22 January 2002
Velvet Melvin, ArcView, Hawthorne
I was pleased to see during my drive in to work today that the old Velvet Elvis appears to be changing names yet again. For a while after the lawsuit, the club was called the Velvet E, then more recently became Woody's Place. Now, it looks like they've settled on the name Velvet Melvin. So there you go.
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Those of you familiar with ESRI's ArcView know just how powerful a package it is. The drawback has been, of course, that applications require ArcView on indvidual user's computers, which can be cost prohibitive. But one of our database engineers was showing me a proprietary interface we are developing that provides an ESRI-GIS interface to our upstream E&P database and requires only a modern browser on the client side. The goal is to integrate much of our political and economics cost analysis into the database, as simple ArcView layers or themes. It's going to be an amazingly powerful tool when fully developed, but I was more impressed with the technology. Interestingly, a local environmental organization makes use of very similar technology on their free website. Check out the mapserver at the Bayou Preservation Organization. Wow!
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Orrin Judd writes some fantastic book reviews, and his review of Hawthorne's The Birthmark is a nice counterpoint to the Reason piece by Nick Gillespie that I recently posted to Reductio Ad Absurdum. Good reading!
[Posted @ 08:01 AM CST]
