Thanks to a fortuitous post from James Fee, I made a great leap forward with my portable GIS today, which is handy as my FOSS4G talk is number 10 in the list (2pm on the Tuesday, if you’re interested). I’m not going to give the game away as to exactly what’s on the stick (what would I talk about in September otherwise?) but I am at the stage of trying to streamline the configuration for all the programmes and putting a nice front-end on it.

That’s fun for two reasons:

1. I’ve used it as an excuse to buy a new laptop (is it bad to say that Vista is actually quite nice?)

2. I’ve never done anything with windows batch files before

All fun and games. My poor colleagues are in for a shock next week when I demand that not only do they go out and buy new USB sticks, but they spend their spare time after work testing my masterpiece :-)