Debugging Python in ArcGIS Desktop

Published on December 27, 2018

Sometimes it’s just useful to debug ESRI script tools rather than peppering them with arcpy.AddMessage() commands – try looping through a dictionary object that way.

We haven’t yet moved to ArcGIS Pro so forgive me if I’ve yet to see the light but for those still working with ArcGIS ...

Scraping a phpBB3 board with Python

Published on January 15, 2018

Recently I was asked to help archive an old phpBB3 forum. At work and at home I am fortunate enough to be able to work with Python. Aside from being accessible and free, those involved with Python often publish thier code which can also be acessed generally under an open licence.

In this particular case I was already familiar with the requests module and while I had heard of the Beautiful Soup module I hadn't yet used it...

Pandas and the UPRN

Published on July 28, 2017

The UPRN (Unique Property Reference Number) is a nice idea. Essentially a barcode for the lifecycle of a property this piece of data can be used to uniquely identify any valid property. It is the crux of the address gazetteers in the UK, used in AddressBase and provides the de-facto ...

Python, ArcMap and Virtualenv

Published on July 23, 2017

At version of ArcMap 10.4.1 a number of more interesting Python modules are included such as Pandas. For anyone with an interest in Python the programming environment suddenly becomes interesting in it's own right. Despite ESRI moving in positive direction, leveraging some the Open Source nature of ...

hip pip hooray

Published on July 14, 2017

I've been working with Python at work for a while (circa 8 years). Work is at a Local Authrority and is a MSFT Windows environment, sat behind proxy servers and a firewall. Home is a Linux environment and it certainly working with the standard Python package manager (pip) and Python virtual environments has been a lot easier...

Passing an argument to django-geojson

Published on December 12, 2013

I've been having a lot of fun working with django-geojson, and django-leaflet to return records from a Point dataset kept in PostGIS. The project docs are very clear but I found an additional tutorial by one of the developers Mathieu Leplatre, which makes it very simple to get a ...

Reset the admin password

Published on July 7, 2013

Just so I know what to do next time.

Dual booting an Asus eeepc 1011px with Windows 7 and Ubuntu Oneric Ocelot

Published on November 21, 2011

£200 pounds lighter from PC World (I just like to be able to walk back into the shop if something goes wrong) and I walked out with an Asus EeePC 1011px. It wasn't quite the exceptional deal I was after, some confusing posters made me think that I was ...

Upgrading Mercurial

Published on January 24, 2011

I've been running two installations of Merurial but tried checking the repo generated by one installation by the other and got an error message today:

hg status
abort: requirement 'dotencode' not supported!

Seems I was running an older version of Mercurial that needed upgrading.

Sharing Symlinks and Shortcuts between Mac and Windows

Published on December 16, 2010

Symlinks don't seem to share nicely across a Mac and Windows environment.

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