Latest Contributions by PaulHuffman

I have this request from a non-ArcGIS user: "Is there an "app" for easily calculating watershed area upstream from a point on a stream?  I'm still using the 1964 river mile index.  You'd think we could make a hell of a cool visual and interactive river mile index."  Since this user is my supervisor and he's been talking about it for a while, I probably should give this request a bit of consideration. I'm trying to figure out an efficient approach to this request. Does something like this exist? That would be most efficient. Or will I have to roll my own?  Assets I have are a 10 meter DEM of the whole basin, and routed hydrography (I've been trying to get these guys using the Washington State SSHIAP hydro as a river mile index for quite a while. Is the NHD more appropriate now?). Tools I have are ArcDesktop 9.3.1 and 10 with extensions, and ArcGIS Server 9.3.1. .NET. Abilities I have include considerable spatial analyst experience with hydro modeling, some success with Model Builder, some python scripting,  some use of map mashups and Java Script API, and laughable ability with VB and Map Objects. I suppose I should go the steps to derive an accumulation grid from the DEM. Then wouldn't each cell in the accumulation grid contain a count of all the cells that drain to the cell, so an ArcMap user could click on the grid with the i tool and get that value, multiply by the grid's cell area and that's your drainage area?  But then how do I streamline that for the user, and particularly how to I deliver that to the non-ArcMap user? I suppose I could also convert the routed hydro to a grid and overlay the accumulation grid and see if I could get a grid that would give a ArcMap user both stream measure and accumulation information in one i click. ... View more

A field crew just brought me a Garmin Etrex that they just bought. Why they picked such an old model, I don't know.  I suppose it was because it was cheap and water proof.  Anyway, they are hoping that I can install a bunch of waypoints from a ESRI point feature class I made into their GPS so they can use the GPS to guide them to their sampling points.  In the past, I've always been able to get points out of a GPS, either with DNR Garmin or just by downloading CSV files from a GPS.  But today I have these two main problems. 1. I'm now running ArcDesktop 10 and DNR Garmin doesn't yet run on Arc10. Or does it now? Which brings me to my next dead end: 2. I can't find a download source for DNR Garmin because of the Minnesota government shutdown. Is there another download source? I was lucky to have a cable for this old Etrex. It connects to a PC via a 9 pin serial port. I was lucky to still have a couple PCs with 9 pin com ports.  Some in these forums say they now use GPSGate. I downloaded a copy, got it running, but haven't come close to figuring out how to use it for this simple task of going from shapefile to waypoints.  Most seem to use GPSGate to connect live GPS to web apps.  But at least I was able to verify a connection from the GPS to the 9 pin serial port. ... View more

I created a map app with the Google Map API to display one of my map services on a Google Map basemap.  I'd like to have the map app start with a map extent closer to the extent of my map service rather than the whole globe.  Sure, Google Map API is completely documented and I can find that the initial map extent is a property of the class esri.arcgis.gmaps.DynamicMapServiceLayer But I'm having trouble figuring out what the syntax is to add a property to the class is.  Are there any examples online?  When I did this with an ESRI online basemap my initial extent was set with var initExtent = new esri.geometry.Extent({"xmin":-13785833.373418408,"ymin":5680675.316201857,"xmax":-13006175.684909647,"ymax":6045127.06706556,"spatialReference":{"wkid":102100}});         map = new esri.Map("map",{extent:initExtent}); I tried this with the Google MAP API but I get an syntax error right away in my IDE: var dynamicMap = new esri.arcgis.gmaps.DynamicMapServiceLayer         ("http://host119.yakama.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/facilitiesWGSWebMer2/MapServer",         null, 0.75, dynmapcallback, initialExtent{"xmin":-13785833.373418408,"ymin":5680675.316201857,"xmax":-13006175.684909647,"ymax":6045127.06706556,"spatialReference":{"wkid":102100}}); ... View more

About a month ago, I created 6 images services for 6 tiles of 2006 NAIP jpg images in 9.3.1. Each service used around 500 jpg images. Now I see that in one service that four images are in the wrong place.  By displaying the ISDEF for the service, I was able to identify the names of the four problem images. The original jpgs map in ArcMap in the correct place.  As in the other jpgs in the directory that went into the service correctly, the problem jpgs have world files associated with them. But maybe the header information was bad. I wondered if ArcMap uses the world file while Image server uses the header file or visa versa.  I thought maybe there were four other images in the folder that had the the wrong world file coordinates, duplicating the world files of these four problem images.  I thought that I could use grep to search for files that have the same coordinates as one of the problem images. If I could find all the *.jgw files that have for example 1234 on line 5 and 5678 on line 6, maybe I would find a duplicate. However, grep 1234 *.jgw| grep 5678 can only find files with 1234 and 5678 on the same lines.  Is there a sed trick that can do this?   I tried exporting these photos to another format like img and even to another jpg.  These exported photos map in ArcMap in the correct position, but the color mapping has changed a little from the original jpgs. I'm wondering what my next steps should be.  Isn't there a way to patch in new images to a image service to see if the image copies will straighten this out?  Should I try moving the four problem images out of the directory, leave the copies in the directory and make a new service?  How do I get the exported images to match the color mapping of the originals? ... View more

I happened to notice that in ArcScene there is export to 3D.  So I tried it. Docs say I can export Scene> 3D and my scene gets saved to a VRML model. It seems to produce a wrl file and a bunch of jpgs.  I thought the VRML format might be useful to send scenes to collaborators that don't have ArcGIS.http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?id=3458&pid=3453&topicname=Exporting_a_3D_document Something I could put up on my webserver. But so far I haven't found a VRML viewer that works with files created by ArcScene. I've tried FreeWRL and Cosmo. Cosmo could view its own demo files but my export from ArcScene was blank white. There are lots more out there, so it doesn't seem very efficient for me to keep randomly trying different viewers. Do you know of any that are known to work with files created by ArcScene? ... View more

I've been playing around with the ancient (2000) LiDAR data from the BOR for the Yakima Basin. There is a directory of ascii files called Bare_Earth_LiDAR named ysht*.txt where * is numbers from 01 to 912. These bare earth files have worked well in constructing some bare earth terrains.  Then there is this directory of ascii files called Raw_Lidar which contains all the hits from 1st returns to bare earth named ysht*.txt where * is 01 - 912.  How do I separate highest hit data out of these raw LiDAR ASCII files? ... View more