GeoNotes Blog

Notes for myself and others

  • Bye Bye Google Reader

     By John C. Zastrow

    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

     By John C. Zastrow

    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

     By John C. Zastrow

    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

     By John C. Zastrow

    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

     By John C. Zastrow

    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

     By John C. Zastrow

    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]

  • Improved File Listing Script

     By John C. Zastrow

    Posted on November 5, 2012

    Run this anywhere and it will recurse through your directories and make some readable output of your files. It’s set to list interesting things for GIS data. I also finally got it working where it will find all the .zip files and list their contents on most environments – even... [Read More]

  • Spatialite and Triggers to Update Data

     By John C. Zastrow

    Posted on October 19, 2012

    I finally decided to do a little demo here of a common feature I need on a lot of projects. We often have systems that maintain point locations of things (create, update, delete, view them) and having attributes of spatial relationship automatically applied to them is often quite handy. For... [Read More]