this page is to support the GIS.stackexhange.com question of the same name, namely how does one most efficiently use arcgis and feature classes to achieve some the same things which used to be possible with arcinfo workstation and region sub-coverages.

Please see attached archives for a v10 map package which demonstrates the problem and (simulated) desired results, and the source arcinfo coverage from which the simulation is built.

I think my python-COM environment is messed up.

Got

D:\> python list-fc.py
../Scratch/blank_canvec.gdb
<COMObject <unknown>>

and expectedsomething like this:

../Scratch/blank_canvec.gdb\ [u'counties.shp', u'roads.shp']\ counties.shp\ roads.shp

Possible culprits:

• using Mark Cederholm's python+arcobjects recipe requires registering com stuff, which conflicts wth PythonWin's com stuff.
• I'm using Arcgis with python 2.6 instead of the shipped 2.5. This hasn't proved problematic before, but maybe I just haven't wondered into this section of the forest before (which means I need to eat crow for Jason Scheirer).
• I have concurrent python 2.5 and python 2.6 …continue.

How to retrieve members and email of an Active Directory group in a re-usable format.

Locate dsget command line utility and put it in path.

Open an administrative command shell and:

dsget group "CN=mygroup,OU=mydepartment,OU=Users and Groups,DC=mydomain,DC=ca" -members |dsget user -samid -display -email

This is from the I can't believe I didn't know that and whyhaven't I been using it for the last ten years!?? department.

Many times in the last decade I'veneeded to*search Active Directory*for a person's name, login name, what members belong to what group and so on. Each time the need has been pressing enough I've gone out and searched the 'net for solutions, and each time after a time come up with a solution. Said time might have been 10 mintues or 2 hours depending on what in particular I was trying to do.  The solutions I've found and used ranged from the easy to use AD-Explorer to roll …continue.

Thanks to the persistence of Kent Nassen and the generosity of Jeff Wunderlich, the Aurora Text Editor can be downloaded and registered, “…the .bat file command I use to register is: ac -reg “Jeff Wunderlich” “xujcwpkgzngqmqn” 1 Feel free to share it with anyone on the net.”

So what’s the big deal? Well I covered most of it a few years ago in Musing on the Favourite Text Editor (slow link, involves time travel), but at the moment my biggest cause for joy is that I can, once again, select a column and inserting a character or range of characters (useful for turning fixed width text records into delimited text), and filling …continue.

Prompted by a conversation with my father eons ago, I'm researching and experimenting how to create a map in a discontinuous or interrupted projection. Initially I was thinking of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map, but I've since chosen a variant of the Bernard J. S. Cahill's Butterfly Map, the Cahill-Keyes M-style.

• Technical notes and specification - http://www.genekeyes.com/CKOG-OOo/1-...rinciples.html
• my code repository of same - https://bitbucket.org/maphew/cahill-keyes/

• GIS Exchange Q on Discontinuous projections in open source GIS

• MJ's work reproduced

2010-Oct-08

I've successfully recreated the single octant and eight octant Open Office drawings from the macros and instructions provided. It took a couple of hours because I had to figure out how OO macro dialogs work, and don't. There were some errors at the beginning that went away by themselves -- which always make me nervous because one is never sure if one day they might also decide to come back by themselves! I used OO v3.2 on linux so that may have contributed to the difficulty.

Results are at https://bitbucket.org/maphew/cahill-...t/5b36f8fd8471 (download using [get source] link at right)\ \ Anyway, the upshot is now I have a practical understanding of …continue.

Hello there, welcome to the web abode of Matt Wilkie. I've been employed as a GIS Technician, now Geomatics Analyst, since 1992 or so. If the job title is new to you, it's a fancy way, make that an opaque way, of saying I use computers to make maps -- thus the moniker -- and a great deal of other things related to that process.

I'm drawn to computer based communication systems, having run the gamut of fidonet, BBSes, newsgroups,  collaborative web editing platforms (drupal, expression engine), wikis (meatball, twiki (now foswiki), mindtouch) and so on. Having now run some dozen or so of these sites in the last decade and a half I've come …continue.

In the spring of 2007 the Natural Resources Department of Canada released digital topographic data for the whole nation under a free and libre license policy. The product is CanVec. For bulk downloads, see http://ftp2.cits.rncan.gc.ca/pub/canvec/ (subst http for ftp if that is more to your liking).

Although the data has been out for 5 months or so, as near as I can tell it has yet to be used in any significant public way (no one has been yapping about it outside the confines of their cubicle). The sole reference I could find is Stewart Russell’s my neighborhood, according to Canvec. A modest project to be sure, but I’m happy to see the first one …continue.

After a lot of hairpulling and asking smart people for help (Mark Cederholm, Kirk Kuykendall) I have a working python script which searches a file geodatabase and changes the AliasName of the matching feature classes from the incomprehensible BS_1370009_2 to the human friendly Residential Area. It does the same for a subset of the attribute names.

AlterAlias.py can be nabbed from my bitbucket canvec repository. It relies on python+arcobjects (necessary portion of which is bundled as parco.py)

I took the route of changing the aliasname instead of the fc_name to make it easier, I hope, to automatically incorporate the twice annual canvec updates.