If you read anything about blogging you’ll know that you’re not supposed to apologise for not posting, but umm, sorry for not posting for a couple of weeks. Oops, there goes my blogging credentials down the drain! Anyhow, the last couple of weeks have been a bit of a learning experience. A major IT mishap, which I could have handled better and possibly prevented, coupled with lots of commitments and deadlines, meant that I just had to get my head down and get through each day an hour at a time.

Something I’ve noticed a lot recently, amongst the IT/Open Source crowd (not specifically geospatial), is the inability to answer a question in a constructive manner, if it can be answered in a “well you shouldn’t use that piece of software” kind of way. This drives me to utter distraction, as it’s not only pretty useless to the person asking the question, if they actually have a problem that they want to resolve, but it also creates a really bad impression.

I’ve been meaning to post for a while on Oxford Archaeology’s Open Archaeology Project, also known as our “Open Ethos”, then what do you know, Joseph posts about it and says it so well that I might just as well repeat his post verbatim. I won’t though- then you might go and read the other blog, and wander around on the internet for a while finding out interesting new things .

From the O’Reilly Radar blog comes this great presentation from Dave Gray, which as Tim O’Reilly says himself is a must-read, must-share for anyone who cares about either science or open access. It’s also one of the most engaging “powerpoints” you’ll see in a while, showing that it’s possible to have something with lots of text, yet still be interesting and attractive. Give it a go and tell your friends!

Back in December, I wrote a post about Microsoft Case Studies “proving” that moving from open source to Microsoft would have massive cost savings. When you looked into the actual case study, rather than the fluffy press release that they put out, the story was rather different. A few comments that I got suggested that other people didn’t necessarily see the case study in the same light, so I was pleased to see a repeat performance.

I attended a seminar on “Business and Sustainability Models around Free and Open Source Software” a couple of weeks ago run by OSS watch, who are an advisory service on open source and free software to the UK higher and further education establishment. It was targeted mainly at academics (not unsurprisingly), who had ideas of creating software and were trying to decide the best way of releasing it- closed or open source.

As of a couple of days ago, the UK local chapter of OSGeo is now official, rather than “in formation”. Thanks to the board for passing our proposal. It might not seem much to some people, but to me it feels an awful lot easier to persuade sceptics and doubters that there is an open source GIS “scene” in the UK with an officially recognised chapter. For information, these are our terms of reference:

OK, so this is a slightly delayed New Year post, partly due to the happy fact that I was without an internet connection for most of Christmas. It’s good to go without sometimes! My love-affair with Mapfish continues with the news that it’s now possible to integrate the google earth browser plugin into your map. I am really keen to try this out, but there is the problem that there’s no google earth browser plugin for linux yet.