Directions Magazine has announced that it is shutting down, with May 31, 2024 as the deadline to access/republish any content from the site. My first reaction when reading this was that I didn’t know it was still around. Unfortunately, I was not being facetious, but it’s also not funny and I should have been more aware. In the early parts of my career, Directions was an important independent source of news (for me) about the geospatial industry. I did not come to geospatial with formal education or training in it, so Directions was a great resource that pointed me to other content where I coul ..read more

It’s happened to us all – tucked away in the dusty corners of our attics or closets is that box with a serial port Zip drive and a dozen disks. Curiosity usually gets the better of us and, after a few downloads and a couple of kernel recompiles, we have that drive working and begin to pore over whatever those disks contain. The ASCII art that once graced the header of our GeoCities site, the dBase files that managed our book collections (and, if we’re lucky, the FoxPro project along with them), and the VRML file of that dancing baby from Ally McBeal. You could shift-delete all of that data and ..read more

As I was building a Python notebook in Databricks, I started thinking about how much Python work I’ve been doing since I went out on my own. That got me thinking about all of the SQL I had been doing the last couple of years at my previous role, then the Javascript before that and the .Net before that, and so on. I realized that, in terms of coding, my career has definitely had phases and I thought about them like rings in a tree. There may be more effective ways to visualize the concept, but the rings stuck with me, so I put together a quick visualization showing roughly proportional rings in ..read more

I’ve been working a project recently to investigate training an LLM (LocalGPT, in this case) to help analyze a document library. (More on that in the future.) For ingest, it handles PDF files really well. I needed some well-known (by me) content to kick the tires for initial prototyping so I decided to dump all the posts from this blog to PDF. It turns out that wasn’t an exceptionally easy thing to do. Although there were several WordPress plug-ins that purported to be able to do it for a small fee, I felt like it should fairly straightforward to do with some Python. It was. I’ve posted the co ..read more

I spent the past couple of days at the Esri Federal GIS Conference, still referred to by many as the “FedUC,” in Washington, DC. The primary reason I went was to attend some customer meetings. The FedUC draws many people (6,000 in this year’s case) from around the country and it’s a convenient place to do in-person meetings in today’s mostly-remote world. I didn’t attend many sessions, but one that caught my eye was an update on the status of the Geospatial Management Office (GMO) at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). While I never worked with the GMO, I worked with adjacent organiz ..read more

Approximately one year ago, I started independent consulting in earnest. I had spent six years at my previous role and had a number of systems and routines in place to manage my day and help productivity. Those all had to be re-examined. This post will be the first in an occasional series where I break the fourth wall and discuss issues related to my consulting and how I’ve dealt with them. I started this blog back in 2006 to post code snippets and such in the hopes that they could help someone else. In that same spirit, I’ll discuss day-to-day issues related to the practice of consulting In m ..read more

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. They are usually motivated by well-intentioned, but often misguided, factors and are typically designed to fail. That said, the annual passage of January 1 is a good milestone for assessing goals for the coming year. A lot of the work winds down between mid-December and January 1, so that time period offers a bit more opportunity to reflect. I typically want my New Year’s goals to be focused more on self-improvement or habit-building. In recent years, I have found that the opposite of SMART (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, time-based) g ..read more

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2024! It’s been a few years since I’ve done one of these, but I’ve been posting more actively in recent months, which has attracted attention from sales and marketing types. Blogging in 2024 is different than it was in 2006, for sure. This is the geoMusings blog. It represents by personal thoughts, observations, and work related to geospatial tools, technologies, and practices. It documents my personal career journey in the geospatial community from 2006 to the present. This site is not a content marketing site. I do not entertain requests by outside authors to do gu ..read more

I was having a conversation a few weeks ago, discussing, among other things, the value of time – its management, its conservation, how it is the one strategic asset that matters above all others. During that part of the conversation, it occurred to me that if time is the asset, then people and relationships are its currency. What I mean by that is that time is the most well-spent, having the highest and most satisfying return when it is spent with people and furthering relationships with them. That statement includes relationships in all spheres of life, but the remainder of this post will mos ..read more

I’ve been integrating pg_webhooks into some project work lately. Conversely, I have not been using n8n much, but a vendor rep used it in a demo of some workflow automation capabilities for a platform one of my customers is using. I had dabbled with it about two years ago but haven’t done much with it since. One thing that I have been lax about is building some practical examples of how to use pg_webhooks, and I thought n8n could be the basis of such an example. It is a platform in the IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) class of tools. It is built with Node and Javascript, which I like a ..read more