Comments for James Fee GIS Blog

Comment on The ESRI Developer Summit and the .NET SIG by fmg

2010-02-09T04:03:29Z

Hey! I did hear stories about people getting thrown into a pool (or hot tub) back when the UC was in Palm Springs… Is it really true?

Comment on The ESRI Developer Summit and the .NET SIG by Archie Belaney

2010-02-09T01:21:44Z

Piffle.

This is what happens companies transition from products-based marketers that rely on partners and developers to serve customers, and becomes a services-driven organization that sells integration on top of its own tools.

IBM stopped making boxes and now they’re almost exclusively a services organization. Who is their closest partner in the geospatial trades?

Watch this space people. And remember the good times, when getting thrown in the pool on Wednesday night was a badge of honor and a measure of your contribution. Cute little ESRI is growing up, and we’re in the way…+

Comment on The ESRI Developer Summit and the .NET SIG by Jim Barry

2010-02-09T00:15:38Z

As James points out, the event is evolving. It’s also growing quite a bit. Preserving the grassroots-iness of this as a developer community event is no doubt important to all of us.

.NET was heavily dominant with us in 2005, and while still large there’s much more in 2010: web services, web APIs, growth of mobile GIS and mapping–particularly phones, growth of Java in our community esp. outside the US, Python for automation and in app design. That’s not even mentioning Geodatabases for developers on any platform–the second largest draw of the Summit.

So rather than a strategy discussion cornered to the special interests of the .NET community or any others, the way we see the DevSummit evolving–the entire event–from tech sessions to the dev team islands, meet-the-teams, hallway chats, all combine to give us a place for a few days to talk about the future, the present, learn from the past, etc.

Bottom line: The heart of the DevSummit will always be your accessibility to our architects, developers, engineers, and our direct accessibility to you. These folks like James lists above, they’re there. Grab them at an island, in the hall, at a session, at the social (before or after the beer runs out). We’ll learn from each other what we need to succeed.

Add it all up and we expect as a community event, we can accomplish and learn so much here even without a specific meetup hour for .NET developers alone.

Comment on The ESRI Developer Summit and the .NET SIG by James Tedrick

2010-02-08T22:58:47Z

Given how much talk and visible desire about community there was floating about at the last UC, this seems to be completely two steps back.

Comment on The ESRI Developer Summit and the .NET SIG by Kirk Kuykendall

2010-02-08T20:06:51Z

In 2005 Microsoft offered neither native spatial types in SQL Server nor a Silverlight Mapcontrol in Bing.

Instead of abstracting away .NET, I think ESRI should make extra efforts to show how they add value to the Microsoft stack.

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by Dave Smith

2010-02-08T15:58:21Z

In checking the Data.gov site, there is in fact a link to the ideascale site – on the right hand of the Data.gov page, it says:

Join the Dialogue When Data.gov launched last May, we promised to evolve this initiative with the public. We are taking that step, asking for your review and input on the design document and soliciting your ideas. Read More..

Clicking that link, in turn, takes you to the data.gov ideascale site.

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by Dave Smith

2010-02-08T15:40:59Z

I knew about the IdeaScale from working as a federal contractor involved in agencies, with feds who are working on getting their data submitted to Data.gov – I’d agree, it probably wasn’t as broadly communicated as it should be, it’s likely just the metadata wonks like me who have been tracking it – though the feds have used various IdeaScale sites for soliciting various comments and ideas for a year or so now. The IdeaScale site should be posted on their main Data.gov site and communicated via other means as well. That’s another suggestion that needs to be posted…

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by Lefty

2010-02-08T14:30:26Z

Dave, other than your link to that ideascale.com site, how would an average user know to go there to give feedback?

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by Dave Smith

2010-02-08T05:50:53Z

Federal agencies need coherent policies, and a consistent means of publishing, organizing, accessing and cataloging data and metadata. These efforts, GOS and Data.gov are a work in progress, presumably to be combined at some point and further improved. With GOS, the service status checkers are supposed to ping the assets to check them. That capability can and should be bolstered – along with better ways to manage data and metadata lifecycle. Did you post a suggestion to have data.gov periodically check the status and availability of posted assets to the ideascale site that was set up to solicit comments and suggestions? → http://datagov.ideascale.com/

Comment on ArcGIS 9.4 Is Now ArcGIS 10 by J.B. Churchill

2010-02-08T04:10:16Z

It is difficult enough to get it working correctly in Windows. Most programs take advantage of the File System of the Operating system but ArcCatalog does its own thing (and subsequently doesn’t update when the file system does). grrr.

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by AlbertW

2010-02-07T21:20:52Z

I was working on a project last month and ran into a couple broken links (csv data, not shp). I can’t find them in my browser cache so I’ll see if I can find them when I get into work tomorrow.

I hadn’t heard of the term link rot before, but I think this is going to be a huge problem with Data.gov moving forward.

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by Archie Belaney

2010-02-07T20:40:20Z

Huh.

Wow, apparently you’re not an active user of either data.gov or GOS. Have you ever used either? You also appear not to have understood the post…the point is, Wow, that the site should have been set up so folks in the user community [don't] have to send emails to prod the admin to keep it running right.

Data.gov is just another lipstick-slathered, porcine PR blast that’s another DC-irrelevancy-in-the-making. Honestly, expecting a government agency to post information that would make them accountable and be shared with others…

Methinks thou doth protest too much, Wow.

Now go fix those links.

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by wow

2010-02-07T20:20:04Z

wow – not getting any action james? – one broken link and you pronounce the end of data.gov – the cloud – soa and the whole internet thing… how about just sending an email letting them know there is a broken link.

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by Archie Belaney

2010-02-07T19:53:46Z

Last spring, agencies threw whatever was handy onto Data.gov to answer the mail from the newbie politicals. They hated doing it, that’s why most of the content was/is marginally interesting.

You know what comes next?

“It’s not my job”

Sigh.

BTW – let’s ask OMB how much money has gone into GOS in the past years, and what the hit rate is on that dreadful cobweb. Might be fun to file a FOIA request to the USGS for hit statistics, normalize out the bots and see what’s left.

Betcha it’s tens of hits from ‘real’ users every month and tens of thousands of hits from Google’s bots looking to scrape content.

Comment on Data.gov Is Already Broken — Just Like Everything Before It by atanas entchev

2010-02-07T19:15:29Z

Link rot is like foot fungus. Potential is always there, sure, but the cause is poor hygiene. (@sgillies).

Comment on Safe FME 2010 by Andreas Tollefsen

2010-02-06T16:28:20Z

I totally agree. Safe/FME is great. I try to do most of my stuff there instead of arcGIS. Been using it for a while, and so far i have not had any major problems.

Comment on Increasing U.S. Census Participation by yodel

2010-02-05T23:44:12Z

Eh that’s the way they’ve been doing it for a while, lowest common denominator I guess. As the 1 person GIS department in New Mexico a few years back we had to do the same thing and it worked out fine in the end.

Before you change the way they want it done check with the Census Bureau first because they not have the means in the local or regional offices to deal with some type of super whizbang GIS data.

I’m curious how the map boundaries actually look after the big CENSUS/Harris MTAIP project to clean up the census maps around the country? I have a bit of effort invested there so I’m curious how it looks in the end…

Comment on Increasing U.S. Census Participation by Geo Quick Bits: Infamous Censuses, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Handbags for Haiti | Geo Lounge – All things geography

2010-02-05T22:30:29Z

[...] of some) is a cake walk compared to some of the more infamous censuses in history. James Fee points out an online mapping effort relating to the 2010 Census called “Census Hard to Count [...]

Comment on Increasing U.S. Census Participation by Ralph D

2010-02-05T20:43:30Z

This is slightly off topic, but it will want to make you laugh or cry. Our county received 10-20 paper maps and a box of red pencils from the census bureau earlier this week to update various boundaries. We are not going to do it that way.

Comment on Increasing U.S. Census Participation by Brett

2010-02-05T18:34:16Z

Have to remember that, Constitutionally, the Census is an enumeration, not a count. That technically rules out sampling. We may never see the list of names, but the Census’ Constitutional purpose is to make a list of everyone in the country, not count everyone in the country. (Edit: Interesting how we all jumped to the same thing without reading each other’s comments