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…
Category: Geo/Planning
Blog posts related to GIS, spatial analysis, and other planning topics
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…
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…
Serving Maps – in the Cloud – for Free (part 3)
It was not my intention to make this a 3-part blog post series, but here it is anyway. (If you want to catch up, you can read Part 1 and Part 2 first). As I continued to work on, and tweak my new AWS Ubuntu server, I decided I might as well add website serving capabilities to it as well. That would allow me to embed my new web-maps into a customizable web page, allowing a more interactive experience, and a more professional appearance to anyone visiting them. The first step in that direction is to: Install Apache Server This…
Serving Maps – in the Cloud – for Free (part 2)
(Note: This is the second part of a 3 – part blog post about setting up the OpenGeo Suite on a AWS Ubuntu server. Links to the other parts are at the bottom of this post) Starting Fresh with a New AMI At the end of my last post, I had my AWS Ubuntu-micro-server running smoothly, but the OpenGeo GeoExplorer was not very stable. It was crashing often, and for no apparent reason. I followed up with a few suggestions about data directory permissions, and swap-file space, but to no avail (Thank you @spara and @jeffbarr). I had been tweaking…
Serving Maps – in the Cloud – for Free (part 1)
My latest personal project (still in progress) is to get a true cloud-based map server up and running, posting maps from a free-tier Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ubuntu server. This has not been easy. I’ve looked at AWS a number of times over the last year, and a few things have made me shy away from trying it out. Mainly, It’s incredibly hard to decipher all the jargon on the AWS website. And it’s not your everyday jargon. It’s jargon that’s unique to the AWS website. It’s jargon2. Amazon has been sending me multiple emails the last few weeks warning…
ArcGIS vs QGIS Clipping Contest Rematch
Round 2 in which ArcGIS throws in the towel. (Please note: This post is about clipping in ArcGIS version 10.0. The functionality has been improved, and problems mentioned have been fixed in later versions of ArcGIS) This is a follow-up to my previous post where I matched up ArcGIS and QGIS in a clipping contest. One of the commenters on that post expressed some concern that there might be “…something else going on…” with my test, and I agreed. It was unfathomable to me that an ESRI product could be out-done by such a wide margin. Knowing that ArcGIS often…
ArcGIS–QGIS Faceoff
Is QGIS a viable alternative to ArcGIS? (Please note: This post is about clipping in ArcGIS version 10.0. The functionality has been improved, and problems mentioned have been fixed in later versions of ArcGIS) I’ve never enjoyed working with contours. They seem to bog down my system more than any other layer type I work with. However, most of my clients are so used to looking at USGS Topo maps they expect to see them on at least one of the maps I produce for them. I recently worked on a project covering a five-town area in the Catskill Mountain…