Zerg's rumble

Windows 7 less known commands

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:47:00 +0000

I am using Windows 7 for about 3 or 4 months now and I finally got some time to go over Tips and Tricks sites and explore a bit. Majority of the tips I have found were not new, especially if you were using Vista.

Anyway here are some keyboard shortcuts I did find very useful.

Start + Shift + Left Arrow and Start + Shift + Right Arrow toggle between monitors
Start + Home - minimizes all inactive windows. Repeat to restore them.
Start + 1, Start + 2... - Launch 1st icon on Taskbar. This works for first 5 icons
Start + T to activate icons on your Taksbar

These are just some of the shortcuts. It is easy to find out other ones.

Windows 7 has some brand new tools. One of the really interesting tools is the PSR.EXE or Problem Steps Recorder. This is very valuable tool if you are involved in any kind of technical/IT/application support. How often do you ask a customer "What did you do exactly to get this error?" and get an answer like "Just clicked the OK button." And we know they did more than that. PSR records all actions including menu options. Upon finishing recording of actions a ZIP file is created and it can be easily e-mailed. The zip file contains a web page with screenshots . Here is an example page I recorded earlier. Note that it captures both screens.

Of course your clients have to run Windows 7 first because it does not runs on Vista (I have tried)...

There are other commands I have found and description what they do:

forfiles.exe
getmac.exe
isoburn.exe
tasklist.exe
taskkill.exe
typeperf.exe

FORFILES.EXE

FORFILES [/P pathname] [/M searchmask] [/S] [/C command] [/D [+ | -] {dd/MM/yyyy | dd}]

Selects a file (or set of files) and executes a command on that file. This is helpful for batch jobs. Full description is available on command prompt by using forfiles.exe /? and here is one of the examples

FORFILES /M *.txt /C "cmd /c if @isdir==FALSE notepad.exe @file"

The command above will search for *.txt files in current directory and open them in notepad. @file variable is available in forfiles utility. If you like writing batch files you will like this one.

GETMAC.EXE

Very simple command to display mac address of network adapters. It may be an alternative to using ipconfig command.

C:\Windows\System32>getmac
Physical Address    Transport Name
=================== ==========================================================
00-16-D4-9B-B2-31   \Device\Tcpip_{750873C4-D970-4336-BA43-5010390F969E}
00-14-A5-F4-B5-48   Media disconnected

ISOBURN.EXE

Finally Windows have a tool to burn an ISO image to a disk. It simply needs drive letter and path to ISO image file.

QUSER.EXE

Show information about users logged on the system. Example:

C:\>QUSER
USERNAME SESSIONNAME ID STATE IDLE TIME LOGON TIME
>john console 1 Active none 12/11/2009 7:33 p.m.

If you want to see processes and/or to kill a process on command prompt then TASKLIST and TASKKILL are the tools for you. Names should be explanatory - list current processes/tasks and second one to kill it.

TYPEPERF.EXE

I like this tool. Instead using Task Manager now you can show chosen performance counters on command prompt, file or SQL database. There are several options you can specify and here are some samples:

typeperf "\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time"
typeperf -cf counters.txt -si 5 -sc 50 -f TSV -o domain2.tsv
typeperf -qx PhysicalDisk -o counters.txt

That is all for now but if I find something else interesting I'll let you know.

NZ ESRI Conference dinner

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:55:00 +0000

Last night was the conference dinner and it was a great one. The dinner was at Michael Fowler Centre which was a change from the usual place – Duxton. Firstly, we had some finger food and few drinks while everybody was gathering.

Then the dinner started. I was very impressed with the organization. The first course was already set up and servings were on the smaller side but very good. When collecting empty plates or bringing new food a group of waiters (number equal to number of people at the table) stands and waits for a signal from a head waiter to deliver food. Very nicely coordinated and impressive.

Here are some of the large numbers of photos taken during the dinner…

There is more to come later on.

NZ ESRI Conference – day 2

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:21:00 +0000

The second day of NZ ESRI User Conference is over. It was a busy day with lots of activities from us (Eagle Technology) to make sure everything is set up and working.

As usual we have a stand with number of PC running demos of various technologies including ArcGIS 9.4 beta, ENVI, Dekho and Apos.

Another quite popular feature is “Doctor’s office” where uses come to quickly resolve technical issues. Here is how it looks at quiet times.

Below is the main doctor’s office, set up for different versions of Desktop and Server products.

Every year there is a “Benefits from GIS” poster exhibition and this year entrants are show below. These pictures may not showing complete poster or the fine details but just as an illustration of submissions.

Once the winning poster is chosen I’ll post better pictures and judges description of main points.

The highlight of the conference is an opportunity to meet people and catch up from last conference over a cup of coffee (and later in the evening a glass of beer or wine).

Next post is coming up tomorrow, hopefully with more photos.

Getting ready for the conference

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:07:00 +0000

In five days 14th New Zealand ESRI User Conference will take place. Conference will be in Wellington in Town Hall. Conference dates are 2nd -5th of November. To find more about the conference visit GIS User site and NZ ESRI User Conference pages.

Above is the theme logo for this conference. Related to that is a big conference dinner. Most of the attendees do make an effort and dress up according to theme and it is always great experience. Have a look at some photos from the last year's dinner here.

On more serious note, we will have great speakers including Hon Maurice William Minister for Land Information, Building and Construction, Customs, Statistics and Small Business, Lawrie Jordan ESRI Director of Imagery Enterprise Solutions, Colin MacDonald LINZ Chief Executive and others.

Agenda is available on-line and we are hoping everybody will find something of interest among the four streams and number of presentations and workshops.

Personally, I will present a half day workshop on ArcGIS Explorer 900. More details are listed here but I will write another post(s) after the conference.

ArcGIS 9.3 and 9.3.1 supported on Windows 7

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:07:00 +0000

Today ESRI support site has published news that ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Engine, ArcReader and ArcInfo Workstation are supported on Windows 7. This applies to version 9.3 and 9.3.1 of listed products.

Server side products are expected to be certified at version 9.4 due to current issues with IE 8.

Fermi technology unveiled

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:02:00 +0000

nVidia has revealed details of it's new CUDA platform - Fermi. Development of Fermi was greatly influenced by feedback from development of G80 and GT200 chipsets. Main areas of focus for development of Fermi were:

Improve Double Precision Performance—while single precision floating point performance was on the order of ten times the performance of desktop CPUs, some GPU computing applications desired more double precision performance as well.
ECC support—ECC allows GPU computing users to safely deploy large numbers of GPUs in datacenter installations, and also ensure data-sensitive applications like medical imaging and financial options pricing are protected from memory errors.
True Cache Hierarchy—some parallel algorithms were unable to use the GPU’s shared memory, and users requested a true cache architecture to aid them.
More Shared Memory—many CUDA programmers requested more than 16 KB of SM shared memory to speed up their applications.
Faster Context Switching—users requested faster context switches between application programs and faster graphics and compute interoperation.
Faster Atomic Operations—users requested faster read-modify-write atomic operations for their parallel algorithms.

With these goal in mind nVidia developed Fermi as significant improvement of predecessor. The table below illustrates these differences.

GPU	G80	GT200	Fermi
Transistors	681 Million	1.4 Billion	3 Billion
CUDA cores	None	240	512
Double precision floating point capability	None	30 FMA ops/clock	256 FMA ops/clock
Single Precision Floating Point Capability	128 MAD ops/clock	240 MAD ops/clock	512 FMA ops/clock
Warp schedulers (per SM)	1	1	2
Special Function Units (SFUs) / SM	2	2	4
Shared Memory (per SM)	16 Kb	16 Kb	Config 48KB or 16KB
L1 Cache (per SM)	None	None	Config 48 KB or 16 KB
L2 Cache (per SM)	None	None	768 KB
ECC Memory Support	No	No	Yes
Concurrent Kernels	No	No	Up to 16
Load/Store Address Width	32 bit	32 bit	64 bit

In simpler words some of the features of Fermi GPU include 384 bit memory interface supporting up to a 6 GB of GDDR5 DRAM memory. Double precision calculation performance is about 4x faster, fluid collision calculation in PhysX for convex shapes is 2.7x faster, application context switching is 10x faster.

More details on Fermi can be found in Fermi white paper.

To make things easier for developers nVidia is working on Nexus – integration of CUDA C, OpenCL and DirectCompute into Visual Studio. It is expected to be released very soon – this month. In the mean time here is a video of functionality that it will provide.

New ArcGIS Server Web Mapping application white paper

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:15:00 +0000

In July ESRI has released a new white paper for ArcGIS Server from it's "ArcGIS Server in Practice" series. This one discusses setup and performance of web application for a medium size local government/municipal site. By medium size they consider about 300,00 population and about 200km2.

Application is fairly simple with common tasks like geocoding an address, finding parcels, basic selections and identify of features.

Document also discusses required dataset for this use case and how to structure the map document used for map service and other required map services. Each of map services is described in detail with reasons for choosing selected options (e.g. why PNG8 was choosen over PNG32).

Really nice thing to see is the geoprocessing model used for selecting surrounding parcels.

Appendix D has all details about the model including the Python code if it would be exported.

An alternative to this approach is use of geometry service and it is also discussed in this white paper. It is also documented in Appendix E.

In short, this is a worthwhile reading if you want to implement similar web application. It covers all aspects of the process - requirements, design, data, processes, development and testing.

The document can be downloaded from ESRI site here.

New topographic map series for New Zealand

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:27:00 +0000

Yesterday LINZ has released a new map series of topographic maps for 1:50,000. It is also known as Topo50. Significance of this release is in fact that it is based on New Zealand Transverse Mercator projection and NZGD2000 – new datum for New Zealand.

Details, samples and other information is available on new web site Topo50 Map.

Main reason for change of map series is summarized in FAQ section:

The change was required as a result of Land Information New Zealand releasing a new national datum New Zealand Geodetic Datum 2000 (NZGD2000) to replace the New Zealand Geodetic Datum 1949 (NZGD1949).

The NZGD1949 datum was a ‘local’ datum that was no longer accurate enough and was limited by the survey technology available at the time. The accuracy has also degraded significantly due to the natural process of earth deformation.

The NZGD2000 datum is an ‘international’ datum and for all practical purposes is the same as that use by GPS.

As a result of this datum change coordinates on map series have moved by 190m in north/sourh and 10m east/west direction.

On Downloads page there is a PDF with fact sheet (only 114 KB) with details of NZTM2000 (New Zealand Transverse Mercator 2000) and how to use new maps with GPS.

Projection	Transverse Mercator
Origin Latitude	0.0 degrees South
Origin Longitude	173.0 degrees East
False Northing	10,000,00 m North
False Easting	1,600,000 m East
Central Meridian scale factor	0.9996

If you are outside of New Zealand and you are using NZ maps make sure you get new ones.

ArcGIS Explorer 900 and ArcGIS Server issue resolved

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:26:00 +0000

In unlikely case of running a whole range of ESRI software (unless you are developer, tester or support staff) on single PC you may have had a problem with AGX and AGS. Not everybody got this problem even if they are running both applications. If ArcGIS Explorer was installed first and ArcGIS Server later, there is not issue. Anyway, ESRI has addressed this problem with a patch released few days ago.

The patch is available for download from here.

ArcGIS 9.3.1. SP 1 expected in December

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:52:00 +0000

ESRI has announced that service pack 1 for current release 9.3.1 is expected in December. As before it is very likely that list of included fixes will grow larger.
Current number of fixes included:

Desktop: 85
Server: 25
Rest API: 3
Image Server: 36
ArcSDE: 31
ArcIMS: 3

Here are some of the more interesting bugs fixed in SP 1 (my choice, not a complete list).

ArcGIS Desktop

N1M012474 - Add network flag with projection returns “Action could not be completed because the underlying feature is corrupt.”
NIMO31 151 - Edits made in the Free Representation Editor do not draw correctly in the Data View when using Symbol Levels.
N1M036336 - EPS, PDF, and Al exports do not clip data intersected by data frame when using cartographic representations, but do when using standard symbology.
N1M038782 - Custom menus are lost from MXDs and MXTs when placed on ESRI toolbars in certain situations.
N1M039061 - Multiple UlButtonControls added to the thisdocument.mxd disappear after closing and reopening ArcMap.
N1M039086 - Customizations of standard toolbars in previous version’s MXD are not kept, when the MXD is saved in new version
N1M040317 - If one feature class in the ArcMap document is empty and contains no features, and labels are converted to annotation, all annotation feature classes are empty.
N1M040502 - Load Locations process time is significantly slower with a lower search tolerence through both the Network Analyst window and the Add Locations GP tool.
N1M040510 - The eastern and southern sections of an output image are stripped after projecting a raster using a different datum.
N1M041054 - Single Output Map Algebra Color Map functions fail after successive runs.
NIMO41 537 - In ArcCatalog, the Project Raster tool cuts a portion of the west side of the output raster and adds an equal amount of Nodata in the eastern side.
N1M041746 - Attempts to Extract a Distributed Geodatbase crashes ArcMap.
N1M042209 - Cannot compress two file geodatabases at the same time.
N1M042285 - Representations are covering donut holes in polygon feature class after upgrading from ArcGIS 9.3 to Service Pack 1.
N1MO42552 - Annotating selected features in ArcMap performs slowly when other layers in the map document have a feature weight of something other than NONE.
N1M042905 - Buffers created on a multi-feature shapefile or feature class will result in different sized buffers when specifying Dissolve Type as All compared to Dissolve Type as NONE.
N1M043043 - Importing the XML to SDE using distributed geodatabase tool ‘Import Message’ fails and returns the following error message: “Import Changes failed The geometry has null Z values. Field is not editable,”
N1M043076 - The create replica wizard is ignoring the definition query when going through advanced.
N1M043109 - Improve visual feedback of selectable state for markers when using the Direct Select tool.
N1M043127 - When shift-click operation is undertaken, Direct Select tool is not removing indicated vertices from a selected set.
N1MO4357O - Exporting xml from Parent geodatabase crashes ArcMap if a relationship class has the same name as a feature dass.
N1MO43927 - Importing an exception with a NULL origin globalid from a delta XML file is fataling the application.
N1M044000 - ‘INTERSECT’, ‘UNION’ and ‘IDENTITY’ operations fail with the same error message “000520”, when the input feature class consists of Polygon M.
NlM044506 - For some data models, comparing replica schema using the geodatabases directly can cause ArcCatalog to crash.
N1M045128 - Representation rule domain values are not being persisted properly at the GDB level.
NIM045189 - Viewing a Database server connection with a 9.3.1 client, where the Database server contains geodatabases with a release greater then 9.3 (a geodatabase release higher then 2.3.0), will not display the new geodatabases.
N1M045263 - Following upgrade of ArcGIS Desktop to 9.3.1, the Append, Delete Rows, and Delete Features tools no longer will operate with versioned datasets.
NlM045489 - ArcMap crashes when saving a MXD that references an inserted graphic whose folder path cannot be found. Will also crash when accessing the properties of an missing inserted image. This would not crash previous versions.
N1M046171 - Cannot export topology exception changes if the owner of the replica is not the owner of the topology.
NIM046267 - Importing an XML Map Document with a NULL representation crashes ArcCatalog.
N1M046710 - Repair feedback of Select tool in Free Representation editor.
N1M04671 1 - Repair feedback of Direct Select tool in Free Representation editor.
NIM046712 - When separating symbol layers for a free rep which is composed of multiple symbol layers, the Direct Select tool is selecting the bottom layer first instead of the expected top layer.
N1M046747 - GDI leak for display of representation marker symbols.
N1M046748 - Application failure for the # of markers property on the Decorations marker placement style when specifying a negative value.
N1M046749 - Application failure for the X step and/or V step properties on the Randomly Inside Polygon marker placement style when specifying a negative value.
N1MO46818 - Angle property for Gradient Fill symbols are being ignored when converting a 9.x symbol into a representation symbol.
N1M046819 - Buffer effect on point input geomtery needs to handle negative values for the Size property as absolute values.
N1M046820 - Attribute inspector shows separate reps tab for each layer in the TOC even when each layer sources the same feature class.
N1M046821 - Improve refresh of representation markers when using Direct Select tool to move.
N1M046822 - Hatch pattern not displaying correctly for polygons.
N1M047046 - The Overflow Annotation window may crash in some cases when there are no overflow labels left in the list.
N1M047049 - ArcMap may crash in certain scenarios when constructing anno using the leader annotation method.
N1MO47O8O - License for JTX Extension is not available from GP script.
N1MO47298 - Text Callouts with empty text strings and margins set to 0 may crash ArcMap.
N1M047725 - Improve the display output routines to better support PLTS Separated TIFF export

ArcGIS Server

NlM038570 - Unexpected results occur when multiple tool actions are performed (identify/zoom/pan) in quick succession without waiting for the previous one to complete.
N1M039840 - Viewing a close extent of a large raster served through ArcGlS Server on Solaris fads to draw the map service.
N1M042454 - Filters included in SLD styles are not applied to WMS layers from ArcGIS Server that are based on Event Layers.
N1M043710 - Snap tool in ArcGlS Server Java Web application does not clean up when edits are saved.
N1M044 189 - Add ability to generalize features for queries based on ArcGlS Server
N1M04431 8- Viewing WMS based on a cache-on-demand optimized map service, does not generate cache tiles if it has a group layer structure.
N1MO44578 - WebQuery::query() fails if the LayerDefinitions property is not set.
N1MO449O3 - Allow WFS-T to apply changes to a feature class that has Z’s.
N1MO45O52 - Adding additional SOC machines does not improve ArcGIS Server system performance when using REST services.
N1MO45O54 - Update the Java Web ADF task framework to run in WebSphere 7 with JSF1.2.
N1M045055 - Modify the faces-contig.xml file to be JSF 1.2 compatible for the Java Web ADF.
N1M045126 - Add map service definition editing to the edipse MXD Editor solution for Windows, Solaris and Linux.
N1M045127 - Drawing an annotation layer in an MSD file crashes the mxdeditor using Java 15 on Solaris.
N1MO45221 - WFS-T should allow editing with standard ArcGIS Server.
N1M045339 - WFS service does not support multipoint geometry with a spatial operator.
N1M045470 - Network attribute name and network sources name is not returned in the json response for route description.
N1M045974 - ArcGIS Server is unresponsive after a period of high volume requests.
N1M045975 - When using Unix/Linux in ArcGIS Server 9.3 Service Pack 1 -exporting a map service to PDF format, the highway shield label text is not centered.
N1M046086 - REST operations fail when the SOM service is installed on one machine and the Web services are installed on a separate machine.
N1MO46427 - Project WebGeometry is using the SDE Shape Library instead of using SDE Projection Library.
N1MO46457 - Default exception MIME type should be ‘apphcation/vnd.ogc.se_xml’ when parameter ‘EXCEPTIONS’ is not set or set to an invalid value.
N1M046458 - The ‘propertyName’ in GetFeature operation does not work if the property name is prefixed with namespace prefix.
N1MO46768 - Server Manager displays that it is drawing map service ‘dynamically’ even though it is using cache tiles to draw map service.
N1MO46769 - Cache tiles schema does not get updated in the Caching properties tab of ArcGlS Server Manager.
NIMO47 178 - Do not generate system-generated capabilities in output directory when external capabilities files are used.

REST API (.Net)

N1M044410 - In ArcGIS Server REST API for the NET Platform, “View in Javascript” does not reflect the version of tundra,css specified in rest. config. It always defaults to serverapi arcgisonh ne .com.
NlM044998 - In Network Analyst solve operation using ArcGIS Server REST API for the Microsoft .NET Framework, add the ability to pass in attribute parameters.
N1M044999 - In REST API for the Microsoft NET Framework, attribute parameter values are not correctly shown in the JSON response for route layer description.

Java WebADF

N1M0451 - Concurrent editing by two users in a standard Java Web ADF editing task produces an error message and does not allow second user edits to be saved.

Image server

N1M009509 - Symbology for ISDEF files are not persisted in saved MXD’s.
N1M013584 - 16-bit imagery appears black when served through Image Server.
N1M036760 - Cannot add ISRef tiles into AutoCAD.
N1M036928 - Add support for alpha channel bands to Image Server
N1M039010 - Stretching process becomes non-responsive after an error message triggered by invalid settings is retuned.
NIM040221 - Please include Aut0CAD 2009 as a supported client for ArcGIS Image Server 9.3
NIM042382 - Document the official support status on A.TOC files with CADRG datasets for Image Server.
N1M042605 - Unable to create an image service using a projection that has a unit of measurement in seconds.
NIM042997 - Unable to add grid stacks to an image service when specifying its directory to load the data into the service.
N1M043254 - Recompute Footprint by Related Geometry uses the geometry of features in the joined shapefile based on FID order.
N1M044308 - 11-bit NITF does not display properly in an image service.
N1M044912 - Pyramids created for YCrCb JPEG compressed TIFF file is not read properly
NIM044913 - PNG format Image gets washed out when viewed in Internet Explorer,
N1M045359 - When creating an Image Service using IKONOS data, only the first set of metadata is read.
N1M04573O - NCDRD specified panchromatic NITF data is not properly supported.
N1M045731 - JP2 compressed NITFs cannot be accessed with Image Server.
N1M046056 - Recompute by Radiometry does not work for all rasters in a panchromatic service.
N1MO47442 - The footprint for some GeoEye NITFs is 100x, which is the size of the actual data.
N1MO4757O - Cannot add a raster catalog to an image service definition.
NIM047571 - Metadata is incorrectly extracted for IKONOS files, wherein the _metadata.txt file references multiple component files.
N1M047572 - Cannot add GRID Stack dataset.
N1M047573 - ‘As View’ selection option selects more rasters than it should.
N1M047574 - Select by view selects all rasters in view >MinPS but does not filter by MaxPS.
N1MO47586 - Cannot read ISAT project files when a strip ID is not present.
N1M047598 - IKONOS 4 band service cannot be created.
N1M047629 - Bug in libtiff prevents reading scanline based JPEG compressed TIFF with component subsampling.
N1M047630 - IKONOS NITF products not supported.
N1M047631 - Recompute footprint by related geometry does not account for the user-specified join, but is defaulted to joining based on the FID.
N1M047632 - Problem generating a 16-bit 4-band IKONOS service.
N1M047633 - Problems adding USGS topo TIFF files.
N1M047634 - Creation of a 3-band RGB service diisplays as a grayscale.
N1M047635 - Editrasterdatasets ISCommand does not edit the RPDefs.
N1M047854 - NITE IKONOS imagery containing embedded RPC’s (no external file) causes orthorectification to fail.

ArcGIS Mobile

NlM042415 - Wrong coordinates posted to Server after editing in ArcGIS Mobile project.
N1M042625 - When running the Generate Mobile Service Cache tool, the following error is returned: “ERROR 999998, Failed to Execute”.
NlM047451 - In an ArcGIS Mobile application, the vector layers rotate correctly but the annotation layers do not.

ArcSDE

N1M039217 - Editing an archive enabled table with SQL through a multi-versioned view in the DEFAULT version does not maintain the table’s archive.
N1M042121 - Encountering a large volume of warnings being written to the ArcSDE error log, specific to being in a transaction when writing to the ArcSDE loglile tables.
N1M042709 - Edits on ST GEOMETRY produces shape area (shape.area) and shape length (shape.len) field with zero values if the ‘move edits to base’ option is selected to register the feature class as versioned.
N1M042753 - Add support for SE_ROW_ID column for ST_GEOMETRY type to ensure that a users existing applications can continue to work after migrating from SDEBINARYISDELOB to ST_GEOMETRY.
N1M043072 - Inserting a feature with out of bounds geometry changes the feature class extent.
N1M043097 - Compressing a geodatabase can lead to blocking conditions in ArcGIS that impact editor user response time.
N1M043242 - When applying a select by attribute query on a FeatureClass with geometry spatial type, it fails with a network I/O error.
N1M044400 - Registering layers using sdelayer —o add that have a different shape column datatype than the chosen geometry storage, —k option could succeed in some cases leading to gsrvr fatals when performing selections.
N1M044630 - Enabling archiving on a feature dataset that contains topology fails with Network I/O error.
N1M045628 - ArcGIS editor stop editing/save operations can encounter database deadlocking situations if two users are saving and have modified the same versioned objectclass.
N1M045726 - Improve performance of spatial queries with definition queries/attribute filters.
N1M046027 - Identify returns “Nothing found” against features in a spatial view based upon ST_GEOMETRY point feature class.
N1M046752 - When creating multiversioned view for feature class with nvarchar(n), n is doubled to 2n thus limiting the maximum nvarchar field length to 2000 if it needs to be incorporated in a multiversioned view.
N1M046899 - With SDO_SRID paraeters set, invalid metadata is inserted into SDO metadata views
N1M047207 - Compress fails with primary key violation on SDE_Geometry CAD side table when duplicate cad element is updated to state_id 0.
N1M047285 - ORA-0923 error when attempting to select or identify with an st_geometry point feature class.
N1MO47399 - The British National Grid scale factor was changed in version 9.2. While the software now considers both values equivalent, the check to determine that is inefficient. This change improves performance.
N1M047400 - When making a direct connection to a schema (project) gdb using ST_Geometry, an error is returned when trying to access the ST_ functions from the project instance.
N1MO47566 - The z-value envelope information is missing in the sde.sde_layers table.
N1M047569 - Improve connection time for map documents with connections to a SQL Server Express geodatabase that is shut down by mapping the returned error code to SE_LOST_DBMS_CONNECTION.
NIM047885 - <DB2/INF> implement a next_row_id stored procedure.

ArcIMS

NIMO441O1 - A capabilities file created using the WES Connector contains an incorrect namespace for feature types.
N1MO44352 - GetFeatures returns the wrong descriptions for fields with a coded value domain, if values for all fields are not requested.
N1MO45565 - Java Connector adds multiple SPATIALQUERY tags in ArcXML for a dynamic layer if it has a filter.

This is it for now. Keep an eye on original announcement page or check back here for updates.

ArcGIS Explorer 900 and ArcGIS Image Server issue

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:39:00 +0000

ArcGIS Explorer is a brand new application with lots of new features. Now there is a problem if you are running Image Server and AGX on the same server. There may not be many cases but if you are planning to install AGX 900 be aware.

The issue is described on ESRI Support Center page and there are two bug reports looking like a possible solution(s):

NIM046078: ArcGIS Image Server 9.3.1 conflicts with ArcGIS Explorer (900)
NIM047684: Add Image Server Connection button in ArcMap 9.3/9.3.1 does not work after installing ArcGIS Explorer 900.

For news check my posts here or go to ESRI here.

Deprecation plan for ArcGIS 9.3.1 and 9.4

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:35:00 +0000

ESRI has released an article on support site describing deprecation plans for both 9.3.1 and 9.4. This is an important document for all GIS managers, IT mangers, CIO and like. For any strategic planning of your GIS please make sure you read this document and inform other decision makers. The document can be downloaded from here.

Here are some of the key points for both releases.

9.3.1

Last version to support Windows 2000 across the product board
Last release with Crystal Reports Wizard
Last release with Survey Editor and Survey Dataset in Survey Analyst extension
Last version to support Visual Basic 6
Last release to support CASE tools and Import Schema Wizard
Last version to support Visual Studio 2005

9.4

Last version to support VBA
Separation of Arc/Info Workstation from ArcInfo Desktop
Last release to support IE 6 (all products)

ArcGIS Explorer 900, Part 2

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:46:00 +0000

Since my first post I was quite busy so this post is coming later then I wanted. In the meantime ESRI was busy writing about it on ArcGIS Explorer blog.
There are four new posts about release 900 after it was released. The posts are:

There is one something I have noticed but I haven’t heard from other users. When I start AGX my Vista is changing colour scheme to Basic. This usually happens when application does not have enough resources. In addition to that when starting AGX from home (using wireless network) for a short time I internet connection is gone. My guess is again maxing out resources of PC. By the way that is HP laptop with Core 2 Duo 2.3 GHz and 2 GB RAM.
Unfortunately, I still don’t have time to explore new options. The ones I am really interested are package layers, projections, presentation mode and customization. When I get more information I summarize them here.

ArcGIS Explorer 900 – first look, Part 1

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:36:00 +0000

Installation of ArcGIS Explorer (AGX) took about 3-4 minutes on my Vista laptop. During installation I have noticed it is doing something in addition to usual steps. It was scanning thru assemblies.
After installation there are two applications in ArcGIS Explorer program group:

Application Configuration Manager
ArcGIS Explorer

Application Configuration Manager
After start of Application Configuration Manager (ACM) first dialog requires you to create new configuration or add an existing one.

If new is selected it must be name and file location specified. Configuration is saved as *.ncfg file.

After configuration you have options to Preview or Modify the application. When modifying a configuration settings, there are 5 main areas –General, Display, Customizations, Add-ins and Custom Resources. More interesting group is the Customizations. Here one can enable or disable certain features on the UI including the context menus as well.

For use of the resources other than ESRI’s on Custom Resources group under Choose Service you can specify your own address locator, routing or place finding service.

After configuring AGX is now running. One of the big news for this release is new UI. This is the Ribbon implementation and I guess it will cause a lot of discussion. I know a several people how just can’t stand it but i think it’s inevitable and it is becoming standard UI feature, at least on PC.

Main new features of AGX 900 are:

Presentation mode
2D display mode
Bing base maps
Support for all coordinate systems from ArcGIS

It is getting late, more to come very soon. In next post I’ll describe new features with more details.

ArcGIS Explorer 900 released

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Today ESRI has released ArcGIS Explorer 900. This version offers quite significant changes compared to build 500. It was demonstrated at the ESRI User Conference in July.

I am still downloading it, so review is coming up soon. To download it go here.

Zerg’s rumble changes and Zerg’s gaming rumble

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:35:00 +0000

For a while I was considering splitting this blog into two. One about GIS and technology and the other one for other topics like gaming, music and like. Not too long ago Blogspot added the functionality to export and import posts. This was the key feature and now new blog – Zerg’s gaming rumble is up and running.

All games related post from this blog are posted in new gaming blog. If you want to read these or my new posts about games please update your feeds.

In next few days I will make some changes this blog to reflect new focus on GIS and technology.

OpenGL 3.2 released

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:05:00 +0000

Today Khronos Group has announced release of the latest update of OpenGL. Information about OpenGL in general can be found on OpenGL registry page including details of the latest version – 3.2.

This new release continues the rapid evolution of the OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms.

Main features of this release include:

Increased performance for vertex arrays and fence sync objects to avoid idling while waiting for resources shared between the CPU and GPU, or multiple CPU threads
Improved pipeline programmability, including geometry shaders in the OpenGL core
Boosted cube map visual quality and multisampling rendering flexibility by enabling shaders to directly process texture samples

GPU manufacturers are watching closely development of the OpenGL and nVidia has released beta drivers already according to Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL ARB working group and OpenGL engineering manager at NVIDIA.

ESRI UC 2009 Day 2 update

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Day two at the User Conference seems to be quiet or there aren’t many updates yet. A friend of mine, Jithen Singh, already did a hard work of compiling a list of news for upcoming version of ArcGIS 9.4.
Here are some highlights for Desktop:

Extension of layer packages to include tools, models, globes and diagrams
Improved Table Of Content – allows rendering of cartographic representations
Add models into toolbar
Multiple page PDF export
Support for Windows 7
Run geoprocessing in the background

For full list of changes for Desktop, Server and Mobile go to Mandown.

ESRI UC 2009 Day 1 update

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:07:00 +0000

Here are most interesting bits from day 1 of the ESRI User Conference. Unfortunately these are not first hand news but compiled from number of blogs and news from the internet.

Plenary session
In first part Jack has described the vision of this conference – Maps and GIS are changing and there are new ways to take advantage of GIS.

ArcGIS Explorer 900 was showed and new features were demonstrated (more on that later).
Second part was about the next release – 9.4. Highlights of upcoming 9.4 version are:

Run in parallel with 9.3 on same machine
New dockable windows (attribute table, ArcCatalog, etc)
Search integrated in ArcMap
Search for symbol by name
Predefined edit tasks
Integration of Python in ArcMap
New Base maps for continuous redraw and panning
Improved 3D performance and SketchUp support
Open geodatabase API

ArcGIS Explorer 900
Information about AGX 900 is know for a while but now the key features were shown and more details can be found on AGX blog. These include:

Toggle between 3D and 2D
Use of layer packages from ArcGIS 9.3.1
Presentation mode
Ribbon interface
Bing data support
Support for all ArcGIS projections and transformations
Customization without programming

Other news

ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF released
ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF toolkit released on Codeplex
MapIt product released

This is just a very quick pick of most interesting topics. More details coming soon.

ESRI 2009 User Conference starts tomorrow

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:52:00 +0000

Tomorrow is the start of User Conference for 2009. As expected there is an official page providing lot of information like featured sessions, on-line agenda, accommodation and other.

Collection of quick links include Facebook, Twitter and Flickr pages. As alternative you can simply subscribe to RSS feeds from this page.

If you haven’t been at the Conference you know it is really busy and spread across very large area. To help you find your way use UC Route Finder. This will show distance and time required to get to the destination and it is also viewable in 3D.

Very soon we are expecting a flood of news from the Conference. I am hoping that ArcGIS Explorer 900 will be released within next few days. AGX blog has plenty of information and photos from specialist events where it will be demonstrated (homeland security, education, etc).

It will be quite hard to keep up with all news but hopefully in next week or two I’ll be able to pick out most interesting news and videos.

Tips for faster caching of ArcGIS Server

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:32:00 +0000

ESRI Mapping Center has a post about improving performance of caching in ArcGIS Server (AGS). If you did any work in this area you know this is very demanding and time consuming process. We (Eagle Technology) created cache for several customers and this can easily take full 3 days to create the cache.

From list of recommendations there is one I didn’t really consider but it makes perfect sense - Relocate the server’s pagefile.sys file.

I like the note about checking of available memory:

This is especially important if you’ve got other services running on the server, because these services are taking up memory, too, and you want to make sure the caching process, which will be more demanding of memory usage, is not pushing out of your available physical RAM and into your pagefile.sys (which will result in catastrophically slower caching times!)

Q & A about 2009 ESRI International User Conference

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:33:00 +0000

2009 ESRI User Conference is near (13-17 July) and ESRI has published the results from survey. Make sure you have plenty of free time if you want to read the full Q & A document – there are 178 questions and answers!

Full list is available here. I will post my pick of most interesting questions from this list later this week.

ArcGIS 9.3.1 REST Services Patch

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:47:00 +0000

Another patch for ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 was released. This patch addresses cases where, under heavy load, adding additional SOC machines does not improve performance when using REST services.

Issue fixed with this patch is:

NIM045052 - Adding additional SOC machines does not improve ArcGIS Server system performance when using REST services.

Even if this does not apply to Desktop or Engine but one of assemblies for Desktop and Engine is affected.

File is GIS931-Server-RestSvcs-Patch.msp and it is 2.1 MB. Full details are available here.

ArcGIS, WPF and Surface in action

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:20:00 +0000

Yesterday Richie posted an article and video about “Police dispatcher for Microsoft Surface” application they (ESRI Application Prototype Lab) ported from Silverlight API to Windows Presentation Foundation and Surface.

Go here for full details, video is also available on YouTube.

If you liked that then have a look at similar example “Cross Country Mobility for Microsoft Surface.”

Creating effective web maps seminar

ZergOne@gmail.com (Zorko) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:10:00 +0000

Eagle Technology is hosting a complimentary seminar about creation and deployment of modern web maps maps and make the most of your investment in GIS data and infrastructure.

Some spaces are still available in Wellington and Auckland.

Location: Auckland, Eagle Technology office
Date: Tuesday June 30, 2009

Location: Wellington, Eagle Technology office
Date: Thursday July 2, 2009

The same seminar will be held in the morning and repeated in the afternoon.
Please advise which session you would like to attend as places are limited.

AGENDA:

Morning session:
9:00-10:15: Design Strategies for Authoring and Publishing
10:15-10:30: break
10:30-12:00: Building Web Applications

Afternoon session:
1:00-2:15: Design Strategies for Authoring and Publishing
2:15-2:30: break
2:30-4:00: Building Web Applications

To register visit - www.eagle.co.nz/gis931