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.

Many tools for many jobs

Creating multi page tiffs or pdfs from multiple images is super easy with ImageMagick. After installing it you run it from the command line. "d:\whereveryouwant>convert image1.tif image2.jpg image3.tif mymergedimage.pdf" This simple command appends your multiple images, they can be anywhere, and makes a multi page tif or pdf. There are other options to the command if you want to look it up.

Hellsyeah Gmail style message origination in Outlook 2010

I got bored and Googled Office 2010 tweaks. To my joy I found that you can get Gmail style message consolidation in Outlook 2010. This means when there is a thread of emails Outlook will chain them together instead of keeping a copy of each individually. It was my main complaint about Outlook and its solved. WOOT!

Read the link for this and other 2010 tweaks.


Office 2010 tweaks

Breaking up large files

I have been running into tables that are too big for Excel and needed an easy way to break them into smaller chunks. Unix to the rescue on that. If you have a Unix box like Ubuntu or emulator like Cygwin all you need to do is run the command line code split option filename prefix. Split has two options -l (by line number) or -b (size in bytes, I think).

So I had the giant table in a csv, I ran "split -l 500000 d:\folder\folder\bigfile.csv smallerfile" and my big csv was broken up into 500k line csvs. From there I just opened them in a text editor and copied the header line into each new file.