ArcMap has the bad habit of forgetting to unlock files that you remove from a project. I have lost hours, as the only solution to remove unwanted locks seemed to be shutting down ArcMap, modifying the file, then restarting ArcMap (that takes at least a minute to load each time). Nothing seemed to help until I came across “Unlocker” […] Continue Reading…
Switzerland discusses food sovereignty – a vegetarian diet might be the answer
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet”, said Albert Einstein. This might also the answer to the questions discussed this Wednesday, September 19th in the Swiss parliament (both in the Conseil National and in the Conseil des États). “Food sovereignty” – coined under […] Continue Reading…
Sunrise or Sunset? Per Capita GDP Evolution in EU Member States
The infographic above looks like a sunset or a sunrise rendered in an impressionist painting of the pixel age. It illustrates EU’s per capita domestic product from 1998 to 2011, expressed in “purchasing power standard” (PPS). To get the PPS, you divide the per capita GDP by the purchasing power parity index. It says, more or less, how much […] Continue Reading…
Restore “New > Text file” in Windows’ contextual menu
If you’ve changed your standard .tex file editor to Notepad2 or Notepad++, chances are that the contextual menu entry “Create New > Document file” has disappeared.
To restore it, just save the following code as a .reg file and run it (thanks to Archos alias Limneos for posting the code on a SevenForums):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt]
“PerceivedType”=”text”
@=”txtfile”
“Content Type”=”text/plain”
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt\PersistentHandler]
@=”{5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}”
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt\ShellNew]
“ItemName”=hex(2):40,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,\
6f,00,74,00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,\
[…] Continue Reading…
I want Windows 7 to sort my files alphabetically, and I mean from 0 to z!
I want Windows 7 to sort my files alphabetically, and I mean alphanumerically, from 0 to z, in ASCII order.
Windows 7 acts way too smart sorting files by names to my taste. On more ancient versions of Windows (e.g. Windows 2000) the sorting order would be something like this:
Ie4_01
Ie4_128
Ie401sp2
Ie5
Ie501sp2
Ie6
On Windows Vista, XP, Server 2003, or […] Continue Reading…
The shadow of Curiosity
First image taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover, landed on Mars in the morning of August 6.
[NASA content (images, videos, audio, etc) are generally not copyrighted and may be used for educational or informational purposes without needing explicit permissions. https://pmm.nasa.gov/image-use-policy]
This morning August 6th, after fourteen years of planning and months of anxious waiting, the Curiosity mars rover has landed, sending […] Continue Reading…
The Islands of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
[Une version révisée, en français, de cet article, publiée dans Le Temps, Genève, en 2012, peut être téléchargée ici.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have been 300 years old today. He was already 53 in October 1765 when he left the waves of the Lake Bienne, heart-sick, expelled from the Island of St. Peter upon the order of the bailiff of Nidau. […] Continue Reading…
Colored proportional circles in ArcMap
Bivariate thematic mapping with ArcMap? Yes you can!
Of course, you could also do it in D3.js (including a nice self-generated legend), or with much less effort in Quantum GIS (post in French).
Whatever method you choose, colored proportional circles cannot be drawn directly on polygons, but you can draw them on points. Thus, all you have to do first is […] Continue Reading…
A mobility network
Methods and tools
After a day and a half of work and fine-tuning, here we go: the commuting network of all individuals either residing, working or studying in the canton Valais. I’ve used R, with the RStudio GUI, and the igraph library for R. My staring point was the mobility matrix between all communes, including communes outside of the canton, […] Continue Reading…
Crop an image in Adobe Illustrator CS3 or later
When you export maps from ESRI ArcMap to Adobe Illustrator, the raster background is by default exported as a series of associated bitmap strips, with superposed vector polygons.Here an example:
Bitmap strips (detoured in orange) and vector polygon layer (in blue)In this – as in many other situations – you might need to crop the image […] Continue Reading…