Category Archives: Technology

Meandering Meetings and Open Data

I love meetings. When the right people are in the room, with a clear agenda and desire to work together towards a common goal, magic can happen. Ideas are put out there and refined as a group, and an action … Continue reading

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Presentations at MAC URISA 2018

I’m currently down at the MAC URISA 2018 conference in Atlantic City. This year, I conducted a full-day workshop on Spatial SQL. I also presented on using Docker to explore open source GIS offerings. If you’re still around at the … Continue reading

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What I’m Reading – July 2018

Here are a few articles I’ve read over the last month that you might find interesting. “I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better,” he once said, “and because I have identified with it.” He … Continue reading

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Leveraging the Power of Spatial Databases

I’m out at the ESRI DevSummit this year, and tonight I presented the following talk on using SQL to perform spatial analysis tasks. The presentation slides are included here. I tried to squeeze in several examples, including mapping 2,199 farms … Continue reading

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Optimize Your Indexes and Selections

I have been working on a project that is driven by a series of functions written in PL/pgsql. The functions look at New Jersey’s land use data over several different time periods and selects out certain areas if they have the … Continue reading

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Using Tableau to visualize land use change

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

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Unix Philosophy

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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“Doing more with SQL” talk at MAC URISA

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:

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Insignificant Spaces

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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Mitch Hedberg and GIS

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

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