Sovereignty and Open Source
Open source geospatial tools are good. I have been making some form of that argument for most of my career, especially on this blog. The mature projects are equal to or better than their proprietary alternatives. The communities that build and maintain them represent…
I find it funny that ESRI likes to play up all the new features in AGOL. But they still cannot figure out how to keep me logged in like every other website can.
Yeah that little Keep Me Logged-in checkbox doesn’t do a damn thing.
We still have some legacy systems hitting it for read only access for a few more weeks, otherwise I’d just take the entire thing off-line.
Let’s see on Monday morning how many people listened to me about switching over to our newest SDE database.
I’m just sitting here killing all rights to all of the layers & tables. I know some people ignored our earlier emails and are going to be complaining that we shut down the server.
Milwaukee is pretty spectacular. And now you have a good excuse to visit! Submit a presentation proposal for GIS-Pro 2026 by March 23: thegpn.org/page/GIS-Pro...
Dear Census Bureau,
Please stop telling my townships to contact me about their boundary changes. Because most decades, they don’t 🤬 change! The last (only) time we had a change was about 120 years ago.
They don’t change! At least not so often you need to tell them to contact the county every year🙄
Not quite. Heretics yes.
Heathens, no. We have nothing to do with that BS. Please don’t rope us in with them. We generally want to live and let live. Each person can do their own thing.
🎤 Call for Presenters: GIS-Pro 2026 | Milwaukee, WI
Have a GIS project you’re proud of?
A workflow that saved time (or sanity)?
A lesson learned the hard way that others could learn from?
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đź“… Deadline: March 23, 2026
Geospatial tech really has become mainstream these last few years. 🤣
#gischat
Oh no. There was usually no text involved. It was JUST screen shots.
The previous administration used to create a PowerPoint file w/ screen shots for each server or service and stored them on some obscure folder on a server, not easily searched.
Going forward it’ll be word/pdfs posted to an internal documentation web app with some search capabilities.
a bald eagle surrounded by stars and stripes and the text "oh my god, what the fuck"
Merry Christmas and a very blessed Yule to you all
How many times do I need to tell people around here we do not certify any maps before it finally sinks in? We are not surveyors so per state statute cannot make any claims on accuracy.
The last two employees left wondering between themselves who they can get to certify our maps since I refused. 🙄🤦‍♂️
And what about the folks with medical devices they depend on to stay alive? It was only barely mentioned at the very end and even then just as a side point.
We’re mostly an ESRI shop so we did their geodb. The personal geodb was awesome as you had the power of MS Access behind it and could modify things without breaking the data. For non-ESRI use or sharing I use GeoPackage.
But when possible I prefer a full server based SQL db (MS or Postgres).
I’m getting fed up with not being able to do things in the UI that I can do as a model or script. They should be the same functions, but the UI cannot handle it. At best I get an error as useless as the old 999999, but most of the time it just sits there doing nothing. 🤬
I was pro Shapefile until I started seeing file corruption. Some were inexplainable, geometry merged in to a single feature and no longer attached to the original attributes (that were still in the dbf) and of course idiots sorting the dbf outside of Arc breaking the link to the original geometry.
An overhead aerial photo from Google maps of a harbor with three boats moored in the harbor. Due to the process of mosaicking multiple passes of aerial image collection while the boats can pivot on their moorings between pthotos, the boats appear slightly askew as ghostly overlapping doubles of themselves.
I’m used to seeing phantom trains fade in & out of existence on my aerials, but not having any water big enough for anything other than a canoe in our county I have never seen boats get the ghosting effect from stitching mosaics together.
Belmont Harbor, Chicago IL
maps.app.goo.gl/FDLBVYY7yXYy...
Oh, I’d love that to be implemented here.
PMost of our communities are good at pushing developers to record before building anything (unincorporated areas need the new PINs for any permits) but then some don’t give us addresses till we hound them for it.
That’s exactly what is happening. For some reason the village is willing to let them develop the land without recording the plays and getting the taxing PIN numbers until they are ready to sell individual properties. The only (official) way we know about any new subs is the recorded documents.
I always love it when a village comes bitching that we do not show their new sub on our maps for 911 purposes when they still have not actually recorded the sub at with the county.
How the hell are we supposed to put in a new road and addresses if we don’t know they exist? 🙄
Great presentation. I’m glad you were able to get it included today.
And now, to wrap up my #GISDay I celebrated by ensuring all of my PC’s are up to date with the latest version of #QGIS.
🤔 Looks like a weasel got spit out of a particle accelerator. 🫣
Fun fact: Fermilab in Batavia,IL used to use a ferret to clean parts of their main accelerator for a short time. (But not while it was operating of course)
Unfortunately we could not properly show our new Open Data portal yet. We’re still waiting on the last sign off from the lawyers to allow us to make our data fully open data*. We hoped it would be live today.
(*Don’t ask me why, that decision was above my pay grade)
Had a great #GISDay open house event today. One of the best turnouts in years and this was without having to bribe data subscribers with the option to pick up our quarterly data release.
#gischat
Chicago (then I may be able to convince the bosses to finally let me attend)
