Gluing Things Together As I described in a previous post, Boundless no longer maintains publicly accessible versions of Boundless Suite nor the suite formerly known as OpenGeo in their repositories. The Boundless Suite (now known as Boundless Server) is available on their GitHub page, but requires building from a cloned version of that GitHub repository. I’ve used Apache Ant and Git to build a few things in the past, usually with limited success. I looked through the steps involved there and quickly decided to try another approach. I figured – Why not try assembling all of the pieces included in…
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NY Upstate APA Bestows Planning Excellence Award for Best Practice
The New York Upstate Chapter of the American Planning Association recently awarded their 2014 Planning Excellence Award for Best Practice to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC’s) new online Environmental Assessment Form tools: the EAF Workbooks and the EAF Mapper application. These tools were developed by DEC, environmental planning consultants Nan Stolzenburg (Community Planning & Environmental Associates), Don Meltz (Don Meltz Planning and GIS), and the geographic information system development firm Fountains Spatial. The annual Planning Excellence Award for Best Practice is given to a planning tool, practice, program, project, or process that is a significant advancement to specific elements of…
Willamette River Historical Stream Channels Poster
Today’s MOTD is something that was going around the Twitter-sphere a few weeks ago. I put a link to it on my desktop, and re-found it tonight while organizing my files. Even though it’s not brand new, it is special enough to be noted here. It is a spectacular piece of cartographic artwork. It’s so unique it almost doesn’t look like a map, but that is exactly what is is. As the publication website says, this is a lidar derived digital elevation model of the Willamette River. Lidar (light-radar) is a technology that uses light to measure distances, and can…
Delhi Kiosk Map
One of the projects I’m working on involves an economic redevelopment plan for a five town – two village area in the Central Catskills. One of our recommendations to them involoves developing a unified way-finding and mapping system that will help visitors find their way around and through the area. While doing some research on the subject, one of our team members found this cool map recently displayed in the Town of Delhi, NY. Delhi (pronounced “Dell-high”) is also a Catskill Mountain region town, but outside our study area. Instead of going into detail about how the map was made,…
Grateful Dead Archive Online – Map
This is how my day went today: A friend on Facebook (John Baumbach) posted a link to a page listing the 20 Essential Grateful Dead Shows. He mentioned how he had been to two of them. This got me thinking about one of my most memorable concerts. I did some searching, and found an archive page with a recording of the Bob Weir concert during my freshman year at Franklin Pierce College on March 4, 1978. Surprised to find this online, I thought: “Maybe there’s an archive of old Grateful Dead concerts, too”. A little more searching led me to the…
SEQR Environmental Assessment Forms Workshop
New SEQR Environmental Assessment Forms Last year, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) adopted revised model environmental assessment forms (EAFs). This was the first major update to the Full EAF (FEAF) since 1978 and to the Short EAF (SEAF) since its last revision in 1987. During development of the new EAF’s, some concerns were raised about the level of detail needed to complete the new forms. As a result, DEC contracted with Nan Stolzenburg and Don Meltz to develop a set of online workbooks to provide additional guidance for completing them. The effective date for the revised EAFs is…
New Website Launched at donmeltz.com
A major facelift to the old website If you’ve been here before you’ll notice a whole new look to my website and a few new things have been added. The site has been completely redone from the ground up. Here’s a brief overview of what’s changed: Integration The primary goal for doing the redesign was to integrate my various online services as much as possible. Previously I had both a website and a blog, but they were hosted in different places and the design was different for each. The same was true for my map site. I also had a…
Columbia County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan
The Columbia County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan is out for public review I worked on the mapping and spatial analysis aspects of this plan. I helped the board identify all of the active farmland in the county, and lead them through a LESA process, producing a prioritized list of farms and farmland to protect. The press release follows: To help guide the sustainability of agriculture on a county-wide basis, the Columbia County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board (AFPB) has developed a county-wide plan focused on agricultural economic development and farmland protection. The culmination of this two year project is…
OpenGeo Suite 3.0 on a micro AWS
The Problem: I want to run the latest 3.0 version of OpenGeo Suite on a free (or really cheap) micro instance on Amazon Web Services OpenGeo announced the release of version 3 of the OpenGeo Suite Monday (Oct.3). I’ve been using the 3.0-beta1 Linux version since it was announced on July 27. There are some interesting improvements to the Suite, which is one reason I made the jump before the final release came out. It now includes PostgreSQL 9.2 and PostGIS 2.0, both of which I wanted to look into. I had been using previous versions of OpenGeo Suite on…
Resizing my Ubuntu Server AWS Boot Disk
AKA: Building a Bigger GeoSandbox (Note: This article has been updated to make it clear that expanded EBS volumes will = additional charges from AWS. Something that is not clearly stated in the AWS documentation.) If you’ve been reading my last few blog posts, you know I’ve been experimenting with various Ubuntu server configurations using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to serve web-maps and spatial data. As my procedures have evolved, the micro-instances I started working with have outgrown their usefulness. Lately, I’ve been testing GeoWebCache, and seeing how that works with GeoServer and the rest of the OpenGeo Suite. As…