Doing some google earth map work.....

[minerrick]

And for some reason, MRDS nor the folios are working for me. Can anyone confirm if they are having the same issues? It makes it really difficult if I cannot use them.

 

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[Clay Diggins]

We host our own MRDS files on Land Matters. They work all the time.

You will find all of the folios and more there too.

Heavy Pans

 

[SpecJet]

MRDS is working fine for me.
I've had times when they didn't, but it has always been temporary, server maintenance maybe.
PLSS does the same thing occasionally.

 

[goldenIrishman]

Since I got the new computer I haven't had any problems at all. My old puter couldn't handle GE any more and it's nice to have it back in the tools available for researching areas again.

 

[minerrick]

Clay, I have made several attempts to view your page, but it takes FOREVER for it to load. Literally, FOREVER. So even though I have tried a couple of times, I have never actually SEEN your info there. Any suggestions to make it load faster?

 

[Clay Diggins]

There are several things you can do to speed things up minerrick. I've broken the possible problems down by their symptoms.

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If you don't see a map window when you click on a mapping link:
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You must have popups enabled to see a map. Maps have their own windows so researchers can use the search functions in the library while they look at a map. If you click on a map link and nothing happens you will need to enable popup windows for the site mylandmatters.org. Maps open in their own windows so no new window = popups blocked.

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If you only see a white map window when you click on a mapping link:
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1. You need to enable javascript in your browser settings. This is normally already set to on by default. If you click to open a map and you get a mostly blank white window the rest of the map interface will never load without javascript turned on. The tools on the map depend on javascript to work.

2. You need to allow cookies for mylandmatters.org maps and library searches. We put a cookie with a single identifying number in it so our server will know which map you are working on. Without knowing who is asking for which map we can't give you the area, map layers etc. you want to see, this is common to all internet maps. We don't keep or use the cookie information for anything but serving you maps. Your cookie is destroyed after three hours of non use or if you quit your browser. We don't track Land Matters users - ever. If you click to open a map and you get a mostly blank white window the rest of the map interface will never load without cookies turned on.

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If you see a black map window when you click on a mapping link:
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If you are getting a map window with a black map that says "CREATING MAP" but doesn't show a map in a reasonable time there could be a few reasons. Each of these problems can contribute to slow loading.

1. You have a very slow connection. You are on your own on this one but I feel your pain. We maintain a separate dial up connection just so we can test mapping on slow connections. Land matters offers a LOT more information density on their maps than google or government mapping. There is a lot more data to transfer than other maps. A slow connection (dial up speeds) can slow initial map loads down to the region of 10 seconds. Adding on high density map layers like aerials or turning on all the layers before zooming in to your area of interest will increase the loading times even more. Try just using the layers you need and zoom in before you turn on additional layers.

2. The size of your mapping window has a big effect on the amount of data that has to be transferred from our servers to your browser. A large map window requires 3-4 Mb of data be created and transferred to you for every change, zoom or move on the map. Make your map window smaller and data transfer sizes go down rapidly. We see map loads as low as a few kilobytes that aren't much bigger than an email. If you want more speed resize your map window smaller.

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Keep in mind that Land Matters maps are not a set of premade pictures with preset zoom levels like google earth or bing. Each time you request a map from Land Matters the map is custom made to your map size, area of interest, layers turned on and transparency settings. The time for our server to create a map to your order from our databases rarely exceeds 4 seconds and is usually less than a second. The rest of the time it takes to see the map you requested is all about how fast your connection is and how fast your computer can display the new map image.

The only exception to this is when we need to stream a map layer from a government server. Sometimes those government servers work well and other times they don't even respond. We give those servers 30 seconds to cough up the data or we move on and assemble your map without that government data. We are gradually recreating all that government data on our own servers so as to eliminate this problem. Lack of service from government servers and maps is one of the main reasons we started Land Matters. Once a map layer is moved from the government server to our server response times go down from stupid slow to fractions of a second.

More than a third of a million people access Land Matters maps monthly. We've served up about 300 Gigabytes of map images in the first six months of this year alone. We watch our server performance closely and constantly tune for better performance. The only slowdowns we see from our end are a few government servers. The slowest and least reliable of those were the MRDS and the PLSS. We have now completely reproduced those on our own server so they are no longer a problem.

Try those tips and you should be mapping along with millions of other people. Let me know if you have any other problems minerrick, we want everyone to have access to the information on Land Matters.

Heavy Pans

 

[minerrick]

There are several things you can do to speed things up minerrick. I've broken the possible problems down by their symptoms.

Clay, your map comes up, but when I click on it to say, zoom in...... nothing happens. It just sits there. It takes forever for the map to be created. And each zoom level takes several minutes "creating map". I don't think it is my internet connection as your site is the only one that is slow. Maybe it is my mac mini that is the problem- but I only have this problem with your site. I would love to find a site like yours to eliminate the hours and hours I am taking to map each township. Tell me what i need to do to be able to view your site....

 

[fowledup]

Rick- Click and drag a box over just the area you want to create a smaller map, it will speed it way up in comparison to hitting the plus sign.

 

[minerrick]

Rick- Click and drag a box over just the area you want to create a smaller map, it will speed it way up in comparison to hitting the plus sign.

Clay/Mark- the latency on the redraw drives me crazy. I feel like I am on dial up. I've tried several times to work that site and it is just too slow on my computer. I guess I will have to go back to the "old fashioned" way I was doing it.

I am glad it is working for so many other people. I just guess I am an old dog who doesn't learn new tricks very well.

For some reason, the folios must be off line. I may have to call Texas A&M on Monday to see what is up. Also, it looks like the BLM took down the LR2000 site this afternoon, as all I am getting is a log in page for some sort of Oracle page.

 

[minerrick]

Also, if anyone else is using google earth lately, is the program crashing a lot for you? About 2 weeks ago I lost over 500 hours worth of work on google earth, when it crashed on me. I thought I was saving my work, but I guess unless you create and save in another separate folder on your desktop, (no matter if you think you are saving it or not), if GE crashes, all the work is gone. FOREVER. I almost cried. So here I am again trying to re-create it, but I swear GE crashes on me at least 5 times during each session of work I am doing with it. It is very annoying, and it is to the point that I must save every new boundary as soon as I find it or else it may be gone. The good news is if I keep doing the same location enough times, it will be permanently burned into my memory and I won't need a map.

 

[SpecJet]

I feel you on the almost cried part, been there and lost a huge amount of work.

All of the data you saved in GE may be recoverable.
That data is stored in a file called myplaces.kml.
There should also be a file called myplaces.backup.kml

These should be located in C:\documents and settings\"your user name"\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth

Now, whenever I put in a long session of research I make a copy of the myplaces.kml file, change the name by adding the date to the name and save it
in a folder on my desktop. Now if you have a crash or corrupt the myplaces file, you can copy the saved file back to the GE folder, change the name back to myplaces.kml
and get all your data back into.

To make all this quicker, I put a shortcut on my desktop to the above GE folder "C:\documents and settings\"your user name"\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth".
It only takes a couple seconds to click the shortcut, copy the file, paste in my storage folder and add the date to the name.

Hopefully this helps save some frustration in the future,

John

 

[minerrick]

I feel you on the almost cried part, been there and lost a huge amount of work.

All of the data you saved in GE may be recoverable.
That data is stored in a file called myplaces.kml.
There should also be a file called myplaces.backup.kml

These should be located in C:\documents and settings\"your user name"\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth

Now, whenever I put in a long session of research I make a copy of the myplaces.kml file, change the name by adding the date to the name and save it
in a folder on my desktop. Now if you have a crash or corrupt the myplaces file, you can copy the saved file back to the GE folder, change the name back to myplaces.kml
and get all your data back into.

To make all this quicker, I put a shortcut on my desktop to the above GE folder "C:\documents and settings\"your user name"\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth".
It only takes a couple seconds to click the shortcut, copy the file, paste in my storage folder and add the date to the name.

Hopefully this helps save some frustration in the future,

John

Thanks for the advice on that John. I have been using google earth for years and never had a crash. The ultimate irony of this whole thing was I was thinking "I've been saving my work, but I've never actually seen the file where it is being saved", so in a moment of brilliance I decided I should create another file on my desktop "just in case". At that point, I NEVER had a crash of google earth. So I went up to the "Save places as" button, clicked it and the whole thing crashed JUST AS I WAS BACKING IT UP. I went online and looked all over the place for where it could be saved, and it was nowhere to be found on my computer. I had over 50 townships of info regarding old mining claims, historical info, areas to check out, etc and it was gone in an instant.....poof! The good news is the 2nd time around I could start fresh and change the way I was noting stuff. So it is much more organized this time. Each township takes me several days of work to compile all the info. The more often I have to recreate it the more i remember about each "hot spot".

Now, google earth crashes probably 5-7 times an hour. So literally every couple of minutes I have to back it up. And amazingly it doesn't have an "auto save" integrated into the program. Are the guys at google lame or something?

 

[SpecJet]

Do a search on your hard drive for *myplaces*.*

You may get lucky and find a non corrupted copy, it's a slim chance but worth the try.

I wish GE had a save function that would save the myplaces file to a new name so that you could roll back to a non corrupted version.
I would think that would be easy to do and worth the effort, many people have had the same problem and lost all their work.

 

[Clay Diggins]

Clay, your map comes up, but when I click on it to say, zoom in...... nothing happens. It just sits there. It takes forever for the map to be created. And each zoom level takes several minutes "creating map". I don't think it is my internet connection as your site is the only one that is slow. Maybe it is my mac mini that is the problem- but I only have this problem with your site. I would love to find a site like yours to eliminate the hours and hours I am taking to map each township. Tell me what i need to do to be able to view your site....

I did some testing on this last night. My results are far away from what you are reporting. Here's what I found:

The longest any map has taken to be created on our server in the last three days was 14.27 seconds. That was one map with all the layers turned on including 1 foot resolution aerials. The next slowest map was 5.43 seconds and the average of the more than 30,000 maps created was .07 seconds (7/100 of 1 second). The server is working fine and has had no problems of any kind for more than three months.

I tested several maps on google earth and on Land Matters. These tests were done several times each on an old mac powerpc, an old slow windows xp box and on our modern 8 processor superfast pro computer. Essentially all the computers produced the same speeds to within 1 second. The type of browser had more influence on speed than the power of the computer.

Google Earth was tested with just the base layer loading and a mapping window about 1/4 the size of the mapping window on the Land Matters tests with 7 layers turned on.

Google Earth - Initial load = 30 seconds.
Land Matters - Initial load = 17 seconds

Google Earth - zoom 1 level = 7 seconds
Land Matters - zoom 1 level = 9 seconds

Google Earth required 5 zoom ins totaling 30 seconds to show an approx 120 square mile area - 1 layer
Land Matters zoomed in to the same 120 square mile area in one zoom in 9 seconds - 7 layers 4 times the map size.

Google Earth - Total time to display 1 base layer at 120 sq miles = 1 minute.
Land Matters - Total time to display 7 layers at 120 sq miles = 26 seconds

These numbers are averages but the variance in 21 tests of different browser/computer amounts to less than 1 second. Two of the computers I used were much slower than your Mac Mini. These numbers are the same results as every test I've run since October of last year. Some of those tests have been run on other peoples computers and connections.

I don't doubt for a minute the results you are getting minerrick but as you can see the slowdown is not due to Land Matters taking forever to make a map. The problem is somewhere on your side.

Knowing that doesn't really help you get any more maps but it does point to where some of my effort needs to be made. My tests do not include every browser or operating system. It's possible some combinations may be slower than others. I would really like to know if that's the source of your slowdown or if I need to look to other possible causes. If you care to share those details by PM it might give me somewhere to start to get a fix for your situation. I'm not looking for blame I just want Land Matters users to have the best experience possible.

Anyone else that is experiencing problems with Land Matters Maps please PM me here or Contact Land Matters. Please include your operating system, browser and any addons like popup blockers or "free" computer/browser security programs. It would be greatly appreciated.

Heavy Pans

 

[Clay Diggins]

The ultimate irony of this whole thing was I was thinking "I've been saving my work, but I've never actually seen the file where it is being saved", so in a moment of brilliance I decided I should create another file on my desktop "just in case". At that point, I NEVER had a crash of google earth. So I went up to the "Save places as" button, clicked it and the whole thing crashed JUST AS I WAS BACKING IT UP. I went online and looked all over the place for where it could be saved, and it was nowhere to be found on my computer. I had over 50 townships of info regarding old mining claims, historical info, areas to check out, etc and it was gone in an instant.....poof! The good news is the 2nd time around I could start fresh and change the way I was noting stuff. So it is much more organized this time. Each township takes me several days of work to compile all the info. The more often I have to recreate it the more i remember about each "hot spot".

Now, google earth crashes probably 5-7 times an hour. So literally every couple of minutes I have to back it up. And amazingly it doesn't have an "auto save" integrated into the program. Are the guys at google lame or something?

Now I see your difficulty with GE. The kml format GE uses to store information is just not designed to support a large number of features. The technical limits to kml files are on the order of 10 Mb. The MRDS is 935 Mb for the U.S. alone. The Townships file is 130 Mb compressed. You are trying to run professional level datasources on an entertainment mapping system designed to support a few thousand placemarks or features. Your Google Earth held up remarkably well until now but it's choking on the data you are trying to display.

Here are the published limits for Google Earth:

Maximum fetched file size (raw KML, raw GeoRSS, or compressed KMZ) 3MB
Maximum uncompressed KML file size 10MB
Maximum number of Network Links 10
Maximum number of total document-wide features 1,000

I suspect you have far exceeded those numbers.

There are some things you can do to get your data back running in GE without crashes but you will have to learn a few things along the way.
First learn to break your KMLs into chunks smaller than 10 Mb. 5 Mb total size would be a better goal. You can load one KML into GE that has references to the other ones you created so when you load up the first one the others are loaded up too. Here is more info on that process.

Another option is to use Google Fusion Tables. This will require you to load your maps up to the Google servers so what little privacy you still had will be gone and you won't be able to update that information easily but it will be much faster and no longer choke on your KML file - no more crashes. You can read more about that option Here.

A more complex option is to buy a server in a server farm and serve the kml files through a mapserver application you've set up on that server. That's a big leap from where you are now and comes with it's own bag of worries but it would give you the possibility to keep a large number of files available. This is how "programs" like Minecache and MinerDiggins old free Gold Atlas work.

The very best option is to drop the kml format. It's bulky, slow and has severe limits on styling and data access. I've written kml files for years and the simple fact is they get slower and less reliable the more information you put in them. You can take your current KML and import it into a real mapping program like Qgis and export them into something much more useful like a shapefile or even a database. There is a learning curve but the possibilities are endless, it's free! and you won't be wasting your time building a project in a format that will be worthless should Google choose to pull Google Earth support. All the Google mapping products are only online and are classed as "experimental" by them. Google is well known in the coding world for disappearing their "experimental" programs without notice.

We get a lot of people requesting that we put Land Matters map info on Google Earth. The fact is with 30 Gb of data currently and near term plans to serve 280 Gb of map data your Google Earth would choke and die on start up just trying to display the info. If you want to assemble research maps you really need to move on to something more professional. Try Qgis or figure out why your browser is blocking Land Matters. If you choose to go to Qgis I would be glad to point you to the data you would need to expand your project to whatever you want. There is a world of great data out there that Google Earth will never be able to display.

Whatever your path from here you will need to change the way you view your project. Google Earth will continue to choke and die at more frequent intervals until it finally pukes and destroys your work again. I learned the hard way several years ago just how bad that can be so I feel for you. Please pursue one of the options above, I would hate for that to happen to you again.

Heavy Pans

 

[Clay Diggins]

You can download the folios directly through the Land Matters Earth Sciences Library minerrick. You don't need to load a map to get them. Just run a search for the area you are interested in.

All 227 of the Geologic Folios are there. You can also get the Geologic Quad maps - all 1,784 of them.

Land Matters isn't just about maps. They've got more than 300,000 items available for download through the extensive, and constantly growing, Library.

Heavy Pans

 

[minerrick]

Clay, I PMed you.

Yeah, I used to keep all my KMz's in "my places" but that crash fixed THAT ISSUE. I learned quickly to keep valuable data OUTSIDE that program. So now, everything is kept on my desktop. I am very much interested in learning how to use a more comprehensive mapping program. I LOVE working with maps and Google Earth frustrates me to no end.

 

[Rob in KS]

The path to some sites is slow while other sites are just fine.

Here is an idea to find out how slow your connection to Land Matter is:
I went to a DOS prompt (yup I'm that old) and I ran a trace route

tracert a space and then the URL of the site

It'll give you the time for each hop on the way to Land Matters. If you get an asterisk, it timed out.

 

[minerrick]

The path to some sites is slow while other sites are just fine.

Here is an idea to find out how slow your connection to Land Matter is:
I went to a DOS prompt (yup I'm that old) and I ran a trace route

tracert a space and then the URL of the site

It'll give you the time for each hop on the way to Land Matters. If you get an asterisk, it timed out.

I'm THAT old, but I don't know how to find a dos prompt on a Mac. Any ideas?

 

[Rob in KS]

Oh snap, I forgot you were on a mac. Probably won't find a DOS prompt there LOL