I’m Sorry! – or – The Accidental Google Plus Worm

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Whew, what a crazy day.

This morning I was minding my own business doing a Google Search, when the flashing red notifier for Google+ went went off and sucked me in for a couple minutes. In that brief amount of time, I started off a chain reaction…

I saw a post by Matt Manolides asking for recommendations of geo people to encircle. Well, I mused, this is inherently a social platform, so let’s see if we can exploit some of its intrinsic properties to… who am I kidding??? I just figured I’d see if people would add themselves to a list.

The reaction? More than I counted on! About twelve hours after posting, my initial message had been commented on by almost 60 people, received 12 +1′s, and been shared 28 times.

Whoops...

This is where my plan(?) kinda fell apart. Though the experiment was a partial success, it also annoyed some people considerably. Many of the good folks that have (had?) me in circles also have each other in circles. And every time one of them chose to “Share” my post, all of the people who had encircled them would see it again. And again.

So, in closing, I bring you back to the title of this post: I’m sorry! If I annoyed you with this experiment, please try to forgive me. I won’t do it again… at least not until Google comes up with an equivalent to Twitter’s native ReTweet that filters out multiple notifications. :)

-J

P.S. If you aren’t on Google+ and would like an invite, just drop me a line by way of my profile.

P.P.S. Darn, didn’t quite make it a year…

FDO’s SpatiaLite Support Goes Native

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Earlier today, Haris Kurtagic at SL-King announced the initial release of a new FDO1 provider for SpatiaLite. This is great news, adding to the native SpatiaLite2 support ecosystem which includes GDAL/OGR, QGIS, GeoAlchemy, and probably others (let me know in the comments!).

Being in a precipitous mood, I decided to plunge in and get my clichés wet. The first step was to attempt to use the new provider with Jackie Ng‘s FDO Toolbox, my go-to GUI tool for examining FDO data sets. I followed these steps:

  1. Downloaded the 32 bit FDO 3.5 version of the new SpatiaLite provider from the SL-King website.
  2. Copied all of the files into my C:\Program Files\FDO Toolbox\FDO directory.
  3. Copied the contents of the providers_kingspatialite_entry.xml file into the providers.xml file before the closing FeatureProviderRegistry tag, modifying the FDO version string to 3.5.
  4. Discovered that something had a dependency on the MS Visual C++ 7.1 runtime, so I found msvcr71.dll and msvcp71.dll on another PC and copied them into the same directory

With this in place, I was able to quickly connect to the SpatiaLite demo database:

And browse and visualize the data:

Confidence buoyed, I decided to take it a step further and attempt to connect to the same data in MapGuide. The initial steps were the same as for FDO Toolbox (adding the provider to the MapGuide FDO folder).

Once configured, I was able to quickly add a connection to the test database, but I had to manually hack in a coordinate system reference and map extents. This is due to an incompatibility between SpatiaLite and MapGuide’s coordinate system handling, and I’m hoping that the WKT projection support in the next version of SpatiaLite allows Haris to fix this.

With the data connection and its spatial context override in place, creating layer and map definitions was dead easy, and allowed me to quickly get to data visualization.

Next Up? Making the SpatiaLite FDO provider work with GeoREST. Out of time for tonight though…

UPDATE (2010-09-01): I was able to get the SpatiaLite provider working with the current preview version of GeoREST with very little difficulty, and the next official build of GeoREST will probably include this provider. If you’d like to play around with it earlier, you can download a totally unsupported package of GeoREST with Spatialite from my temp files area for a limited time only :)

-J

Notes:

1. FDO is a geospatial object/relational mapping framework, allowing consistent programmatic access to dozens of GIS data formats. It is used by MapGuide Open Source, FDO Toolbox, GeoREST, Autodesk’s geospatial products like Topobase, MapGuide Enterprise and AutoCAD Map 3D, and is also included in applications like Safe Software‘s FME and 1Spatial‘s MapRelate.

2. SpatiaLite takes SQLite‘s concept of database-in-a-file, and turns it into geodatabase-in-a-file, offering a full suite of geospatial query abilities in a lightweight extension to SQLite. FDO already has a robust SQLite provider that uses its own open geometry format, metadata, and spatial functions. In contrast, SL-King‘s new provider is intended for users who prefer to use the SpatiaLite geometry format, and takes advantage of SpatiaLite’s built-in GIS capabilities.

Stack Overflow for GIS Launches from Area 51 into Orbit!

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Whoo hoo!

The Geographic Information Systems Area 51 proposal has entered the private beta period. Over the next week or so, folks who committed to the proposal have a chance to create the initial shape of how this site will work for our community. If you committed, don’t forget to go to http://gis.stackexchange.com/ to help out on this critical part of the process!

After this week, it will open to public beta, where a wider audience will be able to access it, and the community norms will be further refined.

While I was waiting for this proposal to reach the beta phase, I participated in the Pro Webmasters proposal, and it’s been a blast! I highly recommend that you have a look on the Area 51 staging website and see if there are other areas where you can lend a hand, or where you might need some intelligent collective answers.

As a reminder, all of the content on the Stack Exchange sites is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution / ShareAlike licence, so these are truly community resources we’re building.

-J

OSGeo BC Meet-Up July 27 (during GeoWeb)

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Martin recently announced that we will be holding an OSGeo British Columbia meet-up in Vancouver on July 27. We have timed this to coincide with GeoWeb; it falls on the Tuesday evening after the workshops are over and before the conference sessions start.

This session is open to all, so if you’re going to be at GeoWeb, or are in the area and want to hang out and eat pizza with some Cool GeoGeeks (oxymoron?) RSVP on the wiki!

We’re also looking for some presentation ideas; if you’ve got a burning desire, then please propose a topic on the wiki.

-J

Kusam Klimb + GPS Watch + Google Earth = Kool

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Please understand that an insane mountain challenge like the Kusam Klimb is about as far away from how I’d choose to spend my weekends as…. well… anything. Fortunately one of my co-workers, Ross Collicutt, is both a sports nut and a tech geek.

Jason Gut

Me
Ross at Gutbuster

Ross

This past week was an interesting bit of synchronicity. First, Ross took advantage of a Costco sale on the Garmin Forerunner 405, a really interesting bit of sports gadgetry that gives you real time location and performance information including heart rate.

Garmin Forerunner 405

Garmin Forerunner 405

Second, Google released Google Earth 5.2 with considerable enhancements including elevation profiles and the inclusion of additional data (such as heart rate) in its GPS import function.

Google Earth 5.2

Google Earth 5.2

And third, this weekend Ross took part in the Kusam Klimb, a gnarly 23 km long trek over Mount H”Kusam near Sayward BC, featuring rugged conditions and a 1.5 km change in elevation. Make sure you check out this year’s conditions…

Kusam Klimb

Kusam Klimb in Google Earth

After completing the event, Ross somehow managed to summon up the energy to post a link to his data upload on Facebook. I have to say, Garmin’s web-based visualizer is very nice! it combines a graph, a map, and gauges in a very clear and easy to use format.

Garmin Player

Garmin Player

If you visit the activity page, you will notice that below the map you can export as TCX, GPX, and KML files. Garmin’s KML file is actually a very nice time-enabled presentation, but it doesn’t include the heart rate or speed data. For this, you need to download the GPX file. The easiest way to open it in Google Earth is to drag it into the globe window. This pops up a dialogue asking what features you want in the generated KML, and then creates a new file in your Temporary Places.

Google Earth - GPS Data Import

GPS Data Import

Now the fun begins. Of course, the obvious first step is to click on the Play button in the time menu to watch Ross run the trail…

Google Earth GPX Animation

GPX Animation

But that capability has been there for a while. What I find really interesting is the extra data that the GPX file brought along for the ride: heart rate, elevation, and speed. You can see the heart rate and speed (I think it may pull elevation from the terrain) by right-clicking anywhere on the track and choosing Show Elevation Profile. This gives you a cool interactive screen where you can display up to two variables, position your mouse anywhere along the graph, and see the information on the globe.

The Run of Ross

Ross on the Kusam Klimb

I have to admit that I have some reservations about this. The profile was very usable, but the design didn’t really fit with the rest of the Google Earth interface, and I would have liked to see all three data points (elevation, speed, and heart rate) at once. Fortunately, Google is well known for its incremental improvements, and I’m sure that it will get better over time.

Something else you can do with GPX data is create a Tour of your run and follow along with dizzying swoops and dips :) To do this, import the GPX as a linestring instead of a track, then expand the legend until you get to the Path and click on the “Play” button, and finally save the path tour.

Play the Path

Play the Path

Save as Tour

Save as Tour

You may need to play around with the Tour Settings in the Google Earth options a bit to get the correct zoom and speed, but eventually you’ll end up with something like the link below. Download the file, expand it in the Google Earth menu, and double-click on the Tour for some dorm-room-Quake queasiness:

Run Ross Run!

Whew. Time for some hard-earned relaxation! ;)

-J