Author Archives: John Reiser

Using Tableau to visualize land use change

Posted on April 10, 2015 by John Reiser

I was home sick on Wednesday, so while I was on the couch I decided to dive into Tableau Public, a free desktop visualization tool. At IERP, we use Tableau for some of our public dashboards. Other than some minor … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Planning, PostgreSQL, Technology, Tools and Scripts, Visualization | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Unix Philosophy

Posted on February 2, 2015 by John Reiser

Often, when I go to tackle a problem, I look to use the simplest tools available first. Unix (and its derivatives/descendants, like Mac OS X and Linux) was designed with the following principles in mind: Write programs that do one … Continue reading →

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Generating row and column IDs for a hexagon grid

Posted on November 17, 2014 by John Reiser

Recently when working on a project that uses a hexagon grid, I used the awesome mmqgis plugin to QGIS to produce the grid. The one small shortcoming with the tool is that I would prefer to have a cell identifier … Continue reading →

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“Doing more with SQL” talk at MAC URISA

Posted on October 30, 2014 by John Reiser

Last week, I gave a 30 minute talk on “Doing More with SQL” at MAC URISA 2014. The slides from the talk are available below:

Posted in Conferences, PostgreSQL, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Insignificant Spaces

Posted on February 11, 2014 by John Reiser

Yesterday, I mentioned that I discovered ArcGIS’s inconsistent handling of spaces within text fields. Today, I tested to see how ArcGIS handles NULLs, Empty Strings and Spaces within its native file formats.

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Key issue with New Jersey’s parcel data

Posted on February 10, 2014 by John Reiser

I’ve been working on a project to visualize differences between assessed value and levied taxes in New Jersey and I discovered a bug in some of New Jersey’s parcel data. New Jersey uses “PAMS_PIN” as a key between the GIS … Continue reading →

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Mitch Hedberg and GIS

Posted on January 30, 2014 by John Reiser

So, a recent post on Reddit highlighted a Mitch Hedberg joke. “La Quinta” is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Google Maps, In the News, Teaching, Technology, Tools and Scripts, Web Mapping | 4 Comments

Using a TMS in JOSM’s Download Data window

Posted on November 19, 2013 by John Reiser

Now that our crowdsourced update to New Jersey’s land use map has had some serious contributions – we’re just shy of 20,000 user-contributed points of new (2007-2012) urbanization – I realized that many of these locations are in need of … Continue reading →

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Portfolio Workshop

Posted on April 26, 2013 by John Reiser

Yesterday, I held a Portfolio Workshop for our Rowan Geography and Environment students. The audio of my talk along with the slides are available on the workshop web page. While I think the talk and discussion was well-received, the audio … Continue reading →

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Rendering weirdness with reference data

Posted on November 27, 2012 by John Reiser

Continued from yesterday’s post: Bizarre GeoServer WMS Rendering Both the NJ Landscape Project habitat data and the Municipalities data are complex. It is hard to pinpoint a rendering issue when the data is very complex. I prepared a reference data … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Web Mapping | Tagged , , | 5 Comments