GeoNotes Blog | GeoNotes

Use Excel’s MID and FIND to extract characters from varying positions

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on July 8, 2011

Use this to grab the values after a certain value, of the whole string the value doesn’t exist. The concatenation ensure that the value is always found. The final Len(A1) forces the entire length of the string after the value to be shown regardless of what it it. the final... [Read More]

USGS GNIS column names and shapefiles

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on May 26, 2011

If you try to convert the USGS geographic names (GNIS) text files from the website straight into shapefiles, you will have field name collisions because the field names willbe truncated to 10 characters which result in duplicate field names. [Read More]

PostGIS Install and Cloning Ubuntu Systems Notes

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on May 11, 2011

sudo apt-get remove –purge\ [Read More]

find to copy files into single directory

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on April 29, 2011

Useful little one liners. This one makes copy of subset of dir/ and below based on finding files that match the criteria. In this case, I wanted all .doc files copied into a single place. [Read More]

My MySQL latest config file

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on April 29, 2011

I never record this stuff and I always wish I did. So here’s a working MySQL config file that I’m using on a linux virtual machine with 2GB of memory. Notes and all so I don’t keep having to look stuff up. [Read More]

File listing ditties

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on April 29, 2011

Here are some simple bash scripts to list files into a text files that can be used to catalog stuff. Most of the time I use the last one. ```bash [Read More]

Benchmarking MySQL

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on April 22, 2011

So I’m trying to figure which old machine to turn into a little mySQL number cruncher. So, I’m going to do some clean installs of Ubuntu server on each and run this little script (with the same my.cnf) and see how they fair. Perhaps you will this useful, run it... [Read More]

Run queries in sequence in Access

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on April 22, 2011

I’ve gotten so used to using “real” databases, that I find myself frustrated when I have to switch back to Microsoft Access. But, hey, it’s good for a lot of things. [Read More]

Screen capture programs

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on April 22, 2011

I always need to capture computer screens into graphic files. Even for my Mom who needs the occasional over-email tutorial. So here is a list of screen capture utitlities that I’ve used over the years. Snag-it is by far my tool of choice. But really, all will work. Do you... [Read More]

Tables of Tables from MySQL

By John C. Zastrow

Posted on April 21, 2011

From Matthew Crowley on the MySQl forums (http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?101,8004), this php script will output a DESC of all databases and tables in MySQL. It needs some formatting for the output, but it works and might be handy later. I really just need to get around to figuring out how to do... [Read More]