I was contacted by someone who has downloaded portable GIS, very sensibly asking for information on the postgresql connection details. When I tried to respond to this person, their email address bounced back with a permanent failure, so I thought I’d better write something here so he doesn’t think I’m not replying! Now, I was sure that I had included a readme file specific to the postgresql installation, but it looks like the pixies might have eaten it.

Via the seasite mailing list, this article about the difference between underwater archaeology, salvage, and treasure-hunting really got me thinking. I started off as a diver, then a marine archaeologist, and often came into contact with the strange point of view that if you find something underwater, like something from a wreck, it’s OK to prise it off and take it home to display proudly on your wall, yet you’d hardly go and break the wing-mirror off someone’s car.

I had a lightning-fast trip to Nottingham on Tuesday to do a short talk on OSGeo and the role of Local Chapters at the Centre for Geospatial Science’s Geospatial Web Services Workshop. I wish I had been able to attend more of the workshop, as it looked pretty good, but alas I was holidaying at the time. All the presentations were recorded as webcasts and are available on the website. The Centre is looking for feedback on how well this approach works, so do check it out.

It would appear that we are having a little issue with our downloads site, where portable gis is hosted. Not sure exactly whether the cause is human intervention, voodoo, or accident, but it would appear that portable gis is not currently available to download, even though it’s there when I ftp in. Ho Hum. Anyhow, I’m off for a couple of days diving now, in sunny Scotland, so unless my colleagues miraculously fix the issue over the weekend I won’t be able to sort it until next week some time.

Update: Due to issues with our download server, portable gis is not currently available. Investigations are taking place as to the exact cause and I will announce when it is fixed, though this may take a few days as I am away over the weekend. Thanks for your patience and your interest! Version 1.2 of Portable GIS has been released today, addressing a number of bugs in Version 1.1. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and spotted the bugs.

Aware that there haven’t been Thursday Tip days for a couple of weeks, or indeed anything else in the way of blog posts (follow-up post coming along soon)- here’s a real quicky: If you want to be able to connect to your postgresql data using an external programme (such as Open Office Base, QGIS, gvSIG or Mapserver) AND be able to properly view/select and edit the data, you will need to do the following:

Does anyone else see the irony in these two statements, which fortuitously popped up in my feed reader one after the other? It’s so depressing when people talk about phasing out paper maps. It seems to be part of a general feeling that all maps are for is getting from point A to point B on the road. Does your sat-nav point out interesting things you maybe ought to detour for?

A couple of people have remarked to me that one reason that they are not prepared to make the open source jump is the lack of support. Well, last week I wrote about a mastermap importer that I had found. I said I would like to be able to merge the huge numbers of shapefiles produced into more manageable chunks. I got a lot of good advice as to ways I might be able to do that using gdal, which is really handy, BUT I also emailed the developer about the same problem.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t really put it off any further… The very first release of Portable GIS is now available for download here. Phew! While you don’t have to register to download, it would be nice if you did, so I know who is interested and can contact about updates. No spam, I promise. For people that don’t read the readme: this is not cross-platform, it’s for windows only. Unzip it and move the folders inside to the root of a USB stick, then double-click on the menu exe to access the programmes.

Moving to open source for our GIS packages continues to throw up some interesting challenges- and solutions. In the UK, the most common way for Ordnance Survey vector data to be delivered is in mastermap format, which without going into the technical details is gml, usually served in gz files. Lots of them. There is an additonal add-on for ArcGIS that converts this into a personal geodatabase, but initially there didn’t seem to be a way of doing this using open source.