Our extended health insurance company helpfully profides pdf forms with my name, client #, etc. pre-filled for easy printing. Unfortunately there are a number of fields which will aren’t likely to change, like my phone number and the names of my kids, which are not filled in. I’m lazy, so I figured it was worth spending an hour figuring out how to save 1 minute of no-thought grunt work every time I need to fill out a form.

I found an article extolling the virtures of flpsed, a pdf “annotator” for linux. Great, that sounds perfect! Flpsed is not listed in the cygwin package repository but a little bit of …continue.

This was an attempt to use some photographic image processing techniques^1^ to bring back some detail in the regions of mountain shadows in a Landsat7 composite image. It didn’t work but I learned a lot in the process. It could be useful in future with other data which is has not lost so much to white and black shadows.

Original on left while right shows result of contrast mask combined with grain merge selected in the layer Mode. It almost works, but not enough for the project I was researching for. Below, detail view of grain merge result.

Comments {#commentz}

matt wilkie wrote:

just found the PHATCH project, http://photobatch.wikidot.com/, which is python alternative to …continue.

As Tom Patterson describes in “Resolution bumping GTOPO30 in Photoshop“, using a too-detailed shaded relief image can actually yield a map which is less legible. In the same article Patterson also demonstrates how to counteract this problem. He says this is something to do to the elevation model and not the shaded relief, but not having a graphics program installed on my machine capable of editing 16 bit images I applied it to the shaded relief instead. The results are good, but I’m itching to try it out properly to see what the difference is when used earlier in the chain. Here is my nutshell re-work of Patterson’s resolution bumping …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.

I’ve moved the Arcmapbook project from Sourceforge to arcmapbook.googlepages.com

I’m tired of meeting all the little challenges which come with being a site administrator, in aggregate, they aren’t so little. In features available to project adminsitrators, Sourceforge still has more than Google Code, but the attention to usability and a clean interface has won me over. The idea behind the move is that with the little time I have to spend on this project, slices between “my real job” tasks and at home after the kids are asleep will be spent actually on mapbook rather than on it’s administration. Passage of Time, as always, will be the best judge of …continue.

A recent thread on the osgeo4w mailing list prompted me to scratch an itch I’ve encountered a few times: trying to figure out if there is more than one executable DLL or EXE in the search path with the same name. The result is dupe-search.bat. Invocation is a simple dupe-search [dir to look for dupes of], example:

dupe-search c:\osgeo4w\bin

Results are saved in %temp%\dupes.txt

It’s not all that intelligent, there is no effort to avoid text files for example, but it works well enough for what it does (for me anyway). The most significant thing I learned, had me scratching my head for a couple of hours, was that a …continue.

Note: BC and Alberta archives are 68mb, Yukon & NWT only 2mb. Simply remove ab bc from the set regions line.

Requires fwtools, wget, and 7zip to be in path.

*update: use ogr2ogr newer than 1.4.2 else some of the attributes will be truncated! Please see gdal bug#1844 for more info.*

 @echo off
 :: rev 0.1 ~ 2007 Nov 10, Matt.Wilkie@gov.yk.ca
 echo.
 echo. Going to download National Road Network files from Geobase
 echo. for Yukon and adjacent regions.
 echo. When finished downloading I will attempt to unpack the archives
 echo. and project the data to Yukon Albers, in shapefiles.
 echo.
 echo.
 setlocal

call :ChkReqs wget.exe
call :Unpack
call :gml2shp
goto