Frank Warmerdam is pretty good at following the release early, release often creed of open source development. It’s not uncommon to get more than one FWToolsrelease a month. Go Frank!   However this proficiency adds work which this end user would just as soon avoid. So being a lazy guy, I spent a number of hours writing some scripts to save me 15 minutes everytime there is a new release. ;-)

The result is gdal_extras which is now available from http://code.google.com/p/maphew/

Basic use guide:

1. unpack gdal_extras somewhere
2. Install latest version of FWTools
3. Open FWTools Shell and run c:\path\to\gdal_extras\gdal-extras-install.bat

And that’s it.

Other than the ease of adding these improvements to new installs, the utility …continue.

I find myself using gdalwarp in preference to ArcGIS ProjectRaster more and more often. Historically I’ve just used gdal when speed is important, large batch jobs for example, but now I’m finding it more reliable as well. For instance this morning I tried for 20 minutes to project a small DEM from geobase.ca but kept getting error messages which didn’t tell me the nature of the problem, “An error was encountered while executing ProjectRaster. Failed to execute (ProjectRaster_3)”. The projection should only have taken 30 seconds or so, including defining all the parameters.

The difficulty with gdalwarp is that I’m always forgetting the correct syntax and options so I have to go look …continue.

Open Tools > Error Console  and paste the following

Components.classes['@mozilla.org/appshell/window-mediator;1'].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIWindowMediator).getMostRecentWindow("mail:3pane").document.getElementById("tabmail").openTab("contentTab", {contentPage: "[mail.google.com]"});

discovered by way of Lifehacker, reproduced here so I have a memorable place to copy/paste from the next time I close the tab by accident.

Dear lazyweb: how can this be turned into a button, menu item, or preference checkbox?

chrome-me-um: A simple batch file to start chrome with a specific user profile. Example usage:

chrome Noah_Body

Inspired by http://www.labnol.org/software/create-family-profiles-in-google-chrome/4394/

How to convert dirnames from upper to lower case on linux:

for each in `ls -d *`; do newname=`echo $each | tr [A-Z] [a-z]`; mv $each $newname; done

Adapted from http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/3799-uppercase-lowercase.html#post12536

For ubuntu 8.04 and perhaps other versions on Dell Inspiron 1501 edit /etc/default/acpi-support and set this line as follows (the quotes were empty “” when first opened). A reboot was necessary.

STOP_SERVICES=”networking nm-applet”

Fix courtesy of Brian Pibris, who in turn found it here http://boulderjams.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/ubuntu-dell-suspend-fix/

Ubuntu distribution upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 on a dell inspiron1501 laptop completed, but X windows failed to start. The solution was to:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-generic restricted-manager
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a

Found here: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Gutsy_Installation_Guide

I use both windows and linux on a regular basis, and would like to optimise the number of things I need to remember distinctly. One of these categories is keyboard shortcuts. Although in Ubuntu Hardy System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts brings up an application to easily view or assign keyboard shortcuts, out of the box the WinKey doesn’t work in combination. It turns out one needs to change the keyboard layout option first so that winkey is treated as a single key. Courtesy of matthodge:

Re: Can’t press Super L + other keys\ Here is the solution :\ 1) Goto System > Preferences > Keyboard\ 2) Goto “Layout …continue.

Check this out:

(XP) start > run “cmd” [enter]

echo dumdididum > a-file_1.txt\ echo dumdididum > a-file_2.txt\ echo dumdididum > a-file_3.txt

echo tweedledee > a-filetoo_1.txt\ echo tweedledee > a-filetoo_2.txt\ echo tweedledee > a-filetoo_3.txt

echo tweedledee > a-filetree_1.txt\ echo tweedledee > a-filetree_2.txt\ echo tweedledee > a-filetree_3.txt

echo justforfun > a-file-with-no-numbers.txt

dir /b *1.txt

a-file-with-no-numbers.txt\ a-filetree_3.txt\ a-filetree_2.txt\ a-filetoo_1.txt\ a-filetree_1.txt\ a-file_1.txt

emphasis added.

what’s going on here?

(I’ll post the answer in the comments later. But it took me and a friend and some generous netizens to get to the root of it.)

Comments {#commentz}

1. Prokhor wrote:

   So what’s the deal with it?

   Posted 27 Nov 2007 at 2:04 pm ¶

2. matt wilkie wrote:

   Hi Prokhor,

   The deal is, dir matches by …continue.

I embarked yesterday on a quest to fix areas of a DEM which are supposed to be flat from a raster generated from lake polygons with elevations, and not have abrubt transition from the flat lakes to the original DEM (profile like a J not an L). Sample data at here (10mb)

There is  a post in the ESRI support forum  which I *think* is describing what I want, in a syntax for arcinfo. Since it looks like I’ll have to do some scripting no matter what, I might as well figure out how to do so in open source tools rather than be confined to the walled garden of ArcGIS. …continue.