LizardTech’s business is not only about compression ratios and lossless quality; it’s about making our customers’ jobs easier by providing the best GIS solutions around while still taking into account their current operations. While much of our team’s time during the last ten months has been spent building and launching LizardTech’s GeoExpress® and Express Server® software products, we’ve also worked (and continue to work) hard to ensure that these products remain compatible with other commonly used GIS software.

Based on your feedback, we know many of you manage workflows that include one or more pieces of Esri software and it is increasingly important for both LizardTech and Esri technologies to integrate seamlessly together. Supported file formats allow projects to run smoothly and make sharing data faster and more efficient. Everyone wins.

To that end, LizardTech has recently made available a free plug-in for interoperability between our Express Server and Esri’s server product, ArcIMS. Express Server 7 came on the scene in July offering exciting features such as added support for raster images encoded to MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) format and the option to install as a 64-bit application. Now when used together, Express Server makes viewing images via ArcIMS up to 25 times faster!

We also offer free plug-ins that add support for MG4 raster data files in Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop version 9.3.1 and 10. Now Esri’s Arc users can harness the benefits of the new MG4 files that GeoExpress 8 produces, including support for compressing hyperspectral data allowing users to compress up to 255 bands of geospatial data.

You can download the plug-ins for ArcIMS, ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Desktop 10 here.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future releases, so thank you, and keep it coming!

We Lizards like to keep busy and we like to share the products we develop with the geospatial industry, because…well…geospatial users are just so appreciative! Hard on the heels of the release of Express Server 7, which can be installed as a 64-bit application and features support for MG4 imagery, LizardTech has unveiled the MG4 Plug-in for ArcGIS 10 Desktop.

MG4 was created to support multispectral imagery and alpha-band transparency, and it is the fourth generation of LizardTech’s MrSID format. It has been met with enthusiasm by both end-users and developers. And the new MG4 Plug-in gives users of Esri products support for multi- and hyperspectral imagery compressed to MrSID format within the applications they use every day.

And, it’s free!

Let us know what other products you’d like to see that would make your job easier. We take our customers’ feedback seriously.

You can download the MG4 Plug-in for ArGIS 10 Desktop here.

At this year’s Esri User Conference we asked our customers, who love our plastic lizards almost as much as they love our software products, to submit a story either about their experience with GeoExpress or about lizards — live or plastic — and we’d pick a winning story from each pile. We got a lot of amazing stories.

Okay, Tyrannosaurus is not a lizard in the scientific sense, and none of the stories were about T. Rex.

Thank you to everyone who participated.The authors of the two stories we selected as our favorites each win an iPad.

With a classic narrative of struggle and triumph that we never get tired of, Matthew Woodworth of TranSystems in Kansas City, Missouri writes:

My organization deals with fairly large amounts of raster data, and a very small storage budget.  About 2 years ago we were confronted with the situation that, not only had our server dedicated to store our raster data become completely full, but we had nearly 1Tb of GeoTIFF data provided by a client sitting on an external hard drive and nowhere to store it on the network. 

We looked at quite a few options to fix the issue including expanding our network storage, when we came across GeoExpress by LizardTech. My IT department was very impressed at the idea of compressing existing data to reduce storage space and I, being the GIS department head for my organization, had used MrSID files for years and loved the idea of not being forced to store my data offline.

We decided to purchase GeoExpress Unlimited and have never regretted it. I went from exceeding my server capacity by 25% to having nearly 65% free space afterwards without losing any information. As of the date of this letter I have not quite utilized 50% of my capacity after over a year’s worth of adding data.

Thank you LizardTech.

And from Thomas Hardy’s own Wessex region in England, Andy Nicholson of Wessex Water in Bath asks the thrilling question:

My GeoExpress Lizards – Thiefs in the Night or Innocent Bystanders?

Every quarter we complete MrSID conversions for distribution across the GIS fileservers. Last year in the office not only did we notice we were getting older – our recollection of the required settings for MrSID file creation had got so bad they had to be written down – but we also started to doubt our own sanity. It all started when someone left a Mars bar on my desk. The next morning we all noticed it showed signs of being nibbled by some small creature. We also noticed that the two LizardTech lizards that sit atop my screen – one green the other green and orange – had swapped sides.

For several days we observed they moved sides and each tasty treat we left for the “thief in the night” was nibbled or eaten completely. It was time to catch the culprits “red clawed”. We positioned a web cam to capture the crime scene. For a couple of nights nothing, then one night much to our relief we caught the thief in action:

In flagrante delicto.

The LizardTech lizards were proven innocent. Mind you, to this day we don’t know how the lizards changed sides on top of my screen.

Congratulations to Andy and Matthew. And again, thanks to all who sent us stories. We’ll see you again at next year’s user conference if not sooner!

Where I go the Lizards follow, or maybe it’s me who’s following the Lizards?

I recently took my family on a long awaited vacation to Maui. When we announced it to the kids back in January, our four-year-old daughter and one-year-old twins, they were ecstatic. (OK, so maybe the twins didn’t really “get it” until we got there, but my older daughter has been excited for months.)

One of the more colorful of the plastic LizardTech lizards.

As a habit, I, the always-prepared-for-anything mom, take lots of snacks and toys on the plane to keep my kids busy so they are less likely to irritate the “can’t stand kids that scream” passengers (nothing against you, I was in your shoes once myself). Among the toys I always bring along the ever-so-popular LizardTech Lizards. They are small enough to fit in my pocket and provide a big enough attraction to keep my kids busy playing with them for a while. Can’t go wrong!

Having arrived at our condo and dumped our luggage in a corner, we were ready to hit the sandy beach! As we were running along the pathway to the water, I stopped dead in my tracks as I saw something small with a tail run across my pathway. Immediately I thought: a rat! Wait — that’s too small for a rat. A mouse? Still, a mouse is a bit bigger. Plus, how dare rats and mice ruin my perfect paradise getaway by showing themselves in broad daylight.

A rat? A mouse? No, an authentic lizard!

Suddenly it dawned on me – it looked like the little plastic LizardTech Lizard I had had to snatch out of my son’s mouth on the plane. Did my husband play a joke on me and tie a string to the plastic LizardTech Lizard and run it across the sidewalk SOMEHOW? No, he was running behind me with the kids (I must get to the water first!).

That’s when a friendly Westin Hotel employee walked up to me asking if I’m OK. I must have had “that look on my face.” I told him what I saw and he laughed with delight saying “what you saw was a little lizard.”

“WHAT? A LizardTech Lizard?”, I asked.

He looked puzzled. “No, a Maui authentic lizard.”

Wow, I thought to myself. I’ve been to Hawaii four times and this is the first time I saw a lizard.

I see lizards…everywhere!

And so my quest to find more “Maui authentic” lizards began. We saw them virtually everywhere, at the park, playground, running across sidewalks, by the pool, on the trees and so on. I even took a few pictures to share. Enjoy and remember, next time you’re in Maui, you’re not alone. There’s a lizard watching you whether you like it or not!

*  *  *  *  *

So, this is my story. Since I’m a LizardTech employee I am not eligible to submit this “lizard tale” for a chance to win a swanky new iPad 2 as part of our Esri contest. But you can! It’s not too late, so submit your story today!

Here are all the details: http://www.lizardtech.com/landing/esriipad/index.php

Good luck!

Justyna

We’ve had some emails from people who are having trouble viewing MrSID images in Esri’s ArcGIS Explorer. We dug around and found out that our friends at Esri had already been notified of the same issue and they’d already discovered that the problem was undefined projections. MrSID images are sometimes created from TIFFs that have no projection information, or the projection is written to an AUX (.aux) file but not included in the actual MrSID image.  

Esri has posted an article on how to fix the problem for immediate viewing using ArcCatalog. Click here or enter this URL in a browser:

http://blogs.esri.com/info/blogs/arcgisexplorerblog/archive/2009/
03/05/projections-and-mrsid-images-for-explorer.aspx

Of course, defining the projection in ArcCatalog only writes the information to an AUX file, not into the MrSID file itself, which would be a better practice. Users should ask their data provider to include the projection system (LizardTech’s GeoExpress® software calls this the coordinate reference system or CRS) in the metadata of the MrSID files they deliver.

As for any images you have already, if you know what their projection is and have access to a licensed copy of GeoExpress, simply add any number of MrSID images of the same projection to the GeoExpress Edit Metadata tab and specify that projection for all of them at once.

Adding projection information to images by using the Metadata tab in GeoExpress. Click for a larger version.

To edit the metadata of existing MrSID images using GeoExpress:

1. Load images into the Edit Metadata tab of the Job list.
2. Select applicable image(s) and choose Metadata from the Options menu. The Metadata Manager dialog appears.
3. Select the Image tab. Click Select Coordinate Reference System. The Coordinate Reference System Selector appears.
4. Select a projection system using the drop-down menus and then click OK.

You can also use the GeoExpress command line tool mrsidgeometa to add a well known text (WKT) string. The syntax is as follows:

mrsidgeometa.exe -f <filename.sid> -awkt <WKT string>