matlab + geospatial

futzing around on matlab help site and ran into this:

Geospatial Data Import and Access
http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/map/ref/f3-12193.html#f3-32594

which includes things like:

usgs24kdem
Read USGS 7.5-minute (30-m or 10-m) Digital Elevation Models

Really?? I guess you need Mapping Toolbox and I'm not sure if that comes standard.

sac remove instrument response

*InstRm: remove instrument signal from seismic signal
[lhsu@thought leslie]$ more InstRm

* read signal
r 2008.005.00.00.16.1150.XQ.ME30.01.BHZ.M.SAC

*possibly transfer first, but remove mean and trend
rmean
rtrend

*taper ends
taper w 0.1

*transfer function to remove instrument noise
transfer from evalresp to vel freqlimit 0.0009 0.001 15 17

*convert to m from nm (sac default)
mul 1e-9

*write out the resultant velocity vector (binary)
w Day005_vel

*fft
fft

*write out the power spectrum (binary)
wsp Day005_sac

more gis tools

Geospatial Modelling Environment
http://www.spatialecology.com/gme/gmecommands.htm

Yesterday Jon downloaded something from the predecessor of these tools, and the interface and functionality looked really good. You can do a bunch of stuff with points, lines, polygons, that I think is more intuitive than arcGIS.

Also, linked to that page is a whole list of open source GIS. Who knew??

Quantum GIS
GRASS GIS
uDIG GIS
SAGA GIS
OSSIM Image Processing
The R Project
PostGIS
Wikipedia GIS Page

Brain about to explode.

mapping software alternatives

Up until last week, I didn't know about any viable alternatives to arcGIS.

But here are a couple (one still under development...)

GeoMapApp

http://www.geomapapp.org/

Open Earth Framework

http://oef.geongrid.org/

Both are being developed at academic institutions, the first at Lamont-Doherty and the second at UCSD.

I haven't used them very much yet, but I hope to check them out more in the near future.