Well, since my last post, I discovered that my site had been hacked and was trying to install a trojan on people’s machines (thanks for letting me know, Bill). I got my account suspended by my web hosts as a result, and got into a bit of a spat with them about how they handled it (absolutely nothing on their support site about it, but apparently you’re supposed to tell them IMMEDIATELY when things like that happen).

I love it when two mutually contradictory posts land in my reader. To be fair, you can argue that they are not, but then where would be the fun in that? Number One: Speedy Hire (UK equipment hire company) saved 1 million pounds by moving to Microsoft Everything from linux-based pcs running open office etc. Number Two: Massachusetts Geographic Information services have gone over to open source GIS to cut costs (amongst other benefits).

I started off this week with the intention of resurrecting and upgrading a demo openlayers map of all our sites, that had been stuck in a sorry corner of our corporate website being neglected. This tied in with moving the map to a different server, upgrading all the components, and generally giving it a shave and a haircut (it is male, that’s for certain). For those people interested in our wms and wfs data- these will be online again soon, I promise.

I have been musing all week over my response to some questions posted originally by James Fee and answered by Paul Ramsey and Jody Garnett. The question has become one about the value of OSGeo as a brand- well personally I think the marketing aspects are really important. I’ve stood up and talked about open source GIS an awful lot recently, to a diverse range of people, trying to persuade them that it’s a viable choice for their business.

Part of my fabulous new plans for portable gis (which will be revealed soon-ish) involve including a database replication option. This might or might not work on the USB drive, but it needs to be open source, portable, and connect to postgresql at the very least. I have been looking at a couple of options for this, without a vast amount of success, it has to be said. The packages that I have tried are: Daffodil Replicator, dbreplicator (a fork of daffodil replicator), Symmetric-DS, and db -connector for Funambol.

I mentioned a while back the cool competition that the government here in the UK were running, called “Show Us a Better Way”. The idea was that people could submit ideas for mashups with public information. Well, the contest appears to have been a great success- it closed at the end of September and the winners were announced earlier this month (no, my entry didn’t win, sob). Not unsuprisingly, the winning entries all had a geospatial component to them, but their future is already in doubt due to some over-zealous big-stick-waving from dear old Ordnance Survey.

A few teaser posts have appeared over the last few days about this new Firefox add-on called “Geode”, which promises to “understand location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content”. There has been a slightly muted reaction to this, possibly due to the fact that it’s supposed to be available today and yet there’s no sign of it in the labs. Some people think these features are now common-place and therefore not that exciting at all.