Traveler IQ challenge game

This is a nice travel (or geography) game. It is a flash based game with nice interface it will test your knowledge of world capitals and famous places. The point is to click on the map as close as possible to the location of given city or landmark.



Game starts at easy difficulty and if you are successful you will quickly progress to medium and then to hard difficulty. Of course, time for an answer is limited and you have to respond quite quickly. The faster your response is more points you get.

Sometimes it is quite difficult to click on exact location of the city (whole of Denmark is quite small) so you if you get the country right you are not too far off.

Play the game at TravelPod site and have a look at some other challenges they have.

It is good fun and you may learn something as well.

Terrain features in Google Maps

Google has added a new feature to its on-line maps - Terrain. What is called a terrain here is known as a hillshade in GIS world. Terrain can be described in a number of ways like listed below;

An area of land having a particular characteristic, such as sandy terrain or mountainous terrain. -GIS dictionary from ESRI

Terrain, or relief, is the third or vertical dimension of land surface. When relief is described underwater, the term bathymetry is used. Topography has recently become an additional synonym, though in many parts of the world it retains its original more general meaning of description of place. - Wikipedia

or check few more definitions from Google.


If you check ESRI's dictionary again here is the definition of the hillshade:

hillshading

1. [map design] Shadows drawn on a map to simulate the effect of the sun's rays over the varied terrain of the land.
   
   
2. [map design] The hypothetical illumination of a surface according to a specified azimuth and altitude for the sun. Hillshading creates a three-dimensional effect that provides a sense of visual relief for cartography, and a relative measure of incident light for analysis.

Penguin's Dictionary of physical geography defines hill-shading as:

A type of shading employed to create an impression of relief on a map. Most examples have the light source shining from the NW, thereby throwing the E-facing and s-facing slopes into shadow. The darker the shading the steeper the slope.

Another term used for this is relief shading. It can be defined as:

• a technique for showing the ups and downs of the land portrayed on a topographic map. The process makes land look three-dimensional by the use of ...
  www.fugawi.com/web/support/glossary.htm
• The use of light and dark tones to depict the form of the land; makes the map appear as if illuminated by the sun, creating highlights and shadows.
  www.maps-gps-info.com/maps-gps-glossary-qr.html

Now about the terrain in Google maps. I like an option to see the terrain but I think it could be rendered differently. It looks like folks at Google have used a higher altitude for Sun when generating terrains then GIS software defaults. I did a quick test on an area in New Zealand - Rotorua (the same area I used in older post about hypsographic shading) and got very similar result to Google's.

Here is a Google map.



This is more or less the same extent shown in the ESRI's ArcMap application with hillshade generated with 60 degrees altitude. As visible here it is very close to the one in Google Maps. In my opinion it is too light, washed out.



If altitude of the Sun is changed to default value in ArcMap (using Spatial Analyst extention) of 45 degrees the following is created. In here features of the terrain are much more prominent and therefore easier to visualize.



One could argue that the later is too dark or too distracting but it will always be the case beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

ArcGIS 9.2 SP4

ESRI has released the latest service pack for ArcGIS suite of applications - Service Pack 4. This is not a single file that applies to entire suite. Service pack 4 is avaialble for ArcGIS Desktop, ArcIMS and ArcSDE. File can be downloaded from ESRI's Support Site.

Here are some of the fixes in SP 4 for ArcGIS Desktop

• GeoTIFF files created with the ArcMap Export Map function should contain spatial reference information in addition to the currently encoded position and transform. This will make the files reprojectable and should make it easy to include map exports on an ArcGIS Explorer globe.
• When ArcGIS is used to export to PDF in a loop, or several hundred times in one ArcMap session, the application can leak memory and may crash or become unresponsive.
• User would like a version refresh available to an ArcView user.
• Text symbol halos often fail to draw correctly, or they drop out.
• Unwanted domains are automatically assigned to attribute fields when creating feature classes in geodatabase.
• Select by location fails when run multiple times, and it fails with the Centroid option with large data. Both situations are due to memory leaks.
• Adding an annotation class as the associated layer for Map Annotation will cause a corrupt MXD file.
• White text, or text that matches the data frame background color, may turn black on export to PDF or AI (Illustrator) formats.
• Closing the map when multiple editors are editing a version concurrently does not save edits when requested.
• When making a direct connect to an Oracle database and not saving username and password within connection properties, data does not display in the geodatabase.
• Add support for datum transformations.
• Building a spatial index fails on a shapefile that has all null geometries.
• ITopologicalOperator::Intersect does not return the correct geometry count.
• When switching from the Maplex labeling engine to the standard ESRI labeling engine, the View Unplaced Labels function stops working for the standard labeling engine, and any previously displayed unplaced labels are removed.
• The AutoComplete Polygon task does not abort the edit operation if no polygons are created.
• The ExportCAD function now creates a new PRJ file if overwriting an existing CAD file that already has a PRJ file, along with the CAD file.
• Export CAD now recognizes the universal PRJ files.
• The IFeatureEdit and IFeatureEdit2 methods do not produce correct results when editing in projected space.
• When ArcGIS is used to export to EMF in a loop, or several hundred times in one ArcMap session, the application can leak memory and may crash or become unresponsive.
• Use of the Profile Graph tool can cause ArcMap to terminate.
• Block copy/paste between low and high precision feature datasets when the coordinate systems do not match.
• ArcMap crashes when the MapControl or PageLayout controls are added to the VBA form and resized.

Service pack is 176 Mb plus another 379 MB for help system update.


Changes in ArcGIS Server for .Net

• Adding a SOC machine to a WorkGroup licensed SOM when the machine name is greater than 14 characters fails.
• Map server caching issues occur when a map service source MXD contains layers from a compressed file geodatabase data source.
• Unable to run applications that have a single Toolbar control buddied to two Map controls.
• Manager is unable to publish Web applications when disconnected from the network.
• Memory leak in ArcSOC.exe process when doing many Identify requests over time.

Full list of fixed issues for Desktop and ArcGIS Server is available here. ArcGIS sever download for .Net is 23 MB while Java download is 261 MB.


For ArcIMS list of fixes is smaller. Here is complete list.

• For ArcMap Services, Features returned from a definition query should not be selected/highlighted.
• When ArcMap Server is not installed, Spatial Server log returns error loading library "..\ext\DataAccess\aimsisGDAL.dll": Error code = 126 with 9.2 SP2.
• ArcMap server GET_SERVICE_INFO response does not escape field alias names that contains special characters such as <, >, &, "" and '.
• ArcIMS 9.2 shows decreased performace compared to ArcIMS 9.1 when geocoding addresses using street names with numbers.
• Spatial server crashes while requesting table of contents(toc) for raster layers that are enabled to display raster resolution in toc for an arcmap service.
• Geocoding address with street names containing all numbers crashes the spatialserver.
• GET_EXTRACT does not return all the features of a multipoint feature.
• Extract server fails to generate output zip file if the host name is too long.
• While using raster catalog as the data source, ArcIMS Image Server was dropping raster tiles.
• GET_IMAGE has a new attribute to return scale factor for an Arcmap service.
• Spatialquery with buffer and target layer does not select features from target layer.
• ERR0416 Operation Failed” is returned when using command line administrator although the operation is successfully completed.

ArcIms service pack 4 download is 65 MB.

In ArcSDE fixes are database specific. I'll list fixed issues for SQL Server.

• Upgrading a SQL Server geodatabase with archive enabled feature classes creates triggers that cause "Duplicate key in shape column" errors during the archive operation. See KB article 33264.
• ArcMap crashes when executing definition query on a text field with a length of more than 4000.
• sdesetup -o upgrade command fails if executed as db_owner member on the dbo schema.
• ArcSDE for SQL Server: Create index fails for Windows Authenticated users who are not the DBO user.
• ArcSDE for SQL*Server: Incorrect predicate binding for the delete statement when removing rows from a keyset table orphans rows.
• ArcSDE for SQL Server 2005: Need to check for a matching default schema during table creation.

ArcSDE generic fixes are:

• ArcSDE for Oracle: sdegroup command does not support NVARCHAR types.
• The sdegroup command fails with "The destination string buffer is too small" error if an involved column's fully qualifed name is more than 32 characters.
• HPUX64 (Oracle 9i): sdegdbrepair command encounters a segmentation fault and core dump after successfully completing.
• The sdesetup command with SQL Server should not allow a lower release version to be executed against a higher release of the ArcSDE instance.
• shp2sde -o init and -o append is not able to load dBASE C-ColType into existing SE_NSTRING_TYPE column. The default has always been to map dBASE C-ColType into SE_STRING_TYPE.
• sdeimport -o append/init return attribute column size mismatch on STRING_TYPE columns
• Enhancement request: ArcSDE Service Pack support Web page should address installation steps for multiple sde services.
• ArcSDE 9.2 Service Pack 3 support page should say that you use the and instead of the SDE user when executing the SDESETUP command in Step 6 in the Installation Steps. (Finally!)

File size for ArcSDE SP is different for every database but files are very small. For DB2, Informix, SQL Server is 3 MB while Oracle 9 and Oracle 10gR2 is 4 MB for Windows installations. For Unix files are larger, but still smaller then other ArcGIS service packs - 10-15 MB.

These are some of the fixes I think are interesting for average user of ArcGIS. Let's hope we won't need any more service packs soon.

New Zealand ESRI User Conference

This year User Conference was in Rotorua, from 7th - 9th November. The venue was Rotorua Convention Centre.

Full agenda for this conference is available on the New Zealand ESRI Users Group web site on section regarding the conference. This year we had slightly less attendees, about 290 compared to 300+ last year.

As usual conference started with golf tournament (in which I don't participate) on Tuesday. For me conference is very busy time, I am helping other people from Eagle Technology Group to get things up and running. One of the things is getting the gear to the Rotorua. Just to make it more fun, we had a flat tyre. That was just the beginning of odd things. Second item on my list is getting the Internet OR LAN connections sorted with venue people. Don't ask me why they don't have LAN and Internet but they don't.  At Wednesday midday we had everything sorted and working nicely (thanks Jithen!).

Unfortunately, I can comment on the content of the presentations since I didn't attend any. This includes presentation of the key speaker - Clint Brown, director of software products at ESRI. This is because I was on the duty in "Doctor's Office" where we try to provide on the spot answers and demos of anything users can think of. It is very easy to spend an hour talking to users about all sorts of things related to ArcGIS, ESRI and GIS in general.

I did present this year, two presentations actually. The first one was titled "Managing imagery in ArcGIS" and the second one was "ArcSDE to ArcGIS Basic". Slides for all presentations should be available on the web site some time soon (when we get them from presenters).

First presentation was about issues in handling images and suggesting procedures/steps to handle images.

Second one was little bit more confusing. In 9.2 release ArcSDE does not exist as a product but it is part (read technology) of ArcGIS Server. Equivalent of ArcSDE 9.1 is ArcGIS Server Basic (AGSB) and Mark Thompson and I tried to show what else is comprising AGSB and what else it has to offer. In short, you get everything from ArcSDE plus:

• ability to create geodata services
• publish personal geodatabase
• publish file geodatabase
• publish personal/workgroup ArcSDE geodatabase
• mange services using ArcCatalog or ArcGIS Server Manager

Of course there is more but for usual general info check ESRI's web site.

That is all for now. I'll update the report with more details and some photos soon.