If you’ve enjoyed PyCon UK the last 2 years, the bad news is that it won’t be happening this year. The good news is that  EuroPython 2009 is coming to sunny Birmingham instead, for 3 days from Tues 30th June to Thurs 2nd July and registration is now open. The even better news is that [...]

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are by their nature data driven. The data comes in a wide variety of raster and vector formats. Rasters hold raw, continuous data recorded striaght from the real world. An example is Satellite/aerial imagery, this is a commonly held in an open format with broad support, such as GeoTIFF [...]

Investigating the performance of an intranet mapping website this week, I was introduced MXDPERFSTAT. It’s a fantastic tool for investigating map display performance. Given an ArcMap document (a .mxd file) it runs ArcMap and loops over the map layers, displaying each at a list of  scales (e.g.  1:100000, 1:10000, 1:2500,  1:500) automatically. Scale cut-offs are [...]

A couple of years ago I tried to use ArcObjects, through IronPython. It didn’t quite work.
Last week I tried again, using the newly released IronPython 2.0. This time it worked better.
create_sde_conn_file.py is based on CreateSDEConnFile.java, from Creating ArcSDE connection files on the fly using Python and ArcObjects on ESRI’s Geoprocessing blog.
For those not already familiar, [...]

For those who aren’t familiar, ArcSDE is server software that sits atop a database to spatially enable it. The resulting geodatabase is able to store geographic features (e.g. roads, buildings, endangered habitats) along with more common SQL data types. ArcSDE can also store georeferenced rasters such as scanned plans/maps or satellite/aerial imagery.
To load raster data [...]