I've been tutoring a community college student in physical geography. (B., you're going to rock that midterm tomorrow; I know it.) It's been fun. I enjoy finding ways to break things down into digestible pieces, particularly for folks who are new to it.
When last we met, I gave you an example of an mxd set up with data driven pages (DDP) using a point feature class as our index layer. In today's article, I'm going to convince you of why you should never do that.
A good index layer, that is a polygon feature class designed to represent your data driven page extents and nothing more, will make you life easier. Period.
This is Part I of a series on the Data-Driven Pages (DDP) feature in the ArcGIS desktop software suite. Simply put, DDP allows you to make a series of maps from a single mxd file. The functionality was introduced at ArcMap 10, but, to my mind, remains one of the unsung heroes of the software suite.
This is not strictly a geographically-related post, but I love all things python and suppose that you might as well.
I found a kid's book on learning python for application in Minecraft this morning. I have a nine-year-old at home and while he's a pretty studious little fellow in general, any sentence with "learn" in it will undoubtably be received with more enthusiasm if it also has the word "Minecraft" in it.
A little bit of fun stuff for Friday afternoon.
First, if you didn't happen read xkcd this week, you should check this out. Almost all we do is historic maps at my office, so everybody got a kick out this:
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I went to a GeoDev meetup in Sacramento tonight. I love these things. Whenever they roll around to Sacramento, I get myself there. If you're in my corner of the world, you can watch this board for GeoDev meetups. (There's always a GeoDev meetup at ESRI UC as well, by the way, so if you're fortunate enough to be heading out to San Diego at the end of the month, check that out.
This is a nitty gritty post regarding the arcpy package for ArcGIS. If that doesn't interest you, feel free to wander off and get yourself a sandwich or something.
An arcpy question popped up over on gis.stackexchange about how to sort an attribute table by one field, and then add sequential numbers to a second field based on that sorting.
Hey there. Welcome to geobug.net. Here we will talk about various things geographical and geek out about maps. Hang out and feel free to geek along.
Some of the topics discussed here are going to be general and friendly to the non-professional map geek. Others are going to be nitty-gritty details that only a GIS analyst would dig. Let the tag cloud be your guide. If you've got a topic in mind or a question to ask, hit the contact button and drop me a line.
