The Memory Leak

Wow, that was fast, my suggestion from two weeks ago has already come to fruition.

Swivel announced at Where 2.0 the release of Swivel Geography.

However, when I click on “Post to Blog”, I was hoping to get some html that I could paste here to show the map. Instead, all I get is the same old graph:

Am I missing something obvious?

Be alert. The world needs more lerts.

Or does it?

The NWS sent this rather startling “graphicast” Friday. I live under the second “a” in Area. As of Monday, I’ve gotten an inch of rain. Credibility diminishes when alerts are issued for events that never occur.

While graphicasts are better than the old all-caps alerts, they still miss the mark.

We need alerts that are more specific. Here in the hill country, the primary risk is at low water crossings - not large rectangular areas. The locations of these crossings are known. Models can predict flooding at these crossings, what is needed is a system to broadcast alerts to subscribers.

“Turn around, don’t drown” is a catchy slogan, but if you’re trapped between two low water crossings the best thing to do is sit and wait.

I’ve mentioned before how Google could do something similar for traffic alerts. This same thing could be done for flood alerts.

I would like to receive alerts via IM on my cell phone when any water crossing along the path I plan to travel is expected to flood. Alternate route directions would be nice too.

I have been using Acronis True Image (TI) to backup my laptop. I’m overdue for a disk crash, last time it was 1995 I believe, so I figure I should verify that my recovery plan is workable.

I backup my entire C: drive to an external Maxtor Onetouch II USB drive. I create a bootable recovery CD using TI 10.0.

I replace my C: drive with a new unformatted disk and boot from the CD.

After TI starts I choose Disk Recovery, and browse to the archive on the USB drive.

The time next to “Total progress” slowly increases, starting from 36 minutes. After about 30 minutes it says time remaining is 2 days. I figure there must be a better way.

BartPE to the Rescue
I research it and find that the issue is Acronis accesses some USB 2.0 disks at a USB 1.0 speed, which is very slow. The solution is to use BartPE to create a bootable CD containing windows drivers.

So I download BartPE and try to install the Acronis plugin. It can only load plugins from .CAB files. Acronis provides a plugin, but no .CAB file. So I use MakeCab from the command prompt, passing Acronis.inf as an argument to create Acronis.cab. I’m then able to load the plugin using PE builder.

I create a WinPE CD using BartPE, and boot from that. I find TI in the menu under the system tools and start that up. I choose to recover, and browse to the archive on the USB drive. I choose not to verify archive while loading. After 20 minutes it says archive is corrupt. I choose to verify archive, which runs OK, then choose to recover again. In the mean time, I start this blog entry thinking the bad publicity will motivate Acronis to help me when I contact them.

However, the second time through it worked. Total time to restore: about 30 minutes. When I boot from my new disk, it starts fine, and Windows says it has detected new hardware.

I’ve heard Acronis is better than Norton Ghost. I notice a plugin for Ghost already installed BartPE. Sure seems like Acronis could document this recovery process a little better.

Moral to the Story
Don’t wait for a real disaster to verify that your disaster recovery plan works. If my disk had really crashed, I would not have been able to create the WinPE (BartPE) CD since all the drivers it needs are pulled from the C: drive. So go ahead and create the BartPE disk ahead of time and verify that it works.

Here in South Texas everyone talks about a looming water crisis, but few are doing anything about it.

An exception seems to be Guadalupe County Groundwater Conservation District where they are using GIS to stake a claim on groundwater.

If the county moves forward with the idea, it could be a groundbreaking option for Texas counties, cities and municipal utility districts to gain pumping rights from groundwater districts and make money by leasing the water rights for property the county owns, including long stretches of county roads.

They seem to be assuming uniform thickness of the water bearing sand formation. I wonder if people will demand a more accurate survey of subsurface water.

Vector One pointed me to Swivel, a site I find very interesting. I really like the concept. It would be really cool if they would incorporate mapping in addition to graphing. Data like this begs to be mapped.

Seems like they could start out really simple by providing points of cities and polygons of political jurisdictions. They could then provide users who upload data an option to create maps by joining them to these spatial datasets.

I wonder if Google will position their spreadsheets to compete more directly with Swivel. Since Wikipedia seems to lack a lot of the data and graphs offered by hard-copy encyclopedias, maybe they too will move in Swivel’s direction.

Emotiv has an interesting video here, showing how brainwaves can be used to interact with spatial data.

I suspect soon someone will attach one of these to an infant, whose neural pathways will quickly develop around the UI.

For older folks, instead of training the user to generate the appropriate waves to control the UI, it seems like the UI could be trained by recording waves, then associating waves with appropriate commands/actions, similar to the way voice recognition systems are configured.

I searched but could not find any additional details from this article.

In addition, Katmai will be able to manage different data types including documents, geographic information and XML.

I found this at Microsoft, but not any details.

With so many earthquakes near Silicon Valley, it probably wasn’t hard for Frank Robles of CityNap to convince Google last year to store geographic data on more stable ground here in San Antonio.

Google is one of CityNAP’s first customers. CityNAP is a secondary site for storage of the geographical data that Google provides on the Internet.

Now Microsoft is building a huge data center here too.

Environmental Impacts

I like data centers. They add a lot to the tax base without adding much to the population. They do consume a lot of electricity though. Microsoft will be CPS Energy’s largest customer. I don’t understand why CPS doesn’t provide time-of-use billing. If electricity were sold at a lower prices during off-peak hours data centers would be motivated to implement Thermal Energy Storage (TES). Specifically, making ice at night to provide cooling during the following day. Kilowatts generated during off-peak are a lot cleaner.

There’s interest in wind generated electricity, but the wind blows strongest at night. Some have looked at TES for wind, but seems like that job could be shifted to the data center itself.

Programmer Impacts
It appears this data center might also host Microsoft’s answer Yahoo’s Electric Cloud. There must be a bad pun in this somewhere … every cloud has a silverlighting?

What I want to know is how I can perform geoprocessing against different layers in different databases in a data center without being killed by round-trips. It seems to me that if two different data vendors store their data in the same data center there should be a way to spatially join their data behind the firewall, relieving me from fetching each feature here to the client. Isn’t there some sort of protocol to support this?

Right now if I want a list of all points from vendor A, that fall within polygons from vendor B, I am stuck with lots of round trips, or locally caching and doing the overlay. (?)

It seems like if a protocol existed, there would be a network effect such that geographic data would become more valuable - Vendor A and B could sell data at a higher prices, thus attracting even more vendors the marketplace.

If Microsoft intends to sell ads …

Once the service is formally launched, Microsoft will keep it free for light users but ask heavy users either to allow Microsoft to sell advertising space in exchange for unlimited usage or pay a nominal fee.

It seems like advertisers interested in geographically targeting an audience would be keen to pay for ads returned by multi-vendor spatial queries.