The new eee….

December 19th, 2007

Oh Yeh, this post is being written from my new asus eee pc… 7 inches of cool gadget. I dont think I have ever used a machine this small… so cool.

$399 for the pc, $19 for 1 gig RAM upgrade, $21 for a 4 gig SDHC card and there you have a pretty fun machine.

Here are some pics…

RAM installNew RAM going in…

!QGIS

QGIS running from a remote server!

Size Size compare with an IPOD…

Well, as I start to install more stuff I will post more info.  So far I am very happy and excited to be playing with the eee

aaronr General

Getting QGIS to install on windows AND support Python apps…

October 11th, 2007

So here are the simple (kind of) steps as of today to get a windows install of QGIS working that supports PyQt and the python bindings to QGIS… all with out having to compile anything:

1) Make sure you have Python 2.5 or newer installed on your machine… if you don’t have it you can download it from HERE (official) or HERE (my archive).

2) Install PyQt4.3.1 from HERE (official) or HERE (my archive)

3) Download and unpack THIS zip file. Copy the PyQt4 directory unpacked from the zip into your Python 2.5 site-packages directory. Make sure to save the old PyQt4 directory in the site-packages by renaming it in case something goes wrong!

4) Download and install QGIS from HERE (my archive). This is the latest release candidate from what_nick that is based on the Qt4.3.1 series.

5) In the QGIS install there are some GRASS documentation files that are missing and can cause warning dialogs to pop up when using the GRASS toolbox. You can unzip the contents of THIS archive into the QGISDIR\grass\docs\html directory to stop the warnings.

You can still follow the instructions HERE to build QGIS yourself and play to your hearts content, but I know that there are many windows users out there that really would just like to get moving without the hassle of compiling. This post is for you.

aaronr GIS Tool Install

FOSS4G 2007… Back home

October 2nd, 2007

Well, it was a great week in Victoria BC for this years FOSS4G conference! Besides the great chance to hang out with the OS GIS community, it was a great chance to take a look at what is hot in our field. Keep checking back to the FOSS4G web site as many of the presentations as well as video from the plenaries are being uploaded.

My talk on the use of PyQGIS (Python bindings to QGIS) for development of some stand alone desktop tools went well. My powerpoints are here (6 meg). I even have a couple of snapshots of giving the talk (thanks to Gary Sherman).

Gary Sherman gave a great workshop on Monday. He has posted the slides and ISO image of the live CD on the QGIS blog. Here are a couple images that show Gary laying it out and some of the students soaking it in. I also had a voice recorder and have made streaming mp3’s of the session available at the following links:

Clip #1 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #2 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #3 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #4 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #5 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #6 (streaming or mp3)

We also had a great QGIS BOF session which was well attended by a diverse group of developers, users, and interested newbies. All in all I think QGIS had a great showing at FOSS4G and am looking forward to pushing many of the ideas talked about there forward.

aaronr General

Look who’s watching…

June 18th, 2007

Well, to my amazement I found this little nugget in my logs this afternoon (click to see full size)…

esri

Looks like someone from Redlands is drinking afternoon coffee while watching some vids!

aaronr General

New video demo’s…

May 15th, 2007

Making Movies

Well, you can now watch me fumble around installing a new Ubuntu system and getting it all ready for development using much of the Open Source GIS stack, including QGIS, PostGIS, GDAL/OGR and many others…

Of particular interest:

1) Demo of installing new 0.9 branch of QGIS on Ubuntu Linux

2) Demo of using Python bindings for QGIS

I have a habit of installing from source, and most of the demos I am producing are walking through the install process doing just that… beware!

Enjoy, and I would be interested if there are things in the Open Source stack that people are interested in seeing a demo of…

NOTE: you can link to the video page from the right pane of the blog window under GIS How-To’s -> Video

aaronr Uncategorized

April 23rd, 2007

URISA

Just returned from a week on the road and one of the highlights was GIS in Action, the Oregon and Southwest Washington URISA annual GIS event. There were over 300 people on site for 2 days of great talks, workshops and panels. I was asked again to host one of the Open Source sessions at the conference and we participated on Wednesday. I presented on the OSGeo, some sample applications of the Open Source GIS technology, and even had a quick online IRC chat with Chris Schmidt of Openlayers in front of the crowd. We also had Dean Anderson from Polk County talking about doing open development when confined to a proprietary environment (often the case in government). He had some great examples of developing Arc based software on SourceForge. Finally we had Deborah Bryant from the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL) to talk about government uptake of Open Source technology. She provides great insight to the front lines of getting Open Source accepted in main stream government. She runs the GOSCON conference and is a wealth of knowledge on the current state of Open Source in government, big and small.

All of the presentations from our Open Source session are posted in my presentation archive…

aaronr Conferences, GIS Industry, OSGeo

Demo’s of new web mapping decision support tools…

March 28th, 2007

film2

(UPDATE: Ecotrust has asked me to remove material related to the Calzone and Gulf Tool.  Please feel free to contact Ecotrust directly to find out more about those tools)

I have been working on a new decision support tool for Ecotrust over the last few months, so today I decided to make some screen casts (with audio!) of some of our work.

Cal-Zone – Web based DST based on Marxan / Marzone for helping evaluate site selection of marine protected areas. Marxan / Marzone results are generated and stored in PostGIS for display via OpenLayers. New windowing functionality introduced to allow for future enhancements such as multi-run comparisons and use of region of interest tools for site selection.

http://www.reprojected.com/demo/cal-zone-demo.html

Gulf Tool – Web based DST based around scenario development for Gulf of Mexico fisheries. Uses a Chameleon based frontend, Mapserver on the backend and all data storage and queries through PostGIS. GMT is used for graphing.

http://www.reprojected.com/demo/gulf-demo.html

Just a snapshot into some of the DST development we are undertaking and very excited about. Hope you enjoy…

aaronr GIS Projects Ecotrust, General

CUGOS – Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source

March 20th, 2007

CUGOSians,

Hope all are well. I just wanted to send out a quick reminder that we will be having our first CUGOS meeting tomorrow (Wednesday – 03/21/07) at the Seattle LizardTech offices. We will kick things off at 5:30pm and wrap-up by 7pm. Some of us will most likely grab a beer near by after as well. Looks to be a great turnout with about 30 new people signed up!

I am really looking forward to meeting everyone and making these meetings a great venue for social interaction and learning for Open Source GIS professionals. See you all tomorrow!

aaronr GIS Industry, General

Planet Geospatial Voodoo…

March 7th, 2007

Voodoo

Well, I am back again after being been hit by the Planet Geospatial Voodoo. James has been nice enough to go under the hood of the ever so sensative PG and re-link to my blog. Must have been dropped in the shuffle of the last few months, but rest assured I have not gone away. I have had some new info posted since last I was linked here and hope that some people find it useful…

New Presentation

New Paper

CUGOS

aaron_racicot General

New Open Source Paper Submitted

March 2nd, 2007

CZ07

Just posted an extended abstract for Coastal Zone 07 to take place in Portland OR July 22nd-26th. Great to get some more Open Source geospatial published…

aaronr Conferences, GIS Projects, GIS Tools, OSGeo