Blog Changes

I've renamed the blog to "Nerdy Things", dropping "Lord King Squirrel" completely.  I gave up the Lord King Squirrel domain years ago and no longer have control over the name. As a result I decided to update the blog so that there won't be any confusion or association with whomever "owns" that name now. Also...

Extending WordPress

I've been working on our preparedness blog (mobileprepperscommunity.com) the past few days and decided to add some home-grown functional goodness instead of using a off-the-shelf plugin. The reasons aren't complicated - we needed stuff done that in the end would be easier to use than going through the gyrations needed to fit someone else's workflow...

How to match FIPS codes and states

Here's another hard drive archeology find - a class that includes two simple yet very useful methods: one to return the FIPS code for a state and one to return a state for a given FIPS code. These are really useful when working with cadastral or agriculture data sets. public static class FIPS { private...

Longitude to UTM Zone

I recently replaced my home PC with a new HP laptop.  Of course doing that requires moving everything to the new box.  Whenever I move (computers, offices, houses, whatever) I use it as an opportunity to see just what the heck I have tucked away. I found some old c# projects and decided to take...

A long-lost specialty programming language

Back in the mid-1990s I worked for a legal services firm named RSI (or more correctly, Reproduction Services Incorporated).  I was the Applications Development Manager, responsible for managing development for both internal software and custom applications for clients. At the time RSI was one of the prime records collection for the law firms representing the...

Some Brief Notes on Histograms

To start, how about a simple definition: A histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of data. A histogram can be thought of as a collection of buckets or bins, each with a min, a max, a width (max - min), and a depth (the number of values in each bin). Typically the number...

A Kolmogorov-Smirnov implementation

The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (hereafter K-S) Statistic, allows for a fairly straight-forward test for both normality and uniformity.  Here I'll concentrate on normality. I won't go into any background information on the K-S statistic, for a very nice introduction head over to T.W. Kirkman's Statistics to Use page. How it works The K-S test compares a sample with a...

Earlier I wrote about finding the NearestPoint() in C# - a handy little function.  I also have a companion function - IsNear().  As with the previous function, IsNear() makes use of Lambda functions and is fairly simple in its approach. How it works Given a set of PointF, and a test distance, the function returns True/False...

Saving an edited layer in GeoObjects

So we've extended the GeoObjects library, and seen how to edit an existing feature.  Next we'll need to save those changes.  The GeoObjects SaveOverlayLayer() method does just what it says - it saves the Overlay Layer along with the two attributes that it carries - Id and Name.  Not so good if you are editing a...

Editing Existing Features with GeoObjects

As I wrote earlier, the Blue Marble GeoObjects library is limited in its editing support.  One major limitation is that objects in the Overlay (or drawing) layer have no attributes that are returned via the GetAttribute() or GetAttributes() methods. What that means is that if you copy an existing feature to the Overlay layer, none...