BmoreGeo-
The price of free
A couple months ago Google unveiled busy times for local businesses. I imagine they are taking the same technology used by Waze for tracking traffic patterns. Basically the idea is that most people have location sharing enabled on their android devices for Google services. Google collects this data and aggregates it into a giant database. They then
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Starting Over
The thing about being a nerd is that you are constantly experimenting with new technology. This website happens to be one of those ways I have experimented over the past five years. As you can see by the timestamp on the previous post, this has not always translated into new content. Since 2009 this site
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State of the Map
Some photos from State of the Map 2015!
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Configuration Files in Python a Quickstart
A large part of my job is taking mundane manual processes that people hate to do and writing a utility that replaces that function. The one I’m most amped about right now is a Auto-Map caching utility. You throw in a rest end point and it kicks off a cache. This is good and all, but how do you make a utility that allows the user to modify what map caches to generate without modifying any actual code? Configuration Files! Yes the oldest trick in the book. Here is a quick rundown on my favorite Python Config Parser library ConfigObj.
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“The Cloud” presentation
The Cloud from christophfricke -
Web Development Updates
The time has come. I’m starting the process of converting my page over to Python instead of PHP. Since all my work lately, and for the foreseeable future, is in Python I thought it would be prudent to make the transition. It is such a hassle to re-remember PHP every time I want to modify something in the backend.
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The Half-Year in Review
The past 7 months have been intense, which has resulted in me not having a lot of free time to update this here blog. However, I have had a number of posts on my companies blog, GIS Inc. Blog.
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Wounded Warrior Project
Each year my company GIS Inc puts together a ‘Maps and Apps’ competition for a charitable cause. This year, I had the honor to work on application for the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP).
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Updated Web Site
BmoreGeo 2.0 is now in action!!! The site is now running programmed in Python on top of the Django framework with a Postrgres backend. It was an adventure to get this thing off the ground, but I finally did it.
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Local Govt. Info. Model
Since the Local Government Information Model’s (LGIM) big announcement/unveiling at the 2011 User Conference my company has pushed head first in seeing how we can help clients across the company utilize the LGIM in their everyday workflow. Being at the front of the pack on a technology can lead to some bumps on the head and a couple scuffed knees. I hit my head a couple times learning to deploy the LGIM, but it is these learning opportunities that helped me to become a better Solutions Engineer.
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PDF Reports in Python
The past couple weeks at work have been pretty exciting. I’m doing some internal development for one of our GIS Support Teams. Creating Data Development reports is a pretty big part of they job and by pretty big I mean most annoying. These reports showed discrepancies in Primary Key – Foreign Key matches between the GIS data and an external data source.
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The More You Know: Oracle Edition
This past week I was working on a project where I compare a feature class to a table and delete the records in the feature class that don’t match.
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Esri Dev. Talk Summer 2011
In June 2011 my talk on using python to reduce my workload as a Solutions Engineer was selected for Esri’s Developer Meetup in Washington DC. I had a lot of fun getting up there and talking about something I use every day to make my life easier. Here is a link to my presentation on slideshare –
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Python!
During GIS Inc’s 2011 company meeting in Birmingham, AL I had to opportunity to give a lightning talk on using Python with ArcGIS. My focus was to introduce non-programmers, GIS Analysts, and GIS Techs to Python and the ArcPy library. Python and the ArcPy library has saved me a ton of time and I wanted pique others interest so they might also get as excited as I am about the technology.
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Upgraded the Portfolio Section
Hooray I finally updated the Portfolio section. I was having some difficulty building a quick loading and good looking grid of images. I decided to scrap the whole grid idea and go with something a little flashier (oops! Javascript and CSSier :-)). Check it out here and tell me what you think!
-Christopher
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Gleaners
The world looks a little different through the window of a bus. Three-mile trips to the store can quickly turn into multi-hour affairs filled with missed connections and half hour waits in the rain.
This poster aims to provide Gleaners with insight on how well they are providing service to patrons that utilize public transit via the Smart Bus system.
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Happy GIS Day
It is a pretty happy day in these parts of the world (39°17?N 76°37?W). First and foremost, I accepted a position at Geographic Information Services, Inc.. I will be starting on November 30th. Pretty rad right?
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Mobile Web Mapping
As a recipient of the Spring 2010 GIS inc Research and Development award, I had the privilege to work on a solo project incorporating cutting edge technologies. During my brain storming process, I settled on probably the coolest segment of the development market at the moment: Mobile Applications.
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GIS Application Development for Mobile Web
I just finished writing a pretty intensive blog entry for my company’s blog.
Here is an exerpt, check out the entire post here.
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Risk Game – Shelby County
I made this map for a cartographic challenge at my company, GISi. Unfortunately, I did not win the competition, but I did have a lot of fun making this map. ‘Continents’ were defined by economic zones within the county. These economic zones were determined by travel distance to the closest large town. This map is totally playable and even includes game cards. If you would like a sharper copy than the attached PNG, there is a 55MB pdf available.
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Updates!
I have been on a wild ride these past few months. First I started working for a new company GISi. and then moved to Baltimore City. Let’s just say Baltimore City is a lot more interesting than Harford County.
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Parsing KML and Programmatic Data Classification
I don’t have any maps to show for this at the moment, but I am pretty excited. Thanks to reading this post by the BJØRN SANDVIK at the Thematic Mapping Blog, I finally got around to creating my own ASKMLesqu function in PHP for MYSQL. If you read anything about exporting database data to KML
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3D Extrude
I have altered the formula so that elements with Z, M, and MZ values can now be parsed. I still have to figure out how google maps parses X,Y,M,Z values though. Also, I added in the ability to extrude an element from the function call. I still have to play around with these additions, but so far so good.
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Maryland CTP
The Consolidated Transportation Program is the six year capital budget for transportation projects in the state of Maryland.
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WKT to KML now in 3d
Alright so I have not exactly tested this with 3d data, but I’m 95% certain it will work. I decided to preg_replace out the commas and spaces instead of preg_replacing the numerical values for lat and lon. This should allow for three values per each point (x,y and z). I am still learning regex, so please pardon the hack. It looks really ugly, but it works.
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So Busy
I am finally getting to the tail end of my road projections project for the Maryland Department of Planning! Unfortunately, because of this and the whole cover letter process, I am getting pretty burnt out on any other kinds of outside of work activities involving GIS.
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Rocks State Park Map
This is my last weekend at Rocks State Park. As much as it will be nice to have weekends free, I am still pretty sad that the season is over. I have a lot of good memories from this summer.
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Projected Road Development
This project will be utilized by the Maryland Department of Planning to determine the differential in new road development between the Smart Growth and Current Growth models of development for 2030.
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Road Projections
I have officially decided to go on a bit of a hiatus on the park map stuff for a while. I wish I had time to work on that project, submit job applications and work 40+ hours, and keep my sanity. Unfortunately, I do not. However, I did do some pretty cool stuff at work last week.
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getGeo PHP code
Over the past couple weeks I have spent some time working on the Trail Maps for Rocks and Susquehanna State Parks. I noticed that there are some errors in the php code I posted a couple months ago with regards to parsing the elevation. In the very near future I will be modifying this code further to pull the elevation value from the database.
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Vacation
So you know when I said I would update next week and didn’t for the next two weeks. Yeah. Well, family came up for the fourth of July and I had to work a few extra days at Rocks State Park due to the holiday. The end result of these events was a slacking off on my mapping projects.
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Speed Cameras in Baltimore
In case you have not heard yet. The City of Baltimore is installing speed cameras around the city. You can check out the press release [here].
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MYSQL, KML, and PHP
I’ve made a lot of progress in the last week with the implementation of a gis utilizing google maps as the front end and a mysql/php backend. It has taken a little work, but hopefully by next week I will have some running models on the site.
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Projects
I finished uploading most of my projects into the projects section of the website. There will be some changes to the projects section in the next couple days to make it load a bit faster.
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New Beginnings
Hello, and welcome to BmoreGeo!
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Eurotopia (At War)
Spending every weekend searching job recruitment sites and applying to jobs on USAJOBS can take a lot out of a person. Unfortunately that means I have been neglecting my web projects.
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Road Density Analysis
This project was completed for the Maryland Department of Planning in the Winter of 2008-2009. Road density in this analysis was defined as square meter of road way per square meter of available land.
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AME Redistricting
As an Intern in the Cartography Lab at UMBC I had to opportunity to work with theAfrican Methodist Episcopalianchurch on their 2008 Redistricting Feasibility Study. I assisted with GIS Analysis and Cartographic Design for a demographic study of church membership and projected population migrations.
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Biodiversity Gradients
This project came about during an argument between a friend and I. After reading an article by Dr. M.J. McDonnell, I proclaimed that it was completely logical that species diversity would be higher in urban areas compared to rural.
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Natural Resources GDB
This project was completed as a final project for Geographic Information Systems Database Design. I created a geodatabase to contain geospatial information on the natural areas of the UMBC campus. This included the individual environmental areas, the trail network and designated points of interest along the trail. Also, this geodatabase contained a tree inventory and tree diversity analysis for the UMBC campus.
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Global Climate Data
The data for this project was compiled from the National Climatic Data Center Weather Observation Station Record. Utilizing BASH and AWK scripting I downloaded, decompressed and summarized weather data from 1980 through 2007. Daily, monthly, yearly and total averages, maximums and minimums were calculated for the temperature, precipitation, snowfall, visibility, dew point and wind speed.
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Baltimore Red Line
Public transportation and I are best buds. Unfortunately the public transportation network of Baltimore is limited to the north-south centric Light Rail, North by North-West Metro and unnavigable and frustratingly slow buses. What is missing is the ability to go east-west through the city on a single mode of transportation in a timely manor. The Baltimore Red Line is the Maryland Transportation Authorities solution to this predicament.
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Antarctica
I produced this map of Antarctica as a final project for introductory cartography in the Spring of 2007.
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