James Fee GIS Blog

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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libLAS has moved forward and has been released as 1.0.0b1 in the hopes of attracting more testers. For those who haven’t been following, “libLAS is a BSD library for reading and writing ASPRS LAS version 1.0 and 1.1 data. LAS-formatted data is heavily used in LiDAR processing operations, and the LAS format is a [...]

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The Friday before a holiday weekend is always nice. Traffic is light as folks cheat on leaving early for vacation, the office is excited about heading to the mountains for camping/boating/fishing and knowing you have an extra day for the weekend to get things done (or just sit in front of the TV) and [...]

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Dave Bouwman has some thoughts on using PostgreSQL as a RDBMS for ArcSDE (or ArcGIS Server Enterprise as we should be calling it).
Thus far I’ve simply come to realize that I have a lot to learn. I need to grok a lot more about Postgresql and PostGIS to start, and then add ArcSDE into the [...]

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I don’t like the term “ESRI Shop”. Both open source developers and ESRI developers use it as an excuse one way or another. Just because you are running ArcMap or ArcGIS Server, doesn’t mean that you can’t explore open source GIS software and in fact you might be surprised how it makes your [...]

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OK here is the other part of the ArcGIS Server 9.3 release that most of us will be interested in; the Javascript API. Jeremy Bartley and Jayant Sai talk a little about the Javascript API in their podcast. Much like the RESTful API Podcast, there isn’t much meat here, but at least you [...]

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I’m sure this is just a coincidence, but ESRI actually posted a discussion of the REST API for ArcGIS Server. In addition they hit on the three Javascript APIs that they will also release with the REST API; ESRI Javascript API using Dojo, Extender Javascript Library for Google Maps and Extender Javascript Library for [...]

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So how the heck are you guys doing it? Google Maps and Virtual Earth have so much distortion up there (or down there as the case may be) that mapping is very difficult. Plus what happens when they navigate off the edge of the map? Anyway the closest thing I’ve found [...]

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via thevacationeers

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I spent most of the afternoon talking with folks about web mapping systems and how to choose a direction to go. What is painfully obvious when you start laying out the different frameworks, APIs and servers is that there is just no clear answer as to what system to pick. When it comes [...]

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On Friday the Google Summer of Code Blog posted very interesting news about touchEarth created by Pawel Solyga.
touchEarth, an application he developed that allows you to control Google Earth using two finger gestures on multi-touch table. touchEarth uses the Google Earth COM API to control some of Google Earth’s features, while all the multi-touch [...]

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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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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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There has been some discussion on my blog about the ArcGIS Online Data Appliance. Most ESRI users already know what is on the thing because they have had access to the ArcGIS Online Beta.
The ArcGIS Appliance provides terabytes of pre-rendered U.S. nationwide and worldwide data that you can host on your own secure server. [...]

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Looks like the Google Van was driving around the Valley of the Sun taking pictures because Phoenix/Tempe now has Google Street View images.

Google took plenty of pictures of my sons pre-school which somewhat freaked my wife out, but they didn’t make it into our neighborhood. We’ll see how the Phoenix press reacts to the [...]

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The Free Geography Tools blog has been posting about saving out Google Earth imagery and georectifying them in your GIS applications. When pressed on the post by a couple users and bloggers (here, here), he’s posted up a clarification of “Fair Use”.
I still don’t believe one can use Google Earth imagery the way he [...]

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Great news yesterday out of the GIS in the Rockies Conference. I was planning on going to the conference this year, but just got so busy I could tear myself away from work. Remember what Jack says about being successful at GIS:
“Now is the time to be the last one out of the [...]

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The news broke this week that Google has updated the Google Earth EULA to allow “internal use” for commercial users. Now what does this mean? I’m thinking that you can now use Google Earth at work for for personal and work related use as long as you aren’t reselling that work. For [...]

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I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the new features that Brian has been working on for Arc2Earth. The KML region stuff is simply amazing (check out some of the demos on his blog).
It’s best you go over to his blog and check out all the great information he’s posted on [...]

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The day I can spend an hour fighting Google Maps to get a route that covers all lower 48 states is the day I’m finally a Google Maps convert. Typing in city name is for wimps. Dragging that blue line all over the country, now that is GIS baby!

Sure it isn’t efficient, but [...]

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