Thursday, August 15, 2002

My co-workers developed a piece of GIS software that is being used on conservation projects all over the world.  It ties the Garmin   GPS unit with Arcview GIS desktop software in such a way that you can download points from your GPS unit into the mapmaking software and upload points from the software into the Garmin unit.  They released it to the GIS community and it has probably saved governments hundreds of thousands of dollars in both software purchases, saved programming time and saved staff time.  It is available for free right here. They heard from someone in Africa using it to track elephants, someone on the Galapagos Islands using it for resource management.   The Federal Natural Resources Conservation Service distributed it to 1100 offices nationwide.  They learned about it just before they were about to purchase a custom made one for thousands of dollars.  Fisheries uses the extension as well.  One researcher needed to plot a bunch of random points on Lake Pepin to take samples.  She used a script in Arcview to produce a set of random points and then upoaded those into the Garmin GPS unit, took the Garmin out on the boat and let it tell her where to go to take the samples.  12:25:14 AM    comment []

Third day of Server Side Java Training.  Today was all about tag libraries.  They are insanely not intuitive.  PHP is so easy in comparison.  But I can tell they are going to be a powerful thing once mastered.  Basically you create custom tags like in cold fusion but there is a lot of mucking around with xml and classes behind the scenes. 12:20:48 AM    comment []