Author Archives: John Reiser

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 →

Posted in Data, Technology, Tools and Scripts | Comments Off on Unix Philosophy

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 →

Posted in Data, PostgreSQL, Tools and Scripts | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Generating row and column IDs for a hexagon grid

“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.

Posted in Data, PostgreSQL, Technology, Tools and Scripts | Comments Off on Insignificant Spaces

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 →

Posted in Data, Tools and Scripts | Comments Off on Key issue with New Jersey’s parcel data

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 →

Posted in Data, OpenStreetMap, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Using a TMS in JOSM’s Download Data window

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 →

Posted in Teaching | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Portfolio Workshop

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

Bizarre GeoServer WMS rendering possibly due to ArcGIS handling of PostGIS data

Posted on November 26, 2012 by John Reiser

I just submitted a problem to the OpenGeo support forum regarding an unusual bug I’ve discovered in GeoServer. Multipart polygon geometries are producing “unintentional art” when rendered through GeoServer. Several GIS data sets that have been brought into PostGIS using … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Technology, Visualization, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment