The event visualisation plugin for QGIS is a way of adding tabular geographic data to QGIS in a similar way to the “add XY data from table” option in ArcGIS. I’ve only tried the windows version so far but it is cross-platform. You download it from here Extract the zip file and move the files to the following locations: Copy plugins/libevis.dll to C:\Program Files\Quantum GIS\plugins Copy the imageformats folder to C:\Program Files\Quantum GIS

Never apologise for delayed posts… this is a Sunday Tip Day post, not a Thursday! Anyhow… I just found a super little cross-platform utility that takes shapefiles and dumps them to a variety of text-based formats. Download it here, and simply unzip it to use it. There isn’t much documentation, but basically your options are to download to gpx or spreadsheet. The following gives you a simple delimited text file with the coordinates and values from your attribute table:

Time for a quick catch up… Last Thursday was the first get-together for the UK OSGeo local chapter. Actually we’re not a formal chapter yet- we have to get approved by the board first but it’s a start! People came along from a wide variety of different GIS sub-disciplines, which was nice, although there was a comment that perhaps archaeology was over-represented! We had a selection of quick talks from Tyler Mitchell (intro to OSGeo), Suchith Anand (OGC Interoperability), me (Portable GIS) and Jason Jorgenson (FOSS for archaeological site catchment analysis), and then had a lively discussion about what we thought the local chapter should do.

Just as we are settling down with the transition to open source, it would seem that a lot of other people are at least considering their options along the same lines, for whatever reason. This thread on the osgeo_discuss list, started off as a question about the value of open source to individual’s careers, but rapidly morphed into a discussion about replacing the ESRI packages. This seems to have lead to a general consensus about the areas where the open source packages do well and do badly.

This is an “interesting” one- particularly if you manage a lot of windows pcs in a domain, so you have domain users and local users on your pc… I started getting complaints from people that the spell-checker in word didn’t work. What they meant was that the spelling and grammar options simply weren’t available to them. I checked that the language was set, and found that it wasn’t, and not only that, but it didn’t seem to persist if I did set it, even if I set it as the default.

Apologies for the delay- it’s been a roller-coaster week at Archaeogeek Towers due to family health issues. Hopefully it’s getting sorted now though. In the process of preparing Portable GIS, I needed to change a string in multiple files of multiple formats within multiple folders. I looked at various windows- based options, most of which had a charge associated with them, but one of my colleagues suggested a linux approach.

I’ve spent the best part of the day musing (whilst working, obviously) about this article, on rivers as archaeological artefacts. It’s a really good article, on how we perceive rivers in archaeology, given their pesky tendency to change course, texture, size and so on. It suggests that we tend to think of rivers as primarily natural features, part of the landscape and full of nice ducks and fishes. Or, in archaeological terms, we treat them as environmental features and subject them to a barrage of scientific techniques designed to test their sediments, so we see them as nothing more than receptacles for more interesting things that have fallen in, such as bugs, seeds, people, boats, etc.

How to mount a USB stick in Ubuntu server using the command prompt only: Do a sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog and plug the usb drive in. Look for lines like these: Feb 18 12:58:32 shuchi kernel: [17192272.616000] sda: assuming drive cache: write through Feb 18 12:58:32 shuchi kernel: [17192272.616000] sda: sda1 Make a directory in /media named usbdrive. Mount it like this: sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/usbdrive To unmount before ejecting: sudo umount /media/usbdrive

A few things from the last month, some slightly off-topic and some just plain geeky: I’ve been fake ed’d… honestly, there’s no one I’d rather be called an idiot by Ever seen emails being sent to donotreply.com- this guy owns the domain (via 43 folders) Our work with openmoko makes it to the Independent- though the title is a little over the top Ways in which my government embarrasses me part 1, and part 2