Recently I watched a video by Seth Godin that talked about how things are broken, which, as well as being really funny, made me realise that so many things are indeed broken. Take the firefox extension update process for example. I appreciate it letting me know extensions are available automatically, but when it finishes it leaves you on a window with a single button saying “continue”. Why? If that’s the only option, then why not simply “continue” without my input?

Crikey, that’s the first time I’ve left it nearly a month between posts! At the moment it feels a little like one of those games you play when you’re a kid, and someone shouts “red” so you go and hit the red post, then they shout “blue” and you dash to blue, then they shout “red” again, then “green” really quick before you' can catch your breath, and before you know it you’re stuck in the middle unable to move.

There have been a couple of announcements recently about marrying Business Intelligence Suites with Mapping- which all sound really exciting, though I’m still a little hazy about exactly what these olap hypercubes are, with their snowflake schema and other such nonsense important sounding things. Immature comments aside, I’m yet to be convinced of the advantages over a standard relational approach. I am, however, keen to understand the Geo BI offerings, as I think they could be key in persuading people in management positions of the real value and power of online mapping.

It’s funny how you can have a fairly quiet time of things, then suddenly everything happens in one week… So Monday was the first Open Source GIS conference in the UK, affectionately known to it’s friends as OSGIS 2009. The event was sold out in advance (150 people) , and seemed to be well received, though it was hectic, with two streams and workshops going on through most of the day.

A quick post to give people a heads up that there seems to be a google groups problem affecting the portable-gis group, amongst others. If you have signed up with a googlemail account (not gmail, or any other email account) then your messages may get bounced back with a permissions error. This seems to be a general problem affecting many groups, so no doubt a fix is in progress, but just so you know, I’m not blocking anyone (hell, I can’t post to my own group at the moment!

You might have seen this post last week about how the Ordnance Survey once again saved the universe from un-approved uses of “their” data, by blocking an incredibly useful application that overlays Ordnance Survey mapping over Google Earth. You might have seen this post about it too. You might even have written to the Ordnance Survey to complain about it. However, unless, like me, you had these posts tagged in your feed reader ready to write something about them, you might not have realised that the Ordnance Survey have (sort of) relented.

Not my own words, but copied verbatim from Chris Schmidt on the OpenLayers Mailing List. Change the name, and they are mostly applicable to any package, not just OpenLayers. Having been guilty of not following these instructions myself, I’d advocate that all new mailing list subscribers should read it before signing up… Many times, users have come to me, or asked questions in IRC, related to getting help with a particular behavior.

OK, I’m excited to announce that the new version of Portable GIS, complete with the latest versions (as of today- I have to draw the line somewhere) of all the software, is now in testing phase and pretty much ready to release. It’s a bit slicker that the previous version, and comes with some extra software and utilities. Here is my problem: the last release weighed in at just less that 1GB downloaded, but the new one looks like coming in at approx 1.