Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: Media Take 2016: the new…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Oh god. I was focused on my nose, right?
I...wasn't going to mention that...
Did you fall off your bike? -
Love the new opening. +1 on both Te Korero Karoro and Hot Take
Protip: do not neglect the sides of the neck while shaving. With a plain colour behind you, those little curlies really stand out ;-) (I speak from personal experience as a head shaver)
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That track, man. It's the spawn of rock music as drone, you can drop it into a modern DJ set, it's everything.
I was grinning madly all through that. Thanks.
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to izogi,
John's probably better placed than me to comment but, yes and no. What's not easy (and pretty damn stupid to try) is getting existing legacy systems into a brand new system that hasn't been built yet by a fixed cutoff date.
There are many and varied GIS systems. They're used to delineate property parcels, plan facilities (drains and sewers being just one example), manage parks and reserves, anything that relates to geographical information. Some are better than others but they all are capable of doing the same thing - presenting a structured view (usually graphical, these days) of masses of data about places. Essentially, it's a GUI sitting on a database, or number of data stores, and integrating them as required.
Let's start with the land parcels. Boundary lines, easements, sewage plans, storm water drainage, gas lines, water reticulation to the toby - anything that might be underground on or around a property (I've even seen dwelling plans included). Then you add service connections - street sewers that your home sewage connects to, water and gas mains, street names, traffic control points, council owned CCTV - all these things can be added as overlays. Each department of council manage the particular data that applies to their function. The parks and reserves people couldn't give a toss about gas mains unless they run under a park. When you hear of someone putting a back hoe through a telecommunications cable, chances are the utility company never advised the council that they'd buried a cable there and so it didn't show on the GIS (or the back hoe operator didn't look, which is just as likely). And it's not just councils that use GIS. Utility companies, roadbuilders, government agencies. Stats is a huge user as is the Electoral Commission. If you want to see some cool GIS at work, go to http://www.koordinates.com and play ;-)
You really only should want 1 GIS per council - doesn't always work that way, as feudal decisions get made and it's usually IT's job to try to make them interconnect within the organisation, because they may not talk directly to each other if they are different brands. Some are completely incapable of sharing data without a huge alchemical process of transmutation, which often results in a lot of useful information not getting transferred.
With the supercity, you had seven councils, each of whom had at least one GIS system (I believe there were more, but I'll stand to be corrected on that) and I'd take bets that there was at least one that was totally incompatible with the rest. The sensible course of action would be to take the biggest one (Auckland) and, one by one, merge the others into it, massaging and error checking as you go. It appears they haven't done this, but I could be wrong about that. Not my city, not my data monkeys.
But that's just one facet of a council. There's also all the finance systems, accounts packages, payroll, HR, etc. These are all the things that AC wanted to bundle into one yet-to-be-built SAP installation. Madness, from an IT perspective. It's the sort of decision that gets made by people (particularly accountants) who think mainframes are just big PCs and don't really understand why they don't run Windows. AC appears guilty of poor decision-making and refusal to review those decisions. There appears to be a total lack of accountability and oversight, particularly around Foley.
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Sacha,
They and the GCIO are under more pressure from Ministers to be involved than previously. And it's Ministerial approval that ends up being used as a bargaining chip by agency managers. I know you've seen many cycles of this stuff.
Well, good, let's hope it works out but, as you say, I've seen many cycles ;-)
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Alfie,
You presumed that the rest of us somehow instinctively knew that. How exactly?
FFS Phil Lyth often comments here. Really, shouldn't you have done some fact checking?
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Sacha,
You might be interested in what Treasury are insisting on in these post-Novopay days (endured a prescribed workshop today for a major project).
Yeah, well, Treasury has always said that projects should be this, that and the other, but the State Sector Act makes it clear that decisions in projects lie with the agency concerned, in central government, and Treasury has no real influence over local government unless central government subsidies are involved. Treasury interfere as much as they can, i.e. withholding project funding until they're satisfied, but they have no real teeth once the funding is released. And they really only get involved if it's over a certain budget level (used to be $5mil, not sure what it is now).
They always get antsy after a big failure - INCIS was the same - but it only lasts a year or two and then it's BAU.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Alfie,
You'd expect a major news organisation like the Herald to have done a simple fact check before running the story, surely?
Is this a serious question?
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Alfie,
Hard to tell whether that's St. Richie or Brian Tamaki...
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
By GIS, I'm thinking of something like ArcGIS or MapInfo that allow a user to manage and analyse geospatial data.
QGIS - ready for prime time. I speak as a user. I built the local government election information website around it in 2010. Worked like a charm then and it's improved since. Runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, Windows and Android and supports numerous vector, raster, and database formats and functionalities. From the website:
* Spatially-enabled tables and views using PostGIS, SpatiaLite and MS SQL Spatial, Oracle Spatial, vector formats supported by the installed OGR library, including ESRI shapefiles, MapInfo, SDTS, GML and many more. See section Working with Vector Data.
* Raster and imagery formats supported by the installed GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) library, such as GeoTIFF, ERDAS IMG, ArcInfo ASCII GRID, JPEG, PNG and many more. See section Working with Raster Data.
* GRASS raster and vector data from GRASS databases (location/mapset). See section GRASS GIS Integration.
* Online spatial data served as OGC Web Services, including WMS, WMTS, WCS, WFS, and WFS-T. See section Working with OGC Data.