Moved to Octopress

If you’re seeing this page, chances are you have followed a link to http://geobabble.wordpress.com. If so, you should update your bookmarks to http://blog.geomusings.com. I have recently moved my blog over to Octopress and no longer be actively maintaining this blog at wordpress.com.

This site will remain online as there are many older links that point back to this URL, but no new content will be posted here. All of the existing content on this site has been migrated to the new location so I strongly encourage you to update any links that may still be pointing to “geobabble.wordpress.com”. If you experience any problems with linking to the new site, please contact me using the information on my “About” page and I’ll try to help resolve the issue.

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geoMusings: Station Identification

This is the personal blog of Bill Dollins, titled “geoMusings,” and has been in operation in its current incarnation since December 2006. Earlier incarnations of this blog no longer exist and no backups were made.

This blog is primarily centered on topics related to geospatial technologies, geographic information systems, databases, and programming but I reserve the right to post about any topic area which I see fit. As a programmer, consultant, and small business owner, I may produce posts that are technical in nature, including code samples in various programming languages but I may also post on issues related to business and policy as well.

Over time, the content of this blog may track with projects on which I am working but may just as easily reflect my personal explorations with various technologies. Ultimately, this blog will serve as a snapshot of my current interests at any point in time. The content of this blog does not reflect the views of my employer or any other entity with which I may be associated.

I first observed the practice of station identification on Sean Gillies’ blog who, in turn, credits John Scalzi. Rather than performing station identification on the first of the year, I have opted to do so on the anniversary of the blog.

Thank you for your continued readership, commentary, and support.

Put Planet Geospatial to Work for You

I’m happy to see that James has decided keep Planet Geospatial going. It’s been one of the more consistently valuable resources in the community since its inception and it’s good that it will continue.

While I’m looking forward to seeing how James evolves Planet Geospatial, there are ways to more efficiently extract value out of its current state right now. At its core, Planet Geospatial is an RSS feed. RSS can safely be called “venerable” nowadays, but it still does what it does very well.

Two of my favorite tools for culling down the firehose that is Planet Geospatial are IFTTT (the title of this post is a riff on the IFTTT motto) and Evernote. If you’re not familiar with IFTTT, you should be. It reminds me of a more-intuitive Yahoo Pipes and it allows you to mix channels, triggers, and actions to automate processes of your choosing. It’s become by preferred method of synchronizing my blog with social media and for filtering data sources. It also drives the Unofficial QGIS Info Twitter account.

SpatiaLite for Android Available

On what seems to be turning into SpatiaLite Monday, Sandro Furieri also announced on the SpatiaLite Google Group the availability of a stable version of SpatiaLite for Android.

I am happy to see that this version was developed and contributed back by the US Army Geospatial Center. The fact that they contributed back to the project under a standard open-source license is a nice step from a DoD organization.

The message is quoted below:

Hi List,

I’m really proud to announce you all that finally a rock solid stable and really easy-to-be-deployed binary porting of SpatiaLite for the Android platform is now available for download [1].

[1] https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/wiki?name=splite-android

Many thanks to the U.S. Army Geospatial Center [2] who very generously contributed this highly appreciated and really useful resource under a genuine free software license (LGPLv3).

[2] http://www.agc.army.mil/

A detailed tutorial [3] explaining how-to deploy and use SpatiaLite on Android platforms has been kindly contributed by Andrea Antonello, who spent many long hours during the last week while performing a thorough testing of SpatiaLite-Android, then deciding to publicly share his experiences with the SpatiaLite community. Feel absolutely free to pay a beer to Andrea; he’ll surely appreciate

[3] https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/wiki?name=spatialite-android-tutorial

enjoy, Sandro

SpatiaLite 4.0 Released

It looks like it was a busy weekend for Sandro Furieri and the rest of the SpatiaLite team as version 4.0 was announced on Sunday. There are a number of changes, so it’s best to catch up on them before switching over.

Not this SpatiaLite

I have a couple of Federal customers that are integrating SpatiaLite into their workflows so I’ll need to take a day or so to assess impacts any impacts there. Looks like the perfect way to slide back into work after a long weekend.

The Biggest News You May Have Missed…

In case you missed it, this tweet floated across the Twitters last week:

Blogged: TileMill Connect – Open Mxd Documents in @mapbox TileMill bit.ly/WbBOKW—
  (@Arc2Earth) November 15, 2012

Yes, the team at Arc2Earth is apparently working on a new feature in Arc2Earth Sync, called TileMill Connect, that will link ArcMap MXDs with TileMill. This will allow users to migrate their ArcMap cartography into TileMill to take advantage of the rich tools there as well as the potential for version control and cut/paste sharing of techniques and best practices enabled by CartoCSS.

Brian Flood followed that up today with a short video showing it in action.

quick TileMill Connect demo video showing how it works. #mapbox #arcgis #tilemill #arc2earth bit.ly/QTWqpH—
  (@Arc2Earth) November 19, 2012

No word on a timetable for this feature, but I can’t wait to kick the tires. I am especially intrigued by the pseudo PostGIS proxy service that enables connections to ArcGIS data sources.

A GIS Day Map for World Diabetes Day

Today is World Diabetes Day. It also happens to be GIS Day so I thought a map (not mine) of new diagnoses would be in order:

Source: International Diabetes Federation Diabetes Atlas, Fifth Edition (Click image to visit)

To learn more about Type 1 Diabetes, please visit the JDRF.