Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

How to: Find out what modules a Python script requires

I do a lot of my academic programming in Python, and – even though I often write about the importance of reproducible research – I don’t always document my code very well. This sometimes leads to problems where I have some code running fine, but I don’t know which modules it requires. These could be […]

How to: Solve GDAL error ‘An error occurred while writing a dirty block’

When running GDAL on my university’s supercomputer yesterday I got the following error: ERROR 1: Landsat_Soton.tif, band 1: An error occured while writing a dirty block This post is really just to remind me how to solve this error – I imagine the error may have a multitude of possible causes. In my case though, […]

How to: Convert OSM waypoints defining polygons into Shapefile

Today I got sent a file by a colleague in OSM format. I’d never come across the format before, but I did a quick check and found that OGR could read it (like pretty much every vector GIS format under the sun). So, I ran a quick OGR command: ogr2ogr -f “ESRI Shapefile” Villages.shp Villages.osm […]

How to batch export PDFs to other filetypes in Adobe Acrobat

When dealing with some of the alterations to a journal article today I had the need to batch convert some PDF files to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript). After quite a bit of Googling I came to the conclusion that the only way to do this was to write some Javascript using the Adobe Acrobat API – […]

How to: Set raster values to NoData easily in ArcGIS 10

While processing some data at work today I had an issue where I had a raster dataset in ArcGIS, where all cells with invalid data had been set to 9999. Of course, this caused a lot of issues for the statistics on the dataset – basically they were all nonsense – so I needed to […]