indicate that developers need information [...]

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Jason Harris of ROK Technologies describes how easy it is to work with the new ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript API.
I thought it was time to put my money where my mouth has been these past couple of months. I have been yapping about how easy the new ArcGIS javascript api is to work with, so I [...]

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The Monsoon really came into Tempe yesterday afternoon and ended up flooding my backyard, the pool overflowed and all that was between the rushing water and my kitchen was me and a push broom (I was able to triumph over the water). I hope we’ll start drying out as the whole yard is a [...]

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For those who haven’t had a chance to register for GeoWeb 2008, the time to do so is right now. I’ll be there pretty much all week and on a Spark Panel Session titled “National Critical Infrastructure Data Models: Implications for Local Government and Utilities“. If that title doesn’t get your juices flowing, [...]

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One of the more interesting features ESRI has rolled out lately is the ability to connect to geodatabases that aren’t the same release. Now ArcGIS 9.2 SP5 or SP6 clients can make connections to ArcSDE 9.3 geodatabases and for ArcGIS 9.3 clients can make direct connections to any ArcSDE 9.x geodatabase.
Direct connections to ArcSDE [...]

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