I just posted a note to the ESRI Web Team that their documentation on the old 9.3 product (I'm still using 9.3.1) had an error. Lets see if they update it. I've been using MakeTableView_management in Python which is necessary for doing a join (long story; see below) and is also apparently handy for renaming fields which is another purpose that I have for the tool. The documentation in the software and online is incorrect with respect to the field_info argument. The script example says ...

gp.maketableview "nf_roads", "TCH", "[ROAD_CLASS] = 'TCH'", "LEVEL ROAD_CODE VISIBLE, NAME NAME HIDDEN"

Fun at work !

This has bitten me twice now so I figured I should write about it to help me remember. It involves the error “ERROR 010240: Could not save raster dataset to”. I got this error everytime I tried to save a GRID from the NLCD 2006 img file. I found the following link that explained a lot.

http://support.esri.com/en/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/38972

I'm still struggling with this so I may edit this post later if/when I discover more about it but the link will let you know that its not just you.

I'm sure most everyone knows how to do this but being old school (ArcInfo) I still get a kick out of some of the editing features in the newer (9.3) software. I really should be trying out version 10 but I might be overwhelmed.

I get a kick out of the ability to paste features from one layer to another. I've been digitizing a lot lately for a project. Here is how it works. In an edit session, clear all selections, then select the features you want to copy (in the from layer). Set target layer to the one you want to paste into. Open the from layer's attribute table and go to Edit - Copy. Then open the to layer's attribute table and go to Edit - Paste.

A little late but thought this was cool
.
Seen at Very Spatial via Wired.

Ah the weirdness never ends. I needed to preserve a big long number as a string (a census data value as fips state, fips county, tract number, and block number). Excel apparently wants to keep it in scientific notation even though I am pasting values from a number formatted as an integer. I found a way to get it to work here so I wanted to book mark this somehow.
http://www.geniosity.co.za/musings/tips/stop-excel-using-scientific-notation-on-numbers/.

Tonight starts the GIS 101 class again. I always like the beginning of the semester when fresh minds are exposed (often for the first time) to GIS. Hopefully I won't begin to burn them out until the very end of the semester at the earliest. We are just going over the very basics of the software tonight (zooming and panning, the magnifier view (does anyone really use that ?), basics of layers and symbology). Later in the semester we will do some simple selections, more advanced symbology (quantiles), tabular joins etc. Then even later we will try some editing, and geocoding. Then near the very end we start in on spatial operations like clip, union, intersect etc. and then I'll have them do a project. Hopefully some of the students will take to this.

Ok If I really wanted control over my graphs, I'd be using "R" (but I haven't installed it yet). Instead I'm using Excel 2007 at work today and I'm trying to make a column chart with labels on the X axis. The values on the X axis are numeric. The problem is if I create the chart just using the y data, it doesn't know what x is so it just numbers them 1 through n. If I select both columns it treats them both as data. Even formatting the cells as text didn't work. Typing the numeric values in as alphanumeric (i.e. one, two, three, four etc.) works !

As a follow up to my post about the conference, I decided to recap my experiences at the conference this year.

What I'm talking about
http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference/index.html

So this summer I had the pleasure of attending my 3rd ever ESRI International User's Conference in San Diego California. My first Conference was in July, 2001 and my second was in August, 2004 In 2004 I entered the Applications Fair with my VB6 version of the Watershed Characterization and Modeling System (WCMS) most of which, my colleagues Mike and Jackie Strager developed previously in Avenue.

Just a little curiosity I discovered today. I've been working with a Python script that has some problems calculating a field using an expression. I figured out that the problem was the syntax used in the expression is treating a variable as if it were a field in the feature class (but it is not a field). This was obvious to me because the variable in the expression is surrounded by Python decode field characters (the exclamation mark).

Anyway my search landed me on this page.