As part of our Microsoft partner program membership we’ve been able to try out Windows 7 for a few months now.  So far so good, I’ve been very pleased with the operating system, highly stable and performance has been phenomenal. 

My first installation was the 64bit Windows Ultimate version and I did an in-place upgrade from Vista Ultimate 64bit – only two items that presented any issue at all (and both were identified by the compatibility checker).  More recently I did a couple of fresh installs of Windows 7, no real difference but I had to check just to see if there was any Vista clutter causing any hidden issues, appears that the answer is “no”.

Those new Mac commercials are misleading…

No clue what to expect while here in Redlands for ArcGIS 9.4 holistic testing.  Tomorrow begins with a demonstration of the new application, hopefully it will be specific demonstrations of the geoprocessing and map automation components (that’s the topic this week so it would make sense). 

Regardless of what they have planned for the demonstration we have a large laundry list of items to test and workflows to step through – hoping for the best that most of the issues of previous releases have already been solved for the new release.

Should be an interesting and intense week.  If anyone has items they want addressed while we’re here then please feel free to comment and/or email.

As part of our Microsoft partner program membership we’ve been able to try out Windows 7 for a few months now.  So far so goo, I’ve been very pleased with the operating system, highly stable and performance has been phenomenal. 

My first installation was the 64bit Windows Ultimate version and I did an in-place upgrade from Vista Ultimate 64bit – only two items that presented any issue at all (and both were identified by the compatibility checker).  More recently I did a couple of fresh installs of Windows 7, no real difference but I had to check just to see if there was any Vista clutter causing any hidden issues, appears that the answer is “no”.

Those new Mac commercials are misleading…

Put the finishing touches on an ArcGIS Explorer 900 project a few days back.  Must admit that I was pleasantly surprised with the light weight ArcObjects that ESRI has made available for use, there is definitely some real GIS analysis that can be done sans ArcGIS Server and sans ArcGIS desktop –  a mild saving grace for the dramatic difference between how you go about customizing 500 and 900.

On the road again after a brief hiatus.  Technology is a wonderful thing and it has been a while since I’ve been able to have an airport giggle at how some people use (aka abuse, misuse) technology at their finger tips.

Sitting next to a couple, he appears to be a executive type (possible director of a boat load of companies) and is sporting a modern day BlackBarry – kudos!  So he picks it up and makes a call, nothing strange yet, and then begins talking with someone (probably a daughter or son) and asks them to go into one of the rooms in the house and next to the curio-cabinet to tell him the barometer reading.  Seriously?  I thought barometers were only given out as service awards these days.

Definitely a paradigm difference – in an era where we say “there’s an app for that” and a bing or google search will give you current and forecast weather, and there are push apps for a BlackBerry and specific websites specialized tailored for mobile consumption.  Using a barometer for weather seems about the technical equivalent of using a magic eight ball to do research.

A long time in the works but with some serious study, research, development, and investment we’ve done it.  A new division of Integrated Informatics will emerge over the coming months named openiii (pronounced Open Eyes) whose mission will be to continue our focus on open source initiatives, spatial data management system hosting, and online spatial analytics.

Several years ago I volunteered to judge at a science fair for elementary students, the coaching we were given was to always pad our negative comments with a positive on each side.

Pad +ve: ArcGIS Explorer 900 was worth the wait (even though I think explorer has been solid enough for production and enterprise use since the 400’s).  Favorite change is the improved way in which it integrates with local files/data.

Feedback — did no one at ESRI test the application to see how well it plays with other ESRI products?  Simple example, run a Python script that has references to arcgisscripting and receive a pleasant message each time I/O warning : failed to load external entity "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\ArcGIS\bin\AddInSettings.xml".  Uninstall ArcGIS Explorer and the issue goes away…

Pad +ve: At least 900 runs on Vista 64-bit, proof being that my Program Files folder is called Program Files (x86).  Small victory and I get reminded each time in the error message!

After years of avoidance I finally attended my first ESRI User Conference in San Diego and I probably couldn’t have chosen a better year to attend!  There is already a bunch of chatter in the cloud about what was showcased so I won’t regurgitate the plenary.  Most notable to me, however, is the clear direction that ESRI is moving in with respect to placing itself at the forefront of spatial analysis by making it more accessible to the casual user through its geoprocessing framework.  Especially pleasing is how they are making .Net more like .Not.

I have to write about it although far from a technical or even GIS related item, I still feel compelled to write about it.  It is a paradigm shift that has changed my world more than you could possibly ever know.  Maybe it is less of a change and more of an obsession – it is just far too tough to distinguish –  yet the impact to my life has been huge.

What could it be that has changed things so dramatically?  Shaken my world for the positive? Motivated me to finally get back onto my neglected blog and blabber on for a paragraph and not say anything of importance or relevance? Well stay with me for a while and I’ll get to it…

Few times in our lives do we witness significant change; change that we know must have come with a large amount of effort; change that must have come from a person with more panache than most; change from an individual or a team that was willing to stick with their vision regardless of the ‘backs they experienced (‘backs = feedback, pushback, and throwback) from others.  Maybe I’m overstating it but maybe not – in this case I’m just an outsider looking in and guessing how things developed.

So what is it?  It is remarkably simple, and it might just be the simplicity (borderline elegance) that has me so hyped.  During a trip to Hawaii was the first time I saw it – it was tuna in a bag.  Shocked?  I was.

It wasn’t that tuna was in a bag it was that tuna was not in a can.  Hopefully you can appreciate the subtle difference.  How many years has tuna come in can?  Sure, its still available that way, but seriously – tuna now in another container – amazing!  Somewhere someplace an agent for change has accomplished a lifetime worth of buy-in.

Anyone working with schemes for Python in Komodo would likely have seen the keywords2 entry in the Element Type (Edit Preferences>Fonts and Colors>Lang-Specific) drop down.  For the longest time I was wondering what was in this list of keywords so I spent some time on the ActiveState forums to see what could be found.

All I was able to unearth was a short post from the development team mentioning the koPythonLanguage.py file that lives under the installation folder.  Poking around a bit I found that by default there are no values in keyword2  (note that in another post I see that keywords2 might be deprecated, sure hope not it is quite useful!). 

The post didn’t specifically say what needed to be changed but I was able to find some similarities in the other Python files living in the same folder.  I should mention that my motivation here was to get some specific keywords highlighted, well, maybe they aren’t real keywords but they are “by convention” keywords and it is really handy to be able to see these more clearly when working.

Cutting to the chase, to make the keywords2 element type behave as expected (aka do something) then all you need to do is add a line into the KoPythonLexerLanguageService class (line 75 in the screen capture below).

As you can see the self and cls keywords have been added and now I’m able to add highlighting to these.  Another nice thing in the koPythonLanguage.py file is the Python Sample Text, I’ve updated mine so that I have decorator and number examples.