Last week was the AGI GeoCommunity 2012 event at Nottingham, and as usual, a great time was had by all. In the weeks leading up to the event I’d been a little worried that attendance would be down as many of “the usual suspects” said they weren’t attending. However, in the end attendance was up, with a lot of new faces and new sponsors. I’d love to know the demographic/industry area for these new attendees (hint, hint, AGI).

Finally, after quite a hiatus, I’m proud to announce the release of Portable GIS v3. In brief, this contains updated versions of the various packages BUT it’s rather stripped down in comparison to the old version. It no longer contains a full apache/php/mysql stack, and no longer contains Geoserver, GvSIG or uDIG- see here for more details and a download link. The main reason for this is to make the package easier to maintain and host.

This week was the fourth annual Open Source GIS Conference, otherwise known as OSGIS 2012, at Nottingham, and a great time was had by all. It might have been the lovely weather and the super venue on the University’s Jubilee Campus, but I very much enjoyed it. The first day was for workshops, and I attended one on OSM-GB. This is a project around measuring and improving the quality of OpenStreetMap for the UK, and providing pre-configured WMS/WFS feeds of openstreetmap data, ready projected into British National Grid format.

A work in progress I threw together some notes on installing PgRouting on Ubuntu last year sometime but I haven’t really had chance to come back to it and do anything meaningful, until a chance conversation with a client got me thinking about trying again with some Ordnance Survey ITN data. If you do a google search on actually doing anything with ITN data you’ll quickly find out that most people are using ESRI Productivity Suite, or various other components, even if the end result is data in PostgreSQL.

UPDATE: Shortly after submitting this post, up popped another from Paul Ramsey that does a really good job of explaining why things are done they way they are. I recommend you read it! Via Paul Ramsey, this post popped onto my radar the other day and got me thinking. My initial impressions about the post were quite negative, and to be honest some of the points still mystify me, but after further investigation, at least some of the issues do make sense, so perhaps there is some room for improvement in our favourite spatial database.

On Wednesday I presented at a great conference in Manchester, organised by the AGI Northern Group, entitled “Innovation and Value in Geographic Information”. The presentations covered a wide range of subjects, and to be honest a few were barely “GI”, but I really enjoyed them, so there! You can find all the talks here. The stand-out presentations for me were probably Gary Gale’s, which was hardly about “GI” at all (unless you count FourSquare, which I don’t) but was about archiving our personal data from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook et al, and Bob Barr’s, which was about the bonkers situation that is Addressing in the UK.

The Mapserver 6.0 release comes with a really useful feature, which they snuck in really quietly but deserves more praise in my opinion: a built-in openlayers viewer. It’s very simple, and only for testing purposes, but it’s so much easier for debugging your mapserver map file compared to the old “mode=map&layers=all” approach. The syntax for calling it is very similar to the old “mode=map” approach (split into separate lines for clarity here but in reality all one line):

Attentive readers (or maybe just me) will recall a post I did a few months ago that outlined how to set up streaming replication with postgresql 9.0. Even more attentive readers will recall a big caveat in the post, around the need for additional software to trigger the failover from the Primary database server to the Secondary, and the necessary changes to IP addresses and such like. I’m now going to introduce one method of handling this, in such a way that the end users hopefully don’t notice, or need to change their database connections.

Just a quick post to rave about something new I’ve just discovered in my continuing adventures in Octopress and other geeky environs: a live previewer for markdown text that works as a plugin in Vim! I didn’t really want to jump on the Vim bandwagon at first because it’s a bit hipster-cool at the moment but I confess to being sold on Vimroom- a plugin that offers you a distraction-free writing environment similar to Writeroom for Macs, and then this new plugin Vim-Instant-Markdown for blog editing.

Continuing the subject of the UK Bid for FOSS4G (see previous post; as previously promised, we’ve now got a page on our bid blog where individuals (or should I say heroes?) can pledge to help us with the conference. We’re not looking for your money, just offers of support to help with any part of organising or running the event, should we win it. This could be anything from dressing as Maid Marion to moderating a stream, or just helping to spread the word.