Welcome to the first Tip Day of 2008! Problem: You may occasionally find a microsoft word document that claims to have no spelling mistakes in it regardless of the fact that you know darn well that it has. You may check the language settings and find that it is set to the correct language and uses the correct dictionary, and you may reset the spell-check and ask it to recheck the document.

A few days late (but better late than never, hey?) are a couple of the archaeology-related posts I’ve spotted on my travels: Erik Kansa has a piece on “Archaeological Openness” on the Ancient World Bloggers Group (actually the AWBG is worth a bullet point of it’s own as a relatively new archaeological blog), in relation to the recent Science Commons Open Data Protocol - this should be really interesting once archaeologists get their head around what it will mean for them;

Man is not the only option for help about a command in linux. whatis — Display a summary of a command (rather than the entire manual) apropos — Display a list of commands that pertain to (are apropos to) a keyword whereis — Display information about the location of a command: the executable, the source code (if any), and the man pages. which — Display which version of a command will execute (for when there are two, or more, commands with the same name installed on the system).

For all linux/Unix n00bs out there, here’s a really good explanation of the layout of the Unix filesytem. What’s in a file name? The files on a UNIX machine are organized in a hierarchy. The very top of the hierarchy is / —commonly referred to as “slash” or “the root directory.” If you change your working directory to / and run ls, you’ll see several subdirectories with cryptic names like etc, bin, var, home, and tmp.

PostgreSQL from 8.2 onwards can be run easily from the command line in windows, without setting up as a service. Go to your postgresql/bin folder and at a command line type: pg_ctl start -D location\of\your\data\folder (as specified in initdb) -l logfile This should output a notice telling you whether the server has started up correctly. It also saves output to a logfile in the bin folder. If the server starts without incident, open another command window at the same location and type:

Archaeologists Bill Quinn and Declan Moore had a flash of insight about the mound they were about to excavate-whilst suffering from a big hangover. Burnt mounds are found all over the place, and they date from prehistoric to medieval times, but no one has been sure what they were actually for. They consist of mounds of burnt stones and an adjacent trough of stone, usually with a water course nearby. The usual interpretation is that they are for cooking, but other people have posited that they were saunas.

I had some interest in the Access module for converting Ordnance Survey NGRs to Eastings and Northings (and vice versa) so I thought I’d risk putting the database on the site for download. It’s in Access 97 but should translate up to newer versions without much trouble. I should also add that several people commented last week about an online NGR converter that looks really handy, and this excel spreadsheet full of handy vba functions for conversion offline.

After last week’s post I was asked in the comments to explain how to convert British Ordnance Survey Grid Squares to sensible Eastings and Northings, for use in a GIS. So here goes… Firstly- to quote from the Ordnance Survey website: The National Grid, like its military predecessors, consists of a systematic breakdown of the Grid area into progressively smaller squares identified first by letters and then numbers. The largest unit of the grid is 500km squares each designated by a prefix letter alphabetically from A-Z omitting I - the first letter to be quoted in today’s National Grid Reference.