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My Boss asked me to do some quick and dirty GIS analysis on Friday and for some reason ArcGIS 10 was not working out for me… I had installed QGIS a couple of days previous since I wanted to check out the mosaicking capabilities after I read somewhere that the program was faster for creating raster mosaics than ArcGIS so I was curious. The first time I tried that functionality I was able to take 10 images and create a mosaic out of this in less than 2 minutes so guess the rumors were true. I discovered that QGIS does not support JP2 on all platforms so  I’ve had some issues with the mosaic engine after that. I can’t seem to get the script to mosaic a directory of Tiffs… I have to do them a little bit at a time. I was able to do 30 in a few minutes.

Back to Friday… so I needed to take a series of irregular shaped polygons and create a 500’ buffer around the lot of them. I was trying to use the Geoprocessing wizard in ArcGIS for this and kept getting an error about “data source was empty.” No clue what was going on there and did not have time to figure it out so after a couple of times I fired up QGIS found what I needed under the Vector Analysis menu, made a few setting changes and PUSHED the BUTTON. QGIS performed this tasks in a few seconds. It was so fast I was like where is the error, where did the file go? I eventually found the file and added it to my project (you can do this automatically but I forgot to check the little box). I added the new polygons with the 500’ buffer to ArcGIS and noticed that QGIS did not create a buffer around one of the polygons. After zooming into the offending polygon I noticed that there was some self intersection going on there so QGIS buffered a part of the polygon but not the larger part. Great now I have to edit this thing…

I did not know how to edit the polygon in QGIS at all so after trying a couple of things I gave up and decided to throw it back in ArcGIS where I was more comfortable with the editing bit. First thing I noticed was that the data was in a different projection system so I had to re-project my data before I started to edit… After that I was moving the file back and forth between the two programs and eventually got what I was after. Lessons for me is to learn how to use the editing tools in QGIS and figure out how to get my projects to default to the State plane coordinate system I work with most of the time. I came across this nice little guide and so I’ve solved this problem, now on to those editing tools.

I had tried QGIS back when I had my Mac Mini and have to say it has matured since then. The latest version has some really solid features and there are a number of plugins available that add extra functionality. I’m eager to try the off-line editing capabilities to help with some field based editing  projects. Since QGIS is free , I can deploy this without fear that the GIS license police will come knocking. There is even a FREE Android version. Too bad there is none for the iPad yet so I can test this out but the good thing is that the Tablets I’m looking to deploy GIS capabilities to are running the full-blown version of Windows 7.  I wish there was better support for ArcGIS File Geodatabases though. I found something about compiling Gdal from trunk and GDAL 1.9 support that makes no sense to me. So I’ll wait until they put this into the main product and use Personal GDB or shapefile for now.

I’m back after taking a break mainly from this site. I’ve been catching up on my reading and a few other projects which left time for little else. I’m still mulling around and planning to fix this site up since I’m getting bored with the current format. Hoping to get inspired but my day job is sucking up all my energy of late so not sure how much inspiration is going to happen.

Earlier today I came across a few more GIS apps for the iPad via Zite. Zite is a personalized magazine app I discovered when I first got my iPad. I’ve found a lot of useful info using this little app before and today I came across a field based GIS app ICMTGIS II you can read all about it at the link. I wanted to check it out so I fired up the App Store and searched for GIS and my gosh did the list grow from the last time I did a search. I found everything from an app I could not pronounce to an app called Wolf GIS. They range in price from “free” to $299.99.

I got distracted and downloaded Wolf GIS just to play around with it and it crashed after doing a search on some sample data you had to download. After launching the app again and searching it worked just fine. It’s rather limited unless you buy the app because you can’t import or export anything w/out a purchase. I was not about to purchase anything so I suppose all I can say is that it showed promise. If you need such an app read all about at at the Wolf GIS page. It seems that they are busy developing a sleeker sexier version to be released in June. Honestly I would wait for June before plopping down any $ on this.

If you need to do some serious GIS editing in the field then maybe that GIS Pro app for $299.99 is for you. There is a lighter version for $99 which lets you export KML and KMZ instead of shapefiles. It too looked promising but I wasn’t about to fork over $99 or $300 of money I don’t have to test it out. Has some offline editing features though.

I turned on my iDevices yesterday ad noticed that the red bad was lighted up instructing me to update my Apps. I hopped on my Wi-Fi, and looked to see what all the fuss was about and to my surprise there was an update for iBooks 2 featuring new interactive textbooks. Wish I had these when I was in school. After the update, I decided to have a look around and for some odd reason the first book I tried to find was an algebra book. Don’t know why I tried to find a book about algebra, was not my favorite topic in High School. Actually I did not mind algebra so much but had an awful teacher. On my way to browsing for algebra books I found a free preview textbook called  Life on Earth, a biology book by E.O. Wilson. The pictures looked really cool and it included videos. Its free so I pressed the download button. It was sort of late and the book was ~ 980 MB… that would take an hour or so to download… so I paused the download and went off to sleep. I resumed download earlier this evening and its still downloading as I type so I can’t say I’ve experienced the book quite yet. Just incase you did not get the invite Apple is now in the business of interactive electronic textbooks. Can’t wait until the download is finished to check this out. The textbooks are about $15 to think how much $ I could have saved on textbooks in College…  Mon $15 for a textbook? Granted you have to have an iDevice and Wi-Fi to download.  An iPad which is what I would use to view these books is ~$540, then you have to have Wi-Fi access to download which means some sort of broadband connection. These books aren’t exactly 10 MB so they are going to take a while in some of the areas with “crappy broadband connections.”  I hope that Apple release a cheaper iPad next Month or whenever the iPad 3 is coming out. It should not only be lighter in weight but lighter in price. If not to compete with the Kindle Fire at least to make the price point a little easier to swallow in these hard economic times. Perhaps the textbooks are a sign of more iPad 3 goodness???

White willow (Salix alba) is a natural source of salicylic acid

I was yapping on the phone with my Mom about stomach issues having had a share of problems of my own on Friday. She was complaining about her stomach being upset for not very obvious reasons. So I was giving her my $100/hr pre- Dr.’s visit diagnosis. You see she’s already been tested for a number of issues and thus far the Doctors have found nothing. My diagnosis was some form of food allergy or the obvious one stress. Anyway, we got to discussing what she was cooking for the evening, she was getting ready to make Stew peas and rice a tasty Jamaican dish with a lot of kidney beans in it. Now I know that both of us have had some issues with the kidney beans in the past. We like kidney beans but kidney beans does not like us very much and all sort of stomach woes tend to result within minutes after consumption.  My Mom told me that she can have the tasty dish it with Beano or Maalox. I looked up the ingredients for Maalox and found a host of inactive ingredients I could not pronounce and a few for which I know I’m allergic to. One warning on the label got me thinking:

“Allergy alert:Contains salicylate. Do not take if you are

• allergic to salicylates (including aspirin)
• taking other salicylate products

I looked up some more info on the Salicylate business and found a host of info here including foods and other common goods that contain Salicylate. The list of foods that may contain this ingredient had me wondering about some of my own stomach troubles…

There is a  food guide here that rate foods and drinks according to the amount of Salicylate in them. Now I have no idea what’s up with my Mom’s stomach issues and I’m not saying it has to do with any Salicylate sensitivity of any kind but I came across this info and perhaps it might help someone out there who has been having some stomach and other issues of late.

Cool Image I found from Couch Ave

Wow! This year sort of sneaked up on me although I’m glad 2011 is over. It was a rough year, we had some of the worst snow storms I’ve seen since I’ve lived here, some serious budget cuts at work, and a whole lot of working and what seems like going around in circles the last part of the year. So to 2011 I say goodbye and Good riddance…  I’m hoping to spend more time with my family this year, get more exercise, and take more time out of my schedule to relax. I’m also looking to not get so stressed out about work, which means getting more help with those unusually large projects we have going and organizing and cleaning those databases and servers that have gotten out of hand the past year.  Yah I have high hopes for this year can’t wait to see how things went come this time 2013.

Beannachd Dia dhuit!