I’ve been a big fan of google desktop for a while now, not so much for the search options but because I like the gadgets. There’s nothing like the Remember The Milk gadget for making you feel guilty about tasks you’ve put off, and I’m currently addicted to the Twitter gadget. However, for some time, Google desktop refused to let me click any web links, access the options, view my google calendar, open links in google chats etc.

I am proud to finally announce the inaugural meetup of the nascent UK local chapter of OSGEO on Thursday 1st May, from 4.30 to 7pm (or later if we can find a suitable hostelry) at the Radisson SAS Hotel, Stansted Airport, just outside London. For those that don’t know- OSGEO is a global organisation founded to encourage and support development in open source GIS. We have been trying to get together some interest in a UK local chapter for some time now, so I am really pleased to announce this event.

UPDATE: We’ve had some more feedback about this from ESRI UK- see my other post for details (though don’t get too excited because nothing really changes) So, our move to open source gets a boost today, from an unexpected quarter. In what can only be described as a noble act of self-sacrifice, ESRI have told us that as an educational charity we are no longer allowed to have an educational discount for using their software and, not only that, our license codes will cease to work at the end of this month.

It would appear that ESRI (UK) were as surprised as we were when they received notification of ESRI (US)’s decision to tighten up the license agreements, and they are negotiating on behalf of all of us educational charities/associate sites to get us a little more leeway. It has to be said that the email we received from them, which I based my blog post on, contained nothing about this whatsoever, and basically told us we had till the end of March to pack our metaphorical bags, but we are grateful to them for their efforts.

Well, there was I just working away in the office, on my super-cool portable GIS setup, doing some work on a postgresql-driven database all working nicely on the USB stick. I should say that this has been working just fine in both my home (Vista) and office (XP) environment for months now. Time came to head off home, so I stopped everything, ejected the stick nicely, took it home and went to start working on it again… only for postgresql to refuse to work.

Firstly, if you’ve seen this post before, apologies. It got lost in a previous re-organisation of the blog and I thought it was worth re-posting… You can get free contour data for the UK from the Scottish Mountaineering Club website. It’s based on public domain NASA data, cleaned up by the club and made freely available. It comes in garmin .img format, in several zip files, which roughly represent areas of the country.

Just a heads up to say that we’re on the look out for GIS staff to work in Oxford Archaeology’s northern office in Lancaster. Whilst primarily we’re after staff for some large-scale projects that we have coming up over the next year, we are also looking for people who can help us work on programming applications, and help with develop protocols and work-flows for getting GIS out to all of our staff.

You might have seen the new google talk chatback gadget, which allows you to embed a chat icon in your blog/website so guests can chat with you, if you’re available. The cool thing is that they don’t have to have a google account to chat with you. The code from google comes in an iframe, which wordpress doesn’t like very much for security reasons. However, if you’re game, you can get it to work with a text widget (assuming you use widgets).

February’s quick links: Via my new colleague (Hi Ben), some tutorials for using QGIS and GRASS as opposed to (or in conjunction with) ArcGIS on an archaeological project Andlinux- a different way of accessing linux-based programmes without going through cygwin. I’ve managed to get GRASS installed, though I haven’t tried it out in anger yet. A n00bs guide to installing linux programmes from source. Don’t be scared, it’s not that bad, though I’d add in how to get the command line to send it’s output to a log file for those times when it all goes wrong and you didn’t happen to catch the error as it scrolled past really fast…