Spaced Out ::

Well as good as….. ArcGIS 9.3 is finally here. 14 years, 8 months, 27 days, 4 hours, 3 minutes and 32 seconds after the USA. I jest, and the good people at ESRI UK and CHEST have delivered the nice shiny DVDs ready for install. In fact this is a mission in itself. Its generally recommended that ERDAS Imagine is installed on top of ArcGIS. So, I had to very carefully uninstall in the following order:

Leica Photogrammetry Suite
ERDAS Imagine
ERDAS Licensing Tools
ArcGIS
ArcGIS License Manager

And then install the ARC/INFO version of ArcGIS which I managed to mistakenly forget to install the bundled extensions, wasting another 30 minutes of reinstall. And of course the new Acrobat GeoPDF add-on which is only 2 Mb but also took 15 mins.

Anyway, its there and working and, touch wood, no problems. I’ve only had a quick play, but the tools in ArcToolbox appear noticeably quicker which is nice. I did try my custom Python script mentioned in an earlier blog and it bombed on the “extent” bug noted last time. The fix in 9.2 was to add in the following line:

gp.extent = “N/A”

This didn’t work and it gave the same “no extent” error when the line was removed. However on this occasion setting the extent to the input file seems to have done the trick.

I ran the script and it didn’t appear any faster “in process” but the speed improvements are on start-up rather than elsewhere. Something to watch out for. There is also a new geoprocessor that you need to instantiate as a 9.3 version. Early days yet though.