2012-11-22

Large collection of free ebooks from Microsoft products


One of Microsoft directors has compiled a big list of free ebooks available from Microsoft for free in various formats, you will find books for SharePoint, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Office 365, Office 2010, Office 2013, SQL Server 2012, Azure, Duet 2.0, Lync, Dynamics CRM, and more.

The list is divided into 2 parts, part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.

2012-11-19

The early days in Revit



One of the fascinating views in business is a startup that succeeds, Revit was one of these companies that established itself out of nowhere, if you are after the BIM industry from the early 2000s, you will be surprised how Revit passed the established market leaders of that time and became one of the leading companies in the industry.

This article talks about one of the conferences for Autodesk Revit, check it here in the AEC Bytes magazine.

I'll highlight 2 parts that are very inspiring for any startup:

Conant showed an early photo of the Revit team in the summer of 1999—of the 12 to 13 people in it at that time, about half of them are still around at Autodesk, working on Revit.

It was interesting to learn more about the early days of Revit, especially a "behind the scenes" look that we don't otherwise get a chance to hear about. I recall the public launch of Revit in the summer of 2000, when it was a very brash, in-your-face upstart that was seriously challenging far more established players like Autodesk, Bentley, and Graphisoft. In particular, it showed up at trade shows such as the AIA National Convention with a booth larger than Autodesk! What we didn't know at that time was that it actually had only 12 paying customers then and spent a sizable portion ($20,000) of its early revenue for a professionally produced video. Luckily for the start-up, Autodesk recognized its potential and acquired it in 2002. The rest, as they say, is history! An interesting fact to note is that most of those first paying customers are using still Revit.

2012-11-13

Some GIS Spatial data sources


Across the years, I've been occasionally in need for geospatial data, whether a World Map, or a Satellite backdrop to a small map for a city, a free satellite image or shapefile was very important.
Luckily, many data sources exist in the Internet that have been published by many Space and satellite-owning agencies across the world, and many derived data that can enhance any map.

Some of my more important sources:
Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF)
http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/
A great source for many satellite imagery products and datasets, it can be accessed through ftp and provide wealth of file formats and resolutions, must check it.

NASA LandSat GeoCover data set
https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/mrsid.pl
It provides access to LandSat Mosaics that has been created for most of the globe in 2 time eras (1990 and 2000), it delivers MrSID compressed mosaics with 15m pixel size.

StatSilk List of downloadable free shapefiles
http://www.statsilk.com/maps/download-free-shapefile-maps
Provides a list of downloadable shapefiles that contains many datasets.

Global Administrative Areas
http://www.gadm.org/
Provides shapefiles for administrative boundaries for the countries.

Blue Marble Next Generation
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/
(Direct download) ftp://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/bluemarble/bmng/bmng_arcview/
The Blue Marble is a gorgeous dataset, it provides 500m imagery for the whole world that is color processed and provides a great basemap backdrop for World Maps.

True Marble (by Unearthed Outdoors)
http://www.unearthedoutdoors.net/global_data/true_marble/download
Another global dataset that is created from LandSat imagery, this time the data has been color and band processed to provide a more natural color and appearance of the imagery, but the full resolution 15m imagery are available for purchase only, in the link you can download the the 250m images.

Global Land Cover 2000 (by the EU JRC)
http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/glc2000/glc2000.php
The Global Land Cover objective is to become a harmonized land cover database over the whole globe, it provides Land Cover maps for the whole world and can be utilized in many analysis functions (mostly on the national level).

2012-11-08

Symbolizing Trees Realistically with ArcMap


A simple guide about how to symbolize trees in a campus map in ArcMap, it creates very visually-appealing detailed gardens/landscape/campus maps.
http://www.esri.com/news/arcwatch/0911/tip.html

2012-11-03

Introduction to Graphs and some of their algorithms



The Graph Theory and the study of Graphs one of the more advanced topics that I wanted to study for so long, it has applications in the domain of GIS network analysis and routing, so having a basic understanding of the algorithms of Graphs analysis is vital if you are trying to understand what's going on while the Hourglass is revolving.

Here are some articles about Graphs and some of their algorithms that can be a simple intro the Graph theory:

Algorithm of the Week: Shortest Path in a Directed Acyclic Graph
Algorithm of the Week: Bellman-Ford Shortest Path in a Graph
Algorithm of the Week: Dijkstra Shortest Path in a Graph
Algorithm of the Week: Topological Sort of a Graph
Algorithm of the Week: Shortest Path in a Graph
Algorithm of the Week: Graph Best-First Search
Algorithm of the Week: Graph Depth-First Search
Algorithm of the Week: Graph Breadth First Search
Algorithm of the Week: Graphs and their Representation

2012-11-02

Google Launches Interactive Hurricane Sandy Crisis Response Map




In response to Hurricane Sandy, Google's Crisis Response team has constructed an interactive map designed to help make sense of the epic weather phenomenon.

Built upon a foundation of standard Google Maps data, the default presentation of the map offers a view of Hurricane Sandy's path, a precipitation radar overlay (with adjustable translucence), public alert zones, and Red Cross safety shelter locations represented by Google's well-known red location pins.
SOURCE: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2411491,00.asp

What's interesting in this news article is Google's efforts to enter more and more in the Geospatial industry, previously when something that big happened, Esri was the company to provide such map as it did in Hurricane Katrina (it actually provides such site under its new ArcGIS.com online service, but it's not that high profile as the Google effort).
We will be seeing a major shift in the key players in the geospatial industry, and GIS professionals around the world should be prepared for such change.

أكثر 25 موقع يزورهم المصريين ما بين مواقع التواصل الإجتماعي والتواصل الغير اجتماعي

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2012-11-01

Automate Facebook with PowerShell


One of the main shortcomings of the Facebook as a social platform is the absence of easily  programmable APIs (of course you can utilize the Apps APIs, but they are not geared for automation tasks and the management of Pages and Fans).
The article below outlines the usage of PowerShell to Automate Facebook functions.