c:\>happy and I know it

Love this. LOVE.

Green Research Complex - Wha?

Planetizen pointed me over to WebUrbanist this morning to check out a gallery of "future green buildings"... most of which appear to be CGI'd straight out of a 1960s encyclopedia of *the future*. Insert dramatic music here.

I zeroed in on the one that looked the most quasi-realistic (give me a break on the ones that actually exist, I was in "land of the future" territory here).

The building looked pretty awesome, I can't hate on that. But wait...

"To study nature one needs to be close to it, but a large building can have a huge environmental and visual impact on its surroundings. The clever solution, in this case, was to keep the building heights low and spread them out - displacing as little of the existing elements of the ecosystem as possible and blending colors to create a carefully semi-camouflaged and low-impact appearance with respect to the forests around the buildings."

They are respecting the forests by building a low height building with a gigantic footprint.... wonder how many trees they will take out to meet that kind of footprint requirement. With that much glass on the facade, I wonder how much heating and air conditioning that sucker is going to need. And fantastically, the building looks like it's built in the middle of nowhere!

But hey, we'll all be using zero-energy floating cars to get to work by then, so it's bound to work out. Lookout, future.

ESRI DS Mapbook *or* Developers Sample Map Book

A very special post today, for users of ESRI's Developer Sample Map Book Application

DSMapbook – How to make it work.

This is some awesome step-by-step action for using esri ds mapbook or esri ds map book. Good luck, you might need it.

Open ArcCatalog
Navigate to your personal geodatabase that holds all of the shapefiles you are using to make the mapbook.
Create a new polygon feature class, call it “INDEX_LAYER”. Give it projection information.

You will create four fields in the new feature class. One called “GRID_ID” as a text field, “SCALE” as a long integer field, “ROW_NUMBER” as a long integer field, and “COLUMN NUMBER” as a long integer field.

Save and continue.

Open ArcView.
Add all the data layers you need for your mapbook.
Create in layout view, the layout template that each mapbook page will use. Each page will have the same layout. You want to have this pretty much finalized before you move to the next steps.

Save and continue.

Add the “INDEX_LAYER” dataset.

Zoom out/in your map view so that you can see the extent of what you want the mapbook to cover.

Click “Create/Update Map Grids”
Set your scale (mine is 2900, do some experimenting, this is the scale that each mapbook page will have) I also use “current extent” for the coordinates.
Use the default on the next two screens.
Click Finish.

Save and continue

Click on “Create Map Series”
The detail data frame will be “Layers”
The index layer is the layer you named “INDEX_LAYER”
The field that specifies the page name is “GRID_ID”
Choose use all of the tiles (you can de-select them later)
Use the default on the next screen
Click Finish

Save and continue

ArcView will now calculate your mapbook. On the mapbook tab at the bottom of your table of contents, there will now be one page for each page of your map book.

This is a very bare bones description, lots of other tweaks and layout stuff can be done using DSMapbook, but this covers the basics to get you started without a lot of the headaches I encountered.