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My People

rjhale · Jul 8, 2019 ·

Let’s flash back to 1996. The Olympics were in full swing. I was 2 years out of college and working for the federal government. I had only been to one “conference” and that was only a state level academy of science meeting. I found myself standing at the underused Chattanooga Airport headed to Cincinnati and then to Palm Springs to the 1996 ESRI users Conference. Coolest part was I was so inexperienced in flying when we were delayed leaving Chattanooga because Al Gore was coming to the Olympics – I had no worry. I would make my connecting flight because there was no way they would leave Cincinnati without me on board. In Cincinnati I was standing in front of the near empty gate because the plane had left. So I was then routed to Chicago. I ended up in Palm Springs at nearly midnight. No rental car because somehow that had gotten cancelled. I stumbled into my room and sat there hungry and hating life with no luggage. The Luggage eventually turned up a little worse for wear. I think it went somewhere far away and was driven in….

The next day I found myself at registration at the Conference center in Palm Springs. I registered and went for a walk. I dragged my giant bag of stuff around with me. The Palm Springs convention center was big – but not terribly large. You could draw a dot on a map on “where are you from” and surprise there was only a few TN dots there. There were special interest groups. There were developers walking around. There were users. There was Bob Hope’s house down the street. There was golf. There was a lot of wind.

Two things happened that week.

I was blown away by a conference. I think there was only 3 or 4 thousand there. Maybe less. It was a good group of people. I mean the conference was nice – but I found a lot of like minded people there making maps and worrying over data. So I talked to people. I spent a lot of time just wandering the halls taking notes. The one talk that still sticks with me 23 years later – the guy that wrote ArcPlot gave a demo of “Tricks and Tips for Arcplot” (I think). As I was the guy who was getting hit by a lot of map requests I was pretty overjoyed to know I could edit data from Arcplot (plus copy files and move things around on the network without leaving ArcPlot). I also got a chance to hassle one of the arcpress developers (look it up – I’m not explaining it). The guy (whose name I can’t remember) finished the demo and turned to the near silent crowd and went “TADAAAAAAA” and everyone clapped. I may have stood up and clapped – Printing was a big deal back then.
I was sitting in the audience when Jack (who seemed really irritated at the Conference Center) announced “We are going to San Diego next year”. I think I went back to San Diego in 98 or 99 and once more in 2002.
(Third thing) – Some guy from ESRI Pulled up at a door in a VW bus. He had a keg or three crammed in the back and it was all held in place by some Sun Sparc Servers (look it up). I helped him Unload the beer. We didn’t drop a server. Imagine that happening in San Diego…….

The move to San Diego ended up doubling the crowds. To me it was more of a pain to get a room and navigate your way downtown than it was worth. Yeah it is nice to see 10,000 other people who were doing “GIS” things – but I really don’t remember much from those years except for the times I snuck out of the conference and went to the San Diego Zoo and was probably almost eaten by a shark in La Jolla.

I’ve been watching Twitter and the ESRI UC is coming up for 2019.

I won’t be there. Which – no joke if I bought a ticket I doubt I’d be let in the front door….and that’s completely fine. That side of my career isn’t that exciting currently.

If I look back at my entire career in Geo (now at 27 years) it’s always been a never ending pile of new things coming down the pike that were earth shaking getting announced at this conference. Learn Arcview Avenue – hey now we are switching to VBA. You can compile ArcINFO with TK for a better ArcTools Experience. Lemme learn VBA and now we’re at VB. Hey we have MapObjects…no wait ArcObjects…….no wait we’ve got SDE for databases…….and look a map on the web…Hey Python I should learn that now…3D (Which I saw a demo of in 1996) is going to be revolutionary. My social media is exploding with posts and pics and that was me pre-social media on cloud 9 talking to people and learning that:

“HEY WAIT YOU MEAN YOU’VE HAD ARCMAP CRASH TOO…..IN FRANCE….OMG WE ARE SO CONNECTED”. Hah. I joke. Mostly.

Anyway – where was I going with this. I have no idea to be honest. I spent an hour looking for the pics I took in Palm Springs. I took a ton of pics with my fairly new 35 mm camera (look it up) – and they are somewhere in a box.

I did crank up ArcMap 10.2 this week to fix a problem I had that couldn’t be fixed in QGIS. No Joke. I sat there just staring at the screen. I couldn’t remember how to dump a DWG to a file based Geodatabase. Back in 2014 I spent an inordinate amount of time wishing for functionality that wasn’t in QGIS that I had in Arcmap. Friday I spent an inordinate amount of time wishing for functionality that wasn’t in ArcMap that I had in QGIS. Plus I really need to look at Pro at some point. Sigh.

If I could bounce back in time to 1996 Randy and go “Hey in 2019 you can’t remember how to work ESRI products” he would probably laugh and throw something at me. I would also yell for him to enjoy that hair while it lasted which won’t be much longer. Oh yeah – trade the truck sooner. Go ahead and buy a dumpy house in 1997 on the North End of town and don’t worry – it will be fine as you won’t leave your job for another 10+ years.

For all of you out at the ESRI UC – enjoy yourselves. It will be a massive week of demos and things happening within the ESRI Ecosystem of products. What will I do this week? Teach a QGIS Class for a group who just transitioned out of the ecosystem. As much crap as I give the ESRI people at times – I do miss it a little (a little).

Anyway – I’m gonna go watch a movie and hope 1996 Van Halen doesn’t Break up.

QGIS 3.8.0 and QGIS 3.4.9 Released

rjhale · Jul 1, 2019 ·

First off – sorry for the lack of talking on my end. I’ve been sitting/thinking more than usual which has led to a pile of things I want to talk about. This blog has always been good for an outlet and that will happen soon enough. In between the random essays I’ll dive back into my comfort zone of technology like today. The dust has now settled and you should be seeing a new QGIS version(s) out and about.

QGIS 3.8 has appeared. For those of you in the know or not in the know – QGIS gets a new version every 4 months. You never have to sit back and wonder when exactly as it’s all been planned out. I’m going to dive into some 3.8 tech things shortly – but for those who want to read the changelog: http://changelog.qgis.org/en/qgis/version/3.8/

The next important thing – the 3.4 LTR (Long Term Release) has moved to 3.4.9. So for those of you who value having software that doesn’t change for 1 year – update! I get to talk (thankfully) to a lot of people who are using QGIS and I always run into 2 situations: “Hey we just updated to the new release” or “We’re running the LTR and we never update”. Every release of the LTR brings a new round of bug squashing and improvements but no new functionality which makes it perfect for corporate environments or educational environments.

So choose wisely and happy QGIS’ing.

Virtual Layers and Bike Data

rjhale · May 14, 2019 ·

To badly quote a Queen Song, “I like to ride my bicycle”. I’ve been trying to find new spots to ride. Of course being me I’m always debating things I can map while I’m out doing something.

This weekend I decided to map the Bike Share Program. It was raining so I went with a combination of windshield survey, bike riding, and internet searches to locate the Chattanooga’s Bike Share locations. I have a long standing history of being wrong about everything. When the bike share program started back in 2012 I shrugged and went “this won’t work” and 6 years later we’re got 40ish stations (I counted 40 and the internet tells me 41) and over 400 bikes. All the bike shares have a printed map and Chattanooga’s open data portal has a CSV of old bike locations.

Here are the 40 bike share locations in Chattanooga. I’m hoping to stick this in OSM and on the Open Data Site for Chattanooga.

I had read about Anita Graser’s Flow maps recently. One thing I notice when I’m out is how many places I see these bikes. Where do people come from and where do they go? Digging around on Chattanooga’s Open Data portal I found travel information that was slightly out of date but provided enough information to make this fun. The data gave me two things I needed: bike check-out locations and check-in locations. I know now people leave from Point A and end up at Point B.

Lets create a virtual layer from the table of information and the point layer. Trips being the table and Locations being the points:

SELECT StartStationID, EndStationID,
make_line(a.geometry, b.geometry)
FROM trips
JOIN locations a ON trips.StartStationID = a.id
JOIN locations b ON trips.EndStationID = b.id
WHERE a.id != b.id

I created what I can only describe as “hub lines” of the Bike System:

That doesn’t really tell me anything. It does show me the power of a virtual layer. A virtual layer is an area of QGIS I’ve not touched much – but in short it’s code tossed against a dataset and that code creates a new layer in QGIS. In this case I’m using functions in QGIS with some SQL code to render the lines. The lines act like physical data.

I refined the code a bit to only show one bike share. So where do people go that leave from the “main” spot (1299) at Outdoor Chattanooga?

Now that we’ve got fewer lines, things are more interesting. First off I don’t have data for all the stops – hence the dots with no lines. The second part I notice is some people go as far as they can go on a bike. They go to the farthest station. The Bike Share Program is “transportation” now on the same level as a bus but in just a smaller area.

Lets pick at it some more and do this:

Select EndStationID, count(*) from virtual layer group by EndStationID

That tells me the counts of where are people going from 1299. Not surprisingly from this location the #1 destination is this location (1299). People come back to where they rent the bike. The next two stops are “the scenic” bike share at 1319 and the bike share that connects to the free shuttle program at 1303.

The least used one is unsurprisingly 1329. That one is located not quite near the college campus and not quite near anything useful for day to day living. There’s really no reason to go there unless you’re lost or going to the Walker Theater for a concert. 1329 may be at the highest “spot” in the city or at least close to the highest (i.e. you have to ride uphill to get there from anywhere).

My next big question: Is it all connected with bike lanes? That data doesn’t really exist except within OpenStreetMap…and it’s outdated. It may exist somewhere in the city but I’m not sure where. My next mapping fun is finding a source of bike lanes for the city. I will probably make my own.

So what did we learn?

If you come to Chattanooga use the Bike Share (and wear a Helmet)
Virtual layers are pretty powerful and I really only did one thing – but it was a powerful one thing.
OpenData for your city is your friend. I will most likely hassle someone for an updated CSV for the city bike share program.

Go out and make a map….and ride your bike.

QGIS Leader Lines for Labels

rjhale · May 7, 2019 ·

So way back when…..I was working in a production map shop and I had to make a map of a Nuclear Plant. The fun part being it was all manual. So we would use a lettering machine to place the labels and legend on the enlarged photo. We would manually trace all the features on an overlay.

Flash forward and we’re using ArcINFO and placing annotation and then drawing leader lines pointing to the features on an OrthoPhoto.

Last week and I had the chance to do something I don’t normally get to do: make a cartographic map in QGIS. I needed to make leader/callout lines from the labels back to the polygons. I didn’t want to manually draw in leader lines. Searching led me to two posts:

I ended up running with the kartoza example although both helped me understand how to get this working. So for the not too faint of heart……Here goes. I have some polygons on which I need to “cleanup labels” and leader lines would help in that regard. I could pull the labels away from the very small polygons I have and attach them back with a line.

The key to all of this ais Geometry Generators. The basics are you can use code and expressions in QGIS to draw Geometry. So I’m going to draw leader lines from my label to my polygon with some code (that I copied from Kartoza’s example – Hey to Kartoza). My data is Categorized. So I’m starting off with this:

So I’m going to click on Conservation Easement and add a symbol. The symbol will be a geometry generator. Just as a little background – I’m stacking symbology. So I’m adding another symbol to my yellow symbol by using the plus button on the symbol selector. I’m defining the type as a Geometry Generator and the Geometry Type as a line.

So what happens with the code I so skillfully pasted into the symbol selector?

make_line(
closest_point($geometry,
make_point( “auxiliary_storage_labeling_positionx” , “auxiliary_storage_labeling_positiony” )),
make_point( “auxiliary_storage_labeling_positionx” , “auxiliary_storage_labeling_positiony” )
)

The code says make a line using the closest point on the polygon and anchor it with the location of the label. Now something happens when I use the label toolbar to move my labels away from the polygons:

Now I have leader or callout lines back to my polygon. I’ll need to add a geometry generator to each category to give me lines for every category. The picky side of me is thinking for 100% control I should manually draw them in (but I’m not). If you read Kartoza’s post they have a more elegant final solution to deal with lines running over your labels. Looking at this now I need to move 210 back to the center of it’s polygon since it’s drawing the leader line under the polygon.Overall – Not bad.

FOSS4GNA 2019 – The Short Review

rjhale · May 2, 2019 ·

I tend to spend probably more effort than I should telling people “Go to a FOSS4G Meeting”.

I made my……(think..think… 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019) fifth North American Event. Six if you count Boston – but that was International but lets count it – so six.

I think this might be a record for me with consecutive conference attendance. I’m a bit burned out on conferences currently. Usually gis conferences are more of the same – except a FOSS4GNA event isn’t. You never know what’s going to happen. If you make enough of these you become part of the group and to be honest – I could sit in a central area and just talk to people for 3 days. Which I did a lot of….more than I will admit. We talk life, projects, and software.

FOSS4GNA tends to skip around the country – this year it was in San Diego. Which was funny because when I said “Hey I’m going to San Diego people would immediately blurt out ‘OMG You’re going to the conference‘”. Well – no. Not that one – I’m going to the fun one. Jeff Johnson hosted at the Marina Village Conference Center. It was actually a better facility than I gave it credit for at first. It was spread out so you had to be outside. What you ended up doing while walking from one talk to another was stopping and going “Hey I’m in Southern California”. You would at some point stop and sit and not worry about things. Jeff had food trucks swinging by the conference center during breaks – you just wander out and get something. Food was plentiful. Every night there was a social of some sort. You get more done at the socials and over food and drink than you do anything else.

I drifted into more LIDAR talks than normal. I’m a bit blown away at PDAL – I don’t use it for work (yet) but I do play around with it in my spare time. The work going into it and the use cases around it are exciting. I’ve been working with Geoserver more and I went to talks on the new releases that are coming.I bounced into a few QGIS talks. I sat and talked to a lot of people – some that I knew and some that I didn’t. It’s nice hearing what people are doing with FOSS4G software and why people are there. I ran into 3 people from the Southeastern US – and that was nice. I’m not alone in this area screaming into the void.

I did my talk on Henry County’s 911 Server and had some great conversations with people after it was over. It’s nice to see other municipalities drifting into the open source software realm.

I enjoy hearing Paul Ramsey’s Keynotes. He tends to look at the economic side of what we do – that’s an important thing for me. Especially because I make my living doing this and I’m always trying to give back. The synopsis of his talk: Open Source Geo is at it’s “Mid Life” with about 20 years of development. At mid life you sit around and look and there’s not much money for FOSS4G development. There’s plenty in implementation because we are all about selling solutions. If you want to check out the slides – here they are. What if you took your normal maintenance costs from your commercial software and threw it at an Open Source Project? Maybe hired a developer?

So – I know probably not the best conference summary but it’s hard to summarize the people. That’s really my main attraction to this conference. I can walk into a room of 500 and see people I know and miss people that aren’t there. I can catch up with friends – people are the most important part of this whole thing for me.

What about next year? Next year is the international conference in Calgary….

….and you should go. I’m going to do my best to get there. Why? People. Come join the community of Free and Open Source Software Community. If you missed out on FOSS4GNA 2019 you missed a good time. If you can’t make 2020 in Calgary keep your eyes open for the next FOSS4G-NA in 2021.

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