Well, I’m three days in to trying to compile and install the latest version of MapGuide OpenSource on Ubuntu Dapper Drake and it’s quite hard going. Maybe it’s just naivety on my part, but I’m constantly amazed at how many other packages are required, that are not in the documentation, before the various components will install. It’s not the first time I’ve done this either, as I tried it on Suse 9 and Fedora 4 last year and I had the same problem then.

So Leif let out my dirty secret, that I regularly carry three moleskines with me, so I thought I’d better come clean about my burgeoning habit. As all GTDers know, coming up with a system that works for you is an evolving process. I have been through a digital phase (wasn’t free-range enough for me) and several incarnations of an analogue phase. My current system has been stable for a month or so and, you know, it just feels like it works.

Back in Lancaster after a successful CAA conference and Archcamp. Just a quick post, as it has been a long day and other people have been tasked with providing the lowdown on it all. Archcamp provided us all with an opportunity for a demo and more in-depth discussion on some of the applications we’ve been working on, and other interesting things. It was also an opportunity for a visit to the University Archaeology department’s new building, which is very nice and has an extremely well-equipped computing lab.

Day Two of CAA 2007, and some more very interesting talks. A common theme today was the use of 3D modelling in archaeology, but approached from very different perspectives, and for differing uses. First up we had a talk about using 3D modelling as one of a barrage of techniques used to examine the visibility, or visual consumption of interior wall paintings in the ancient Greek settlement of Acrotiri. 3D modelling was used here alongside crowd-modelling techniques at both a macro- and meso-scale to highlight that the paintings would have been visible from a particular pinch-point in people’s movement through a street network.

Crikey, day one and we’ve already had something like 15 talks. So where to start, since it’s all been great? These conferences are good because you get a real range of speakers, so we had a run down of twenty years of the archaeological computing MSc at the university here, the archaeology of Greenham Common protests, tracking the routes of students between two pubs in Cardiff and what that can tell us about phenomenology, using network analysis to study the interaction between the cities of Minoa, using “fireshed” analysis and the location of bullets and cases at Litle Bighorn to analyse the movements of the individual combatants, and last but not least a gallop through the varying ways that the International Documentation and Research Committee of ICOM (CIDOC) are trying to document archaeological monuments and the events (eg excavations and surveys) that bring them to light.

I’m in Southampton for the 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference. This is always a really interesting and often inspiring get together with a mix of commercial archaeologists such as myself and academic archaeologists (they normally have the best presentations). There’s wifi available in my lovely salubrious Travelodge room, so I’ll aim to post some feedback on the first day’s talks tomorrow evening. This post is also exciting for me, because I’m experimenting with the Geopress plugin for Wordpress.

The decision to move towards opensource software is one that more and more organisations are making, and there are many reasons for doing so. We are moving along the route slowly, but surely. Most of our back-end and infrastructure software is now opensource, whilst we are still investigating alternatives to the mainly closed source desktop packages. Today, I read a series of posts about making the difficult choice between different opensource solutions.

I have made a little more progress with evaluating the various free options for accessing PostgreSQL/Postgis database tables from ArcMap. I have to confess that some of the problem was down to my own lack of experience with Postgis! The issue that I had with PGarc was that it would fail with an error if you had deleted tables from a database. It turns out that this is because deleting tables using the PostgreSQL “DROP TABLE” syntax does not remove it’s reference in the “Geometry_Columns” table.

This post is a discussion of my experiences with a couple of ArcGIS connectors for Postgis. To me, a reliable Postgis connector would be so useful, as we simply don’t have the resources (or the inclination) to purchase the equivalent proprietary products. We are also looking for a solution that will provide a flexible backend for all sorts of interfaces, such as MapGuide Open Source, UDig, and so on, alongside ArcGIS.