About 250 LizardTech users took our customer satisfaction survey in April. I wanted to thank you for taking the time to tell us about how you use our products and what we can do to improve. Ninety-eight percent of you said you’d recommend LizardTech’s products to a colleague, and as a product manager that makes me about as happy as can be.

Some of you said you’d be willing to talk to me in a bit more depth about what you’d like to see in future versions and things LizardTech can do to make your life easier. I’ll be starting to make calls in early June, so thanks in advance for your help.

The JPEG 2000 standard provides for a variety of encoding options available: depending on where you sit, this makes for either a very cool experience or a very daunting experience. For the geospatial realm, where we deal with very large images, this plethora of choices is particularly important, because the choices you make at encode time can significantly affect both encode and decode performance, for both memory usage and CPU time. And, unfortunately, it’s often the case that fast encodes can make for slow decodes, and vice versa.

We’ve designed GeoExpress to default to a reasonable compromise in its choice of encoding options, and we’ve also provided a few “profiles” (predetermined encoder settings) based on NGA’s recommendations for workflows with particular requirements. Nonetheless, I’d be the first to admit that the subtle tradeoffs among tile sizes, precinct sizes, codeblock size, progression orders, quality layers, ad inf., can be truly bewildering. I give talks and write high-level articles on this JP2 stuff pretty regularly, but I’ve never quite had the time to do a stand-alone white paper discussing specifically JP2 performance and profiles using the internal benchmarking we’ve done inside here at the LizardTech Labs.

Happily — for those technically inclined, anyway — Margaret Lepley of MITRE Corp. has just done the work for me, publishing an article showing some good benchmarking analyses of these performance issues at http://link.aip.org/link/?PSI/6943/69431B/1. It is not downloadable for free, but if you’re looking for a good read on the difference that tiles and progression orders can make, I’d strongly recommend it.

JPEG 2000: fast access to large grayscale images, Margaret Lepley, The MITRE Corp.,
Proceedings of SPIE — Volume 6943

JPEG 2000 image compression allows many formatting alternatives, but users frequently have insufficient knowledge or experience to direct the choice. At compression time many of these options may seem approximately equal, but during exploitation the file structure differences can have a huge impact on access speed. This is particularly true for very large images such as those regularly used in remote sensing and many defense systems. This paper examines the impacts of JPEG 2000 options such as tiling, tile-parts, precincts, and packet ordering on large single band images, particularly in relationship to random access speed.

This week LizardTech finally retired our worn-out old bug tracking software for something shiny and new.

Our old system, whose name I politely won’t mention, has done a fair job for several years now, but as our engineering practices have developed and matured the software just wasn’t able to keep pace with our needs. Oh, we did try – I’ve got the SQL scars to prove it – but we reached a point where we finally found something that seemed to do everything we needed without needing me to bolt lots of kludgy scripts on top of it.

You see, while the engineers here are really good at writing code and fixing bugs, us manager types have had an increasingly hard time keeping track of all the features and bugs being worked on, which release they are for, when they will be fixed, and so on. We wanted a tool that would allow us to do simple, lightweight, intuitive schedule estimation, as part of the normal bug tracking system, and we think we’ve found it.

We’ve been fans of Joel “Smart and Gets Things Done” Spolsky for a long time, and to varying degrees we’ve adopted his ideas for task estimation and hiring. And so when he came to Seattle last year on his World Tour a bunch of us Lizards hiked up the hill to see just what this FogBugz thang was all about – and we came away impressed.

You can find a lot online about FogBugz, both on the company’s website (they’re called Fog Creek Software) and on others’ blogs and such, so I won’t go into detail here. Instead, let me just point out three things that sets it high above other systems we’ve seen:

• The interface is only via the browser, which initially had me worried – until I started actually using it. Intuitive interface controls, sweet filtering options, flexible searching, very responsive feedback – one of us commented that this is one of the only Ajaxy apps he’d used that had actually got it all right.
• Project estimation is fun again. The “EBS” system they use for estimating ship dates may seem a little over the top when described in print – Monte Carlo methods? for project planning?! – but by golly in actual use It Just Works. Of course, the graphs produced are only as good as the data you’ve entered, but that entry process is clean and easy – and, most critical, it’s developer-friendly enough that the engineers need not stress out about careful time-keeping.
• Tech support is both responsive and helpful. Emails (and forum questions) are quickly and fully answered, with follow-ups welcome. Real, live, breathing humans on the other end of the line – how cool is that?

There’s a lot of other stuff in there we’re not using – Wiki, discussion groups, customer email, stuff like that – we’ll see, maybe later on. For now, it’s a system that gives us much better visibility and control over features and bugs.

Which makes for happy managers and developers.

How cool is that!

Last time, we talked about despeckling. Another popular workflow with GeoExpress 7 uses two new features: output tiling and decoding.

Lots of customers have massive SID images that they need to chop up into smaller tiles and decode out to TIFF. In prior versions of GeoExpress, you could use a series of command line tools to do this, but of course this was unwieldy.

Here’s how easy it is to do in GeoExpress 7:

1. Add the file(s) you want to work with to the Images tab of the job list.
2. Select Image Crop… from the Tools menu. The Image Crop dialog appears.
3. In the Output Tiling section, choose how many rows and columns you want to divide your image into and click OK.
4. Now, just choose “GeoTIFF” as your output format (use the drop-down menu on the main interface) and click Encode Selected Images.

In no time, you’ll have a series of GeoTIFF tiles created from your original SID image.

Many customers have requested an easy way to be notified when updates to LizardTech products are available. Today we launch a new RSS feed specifically for product updates at http://www.lizardtech.com/files/rss/updates.xml.

By subscribing, you’ll know when patches and new versions of LizardTech software are available.

You can view all of LizardTech’s RSS feeds at http://www.lizardtech.com/company/rss.php. Also, the LizardTech RSS feeds are able to be “auto discovered” by many RSS readers on any page of the LizardTech website.

Most of you are probably already using GeoExpress 7. We’ve received some rave reviews from some of you about the new features we added, so we thought this might be a good time to introduce and explain how to use some of the great new tools in GeoExpress 7.

If you’ve ever received imagery from the USDA NAIP program, particularly MrSID Generation 2 (MG2) images from previous years, you’ll have noticed that many of the images have black collars around them. If you load these images into your GIS application and drop out these black collars, you’ll see a lot of ugly “speckling.”

These speckling artifacts happen because compressing images to MrSID at high compression ratios requires approximating colors. In other words, “black” becomes “almost black.” While the human eye doesn’t ordinarily notice the difference, this can make it difficult, not to mention ugly, to mosaic images together. Speckling happens with other background colors, too. Below you can see speckling around the edge of a mosaic with a white background.

Not to fear, though. GeoExpress 7 has new “despeckling” tools to clean these images up.

Start GeoExpress, and add your SID files to the “Despeckle” tab of the job list. In most cases, you won’t even need to adjust any options. Just click the “Despeckle Selected Images” button below the job list and GeoExpress will clean up your images for you. Here’s the result:

Next time, we’ll talk about “tiling out” images as TIFFs.

Images courtesy of MapMart.

A couple weeks ago Jeff Martin posted on Google Lat Long about a new Penguin Publishing website called wetellstories.co.uk that fuses fiction and maps in a series of newly published short stories, where the text of a story unfolds interactively on a map.

Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods comes to mind about now. This is a little book of essays in which the novelist muses on the nature of narrative and location.

In one essay Eco tells of getting mail from a reader of his ponderous novel Foucault’s Pendulum. The correspondent, who had obviously been doing research in back editions of Le Monde, complained that if the hero of the book had really traveled that particular route through Paris on that particular night, as Eco described in street-by-street detail, he would have encountered a huge fire that blazed in the city that night and that took hours to extinguish, yet the narrative makes no mention of the fire even as the character walks within yards of the spot.

Eco used this anecdote to discuss the blurring of the line between reality and fiction where familiar location is involved for the reader. We might also observe that 1) people who write letters to novelists correcting historical facts in fictional stories are crazy, but 2) if Eco had subjected his manuscript to testing on a website like Penguin’s, the whole “why didn’t the hero notice the conflagration” question could have been avoided.

Another thought I had about this is, what a boon this would be to Bloomsday enthusiasts, a throng of dedicated James Joyce fans who have demonstrated the allure of linking “story” with “real-world place” by setting a day aside (June 16 - “Bloomsday”) to trace the path of Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom through the streets of contemporary Dublin, pausing where the fictional Bloom downed fictional pints at actual pubs. It was Joyce’s stated goal that if Dublin disappeared it should be able to be reconstructed from his book, so I wonder what he would have thought of merging maps and narrative.

Of course, Ulysses is not a short story (alas, not even a short novel), which I’m guessing would make it difficult to read on a map. And then there’s the troubling (dare I say unmappable?) matter of Molly Bloom’s 45-page punctuation-free soliloquy. I can just see the Penguin people considering publishing Ulysses as a cartographic novel: “…and maybe we said maybe we will maybe.”

I’m lucky I got my degree in English while geography and mapping science courses were still elective.

Last week, some of us went south to Palm Springs to escape the rain and enjoy the company of the crew from Redlands at the ESRI Developer Summit. Much of the conference has been blogged about elsewhere, but I did want to share my observations of the talk on OGC capabilities in ArcGIS Server 9.3.

Satish Sankaran, Yinqi Tang and Gary MacDougal gave a very exciting discussion and demonstration of ESRI’s implementation of OGC Web Services. The quick and dirty is that at 9.3, ESRI has exposed considerable out-of-the-box support for all three of the main OGC specifications and demonstrated interoperability using non-ESRI clients and servers.

It might be worth starting with a little background. For a long time, if you wanted to use ESRI software to access server-based data you really had two choices: use ESRI clients (like ArcMap and ArcCatalog) to access data served from ArcGIS Server or use a web browser client to access the data as a read-only image from ArcIMS. I’m setting aside any discussion of the (client side) Interoperability Extension, which requires an additional license and which I’ve never seen.

If you had another application which could really benefit from content in ArcGIS Server, that was an integration task. More specifically that was your integration task. Similarly if you had an ArcMap-based geo-processing workflow that could benefit from integration with a non-ESRI content provider, well, that was your problem too.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (of which both ESRI and LizardTech are members) exists to publish freely available specifications that allow geospatial applications to talk to each other. The three most commonly used OGC specifications are:

• Web Map Service (WMS) for serving custom maps into web pages. Typically these are small JPEG image “tiles” that make up your map.
• Web Feature Service (WFS) for serving features (vector data like roads, borders, pizza shops) from your dataset into another geospatial application that can interact with them at much more controlled level than a read-only map. Think of WFS is as serving GML over HTTP. An OGC extension for this is WFS-T (T for “transactions”) which allows remote editing of data.
• Web Coverage Service (WCS). Like WMS, this provides a means of accessing raster data. However, here the service is optimized for sending to another geospatial application, rather than a simple web service.

At 9.3, there is significant support for all of these.

WMS

ArcGIS Server’s WMS support is extended to the current version 1.3 including support for Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD). SLDs are part of the WMS specification and allow customized symbology for features. The demonstration here included an OpenLayers web page client rendering a map (with user-selected symbology) served from ArcGIS Server via WMS. That was pretty good, but really, only a marginal improvement.

WFS

The previous 9.2 Data Interoperability extension will continue to provide WFS support to the Desktop Clients. However, at 9.3, “Simple Features” support comes out of the box (without the extra license). On the server side, 9.3 includes a WFS server and if your back-end store is SDE then this includes WFS-T support. What that means is that if you use SDE, non-ESRI clients (who speak WFS) can edit your geodatabase. Stop for a minute and think about that.

The demonstration here showed again the Open Layers client. This time it accessed the parcel data stored in ArcGIS Server via WFS. It corrected some of the parcel boundaries and this was reflected in the same GDB accessed via ArcMap. Frankly, I was pretty impressed.

WCS

WCS support is totally new in 9.3. The demonstration of server support showed the Open Layers client rendering a 4-banded Modis image served from ArcGIS Server via WCS. More interesting to me was the client demo where ArcMap read a dataset via WCS from ICDES and did some sort of raster-based geo-processing on it (I can’t remember exactly what it was). Very, very cool.

Whether or not you believe “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa,” ESRI’s support for this sort of interoperability can only be seen as good news for GIS and for ESRI.

My family (Donna, Ian, and Maya) and I were fortunate to spend two weeks in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. We spent the first week at the Hotel Sotavento on Playa De Ropa and the second week at the Hotel Krystal on the beach at Ixtapa.

This image of our trip in ArcMap will open a new tab or window.

Our first week we swam and snorkeled at both the beach and pool, went fishing and caught a fairly large needle fish, which strongly resembles a barracuda, and snorkeled again at a nearby reef. Ian and I sailed on a Hobi Cat in very strong winds. The kids also climbed and explored on large rocks off the beach. Body surfing and boogie boarding were a big part of our beach experience here. Donna and Maya perfected their surfing techniques.

Up the beach at Ixtapa, the hotel was a more “American style” resort with lots of snowbirds escaping winter in the upper Midwest. The surf was a lot higher at this beach so boogie boarding was more dangerous. On our last day the waves approached twelve feet high and they closed the beach.

A highlight was our day trip to Isla de Ixtapa. We enjoyed fantastic snorkeling at three different beaches. Ian spotted a small moray eel in the sandy swimming beach and we followed it for some time with masks on. He and I also made a jungle trip to the top of the island, following the trails of small deer and rabbits. Our afternoon ceviche lunch - fish or shrimp cocktail “cooked” in lime juice and served in a dish with salsa and other goodies - was interrupted by a dozen sting rays jumping three to four feet out of the water in choreographed lines as if herding fish.

Stopping at a wildlife sanctuary back on the mainland we photographed huge crocodiles and turtles as well as birds and iguanas.

In town we got a good look at the street life of Zihuatanejo, where people live a lot differently than they do at home. The kids got to see how food and transportation are handled in countries that do things differently than ours. We hope to return in the future and explore some of the volcanoes that are just inland from the beach resorts.

Last Tuesday evening, LizardTech hosted a party at GameWorks in conjunction with our participation in the GITA conference. I couldn’t attend the party, but several of my fellow Lizards did and the report is that a good time was had by all. Thanks to all who stopped by.

Here is one of our favorite photos from the evening. As editor of Geospatial Solutions Online, Cyrena Respini-Irwin is an old friend of LizardTech. She has reviewed a number or our product releases in recent years. Here she is blasting away at indiscriminate evil alongside our own marketing coordinator, David Calabro.

We’ve always known her aim is true.