Latest Contributions by BrianWilson

 I love opensource and that includes the Anaconda project, which Esri has chosen to incorporate into ArcGIS Pro. I used spyder for over a year. That said, I find Visual Studio Code to be vastly superior to spyder. I could probably write a 1000 words here easily to tell you why but I will spare you that. It's not open source but it's still free. I use it all day developing both Python and JavaScript code to support GIS work. The best approach to GIS is not Esri OR open source, the best approach is to use the ALL the tools that work for you, and using VSCode + conda environments makes this approach a lot easier. It's possible to do just about everything Pythonish inside VSCode, including running Jupyter notebooks. It's also possible to work remotely across network connections and also to use Docker containers for special projects. Anyway, dump spyder, switch to VSCode. It will be easier for you in the long run. ... View more

Good morning Derek, When I click on the link it jumps immediately to a 404 page.  The link goes to https://community.esri.com/external-link.jspa?url=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FXKsyW6juJS  That then takes me to https://t.co/XKsyW6juJS  Our county probably blocks the t.co domain; weird because they don't block Twitter itself, just the shortcuts. I am checking on that. When I type in the bit.ly text as the URL which is https:// bit.ly/2Hfxede it works.  Why would you put a bit.ly link in the page but link it to t.co? Anyway- thanks for the assistance. Brian ... View more

The gallery link is broken ... View more

Okay so my test was far easier than I thought it would be. The URL for the OpenLayers example used an ESRI service! It's only showing one attribute, I suspect that's what is in the vector file? The URL used in the example is  is   https://basemaps.arcgis.com/v1/arcgis/rest/services/World_Basemap/VectorTileServer/tile/ {z}/{y}/{x}.pbf I tried with several layers that are served from my own Portal and I can see them too so the query limitation is in ArcGIS JavaScript API and not in the tile service itself. I wish OpenLayers could read the styles from ESRI instead of showing thin blue lines for everything. ... View more

Apparently it's not impossible, as OpenLayers supports querying vector tiles, here is an example: https://openlayers.org/en/latest/examples/vector-tile-info.html?q=vector+tile  I have to test and see if it works with an ESRI service too. Will do that in a bit and come back here. ... View more

Dan, you sound like Robert Heinlein fan. TANSTAAFL? 🙂 Has your opinion changed since 2016? The wealth of free tools and freemium cloud products available for GIS now is staggering.  ESRI is on board too with free basemaps and services like geocoding through their free developer accounts that every GIS student should know about. --Brian ... View more

I realize you wrote this almost a year ago, but a reply might help someone else. The scratched out URL in your screenshot says "desktop"-something.  The error messages says you need a "fully qualified domain name" in the URL. 1) You have to run a web browser ON THE SERVER for this step. If you try to connect via a desktop computer it will refuse to let you go on. 2) You have to have a full domain name, like "servername.somecompany.com" not just "servername", that's what the error message means.  You should test this before installing web adaptor, make sure you can reach the site with the name you are about to enter here, for example "https://servername.somecompany.com:7443/". If your browser cannot see the portal there (you get errors about "site not found") then you need to fix that problem first. 3) Remember that you have to install web adaptor twice, once for Portal and once for Server. Once it's installed correctly then you can't go to its URL anymore, you manage all connections through Portal. Good luck! Once it's running it's relatively reliable and you probably won't ever have to do it again! ... View more

Since I wrote last year things have changed and have not been using ArcGIS as much at home. I tried ArcMap last night and it turns out somewhere in the last 12 months the slow start problem went away. What's changed? some random automatic Windows 10 update??? I normally remove software when I stop using it, so possibly Dropbox or Google Drive was causing it? Seriously those should have 0 impact on ArcGIS STARTUP -- only DATA is stored out there not applications software! But the problem went away outside my awareness so it is no longer an issue for me. My sympathy to anyone else still experiencing it. Comparing work and home set ups would have been immaterial because work = Windows 7 and home = Windows 10. The frustration with the home set up was that it's a killer machine - I9 10 core CPU, 64 GB ram, 750GB SSD. Everything else rips on it, the only problem I have seen is ArcMap When I started using ArcGIS Pro at work I had to get a RAM upgrade (from 8 to 16GB), it still kills that little Dell W7 laptop whenever it is running.  Brian ... View more

Agree 100%, I stand corrected. I remember that lengthy gap when agencies started publishing file geodatabases and I had no way to read them. Then ESRI published binaries instead of specs, and only for later versions of FGDB so I still had no way to read them.  With LiDAR it's especially painful because of the time and space required to unformat LAZ -> LAS and then reformat LAS -> zLAS It is slowing my adoption of the technology by making it easier to compromise and use lower res DEMs. ... View more