The title says it all really, Archaeogeek’s second birthday snuck by the other day without me even noticing. Mr Archaeogeek says this means I have to take him out for dinner. I’m sure he has it the wrong way around, but maybe he needs rewarding for putting up with me! Anyhow, happy birthday to Archaeogeek. I’m even more astounded than I was this time last year that my attention span has lasted this long, given that it has actually been a pretty tough year around these parts.

So, Chrome, the fabled small-footprint open source browser that we all wanted…well I quite liked the idea anyhow, though in my ideal world google would just have partnered with mozilla to make firefox even bigger and better. Or should that be smaller and better? I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m mighty disappointed. I download, I follow instructions, it fails to load it’s own welcome page. Not to be daunted, I load my personalised google home page, I go off and make tea, I come back and eventually it loads.

Vector One points us to an article in the Independent about how google are destroying Britain’s culture by not showing it on their maps. The interviewee, from the British Cartographic Society, is slightly hysterical about this- let’s face it google are not that evil, but I have to say I agree with the basic premise, and disagree with Vector One’s analysis. The fact is that Google maps are not as rich and interesting as those the Ordnance Survey produces.

Like others, I recently received a comment about an upcoming competition on my “about” page. Like others, I feel that this is a curious way of advertising a competition with large monetary prize. Possibly unlike others, I also feel quite strongly about being contacted in this way. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a very worthy competition, and had the advertising policy been better thought through I would be all for it.

Suddenly, in a couple of aggregated feeds that I subscribe to, I’m starting to see feeds of people’s comments, and individual posts from mailing lists. This doesn’t work for me in the slightest, as they are both snippets of conversations or threads, without real context when seen on their own. If people are interested in comments to a given post then surely they will subscribe to them anyway? Solution- unsubscribe from the aggregated feed and go through and subscribe to the individual feeds that I’m interested in.

After a week away on the Isle of Skye in Scotland (with no computers, no phones, great weather and gorgeous landscape, but more midges than any sane person really needs) I had over 1000 rss feed items to read, most of which appeared to be about google (photos of the olympic site or streetview), but a few little gems did stand out: For the historians and literary types amongst you, the diaries of Samuel Pepys and George Orwell are being syndicated, one entry a day.

In that serindipitous way that rss readers work, two posts came to my attention over the last couple of days. The first was from Gavin, about problems that occurred when the South African Government failed to keep control of the source code on two GIS programmes that they had developed. When contracts end, or funding dries up, if you don’t have complete control over your programmes then you might as well start rebuilding them now.

Two Mondays ago I came into work in the morning to find one of my windows servers no longer booted. The short version is that all the data was fine, but the windows partition had got itself corrupted. I now have a linux server, and know more about samba and winbind than I ever thought I would need to. No big deal, you might say, but it has been a learning experience for me, and I’m very grateful to my colleagues for their patience whilst I dropped everything else and flailed around in the dark trying to learn the intricacies of samba config from scratch.

Someone (thanks Bruce) has alerted me to a mistake in Portable GIS, which luckily requires a very minor patch- so minor that I am not going to release a new version now and force everyone to download it again, although it will be fixed in the next version. Basically there is a line in the apache config that doesn’t update it’s drive letter because the slashes are the wrong way around.