Friday Miscellaneous

A couple of things:

Cool Open Data Site: City of Burnaby

Career/Life Advice: via Lifehacker

March highlight: Off to Reno Nevada for the AAAE 2017 GIS Conference

Kudos: FME Presentation by Tim Albert of the Victoria Airport Authority

Me today, trying to wrap up stuff....

Friday Frustrations.....!

God damn it.

Friday pet peeves.

1. People who don't text back within a resonable amount of time, given the weekend is coming fast.
2. Slow networks at works. Slow editing. Not having a ArcInfo license until January 2015.
3. FME connections to SDE databases that used to work before but now don't. Argh.
4. I haven't played ice hockey in weeks.



As you were.

Post #FMEWT 2013 Thoughts, Vancouver edition

So, on Tuesday, Dale & Don did the annual Safe Software FME road show, showcasing the latest & greatest stuff in FME 2013.  Good times. Always a good time to go, meet some fellow #FME'ers and check out the new stuff.

I won't go into all the details (you can find it here, a live blog account, and watch James Fee & company discuss it here) but I did enjoy 4 big things:

1) Better Labeling, via the MapTextLabeller. 
Even though it's an extra cost add-on, you can't deny that adding better labeling transformers are really going to help those customers with limited GIS budgets. This helps fill that void somewhat. Maplex in ArcGIS covers a lot of the same (if better) functionality, but if you don't have access to that resource, this will do nicely if you aren't tied into the Autodesk/ESRI stack.  And definitely helpful for guys like Jonathon McIntyre making those high quality floor plan PDF's from FME.

2) Uploading and testing your CAD files right to FME server, to QA/QC those pesky as-built drawings from contractors.....! Geometry validation is going to be very useful for our infrastructure GIS guys here in the office.

3) Real-time tracking.  Watching Dale's TESLA in real-time was pretty cool, and pulling the City of Vancouver's data via FTP into FME's workbench was just as awesome.

4) Reading ZIP files! Writing to ZIP files! Damn, wish I had this when I was revamping the scripts for our Open Data site. No biggee, Python helped out on that regard.

Thankfully, I've got 2013 installed at work now so I'm excited to try out the new stuff right away!


Yes, Soup for me! heh, heh, heh.....

When I get work approval to attend Safe Software's FME Users Conference (#fmewt) next week

ht: DBA Reactions

Safe Software Open House: Tuesday Dec 16

A bunch of us here at the City are heading out to the Open House next week. Should be good to meet up with some old BCIT classmates and see what is going on these days. Last I was there was back in 2005 - a few of us took their intro FME class.

Here's some of Safe's blogs for further reading....

Dale Lutz, The Corporate Blog of Safe Software

The FGE Evangelist, the newletter blog that "delivers insider news, cutting edge examples and the latest functional developments for Safe Software’s FME application."