I recently had the privilege of spending a week in the Denver Metro area visiting LizardTech customers and business associates.  I have been to the beautiful city of Denver many times, and I look forward to each and every visit, especially the part where I get to leave my umbrella at home and bust out the sunglasses! (Yes, they actually sell sunglasses here in Seattle, wise guy…just don’t expect to use them much. )

But something I never seem to adjust well to, no matter how much I prepare for it, is the altitude and humidity change between Denver and Seattle.  As a means of outsmarting my internal self, the first stop as soon as I hit town was to a Super Target to pick up a case of water for the week, in hopes that it would help my system adjust going from 80% humidity at sea level to virtual 0% humidity at 5280 feet. But little did I know that I would experience a new symptom of higher altitudes on this trip – nose bleeds.  As a co-worker based in Denver says: “They don’t call ’em the Denver Rockies for nothin’.”

Pike’s Peak framed by the Siamese Twins rock formation in the Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs. Image by Beverly Lussier, public domain.

So with my case of water and a box full of Kleenex I powered through an action-packed week in the Mile High City.

Monday 11 am – Pixxures

It was just me on this inaugural Denver Metro area customer site visit. Pixxures is a very important LizardTech customer. They provide custom digital aerial imagery, orthophotography, GIS and mapping services. In addition to collecting direct-digital, high-resolution multispectral aerial imagery, they scan and orthorectify historical aerial photography and offer value-added remote sensing services.

I was able to meet with all seven people on the production team and go over LizardTech’s LiDAR Compressor and GeoExpress 8 software. They are heavy users of multiband and lidar imagery so LiDAR Compressor and the new multi- and hyperspectral support in GeoExpress couldn’t have come at a better time for them.

Monday 1:30 pm – Mapmart

Terry Ryan and myself on another Denver Metro area customer site visit. Mapmart is a division of IntraSearch Inc., a full service mapping company, headquartered in Denver. MapMart is partnered with over thirty of the top geospatial data creators to cover nearly all facets of geospatial data needs. They are branching into the field of data hosting and are very interested in implementing LizardTech’s Express Server software.

You say you don’t know much about Express Server? Here’s some quick schoolin’ for you:

• Check out GIS Planning’s Express Server data hosting website here.
• Express Server also works within any WMS client as well as a number of proprietary clients. Your imagery is accessed directly within these applications. Check out the entire state of New Jersey here!
• View more WMS imagery being delivered using Express Server here.

Tuesday 8:30 am – CompassTools

It was just me on this Denver Metro area training. CompassTools is an authorized LizardTech reseller located in Centennial, a suburb of Denver. They specialize in field data collection tools and graciously offered us the use of their training room at no charge and even provided a continental breakfast for the attendees.

We promoted this session through a LizardTech marketing e-blast and the CompassTools newsletter.

Wednesday 1 pm – City and County of Denver

Terry Ryan and myself on this customer site visit. We met with Paul Tessar and his team of developers and GIS gurus. They are very interested in Express Server for accessing their imagery using ArcIMS.

Seal of the City and County of Denver. Image public domain.

Wednesday – ERDAS 11 World Tour

This half-day event was hosted by ERDAS and Digital Globe (another very important LizardTech customer!) at the Xilinx Facility in Longmont. T-Ryan and I learned about all the new features and benefits in the ERDAS 2011 Software Release.

Here is a GISCafe article with a bit more detailed information on the ERDAS 2011 Software Release.

The event wrapped up after lunch (a very healthy and delicious taco bar!) and as luck would have it Longmont is a mere 15 miles from Boulder, famous for its status as one of the most liberal cities in Colorado and located at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 5,430 feet.

It was a beautiful day in Boulder with mostly blue skies despite some broken smoke signals from the wildfires in the area. The mountain views were breath-taking and there are a multitude of hiking trails and climbing for all skill levels throughout the city.

Thursday evening  – Business Dinner at Euclid Hall in LoDo District

Built in 1883 as a house for Dr. Byron Albertus Wheeler, Euclid Hall has been home to the Masons, the Colorado Women’s Relief Corps, The Cootie Club, Maudie’s Flea Market and is even rumored to have once been the very fancy headquarters of a brothel catering to government officials, law enforcement and members of the media. Perhaps its most memorable occupant was Soapy Smith’s Double Eagle Bar which operated from 1977 through the end of the century. The bar was a long-time gathering place for good food and live entertainment, with focus on high quality and innovative pub food from around the world including housemade sausages, po’ boys, poutine and schnitzels.

They’ve since taken the stickers off the new windows of Euclid Hall. Image copyright Lori Midson, used with permission.

That said, I had to try the Sausage Tasting plate.  It came with four types of mustard, two sweet and two spicy and a link of each of the following:

• Beef Short Rib Kielbasa – beef blood infused sausage
• Uncensored Hoppwurst, Carr Valley cheddar
• Boudin Noir, avec curry e aubergine
• Bavarian Veal Weisswurst

They did offer to substitute the blood sausage for one of the other three they offered but since I had never had it before I decided to take a walk on the wild side and give it a try. All the mustards and sausages were delicious but I just couldn’t get past the color (it was a deep purple, almost black) and texture (pasty, pâté-type consistency) of the blood sausage enough to enjoy more than one bite.

But rest assured I will be going back to Euclid Hall. The service was amazing and I still have yet to try their famous poutine.

Friday 9 am – Sanborn

Jeff Young and myself on this Colorado Springs customer site visit. Sanborn is our biggest commercial GeoExpress user. They are headquartered in Colorado Springs with locations in Oregon, California, Texas, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, and New York.

Jeff Young, our business developer, and I were invited to meet with the productions operation group and discuss the new features in GeoExpress 8.  We were given a tour of the office and got to see the many server rooms they have designated just for image processing. They handle so much imagery that they not only have workstations processing overnight, they actually have a graveyard shift of imagery technicians performing digital orthophoto processing.

Sanborn logo from an early map of Denver. Image copyright Sanborn, used with permission.

You’ve heard of Open Street Map, right? You can think of it as Wikipedia for maps: people from all over the world map their own neighborhoods, and the results are made available for free, to all, with no copyright restrictions. For most of the US the road network has been pretty well mapped already, via free data available from the government, but it can get out of date surprisingly quickly and of course it doesn’t list the really important stuff like where to get the best ice cream.

These brave souls are about to redefine the leisurely walk.

On March 13th, nineteen people from CUGOS (including three Lizards) and one dog met up over on sunny Bainbridge Island for an Open Street Map mapping party. It was a diverse group — academics, kids, hackers, spouses. We met in the morning at the Bainbridge ferry dock, took a picture to commemorate the event, and divided up into four groups. Each group then spent the next few hours walking around a different part of Bainbridge’s downtown core, recording the coordinates of any “features of interest”:

• roads that had changed or been renamed
• “street furniture”: bus stops, park benches, fire hydrants
• points of interest: pharmacies, libraries, museums, pubs, ice cream parlors
• walking trails
• and much, MUCH more

Holly reviews her route while Dane gets “walking orders” from Michael.

Altogether we collected a few hundred different way points, using everything from handheld GPS units to iPhones to laser range finders. Over a leisurely late lunch by the waterfront, and in a subsequent CUGOS meeting, we worked to get all our GPS tracks and waypoints uploaded to the OSM databases.

Leaving no avenue uncharted, no point of interest unheralded, Michael, Walter and Roger investigate.

A walk through Bainbridge on a sunny day with friends — and GPS gear. What more could a GIS geek want?

Roger and Tifani display the elements of their GPS walking kit (bus stop sold separately).

Photos courtesy of CUGOS’ own Roger and Tifani.

No really, I mean literally, in the alley behind our building. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) was scanning buildings in Post Alley between Madison and Spring this morning, creating LiDAR point clouds.

I ran into these guys a few months ago on my way to work, where the alley between First and Second meets University Street. As the technical writer here at LizardTech I’ve seen plenty of LiDAR data, but I’d never seen a LiDAR scanner before. I had once worked on a survey crew and used a theodolite, and thinking this was just a topographic setup I almost walked by these brightly vested crewmen and their tripod without a second thought. But then I noticed that the machine atop the legs was bigger than a theodolite and it was moving, very slowly, by itself. On the wall of the alley opposite the machine, a small green light pattern was flickering.

Since we make products for losslessly compressing and viewing LiDAR files, I was fascinated and engaged the men in conversation. On a laptop lying there on the cobbles and plugged into the scanner, they showed me how they programmed the machine using Leica software to scan from here to there, and at a desired density. A viewer enabled them to see the LiDAR data that was being captured right then, or an image of the alley from the perspective of the scanner, or both together.

They said they were scanning all the buildings within a certain radius of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which, if you’re from around here, you know is due to come down soon and be replaced with something better, or at least something newer, safer and more expensive. WSDOT doesn’t want anyone coming back after the viaduct project saying that their activity caused their building’s walls to shift or its foundation to sink.

WSDOT has to take all these measurements in the warm weather of summer, then repeat them in winter, because buildings heat up and expand enough that their outer walls actually move. Also, down by the bay, the earth expands and contracts with the ebb and flow of the tides, so they’ll have to take measurements at high and low tides. It had not occurred to me that our buildings and even the ground they sit on were breathing in and out, as it were, with tide and temperature.

You could have knocked me over with a LiDAR point. 

Glen Thompson and I were fortunate to attend the ESRI Developer’s Summit in Palm Springs last month. In addition to being a great excuse to get out of the rain here in Seattle, the Dev Summit provides a great opportunity to catch up with our friends from Redlands and see what’s new with ArcGIS.

Those who missed it can look over the presentations.

One way to think about an event like this is in terms of what’s cool and exciting and what’s getting the “business as usual” treatment. This year what’s cool and exciting is most definitely client-side web mapping. We’re talking Flex, Javascript and the newly released Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server. These were accompanied by cheering, contests, prizes and “Playful” (?) references to glitzy, “silverlighty” (get it?) applications.

There were no contests or prizes for the backend stuff on which Glen and I spent most of our time. Of particular note, GDAL is definitely on the rise here. GDAL is the open source project that (among other things) provides the ability to convert between raster formats. Principal maintainer Frank Warmerdam presented a technical session on “Custom Raster Format Support in ArcGIS through GDAL”. Guys, start thinking about migrating those Erdas Imagine / RDO extensions to GDAL. The writing is on the wall.

And, speaking of items that will eventually need migrating, I gave a short talk on “Implementing a Custom Image Server Raster Format.” It describes the technical architecture of the project and includes some server benchmarking work that we did in Seattle highlighting the impact of using Express Server with ArcGIS Image Server Extension.

ESRI is even hosting a video of the presentation.

Thanks, guys!

The “Call for Presentations and Workshops” for GeoWeb 2009 has just been announced. The theme of this year’s conference is “Cityscapes”: the geography of urban environments, BIM-CAD-GIS convergence, 3D modeling.

LizardTech has been fortunate to be involved with this conference for a number of years now, and so we’re once again looking forward to July and another fun week with our neighbors to the north.