In support of FEMA’s hurricane Ernesto preparations, theNational Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has deployed its newest geospatialintelligence mobile system. The Domestic Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System or DMIGS is aself-contained vehicle custom built on a fire truck chassis that allows NGAanalysts to drive to a crisis location and provide on-the-spot geospatialintelligence analysis and products. Accordingn to the NGA, they tailored this mobile system to support homeland security missionsincluding responding to natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes orother catastrophic events.
Archives for August 29, 2006
At 6:49 pm the $1600 ransom was met for the free the maps (DRG) effort
Kudos to map ransom for meeting his quota and getting all the ransom money he needed to free the DRGs. I’ll be curious to see how free and available these data will actually be. Our company actually purchased Colorado DRGs from them to help with the effort – way to go Marc! See http://ransom.redjar.org/ – I’d say that mapransom owes a bit thanks to James and all the geobloggers who help spread the word as there’s no way on Earth he could have done this in one day without that exposure. I’ll be curious to see how long in takes to archive the entire DRG collection as there are thousands of files to get onto the server. Also, I hate to be a sceptic but when you look at things this way, the GIS community just paid someone $1600 to have access to publicly available, free DRGs which are all available for free download via a number of mechanisms. Granted, people that paid, er… donated a small fee to get DVDs containing their DRGs got a relatively good deal but didn’t they just pay for free data? Isn’t the ransom project all about not having to pay for free data? Something else to consider, I was looking around the site for info about the developer, JAred… I stumbled onto this piece of info in the who am I section… “Although I’m an extreme GIS neophyte, I’m starting to get a hold of some of the quadzillion concepts and acronyms. “ So, once again, i hate to be a skeptic but the community just paid $1600 to this dude because he’s promised to make these data freely available. Of note… does anyone out there have the USGS DEMs that they purchased – obviously, since these data are also being held for ransom by several USGS biz partners! If anyone there has the DEMs and wants to make them available please let me know or contact Jared at ransom as I’m sure he’d try to get them archived as well.
Flickr Geotagging – finally embeded in the organize tool and its a breeze!
Flickr has finally made geotagging simple as drag and drop on a map… sweet! All one needs to do is go into the user “organize” utility and select the “map” tab (new). A map will be presented (Yahoo! map obviously) and then you simply select your photo(s) of choice, zoom in to a location on the map, drag and drop a picture onto the map, and that’s it… sweet! Some added privacy protection has been provided so you can set geotagging to be made available to your friends or everyone. Then, when visitors browse photos, if a photo is geotagged an optional map tag will be hyperlinked to a map where the photo can be seen on a map. You’ll know if a photo is geotagged if it says something to the effect of “taken in San Diego, CA” and has a “map” hyperlinked. See sample photo here. More on the flickr geotagging functionality available in the Flickr Blog or see this handy video tutorial (source of inspiration for this post was scrappad.. thanks!)
Sending products or paperwork over the border… watch out for the tax man
Is your company sending promotional material over the Canada / US border? If so then your clients may be in for a surprise when they get invoices from the courier company to pay Provincial (PST) and Federal (GST) taxes. I tell ya, this Canadian government never ceases to amaze me and I won’t hesitate to tell you that the main reason I’m sooo looking forward to returning to the US to live and work.. simply put, the government here makes me want to puke! These guys can’t catch people cheating on their taxes or even avoiding paying taxes at all yet they can manage to get me an invoice to $2 in taxes to be paid on an envelope i received 4 days ago that contained brochures and product specs on some hardware and a simple t-shirt. Now they want me to slap 85 cents worth of postage on an envelope and submit $2 and change to cover taxes… are you freaking kidding me???? What the hell is this going to cost in paperwork alone??? Way to promote doing business up here guys… you folks in Ottawa are indeed rocket scientists aren’t you. How about the thousands of Canadians every single day that trek over the 49th parallel for cheap(er) gas and fill up in the USA, grab a case of cheap beer and come back to Canada sans duty on these products. Oh, most average Canucks will also grab a block of cheese and a few groceries on their daily trip over the border too…. however, the small business up here trying to make a deal is constantly raked over the coals… ever wonder why there’s a brain drain inn Canada??? It never ends. So a tip, when you send any literature of anythinng over the border be sure to state that the value of the goods you’re shipping in about $2 and no more unless you want your potential clients to get ticked off. Of note, I once had a cell phone sent to me as a trial unit and got slammed with $100 bill for taxes.. this was for a demo unit that I was to send back in several weeks… you gotta love free trade! So, I guess I better start practicing again – I pledge allegiance to the flag…..