openSource

As a joke we once said that: “the student has become the master”.  In recent history I have had amazing mentors who have helped steer what has almost always been my vision to the point where we are nearing reality.  My most recent mentor is a HUGE proponent of Open Source technology, of which I have never been super fond of, mostly because I am not developer enough yet to leverage the full capabilities of the technology.  However, the reality exists that the world I model is by and large owned by a single proprietary source company and we only get extend their product.  That still offers a number of exciting opportunities, especially with the way that we communicate geospatial information.

I’ve taken way too long to write this entry (going on a week or a little over), and my intent here wasn’t to discuss my developing knowledge of the open source options for geospatial information technologies, there are better individuals to carry that message; my intent is to give a quick thank you to the people that have helped get me to this point.  I can’t discuss this without mentioning how I’d still be contemplating soils research or applicationns of satellite imagery to blah blah blah, if it weren’t for the help of the Research Manager at Akron.  I’m grateful that with his guidance I was able to congeal the randnomness of mycareer and skill sets into a single message/ goal.

Thanks to all of you!

theDrive

I lack ArcDesktop on my laptop.  At development time months ago, I was in need of the web ADF for the DOTNET environment on my laptop so I went ahead and uninstalled the build of the Desktop environment that I was running so that I could get Server running and get access to that API.  So now, three weeks after graduation I want to go back and work on updating a custom tool I built back in April, but to do that I need to drive back to Akron (I “relocated” back to Columbus over the holiday weekend).  I’ll spare you the techno babble for now except to say that I am passing on rebuilding the tool in flex and I’m not really interested in developing a user interface blind, so I’m not building in Python or Eclipse, which brings us back to the DOTNET environment; cycles after all.

So the drive back here this morning did give me the opportunity to process the fact that Columbus isn’t home anymore.  The landscape is still similar enough to when I left that I recognize it, but it just feels a bit foreign now.  And so I’m in Akron, a city I was very recently all too eager to get out of, trying to figure out how I can eek out and find an interesting gig in this Shrinking waning region of the country.

And THERE it is folks, the official declaration, I will relocate for/to the highest bidder, and I have locations that are higher than others on my “big board” but Akron/Cleveland are higher on the list than my hometown of Columbus (neither are number 1)

Tales from a burning river

Now that I have time I can get back to trying to work on this blog under the advice I was given once upon a time.  Try and write something for everyone everyday.  So today, I sat down with every intention of discussing how NE Ohio fit into my concept of Home as a Landscape Extent, and how all of that was influencing my current job search.  That will have to wait until later this week, after I’ve packed and opened up a couple of other projects (python/VB.NET).

So what I am working on today, or at least going to be working on today, relates to the User Interface within ESRI’s ArcGIS Desktop.   A couple of months ago I developed a customization of an Intersect operation, without getting into the nuts and bolts of what I do with it and how I do it, this customization allows me to filter the attribute fields that are included in the output feature class or shape file.  I used the arcgisscripting API obviously, so I didn’t rewrite the Intersect algorithim (that would be scary), but theres some stuff and then I get to this:

…

junk = temp1 + “;” + temp2

gp.Intersect_analysis(junk, outFeature)

gp.deletefield(outFeature, “FID_temp1 ; FID_temp2″)

…

then there’s more stuff that help to clean up the file structure.  So I like this, and my colleagues (other students, and a couple of professors) like this, however I have a couple of big limitations that I am going to try and fix.  First, I can only conduct this operation on two features at a time.  This is a big small problem, and it relates to the UI in that the script window in the GIS uses an “obtained by” tag to update the field map frame and this obtained by only works on one feature.  To fix this in the script I tried a simple split operation around the ‘;’ that delimits the multi input, but it breaks the availability of the obtained by update so I need to go back and look at that.  The second problem I have is that I am currently creating temporary files on the disk when I would much rather run the entire operation through the %SCRATCHWORKSPACE%\, so I am going back and looking at that today.

My apologies if you were really looking forward to some philosophical discussion of landscape but I’ll make it up to you later on, likely with a photo essay type entry.   Sound like a deal?

Drowning

Its a bad title, considering in a little over four months from now I’ll get to start Diving again, but hey it is what it is…

Java, Visual Basic 6.0, Visual Basic .NET, CPython, JPython, XML,  C#, and likely C++  quickly are what I’m attempting to get through and be “conversational” before 9 May 2009. It’s a bit of a lofty goal, and If I get anywhere near it I think I’ll have to consider it a success, all things considered.  But at the moment it’s a bit straining, and considering the amount of free time I should have had for a job hunt this semester is quickly being eaten up by throbbing headaches and being so confused and frustrated that I can’t even spell my name, and this is graduate school, so it’s to be expected.

I was hoping to include some of my most recent pictures, but unfortunately I didn’t do much with my camera over the holiday and I don’t want to bore y’all with screen captures of really bad Visual Basic and Python code.  So what I’ll attempt to do here is to give you  a ‘little’ stitched photo of one of the parks close to my home back in C’bus.