http://local.live.com/

Well, another mapping service popped up. Microsoft inproved its msn virtual earth to create http://local.live.com. Some gui-improvements are implemented, but the most interesting thing are the bird-eye views of some mayor downtown areas in the US. Pictures have been taken by Pictometry International Corp. with low flying airplanes. From each point you can look into four directions.

MapServer + Autodesk = ... Enterprize?

This week autodesk and mapserver announced a cooperation in a new project MapServer Enterprize. A GPL project in which both organisations combine their technologies, to generate a new open source gis internet tool in which developers can use php, .net or java. New for the mapserver users are autodesks vector-viewing possibilities (where is SVG/GML?) and a desktop tool to configure the gis-data (at last!).

Well good news i guess. Though autodesc, not specifically being a GIS company, might not be my first choise to cooperate with. However they have a zilion of users. If they all are using MapServer soon, the comunity will be bigger than the mozilla team...

Download an early release here: http://www.mapserverfoundation.org/mapserver_enterprise

wkt syntax (howto)

Geometry types and their text representations

Geometry type	WKT representation	Comment
point	POINT EMPTY	empty point
point	POINT ( 10.05 10.28 )	point
point	POINT Z( 10.05 10.28 2.51 )	point with Z coordinate
point	POINT M( 10.05 10.28 4.72 )	point with M coordinate
point	POINT ZM( 10.05 10.28 2.51 4.72 )	point with Z coordinate and M coordinate
linestring	LINESTRING EMPTY	empty linestring
polygon	POLYGON (( 10 10, 10 20,20 20, 20 15, 10 10))	polygon
multipoint	MULTIPOINT Z(10 10 2, 20 20 3)	multipoint with Z coordinates
multilinestring	MULTILINESTRING M(( 310 30 1, 40 30 20, 50 20 10 )( 10 10 0, 20 20 1))	multilinestring with M coordinates
multipolygon	MULTIPOLYGON ZM((( 1 1 1 1, 1 2 3 4, 2 2 5 6, 2 1 7 8, 1 1 1 1 )))	multipolygon with Z coordinates and M coordinates

Advanced drawing in chameleon

Today i noticed the guys at http://www.uwaterloo.ca have been working on some really advanced javascript drawing techniques for chameleon. They used walter zorn's drawing library to create dynamic circle and polyline drawing tools.

opensource gis desktop clients

Recently some opensource (free) desktop GIS clients came to my attention.

• uDig (http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Home ) is a java-eclipse based environment for viewing maps (.shp,tiff,wms,wfs,postgis). The eclipse environment offers you ease of configuration to build your own gis-cleint.
• gvSig is a free multi langual gis-client in java by a spanish firm (wms, wfs). (http://www.gvsig.gva.es )

Basic clients

openEv is a basic gis-viewer by frank warmerdam (http://fwtools.maptools.org/ )

development environments

Lots of groups offer platfoms in which you can easily build your own desktop gis client.

http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu

http://www.vividsolutions.com/jts/jtshome.htm

http://openmap.bbn.com

Free clients
- the guys at http://www.tatukgis.com created a Delphi.net environment in wich you can build your own viewer with a few clicks. But they also offer e simple viewer for free. Tatuk manages to put all gis-functionality in just a tiny 10mb application.

soon to come
- At http://fmaps.sourceforge.net they are coding to bring a decent gis-client to the linux-platform. They use postgis to store data.

sql-flavours

when talking to lots of databases you notice there are many flavours of sql. Once in a while it drives me crazy to get for example the syntax for a limit in db2 and so on. Recently i found a nice overview of the different flavours: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/ So now we all know that a limit in db2 sql = 'FETCH FIRST n ROWS ONLY'

bbbike.de (open source navigation)

We recently discoverded an open source navigation tool (to calculate shortest distance between points of interest) at www.bbbike.de It can be used as a standalone perl desktop application or in combination with mapserver as a server based navigation tool on the web. Good work, as far as we know, the first open source navigation map.

Eclipse all-in webdevelopper

We recently changed to using Eclipse as a web-editor. Eclipse is an open-source editor which has been designed to program java-applets, but in the meanwhile lots of other tools have been incorporated to support web-development in general. Now we can use 1 tool to edit web-templates, look in to jdbc-databases (oracle,mysql,postgres), do file-comparissons and cooperate using version management.

A special plug-in is available to work with cold fusion (cfeclipse) this plug-in has equal capacities as studio/homesite (like syntax highlighting,collapsing).

Another nice thing is that it runs on java and you don't need to install anything to get eclipse going, so if we visit a customer where we do not have lots of privileges, we copy eclipse to the harddrive and start working.

Some disadvantages are: the total code is at least some 200mb of files (huge download) and it runs on the java-platform which sometimes gives some performance issues on windows computers.

Mapserver virtualspatialdata

It's a long time ago since i posted something here... (got married in the meantime). These days we are working on an application in which users can insert point-data in an mysql-table. The data is displayed in the map afterwards.

The application is based on chameleon/mapserver. To present the data virtualspatialdata is used. The mapserver Wiki gives a clear description on how to implement is. However i'd like to point you on a single issue.

When i first tested my virtual ogr file using ogrinfo (on a windows 2000 sp3 server), I recieved messages that the file gcs.csv could not be opened, containing the projection information.

ERROR 4: Unable to open EPSG support file gcs.csv. Try setting the GDAL_DATA environment variable to point to the directory containing EPSG csv files.
ERROR 1: Failed to import LayerSRS `EPSG:28992'.

The reason was that i hadn't run setenv.bat.

Later when i tried to view the virtualdatalayer in mapserver i got the same messages. Apparently mapserver/apache/ogr also didn't know where to look for the projection-files. After introducing the parameter gdal_data in apache config the layer was displayed properly.

SetEnv gdal_data "/ms4w/tools/ogr-utils/data"

Good luck trying out yourself.

Msn virtual earth

So it seams MSN copied google's ideas to create a world-mapping-application... Unfortunately they lack speed and functionality. Test it at http://virtualearth.msn.com. It seems they virtually destroyed Apple's headquarters (1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014) and reinserted old farm houses (= in that specific situation they used old photographic material).

*fun* Do you know what material the moon is made of primarily? Find out by zooming in at any position at http://moon.google.com

chameleon-shirts

I recently noticed you can buy t-shirts with the chameleon logo, so from now, you can show all you're friends, what you're working on (and hope they understand).

http://www.cafepress.com/maptools

satellite imagery of europe in Google maps

Google recently added satellite imagery of the whole world to its fast mapping service. Until now only the united states could enjoy their fast mapping service. But we're very pleased to see the whole world getting visible in google maps

Very interesting is the imagery of Africa. A part of the world where not much internet-mapping is available (in most cases, no maps are available). Maybe the google service can aid scientists and development workers there by providing easy-to-use, fast imagery of the region. Personally i visited Cameroon, Kenya and Guinee and could easily point out the various trips i made to maintains and cities.

Variables in CF

Try this out...

<cfoutput>
<cfset x["y.z"] = "a">
#x.y.z#
<cfset x.y.z = "b">
#x.y.z#
#x["y.z"]#
<cfdump var="#x#">
</cfoutput>


the amazing world of CF

Introduction of new srid to load autodesk data for mapguide not supported by oracle?

In the Netherlands we have (had) a lot of problems when introducing Autodesk geo data in Oracle Spatial, because of the different spatial reference systems used in both applications. A company ISIS (these days part of Bentley) develloped a fix for the problem, which is widely used by local administration in the Netherlands (organisations using mapguide FlexiWeb).

In the fix ISIS, amongst other things, introduces a new srid in Oracle (srid 19025), similar to RD (dutch standard system).

However yesterday i learned this fix is not officially supported by Oracle. So lots of organisations will miss oracle support when there software solution fails. The province of Limburg didn't agree with the ISIS-fix and tried to find another solution, so they brought a team of Oracle, Autodesk and other developers together working on an Oracle supported fix. The project is in full progress and a fix is expected soon.

read more
introducing an srid in oracle (autodesk)
known bug in 8i/9i with srs's (autodesk)
problems showing oracle data in mapguide (autodesk)
Loading data from autodesk (oracle)
Nice mapping application (limburg)

the world of fusedoccing

off course i don't have to explain the good sed of documenting the code... but some years ago, we didn't have the same habits to document code. So these days, while upgrading some fusebox 1.0 applicatons to nowerdays standards (read all about fusebox methodology), we had to add lots of documentation in the scripts too. But fortunately some guys develloped tools to make our work much easier. I used three tools to automate the code documentation and i liked them!

AutoFusedoc is a plugin for Homesite/CFstudio. When pressing ctrl-shft-d it scans the current document and generates fusedoc including io-parameters it can find in the cf-code and the name of the current file. It saves you lots of hours for only $50,- (if you have applications of 1000+ files like we do)

There is a tool out there, fusedocer, with which you can automatically read all fusedocs from all files in your Fusebox 3 application and generate a nice report from it. We're currently improving the tool, to make it more stable (right now it crashes on simple cf-errors). When we're ready you can download it here. Those guys are working on a version for Fusebox 4.

Fusebox 3 to 4 converter: well if you've got your code in FB 3, why not change it to 4 and profit from the performance gain. It needs some manual fine tuning, but the xml-generation is perfect!

Macromedia -> Adobe

Yesterday, word got out that abobe purchases macromedia for $3.4 bilion. http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html. Wow... What will happen to Freehand, Dreamweaver and Fireworks? The most elegible candidates for dissolving in Illustrator, GoLive and Photoshop. And what will come of Flash, will it all be (open) SVG or PDF soon? Time will tell.
Other issue: ColdFusion incorporated open source pdf-generation in it's latest release. I guess it will be depreciated soon.
By the way Macromedia still sells Homesite and ColdFusion, which they acquired, when bying Allaire a couple of years back, probably the Macromedia product line will still be available for a while.

Smallworld 4 introduced

GE introduces smallworld 4, the gis-system that lots of energy/gas/water distributors use to map their wires/lines/cables/tubes. Smallworld Internet Application Server brings their wires to the web. The server is WMS-compliant.

News about the 4-upgrade is that, unfortunately it is not downwards compatible to code added in Smallworld 3. So probably it will take up to 2 years to get everybody upgraded. Thank you GE, to having saved our developer-jobs.

alternative for a virtual oracle data layer in mapserver?

So you have got some non-spatial data in oracle, but containing simple xy attributes and want to map it using mapserver (event theme)? Don't start defining a virtual data layer using ogr (especially difficult if you have to compile it with unixodbc). Just define a (materialized) view in Oracle 9i in which you convert the x-y attributes to a spatial-field, and add the view as a normal oracle layer:

select
MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY(
2001,
900211,
MDSYS.SDO_POINT_TYPE(st.x, st.y, NULL),
NULL,
NULL) as geom
from world.data st

good luck!

By the way mapserver 4.4.2 has arrived (i hope they fixed some mis-configurations in the precomiled win32 binaries with oracle support)

Mapping Google

Recently http://maps.google.com added some satellite images to their map-service. With their tile-strategy, it works amazingly fast. Open http://maps.google.com and click on 'satellite' (in the upper right corner). The resolution isn't perfect, but the performance is!

Have a look at this article, this dude checked out how google maps works
as simple as possible, but no simpler: Mapping Google

New css stuff

i'm frequently amazed what those dhtml-boys can do with just a little html, javascript and css. check these out:

• clagnut.com (firefox only) these guys present draggable, resizable stickies (found at www.stylegala.com).
• alistapart.com shows a pure css menu, but it looks very non-css.
• Walter zorn created some scripts to enable dynamic drawing in your html-website. Draw a polygon and submit, write the form-fields to your oracle spatial db and a simple red-lining module was born.

By the way, do you need a small, free, windows photo editor and don't want to install the gimp? Try http://photofiltre.free.fr

label angle in mapserver

The department of natural resources Minnesota set up a demo-site with some nice features of mapserver. All nicely documented with examples and downloads. Go have a look. Things like label angels dynamix label sizing, automatic rotation for lines(streets), live mapping and dynamic queries. Visit http://maps.dnr.state.mn.us/mapserver_demos/tests40/index.html

FGS Linux Installer

on www.maptools.org a new package (FGS) is available. This package can install all required components to compile mapserver at once on Linux. The following distibutions are supported:

• Redhat 8, 9
• Fedora Core 1, 2, 3
• RedHat Enterprise 3
• Debian
• Gentoo
• Suse 8

The package contains things like apache, php, mapserver, gd, gdal, proj, tiff, jpg and freetype

Extra modules are available like mysql,postgis,chameleon. I hope this package solves some installation problems for some of you. Somebody any idea why suse 9 is not supported?

alternatives for sqlplus/enterprice manager console

Several alternatives exsist for oracle's sqlplus/enterprice manager console. Some of them free (gpl), some of them commercial.

• www.sqltools.net brings a free lightweight oracle client, but unfortunately without support for spatial fields.
• www.sqlpal.com has a free java client that can connect through jdbc, for that reason it doesn't need oracle client to be installed at the local machine. sqlpal can't show spatial fields either.
• www.toadsoft.com sells a commercial client which can show spatial fields, and a free client which can not (free license has to be updated every 3 months).
• www.dbtools.com sells a commercial client that can connect to lots of databases, including oracle (display of spatial fields unknown). Their free license can connect to mysql, postgres, interbase and sqllite. Very usefull to convert msAccess to MySql

Mapserver hosting

It's hard to find an affordable mapserver host. These are the ones i found. From each site i chose the cheapest option.

mapserver hosting	price ?/month	disk	postgis	mysql	php
http://htmlx.com	15	500	y	y	y
http://www.zopecms.de/
http://www.dvm.at/mapserver.html	36	1000	y	y
www.gishosting.net
www.nieuwland.nl	25	100	y	y	y
http://www.eikonix.net	89	1000		y
http://www.sibern.com.au	110		y	y	y
http://www.gdv-gis.de/hosting/	30	500	n	n	n
http://mapserver.eligeos.org/
http://textdrive.com/	12	300		y	y
http://www.gislogic.com/hosting.cfm			y	y	y
http://www.pghoster.com			y	y	y

did i forgot your company, send me an email.

webbased ftp client

Lots of you are behind firewalls, or can't install progs... i found a nice solution 4U guys. On the website www.net2ftp.com you can upload and download files from an ftp-server in a webpage.

By the way, wanna see some nice aerials from barcelona, check this out: http://www.gencat.net/ptop/actuacions/hipermapa.htm

So you wanna boycot some bad companies...

Go to http://www.karmabanque.com/ and subscribe. Choose different companies to boycot and see their share-value go down (and your karma-dollars go up). Bad companies are companies who ruin the environment, earn money on childrens labour or do other bad things to society (like mc donalds, microsoft, Exxon, Ryanair). Good work guys.
After subscribing send me an email and i'll invite you to some boycots (the way to earn karma-dollars)

"name can't be empty"... what?

Somewhere deep in my cfc's i got this message thrown by ColdFusion mx61. The problem appeared simple, Somehow my datasource variable got blank. Cold fusion throws this descriptive error when you ask [cfquery dsn=""]Select...

And now this: while doing CF-webservices 1000 of times already i've seen the CF-quote: '[java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError : Dependent CFC type(s) have been modified. Please refresh your web service client.]'. Some discussion can be found on the net, but nobody really can tell what's going on. First try to clean up the webservices cache in cf (use this script). That solved some, but not all problems. I ended up renaming all the cfc's i extend with the webservice and the references to them. That did the trick, but in the end leaves me with cfc's called error23.cfc
i hope so much CF7 solves these issues. Hope to tell you about it soon.

Now it's time for some interactivity

Hi, just a little fizzling around with inlinewms

click=zoom in;ctrl-click=zoom out;shift-click=recenter

why guinea? well i've got some family there...

mapserver/oracle on win2000/iis

Oh man, i hate iis, you can never find what aspect of it is causing a problem, just too many screens and options (each different per os/iis-version). Today i tried to install a mapserver precompiled binary on two servers (one winxp and one win2000).

after starting up by placing the files in the required directories, i found out (type mapserv.exe on the dos-prompt, fix dependencies until: 'This script can only be used to decode form results and should be initiated as a CGI process via a httpd server.') some more dll's were needed (msvcp60.dll (windows runtime) and a libpq.dll (postgis), both found in the fwtools package). Then all worked fine, on the winxp-test server (calling mapserv.exe as a cgi should result in 'No query information to decode. QUERY_STRING is set, but empty. '). When i repeated the procedure in the win2000 machine up to type mapserv at the dos-promt. But when trying to call mapserv.exe as a cgi things went wrong. First the very descriptive message 'file not found'. Appeared to be a problem with rights, i had to tell this IIS to permit .exe programs (also you have to allow script execution in the folder). When i fixed that i got a blank response on all my requests. I thought iis was the problem, but when i replaced the binary by a slightly newer binary found at http://fwtools.maptools.org, an answer as expected was shown (but this binary doesn't have oracle support unfortunately). So somewhere in that server is a misconfiguration or dependency, which i can't resolve, because mapserver-logging was not triggered (Does iis have a logging option?).

oh, do i love compiling my own progs in linux, easily add all the options i want, and skip all the utilities i don't need, they only give unwanted side effects.

By the way i used gdaltindex.exe (part of fwtools) for the first time today. It is used to make a tileindex of a set op jpg/tiff aerial photo's (and add all photo's as a single layer in mapserver). This really works great: 'c:\profi\fwtools\bin\gdaltindex indexname c:\data\photos\*.jpg'. Be sure to have a world file (did you know all *.tfw (for tiff) *.sdw (for mrSid) can be renamed to *.wld and instantaniously work for jpg's) for each image (type 'copy *.tfw *.wld' at the dos-prompt). If the location of the photo's changes, re-run gdaltindex or open the shape dbf in Excel and search/replace the file location in the location field.

I forgot to tell you about the ora-03113 error, according to resources on the net, it is the error oracle throws when it doesn't know what went wrong. Since we were getting it when creating materialized views on large tables, i suspect it's a memory problem (experts say: try increasing the buffer size... well were can i find the buffer-button?)

FarCry open cms in cf

Unfortunately one of the greatest open source CF projects is not available in cfopen.org. Farcry is a spin-off of the discontinued Allaire Spectra project. Spectra has been used by some large firms, a lot of them switched to Farcry now. It takes some time to get used to the large file structure, but possibilities are limitless.
Read about FarCry at http://farcry.daemon.com.au/

New gdal version 1.2.6 available

Frank Warmerdam announced last sunday there is a new version of gdal 1.2.6. With one of the most important improvements, support for mrSid. Gdal is the GPL spatial conversion lib used by mapserver to convert all types of geodata to geodata used by Mapserver. http://www.gdal.org. Gdal enables oracle,postgis,ecw and much more in mapserver.

Cold Fusion Image manager for htmlarea 2 and htmlarea 3

Before i started using fckeditor, i've been using htmlarea, i've rebuild the phpimage_manager-module to CF. I got some questions to share the code. Here it is. It's a while back, so i'm not sure all off the configuration still is right. The code is based on the Wei-module.

download image_manager4htmlarea3.zip

For htmlarea 2 I develloped a basic file manager in coldfusion. Get it here: image_manager4htmlarea2.zip

Recently the developers of htmlarea discontinued htmlarea 2/3 and removed it from their website. They launched a new site, htmlarea, in which they offer a listing of all kinds of wyswyg editors. htmlarea is only available via the wei-module at sourceforge.

cfopen.org

This weekend found a nice initiative: http://www.cfopen.org/, which must have been around since mid 2004. Unforunately not much is going on in the forums. So i'm curious whether there will be some response on my questions about the two most interesting projects: cfbughunt and cfusergroup. Perhaps the coldfusion community is not used to the world of sharing, since all of them payed a lot to macromedia to get started in the first place and most of them still develop apps for CF on Windows using db's like Access and MsSQL.
But still a nice idea, i wish'm good luck.

Weird bug in winXP 'no disk in \device\harddisk1\dr12' when starting QuickTime

Another weird micr$oft bug... (or is it a quicktime bug). When starting QuickTime a popup keeps showing up showing the massage 'no disk in \device\harddisk1\dr12' (and none in \device\harddisk2\dr14, \device\harddisk3\dr15, \device\harddisk4\dr18, 12 popups in total).

Microsoft wrote a technote on it, but that didn't work for me...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330137/en-us

Finally found an answer on some german site.

http://nickles.de/c/a/forum2-537724576.htm

They claim QuickTime keeps a list of recently used items and every time QuickTime starts, checks for the items in the list. Some of the recently used items were on removable drives (memory stick). Quicktime (or is it windows) doesn't recognize the removable drive and shows the error.

Solve the problem by clearing the list of recently used items, or remove the file
c:\docs&seetings\all users\appdata\quicktime\QuickTimeFavorites.qtr

Oracle 9i 3D to 2D data for mapserver

Another weird thing we discovered in mapserver / OraSpatial is the fact that mapserver can not display 3D data. Fortunately Oracle has a function to reproject the data to 2D. To prevent that in each query, all the data is converted to 2d, before making the extent-selection we used a materialized view (snapshot) to reproject the data and keep it available for mapserver. In a snapsot all data is copied so it takes a lot of diskspace. In this months oracle magazine, u can read a nice article (http://oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/05-mar/o25data.html) on snapshots.

CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW ITEM2D
BUILD IMMEDIATE
REFRESH NEXT sysdate + 1
AS select
SDO_LRS.CONVERT_TO_STD_GEOM(i.geometry,m.diminfo) as loc
from
item i,
user_sdo_geom_metadata m
where
m.table_name = 'item'
and
m.column_name = 'GEOMETRY'

In for example Toad, the materialized view is not stored in the list of views, but as a table. However the snapshot can not be removed using drop table, instead use drop materialized view ?item2D? (in quotes). Don?t forget to create a new spatial index on the materialized view (since its not a normal view)

INSERT INTO USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA (TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, DIMINFO, SRID)
VALUES ('ITEM2D', 'LOC',
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ARRAY
(MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('X', 180000, 220000, 0.005),
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('Y', 380000, 450000, 0.005)
),
19025);

and

CREATE INDEX si_ITEM2D on ITEM2D(LOC) indextype is mdsys.spatial_index

Finally installed CFMX 7

We finally got some CFMX 7 servers up and running. Some weird problems occured which we can not find in the macromedia forums: Every time CF starts up (on a SUSE Linux box), it tries to register in the apache config. Occasionally the server hangs when it finds out it has already been registered.

Well this is a moment we've been waiting for quite a while. Major issues fixed in this release are:

• Better cfc/Web services support (as we found out unfortunately not all the wishes of the community)
• querynew function can finally set fieldtypes for colums (and it works great!).
• cfdocument and cfreport can easily create pdf docs of db-content (first tests look great, support for divs)

Mapserver project 4 Mambo CMS

Recently a mr Ye Shakka started a new project to bring GIS (UMN mapserver) to the popular world of Mambo CMS (PHP/MYSQL). Off course we encourage the efforts of mr Ye Shakka, but wouldn't it be nicer to integrate exsisting projects into Mambo, like mapbender, chameleon or very basic solutions like inlineWMS and WMC.

Afterall a good moment to join the Mambo community, however when i tried to subscribe the system failed and sent me a blank confirmation email.