You get what [someone] pays for.

I am starting to use Visual Studio (Professional) to write python. The first thing I had trouble with was missing the function in Pyscripter that highlights all occurrences of a selected word . A little trip to the google got me an extension that does this. I got it here.  Woot.

Data Flow Diagram... Ok

I have to do my first "official" data flow diagram. I don't really know what I am doing yet but after rummaging around for the an approach to take I found that Google Docs drawings has flow chart functionality. It looks like it will do everything I need.

Scratch Names

I was always wishing there was an easy way to create a unique scratch name for outputs of geoprocessing scripts. Today I found the simple solution http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/CreateScratchName/000v0000001z000000/

The Create Scratch Name code does just that so if you are making a temporary copy of  features or a temporary buffer or whatever you can slap this line in and have it make names for you. Its great for someone like me that has to run their code 70 times before finishing it.

Why did it take me so long to learn about this?

I just came across a little tool in Windows 7 that might come in handy. Its a recorder that records your mouse actions and takes screen shots along the way. When your done it puts it in a little html and zips it up. You can even edit the html in Word to clean it up or use it for "how to's" and what not. Seems like this could be a very useful little guy.

To run just hit the Windows key and type psr.exe.

Too much of a good thing

This is random but I wanted to write it down.

We had 55 attendees at our wedding. Our wedding events included a welcome bbq on Friday night, wedding and reception on Saturday and general hanging out on Sunday and we had 30 people staying on site with us Friday-Sunday morning. Given these factors we thought we would need a lot of alcohol so we acquired 3 kegs several buckets of Margarita and several 3 liter boxes of wine. I don't know what we were thinking.The kegs were available to our guests from about 3pm on Friday until Monday morning around 9am. Despite everyones best efforts only 1 Coors lite keg was fully consumed. The other Coors Lite keg was only lightly dented and the Mirror Pond keg was about 3/4 drank. We also had a fair amount of wine left over.

The moral of the story is unless your party consists of lots of college kids, Don't buy so much booze.

Unique IDentification

I don't know how I missed this, but the Global ID (GUID) field in ArcGIS gives you a hands free way to add unique ids to features. The Add Global IDs tool will create the field and populate it with the ID. The GlobalID will stick with the features as you edit or join or export or clip or whatever. This will allow you to trace back and maintain relationships.

I will start using this in everything. No more staring at the attribute table to see what I can combine to make a Unique ID.

Metadata is for the birds

Today I was faced with some metadata that ended up in HTML but needed to go back into a geodatabase as FGDC metadata. Luckily I found this link that outlined out to use a USGS tool to convert the HTML to a text file that could be imported. No manual ctrl+c and ctrl+v required.