Good morning/afternoon/evening/night from Victoria. End of Day Two of FOSS4G, and the now infamous Reception and Dinner. But, in order, for me today was mainly a database and web app day. This morning there were some incredibly useful talks comparing MapServer and GeoServer, then MySQL and PostgreSQL for a range of different situations and loads. Time for much reconfiguring of servers when I get back methinks! Another session that I saw was on Sextante, which is a spatial analysis extension to gvSIG, a really promising Spanish desktop GIS.

Well that’s the first official day of FOSS4G 2007 over and done with. A good time was had by all I believe. We kicked off with the opening sessions- of which the highlight for me was the lightning talks. Just like [last year]((https://archaeogeek.com/blog/2006/09/14/of-neogeography-and-mashups/), Schuyler Earle managed to say more thought-provoking and interesting things in fifteen minutes than, well, most other people can. His talk was entitled “Latent Semantic Analysis of the FOSS4G 2007 Conference Programme”, which sounds dull as ditch water but succinctly highlighted the clusters and trends amongst the various talks at this year’s conference, dressed up in high end stats speak.

Greetings from Victoria, on the day before the official commencement of FOSS4G 2007. I’ve actually been in Victoria since Friday, but William Gibson was right when he said that jetlag is like waiting for your soul to catch up with the rest of your body, as that’s exactly what I’ve felt like. So- in brief- the flight from the UK was superb- the weather was clear over Iceland and Greenland so I had fantastic views of both.

Tomorrow (Thursday 6th September) is Archaeogeek’s 1st Birthday! Hooray! I won’t be able to post tomorrow as I will be in deepest darkest North Wales learning how to roll my kayak using the power of my mind alone, or something like that. I hope to get a better posting rhythm soon- things are a little fraught at the moment because of things happening in my personal life (my parents and Grandparents have sold their houses in Kent- 300 miles from us, and moved to one big house in Kendal- 18 miles from us), and my work life (our company is also moving offices at the end of September).

One of the things that I wanted to do with my portable GIS was to include a menu on the USB stick to tie everything together and provide easy access to the configuration files. The first option I looked at was PStart, but that’s not open source and has quite a limited license. Luckily (again) a saviour has come along, in the shape of Tim Fehlman’s USB Drive Menu. This started off as freeware but he has now made it Open Source so it’s ideal.

I’ve decided that I’m going to re-integrate the Archaeogeek tumblog into the main blog. Reasoning- I don’t have enough time at the moment to properly integrate the two blogs, and I would imagine that more people subscribe to the main blog rather than the tumblog. I’ll have a “tip day” once a week (don’t know which day yet) and all the tips posts will be tagged so they should be relatively easy to find.

The Ordnance Survey’s shortsighted license agreement has put paid to the fantastic 3D Virtual model of London that the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL has spent six years researching and creating. The full story of the negotiations can be found in this Guardian Article, but briefly speaking the Ordnance Survey’s refusal to change the terms of their license has meant that the data cannot be made freely available on the web, although it can be used by the London Boroughs.

Thanks to a fortuitous post from James Fee, I made a great leap forward with my portable GIS today, which is handy as my FOSS4G talk is number 10 in the list (2pm on the Tuesday, if you’re interested). I’m not going to give the game away as to exactly what’s on the stick (what would I talk about in September otherwise?) but I am at the stage of trying to streamline the configuration for all the programmes and putting a nice front-end on it.

Edit (Jan 2008): Since Mapguide is being continually developed, these instructions are now a little out of date. For the most up to date instructions you should see the wiki pages on the osgeo site that I and others have been working on. As promised, here are my instructions for installing the svn version of mapguide open source on Ubuntu 6.06 server. Standard disclaimer- I did this with a lot of help from the Autodesk team (thanks Trevor).