The UK local chapter of OSGeo are bidding to host FOSS4G in the UK in 2013! For those of you that don’t know, the location of the main FOSS4G “meeting of the tribes” conference moves around from continent to continent each year, and 2013 is Europe’s turn. We want to dove-tail the event with the UK’s main annual geospatial conference, AGI Geocommunity, giving developers a great chance to showcase their work to a new audience, and for UK GI people to see all the fantastic work the open source community has been doing.

Archaeogeek is now migrated to Octopress! There are a couple of things still to sort out, such as some old broken links, a non-default theme and comments on older blog posts. Hopefully the pharma hack that has been polluting my google search results for a while now will disappear as the site is reindexed… There are a few stuctural changes. I’m no longer asking people to register for downloading Portable GIS for a start.

I’ve talked previously about wanting to move Archaeogeek from Wordpress- well I’m about to start that process. I’m expecting some disruption as I feel my way with Octopress- blimey even getting 7 years of blog across intact is going to be fun! So, apologies in advance for feedburner-style reposts, broken links/comments/entire sites. In the process of making this switch, I’m going to strip out a lot of the plugins and additional bloat from the site.

Over the last couple of weeks, a few people have asked me the same question, which is (to paraphrase) “what’s the difference between Portable GIS and OSGeo Live or USB GIS?”. You get asked something once, and that’s fine, but more than that and it’s worth a blog post! The main difference between the two options is that OSGeo Live and USB GIS are bootable disks. You plug the USB stick (or DVD) into your computer, reboot, and you’re presented with a fully configured Linux environment, with all the software ready to use.

Earlier this week I did a couple of presentations for the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Welsh Group, along with my colleague Matt and a couple of people from Dotted Eyes, another company doing a lot of work with Open Source here in the UK. I did an introductory presentation on open source and the OSGeo “stack”, and then one demonstrating the capabilities of Quantum GIS. You can see my slides here and here.

It has been a while since I posted, and while I’m probably the only person bothered by that, I thought I ought to put an update together! The blog has been going for over 5 years now, and in that time, in the UK, the attitude towards open source software has changed completely. There are now a lot of people who “get” open source, and are quite vocal in combating the FUD which we still unfortunately see from time to time.

There has been a lot of fairly excitable posting recently about the continuing rise of OpenStreetMap, and how it’s now being used in place of Google Maps, in particular since Google started charging for data. People have been talking about how “authoritative” crowd-sourced spatial data can be, and to be honest, I’ve found that the discussions seem to have missed the point a little bit. For me at least. So- here’s a few of my personal thoughts about OpenStreetMap and why it will be a while before I will consider it authoritative at least.

Caution- this post won’t make you a pgRouting guru, but it will allow you to get pgrouting up and running on Ubuntu 11.10 and have some data on a map in approx 20 minutes. ** Update (17th August 2012)- the instructions below will continue to work for PostgreSQL 9.1 and PostGIS 1.5 on Ubuntu 12.04 or variants thereof. The fix mentioned in step 2 will lead you to a 404 error on github-this is currently correct though.

If you end up doing a lot of work on mapserver and tilecache behind corporate proxy servers, you’re likely to hit a couple of snags, when the proxy thinks you’re trying to do something evil, when really all you want to do is seed a tilecache or look at an external WMS server. Fortunately there are a couple of useful workarounds, which I record here for my own sanity as much as anything else!

September is clearly conference month in the geo world. FOSS4G in Denver, which I didn’t go to, was closely followed by the AGI GeoCommunity in Nottingham, which I did. I participated FOSS4G vicariously, following twitter and starring lots of posts in my google feed, and it’s only now that I’m having chance to catch up on them all and assimilate them. Seems like there was a lot of soul-searching going on, about the future of the organisation, the conference, and the geospatial industry in general.