Subtitled: Why error messages are good. Came up with another error while running TopoToRaster but this time ArcGIS gave an error message that led to a solution. Turned out all my contour lines had an elevation of 16 which TopoToRaster did not like. I had intended to increase the elevation and inadvertently set them all to sixteen. I had saved the previous values before editing so it turned out to be a simple fix and I didn’t have to spend a day trying figure out what was wrong.

In running an automated process, I had a TopoToRaster repeatedly fail on me. The only input theme was a contour theme. The process ran fine when I used the envelope of the contour theme as the output extent but when I changed it to the envelope of a polygon theme, it would bomb. The polygon’s envelope was smaller than the contour theme. ArcCatalog would bomb out without presenting any sort of useful message.

Stumbled across ArcBruTile, an ArcMap application that allows you to display map tile services–such as OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Bing, Spatial Cloud, and Tile Map Service (TMS)–in your ArcMap documents. It works pretty well from my preliminary testing of it. I have found that at times that the graphical tiles are distorted but I am guessing it is because they are optimized for display in a specific projection, at specific scales and, in ArcMap, you can use any projection/scale combination you want.

Maybe I am just dense, but skimming ArcIdeas, I found out that the transparency for an icon is determined by the upper-left pixel. Don’t know if this is an ESRI convention or not but thought I would pass it one.

I have been working on updating some data that was published using Arc/Info Workstation Export (.e00) files, converting them to shapefiles, or in the case of annotation, to a geodatabase feature class. While converting some INFO tables, I have received this error: It turns out that Workstation can create export files that contain values that did not fit within their field–I’m guessing that somehow you are actually able to enter invalid values into those fields but I did not confirm that.

I was using Model Builder (ugh!) to select records in one table (CWI.C5ST) that relate to a subset of records ([BHGEOPHYS] = ‘Y’) in another table (CWI.C5IX). There is not an existing tool for doing this in ArcGIS. I did find a post by Layne Seely in ArcForums titled ‘trying to perform ‘relate’ in Model Builder.’ that led me to the Make Table View under Data Management Tools-Make Table View and even had the basic syntax I was looking for (if it hadn’t I probably would have guessed that it would not allow subqueries).

The Utah Geological Survey has a good supply of Maps and data available online and some online maps. They also have an online Blog. The GIS data is a fairly complete package–the sample I downloaded included .pdfs, shapefiles, layer files, images and ArcMap project (.MXD) files used to generate the .pdfs. File sizes are larger because of the completeness. Feature classes have a moderate level of attribution. The highlight, however, are the sample Keyhole Markup (KMZ) files of the of the St.

As previously mentioned, I have a scheduled nightly backup that is written in Python. Most of it has been working fine but I had not gotten it to copy files to network drives. I finally got around to correcting that part. My first attempt was just to map the network drives for the user account that is used to run the task. No good. My second attempt was to call a .

The Arizona Geological Survey has a great looking site with some good information. They have a publication list that can either be downloaded or ordered and are making pdf versions of their recent publications available online. I was going to note that there was no download-able data available until Google told me that they in fact had a WMS/WFS available online. The WMS is a great looking map, I have not gotten the WFS to work, however–probably more due to my abilities than the service.

The Create Geologic Cross Sections–eXacto Section v. 2.0, ArcMap 9.3 written by Jennifer Carrell of the Illinois State Geological Survey is a handy tool for creating cross sections. It requires ArcGIS and a 3D Analyst Extension license. You can create profiles against multiple DEMs at once, define the vertical exaggeration, and have it include contact points. It is well documented and comes with sample data to use with the tutorial.