Category Archives: Tools and Scripts

Stamen Map Tiles now a paid service

Understandably, the awesome map tiles produced by Stamen Design over 10 years ago have been moved to Stadia and are now a paid service. I have extensively used the Toner Labels service as annotation to aerial photography and as a … Continue reading

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Broken libraries? Docker to the rescue!

I’m working on some spatial data, loading shapefiles into PostgreSQL on an older server of mine. Revisiting my previous blog post, I wanted to review more recent NJ Land Use/Land Cover data with the 2002 LULC data I imported to … 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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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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Generating row and column IDs for a hexagon grid

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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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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Key issue with New Jersey’s parcel data

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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