Cartogram 2012 US Presidential Election

Playing with election results, a shapefile of the US(lower 48 I clipped out Alaska and Hawaii, sorry Alaskans and Hawaiians)  Distorted the areas of the states based on the total estimate 2011 population.

PostGIS 2.0.0 released

Looking forward to installing and testing out some of the new features in the latest release of postgis.

PostGIS 2.0.0

5yr Abs Chg

The data is comparing absolute enrollment numbers from 2005-2006 to 2010-2011.

This map was created by downloading PEIMS data from the TEA, joining it do a vector file of all the school districts and doing some simple calculations and then marking up the resulting data in Tilemill.  It's being hosted using Mapbox basic hosting plan.

Solar Power System

From Last day

I spent the last two weeks near Bayfield CO with my parents building a new solar power system.
Specs:
6x 230 watt Canadian Solar Panels configured for 2 series of 3 at 90VDC
4kw Schneider Electric Charger/Inverter with 8kw 10 second surge capacity
60amp Schneider MPPT charge controller
12x 6volt 370AH deep cell batteries wired for 24volts at 1110AH

The build went smooth and everything worked on the first flip of the switches. When I left at 10am roughly 3 hours before solar noon the output was 1180Watts, almost 30 volts at almost 40amps. Not sure yet how high the output got by 1pm if the sky stayed clear.

From Last day

Setting up a spatial postgresql database with postgis

My machine is running Ubuntu 10.04 x64 This is assuming you already have postgresql and postgis installed.
First create the PostgreSQL database:

createdb yourdatabase

Then add plpgsql support to that database:

createlang plpgsql yourdatabase

Then you need to import these two SQL files into that database to set up the PostGIS functions:

psql -d yourdatabase -f /usr/share/postgresql/8.4/contrib/postgis-1.5/postgis.sql psql -d yourdatabase -f /usr/share/postgresql/8.4/contrib/postgis-1.5/spatial_ref_sys.sql

That's it!
QGIS has a nice plugin tool for pushing shapefiles into postgis enabled postgresql databases called SPIT(Shapefile to Postgresql Import Tool

change in unemployment rate county by county coupled with total economic recovery spending

Courtesy of Development Seed

SEXtante

"SEXTANTE is a spatial data analysis library written in Java. The main aim of SEXTANTE is to provide a platform for the easy implementation, deployment and usage of rich geoprocessing functionality. It currently contains more than three hundred algorithms for both raster and vector data processing, as well as tabular data analysis tools. SEXTANTE integrates seamlessly with many open source Java GIS (such as gvSIG, uDig or OpenJUMP) and non-GIS tools (such as the 52N WPS server or the spatial ETL Talend)."