• I Love LIDAR

    Posted on April 12, 2013

    Over the years I’ve tasted good bear, coffee, and hot cocoa. Now I have a hard time drinking the cheap stuff– though I try not to drink expensive wine for fear of losing my wallet. I’m about to get another expensive taste: LIDAR data. I’ve never worked with it before,... [Read More]

  • Spatialite wishlist for 2013

    Posted on April 1, 2013

    The Spatialite project and its family of products is progressing and gaining a larger following by the day. Growth seems to be coming from its apparent target audience – mobile developers (though I rely on it for desktop use). This is likely to only snowball as Spatialite acceptance increases and... [Read More]

  • Find listen ports on your linux

    Posted on March 22, 2013

    For example, if you only want to see TCP connections, use netstat –tcp. This shows a list of TCP connections to and from your machine. The following example shows connections to our machine on ports 993 (imaps), 143 (imap), 110 (pop3), 25 (smtp), and 22 (ssh).It also shows a connection... [Read More]

  • Bye Bye Google Reader

    Posted on March 14, 2013

    Now Google Reader, next Gmail. The Internets are abuzz with news that Google is going to kill off the Google personal RSS Aggregator called Reader. I use Reader everyday. Even more than Gmail. So this is another example of the evils of SaaS and cloudy stuff. You don’t own it.... [Read More]

  • Wget examples

    Posted on February 20, 2013

    I keep having to Google wget incantations. So, I’m going to just write some common ones down here. The spell at the moment is below and can be used with my previous post about processing EPA WQX/STORET domain values into useful tables: [Read More]

  • Importing EPA WQX Domains into MySQL Tables

    Posted on February 19, 2013

    I wanted fresh WQX domain values from the STORET web service that are updated daily ( http://www.epa.gov/storet/wqx/wqx_getdomainvalueswebservice.html ) – which are provided in XML format. But, it’s not a friendly format for most software. Excel and Access “see it” but they don’t make useful tables out of them. It turns... [Read More]

  • OGC Geopackage [GPKG] on the street

    Posted on January 14, 2013

    I am thrilled to see the OGC Geopackage [GPKG] spec hit the street and see Sandro, Brad and Spatialite taking such a prominent role there. Using Spatialite as the vector reference implementation makes a lot of sense. The spec does seem a little bloated to me. But OTOH, sometimes I... [Read More]

  • Spatialite is my default

    Posted on January 9, 2013

    Like James Fee, and a few others: I love Spatialite and want to use it more. I find myself keeping maybe three 500MB .sqlite files in my Dropbox folder with my favorite and newly found data ready for use. Although I have access to and use ArcMap at home and... [Read More]

  • ogrinfo and gdalinfo script to document data

    Posted on November 29, 2012

    I needed to recursively document a bunch of Shapefiles and geotiffs in a hierarchy of directories (soon file geodatabses). I can’t use Arc*anything so I’m using ogrinfo and gdalinfo in many directories. I started using xargs, but ran into weirdness beyond white characters, and involving bash string manipulation (I’m running... [Read More]