sdteffen's blog

GHydraulics 2.0.4: Write EPANET Junctions from QGIS

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:24:00 +0000

GHydraulics 2.0.4 is available. This version allows to create simple EPANET models consisting only of junctions from Quantum GIS (QGIS). Advanced users may also update junction data in existing EPANET INP files. If you're interested, here's a little walkthrough to get you started:

Start QGIS
Install or upgrade to GHydraulics 2.0.4 (detailed installation instructions).
Add a junction layer with at least the following fields: 'DC_ID', 'ELEVATION', 'DEMAND' and 'PATTERN'. If you don't want to create this data yourself, you can use the DC Water Design Extension sample data.
Open the GHydraulics Settings: Select Plugins->GHydraulics->Settings from the menu.
Drag and drop Your Junctions layer from "Unused" to top "Junctions" item.
Write your EPANET INP file using Plugins->GHydraulic->Write EPANET INP file from the menu.
Open your INP file in EPANET.

Of course, GHydraulics will not stop here, future versions will support more EPANET network elements. But the current version should allow a first impression, how the finished product will "feel" like. Your feedback and ideas are most welcome.
The blog post "GHydraulics: Integrating QGIS and EPANET" provides some background information.

Capture the flag: Syrian map editing war

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:29:00 +0000

A couple of days ago a discussion about Arab League observers possibly being mislead in Syria brought the importance of maps back to my mind (Al Jazeera: "Activists accuse Syria of misleading monitors"). How could this happen in the days of GPS-equipped smart phones? Well, GPS use is prohibited in Syria, I'm not sure if the Arabic League observer mission is equipped with such devices.
And even if you're able to obtain correct location information, you'll need reliable base maps to go along with it. Some of those very base maps (notably Google Maps and OpenStreetMap) are currently subject to edit wars: The Ogle Earth post titled "Google conspiring for regime change in Syria through maps? Hardly." explains what's happening.
So these crowd-sourced maps are possibly tainted. How about historic base maps? Aren't they more reliable? Eventually, but chances are high that they're not digitized so they're harder to handle and Syria's population and settlements are growing fast, quickly outdating those paper maps.
Having secured your correct location along with correct base maps, you may need the right glue to stick them together: Map projections: Formulas that allow to transfer map coordinates (the x and y) from one coordinate system (the GPS location) into the the other (the base map). In Syria many historic base maps use "secret" projection parameters. Rumor has it that Syrian and Jordanian forces have been shelling each other during one of the wars with Israel because they both used secret maps that didn't fit together.
To quote Ernest Hemingway: "In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates."

Bonaire Turtle Tracking

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:49:00 +0000

When you go diving, seeing a turtle is a great experience. It's marvelous how elegant this endangered species moves under water. If you don't have the chance to go turtle diving, you can still follow the movements of a turtle in the Caribbean Sea around the island of Bonaire. The Google LatLong blog has all the details.

GTK DBF Editor 1.0.4 released for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 20:41:00 +0000

A new version of GTK DBF Editor is available from sdteffen.de/gtkdbfeditor. Version 1.04 supports a number of different codepages (like WINDOWS-1251) and is the first version that is fully translated to German. If you would like to translate the software in another language, please contact me. The Windows and Mac OS X installers have been improved.

Dia 0.97.2 for Mac OS X

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:48:00 +0000

A fresh build of Dia 0.97.2 for Mac OS X is available from dia-installer.de/download/macosx.html. Besides the changes described in the last blog post, Mac OS X users might notice that the localization (translations) are working now: Dia will use the language you've selected on your Mac.
A prior version of the package (Dia-0.97.2-1.dmg) was available since christmas. In case you're using this one already, there's no need to upgrade. In case you weren't able to run Dia from that DMG, please try the new Dia-0.97.2-2.dmg, it fixes some library loading problems.

Dia 0.97.2 available for Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:03:00 +0000

This bugfix and maintenance release is late by about 11 month, but just in time for Christmas. It's loaded with many translation updates, 28 bug fixes and one new feature: More colors for SADT.
You can get your copy of Dia 0.97.2 and additional information from dia-installer.de.
Thanks to Hans and all the others that have contributed!

If you like this version of Dia in particular, I've updated the dia-installer.de Donations page with an Amazon search form. Now you just have to shop at Amazon using this search form in order to support dia-installer.de. I've also added some products that I was able to buy from previous donations.

Back in January I talked about a million Dia downloads in 2010. The figures for 2011 look even better (see below, note that the December data is only partial). If you help spreading the word about the new release, we might pass the 1,5 million download mark in 2011!

P.S.: Mac OS X users: The DMG is under preparation...

Dia and libvisio: progress with VSD files

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:17:00 +0000

Support for files in Visio's *.VSD format in Dia has been requested many times (Visio's *.VDX is supported for a while already, but it's not Visio's default format). But until now this simply was not possible. That's why I was really exicted when I learned about libvisio, an open source software library that allows to read VSD files. It was time to get a Visio license - thanks to the dia-installer.de donors that helped to make that possible! (You can also donate). The screenshot above is a first shot showing a Visio drawing that was converted to SVG using libvisio and imported into a Dia diagram. As you can see, it does not look too bad. For some reason the texts are displaced. Before you get too excited:

The SVG is inserted as an image object, Dia's SVG import will not give such a nice result.
libvisio provides the vsd2xhtml tool which I've used, to generate the SVG, a little bit of manual editing was required.
Visio supports several drawings combined in one file. Dia supports layers, but that's a slightly different concept.

Of course the vision is to integrate libvisio into Dia so that *.VSD files can simply be imported. But before we reach that stage, I would like to create a simple standalone conversion tool that creates SVG files that don't need any editing in order to be imported to Dia. Other programs with SVG support such as Inkscape would also benefit from such a tool.

Dia on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:21:00 +0000

An updated DMG from dia-installer.de/download/macosx.html allows to run Dia on Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion". It looks like Lion automatically installs X11 which further simplifies the Dia installation compared to Snow Leopard. Happy diagramming, Lions!

Google+ + Dia

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:06:00 +0000

Feedback from social networks is a marvelous motivation source. Your likes and +1's do matter. However, not all networks take off for all communities. For example, Dia and Twitter don't seem to get together and the number of twitter.com/#!/diagramr followers only grows slowly. That's the reason why I made Twitter less prominent on dia-installer.de - before it had Twitter buttons everywhere.
Enter Google+. From the Dia community point of view, will it be more like Twitter or more like Facebook? - On Facebook you'll see the fastest growing Dia community that I know of. I was sceptic first but nevertheless added a +1 button back in June (you have to give it a try). Looking at the figures now, it's doing quite well: 77 English "likes" in this period (I'm ignoring other languages here) and 23 times "+1". Given the fact that +1 is young compared to Facebook, that looks promising!
But social networks should provide more that these buttons: Stories that provide you with the latest updates. On Facebook, there's www.facebook.com/diagramr and now I've created plus.google.com/u/0/b/116474997424195525016 for the same purpose. In case you know how to beautify that URL, please let me know. I'm a +1 rookie.
I don't want to start a "ultimate social network" flamewar here. Just go to your favourite social Dia community and read about the latest download figures.

GHydraulics: Integrating QGIS and EPANET

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:57:00 +0000

Since long I wanted to create a Quantum GIS plugin that integrates EPANET like the DC Water Design Extension does this with ArcView 3.*. But I never found the time. Now I've actually started. It'll take some time until the whole thing becomes useful. I've decided to use the existing GHydraulic plugin as the base, but renamed it to GHydraulics. My development version has a setup dialog that offers all vector layers from the current QGIS project. By default all these layers are added under "Unused" - to configure your model, you'll have to drag'n'drop them to the respective EPANET model elements (junctions, pipes, reservoirs, tanks, valves). As you can see in the screenshot below, you can have more than one layer per model element. I always felt that the fixed one-to-one relationship between layer and EPANET models was a serious limit in the DC Water Design Extensions. GHydraulics should be more flexible.

Looks interesting to you? Keep an eye on epanet.de/ghydraulics (like +1) - and no, the development version cannot be downloaded (yet) from there or the QGIS Python repository. If you are a developer, the sources are available in a git repository: http://ghydraulic.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=ghydraulic/ghydraulic;a=summary

Inptools 1.0.0 supports Windows 7 64bit

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:20:00 +0000

Often it's no problem to switch from 32 to 64 bit. In most cases the 64bit operating system is able to run 32bit applications. But in some cases it doesn't work like this. The Inptools Windows Explorer integration was such a case. It didn't work on Windows 7 64bit. After a complete rewrite, an updated and extended Inptools 1.0.0 package is now available, supporting 32 and 64 bit. Grab your copy from epanet.de/inptools The package now also contains the latest EPANET version along with the EPANET documentation. Note that this version requires Windows 7 or better. Is there anything missing to make this your favorite EPANET installation package?

Bugfixed EPANET for Mac OS X

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:40:00 +0000

An updated EPANET App for Mac OS X is available from epanet.de. The previous package had a problem with the temp file location that prevented you from running the simulation.

Georeferencing images with QGIS

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:32:00 +0000

Looking for things to flattr (it's the end of the month), I ran across "Image referencing with QGIS". Nice step-by-step instructions.

Linus' lessons learned

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:44:00 +0000

HP's Input | Output has interviewed Linus Torvalds on "software development management" (focus is of course on open source projects). According to the statistics, most of the readers of my blog don't use Linux. Still I recommend this article to all of you that are involved in software development.

Visual Basic example: Using the EPANET Toolkit DLL

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:29:00 +0000

A Visual Basic 2010 sample project is available from http://epanet.de/developer/index.html.en The sample illustrates how to use the EPANET Toolkit DLL from Visual Basic. You can use the free Visual Basic Express edition to compile.

GIS + Git = GeoGit

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:03:00 +0000

James Fee brought GeoGit to my attention. Looks like an interesting approach to me.

I18n for webmasters

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 06:59:00 +0000

Internationalization (short i18n) of software or websites is always a tricky thing. On Google's Webmaster Central Blog you'll find some i18n recommendations for webmasters.

Learning UNIX (and who's behind Midnight Commander)

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:05:00 +0000

In his blog, Miguel de Icaza recommends some books to Mac and UNIX developers. Readers also learn that he originally created the Midnight Commander file manager (before he became famous with GNOME and Mono).

Adjusting EPANET's relative viscosity parameter according to temperature

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:49:00 +0000

Having to adjust EPANET's relative viscosity parameter according to the water temperature often confuses EPANET beginners. Template projects available from epanet.de/support/temperature.html along with the matching relative viscosity values should help. Is this simple enough?

GTK DBF Editor 0.4.0 DEB package for Debian Squeeze

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 07:40:00 +0000

A 32-bit DEB installation package of GTK DBF Editor 0.4.0 is now available from http://sdteffen.de/gtkdbfeditor

Second 64-bit EPANET Toolkit DLL

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:54:00 +0000

A second 64-bit Windows DLL of the EPANET Toolkit is available from epanet.de/developer/64bit.html. This version was compiled using Visual C++.
Your feedback is appreciated.

EPANET Help Installer for Windows 7 and Vista

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:55:00 +0000

I had to realize that there's some security magic applied to downloaded CHM files, effectively rendering them unusable. So here's the second attempt: An installer that "installs" the EPANET 2.00.12 Help and Tutorial files in CHM format. Once installed, they'll be available from your Start Menu.
The installer is available from epanet.de/documentation
In case you encounter problems, please get back to me! I'm pretty sure that some people had problems with the zip file but didn't complain.
For those interested in the details: Downloading the zip and unzipping through Explorer would give you a "broken" CHM - due to the security magic. Downloaded and unzipping with 7-Zip would provide you with a working CHM.
The NSIS installer source is available from the Git repository.
Sunday's post on the CHMs

EPANET Help and Tutorial converted from HLP to CHM format

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 07:32:00 +0000

Users running EPANET on Windows Vista or Windows 7 suffer from the fact that they cannot view help and tutorial files because they are distributed in the outdated HLP format. Luckily, these files can be converted to the newer CHM format that works on recent Windows versions.
The converted files can be downloaded from epanet.de/documentation.
The conversion process required some manual editing - please let me know if you spot a problem.
If you're interested in the conversion process, have a look at the excellent Converting WinHelp (HLP) to HTMLHelp (CHM) tutorial on help-info.de.
If you're interested in the CHM sources, they're available in a Git repository.

EPANET on Mac OS X

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 18:05:00 +0000

EPANET 2.00.12 available for the Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard": I've packaged the windows version - including the graphical user interface using Wineskin. Grab your copy from http://epanet.de/ You'll have to install X11 with is availabe as an optional install on your installation DVD.

Dia organization chart plugin available

noreply@blogger.com (Steffen Macke) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 19:01:00 +0000

A simple Python plugin to generate organization charts from CSV files is available now for Dia.