Just another ignorant question fueled by the existence of Datum Shift:
“How do I migrate from ArcIMS to MapServer or to Ka-Map? Is there a utility to “easily” convert AXL to MapScript?”
Seriously, though, I had a bad day with ArcGIS. It may have been my three year haitus from GIS? It may have been gremlins? But whatever it was yesterday, it sucked. I tried to export a project to PDF, GeoPDF, and even AI for printing and all I got was a self-closing version of ArcGIS. (Steve had a similar issue yesterday too.)
This all happened late yesterday and my ESRI rep was able to recommend something that required a ScanDisk and a defragment. So, I put the wheels in motion last night before I left the office. Hopefully, this morning what I did worked.
Oh!
The other thing that confused the hell out of me and some colleagues was: measuring the area of GRID rasters in ArcMap. I know that I need to use the Zonal Statistics tool, but I needed to convert the Grids to something else. Anyway, long story short, a friend hacked it out for me and got my area measurement.
Note to ESRI for 9.3 & 10.0 devleopment: The above—Not as easy as it should be.
nice post. ths summarizes many of my frustrations with their software: mysterious crashes, and too much effort required for the simplest of tasks. As soon as there is an opensource methods for *quickly* producing nice maps they are going to have something to worry about. Until then GMT is my cartographic tool of choice.
Cheers,
Dylan
Comment by dylan — October 24, 2006 @ 9:41 am
[...] And this ties into the thread James, Dave, fantom, and others have going around about Open Source. ESRI charges quite a bit of money for their products. There software has some quality issues. With those two things going for it ESRI needs to start showing some love to the users. It is not enough that big pocketed or strategic clients get to call Jack or other higher people in the company and demand new features or bug fixes. Without a fault, every person I talk to in small to mid-size firms complains about having to use ESRI software. When I taught using ArcGIS software my students would greet me in tears because they had left a job running overnight only to be greeted with an application error. I gave a presentation the other day and ArcMap seg faulted. Thank goodness they were all ESRI users and so we all shared a laugh. [...]
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