Running Magik Remotely from Google Talk

Bhimesh over at the Magik Fun blog has posted a video of how he uses the XMPP protocol to send/retrieve standard input/output from Magik. It kind of reminds me of the remote_cli class in Magik.

You can view the blog post here.

Exporting Node Coordinates via FME

I received a query today from a reader that wants to export the node coordinates for each electric conductor sent to FME. The sw_gis!node table is not a user table in Smallworld and is therefore not typically exposed to the FME plugin. But if you use the GE FME plugin, you can make use of the pseudo_fields functionality to gather up the relevant node information and send it to FME as a conductor attribute.

The basic steps are:

1. define pseudo_fields on the conductor class (or whatever class you are interested in)
2. write Magik support code that populates the pseudo_fields with appropriate node-based coordinates.
3. create a FME Workspace that reads the new pseudo_fields and processes the appropriately.

This video describes these steps in more detail.

Another Mapping Blog

I am expanding my mapping experiences beyond Smallworld. Particularly, I am getting more involved with OpenStreetMap. In order to spare those of you interested mainly in Smallworld the details of non-Smallworld blog posts, I have created a new blog at boulderalfmaps.blogspot.com