Continental did listen to us

Posted on by
Reply

I was on my first flight of the year on Continental a month or so ago and was perusing the magazine to see what was going on and noticed that they have switched from the crazy ear muffs style headsets to in-ear ones.

That’s not the interesting part though…the interesting part is that they are normal 1 plug headphones with a DETACHABLE converter to two plugs so it works on the plane. COOL.

image

They even want you to use your own headphones. I had thought about buying one but never got around to it. So I sat in First Class (upgraded) on a 3 hours flight from Houston to San Diego and watched The Day the End Stood Still and could actually hear what they were saying! Amazing.

Thanks Continental. Keep on listening.

Exporting from ESRI GDB to CAD

Posted on by
3

I am implementing a project that needs to export from the ESRI GDB into DXF format. There are many ways to do this but one of the main requirements is that we should not had to the list of royalties required to deploy the system. The application will use an ArcGIS Engine Runtime license so that is that I have to run within.

After some investigation I found a component online which is completely .NET based with royalty free distribution. The component is Cablib by WoutWare. The API is simple and easy to use but provides all the power that is needed for this project.

Disk Defragmenter with Virtual PC

Posted on by
Reply

Hard Drive Windows does not really do a great job of de-fragmenting a hard disk and this is especially true when you are trying to get a Virtual PC image smaller.

I did some searching on the web and found this: Free Disk Defragmenter which seems to do a really good job.

It looks like at a low level it copies all the files from the main used area in a temporary space on the disk and then copies then back to de-fragment them. Simple, quick(-ish) and it works like a charm.

Using this and the compacting the VPC image post describing the use of the built in compacter took a 2.5GB installation down to 1.5 GB. Can’t complain at that!

Plane Laptop Mount

Posted on by
Reply

iStock_000007247037XSmall

The last time I was sitting on a plane, in coach, trying to get some work done and I came to the conclusion that unless you have a 10 inch screen you are doomed. Especially when the person in front of you reclines their seat.

It is doable but your wrists are so contorted that it is almost not worth it.

I have resorted to angling the laptop up so the keyboard rather than being flat is at a 45 degree angle and the screen ending up at your eyeline…ish. I like it. You are not crammed in and the screen is at a great viewing height, There is one problem though..the 45 keyboard angle. It makes it great for reading email but bad for answering.

I think a plastic, foldable mount that rests on the tray table and angles the laptop would be the answer. It would stop the laptop from moving when you move the keys and could contain an additional USB keyboard under the raised laptop that is flat so that you can type easily.

I bet that business travelers who do not get enough airline status to guarantee First class seats would pay $30 to get something like this. I know I would. 3-4 hours of quiet time with the ability to work is invaluable.

Dark Room

Posted on by
Reply

I have been getting up early again for the past few days and reverted back to an application I have been using for a while.

The application is called Dark Room. It is a c# word processing application that has a black background and green text. I know it sounds strange but when your eyes have not adjusted to the light yet this app is wonderful.

I use it for about 30 mins until I can brave using normal bright tools like Outlook. I then simple copy the email(s) I have been writing into new outlook messages and send them. Done.

I stopped doing this a while back as it was hard to type properly but with my new laptop and it’s backlit keyboard (just bright enough – not too bright!) it makes sense again.

VS .NET 2008

Posted on by
Reply

I know that every other man and his dog have been using VS .NET 2008 for a long time now but when you are supporting product that needs to run in ArcGIS 9.2 then it is more difficult.

Now that most of our clients have moved or are moving it to 9.3 we can actually start using 2008 more often. I am looking forward to some of the technology in 2008 or more specifically .NET 3.0 and 3.5

More on my thoughts as I have them!

Oracle Spatial and ESRI

Posted on by
1

I have not long finished an interesting project which handled, amongst other things, taking data in and out of Oracle Spatial and putting it in an ESRI Geodatabase (File based) without ArcSDE being in the middle.

It was not a straight Oracle 10g database but rather one that had business logic built in but ultimately it talked with the SDO API to get the features just not using a a spatial filter to limit the amount of data it took out.

The most interesting thing about the code was that it communicated with the client using XML with GML for any geometries that arose. It also communication directly using HTTP so the client did not need any special software or libraries installed. It made for a great deployment model as all requests were handled using straight HTTP calls.

Here’s hoping that I get a chance to write against this API in the future. It was a refreshing change.

Streaming Video

Posted on by
Reply

About 2 years ago I stopped my Netflix subscription. One of the issues with DVD delivery is that the time between deciding you want to watch a movie and actually been able to start watching it is days.

We were not using the DVDs and it made more sense to just use the On Demand feature from Comcast when we want to watch movies.

That worked for the last few years but every time we want to watch a movie there is nothing that we would like to see.

I got a Xbox for my Xmas and noticed that it can stream Netflix movies. The benefit of Netflix with the convenience of streaming. Now, they only have about 10% of their inventory that is stream-able but that is good enough by now.

I have been watching a few movies today and I must say that I am REALLY impressed. Easy to use and for people that never know what we want to watch or when we can watch it it is looking like a good prospect.

More on this as I try it out more. So far so good!