I imagine I’m not alone in having parents and grandparents who don’t really understand what I do for a living. “I work in computing and do stuff with maps” is the easy approach (in fact it’s easier now that I don’t have to tag on the bit about being an archaeologist but not actually digging, and no it’s not like Time Team or Indiana Jones). Sometimes people ask why we don’t just “do everything with google maps”, which is the cue for a sit down and a longer chat about how (deep breath) you can’t do everything with google.

Over the last couple of months I have been investigating options for setting up a standby server for PostgreSQL, you know, the sort of magical thing that stops your day/night/week being totally wrecked when, to quote Joel Spolsky you “go crying to the system administrator and asking piercingly sad questions about why the backup system is “temporarily” out of commission and has been for the last eight months”. As a relative beginner to all of this, if you look in the PostgreSQL documentation, you will get totally overwhelmed and confused (well I did, anyway) as the information you need is spread across several chapters and is dense, even by the PostgreSQL documentation’s standards.

Woefully out of date now, here’s a quick run down on theOSGIS 2011 conference, 3rd in that series, held at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences in Nottingham over the 21st and 22nd of June. The 21st was a day of workshops, under the banner of Interoperability and the OGC. My new colleague, Matt, and I did a workshop on using Ordnance Survey Open Data and Mastermap with Mapserver and PostgreSQL, using the OSGeo Live DVD.

I’ve been attending the AGI GeoCommunity Conference here in the UK for a few years now- and this year the AGI kindly asked me if I would sit on the working group for organising GeoCommunity 2011. Being completely new to conference organisation, and wanting to get some experience for the glorious day when OSGeo:UK holds FOSS4G in the UK, I jumped at the chance. This year’s event takes place from September 20-22nd, in Nottingham (a departure from previous years, where it has been in Stratford-upon-Avon), but the working group has met a couple of times already to get things organised.

A quick note on some really useful things I’ve picked up this week. They might only be new to me, but I thought I’d jot them down for the sake of future google searches… Crosstab Queries: These are those clever queries that take a set of records, aggregate them up, and transpose the rows into columns. In Microsoft Access there is a wizard for doing this, but in PostgreSQL you have to do it the hard way.

A short case study into flexibility, collaboration, and why open source software is so damned cool: At my new place of employment, we’re doing a lot of work with Ordnance Survey Mastermap data, so one of my colleagues built a quick python wrapper around the ogr2ogr script to easily pop the data into postgresql, or shape file, or whatever support format you like. This is now available on Github (caveat- it doesn’t do change-only updates yet- we’ll keep you posted on that).

I learnt something new this week (week 2 in my new job)- it’s probably not new to everyone else, but just in case someone is interested I thought I would document it… Scenario: You have some Ordnance Survey Mastermap data in a PostgreSQL database imported using OGR2OGR. You wish to display it using Mapserver. The key fields you are interested in for styling your data are “descriptivegroup”, “descriptiveterm” and “make”. These dictate the actual detail about the styling, such as the type of building or type of land.

So, I’m late to the game and only just learning about the coolness that is python. To be honest, for years the need to keep the indents in the code neat and tidy put me off, but I figured I’d better have a proper look at some point. I spent some time over Christmas going over some tutorials (more below) and more recently I’ve chosen a python-based approach to problems where previously I would have used a different method.

So, it’s 5 years since OSGeo was formed- that’s pretty cool! Spurred on by this post, I thought I would say a little bit about my involvement with OSGeo, and also rather clumsily segue this into an announcement about my impending change of job. It’s true- after years of not really thinking of myself as an archaeologist any longer, but rather ‘someone who works in an archaeological unit", I’ve finally gone and got myself a real job.

via @stephenfry: Counterexamples to relativity. http://bit.ly/ce3qJT thank goodness for “the trustworthy encyclopedia”… # just saw an old man pick up a live pigeon and put it in his shopping bag. Live. Pigeon. Shopping Bag. #fb # never heard of the 451 group before- though is CAOS theory is a good name for talking about enterprise open source? http://bit.ly/hWJm13 # ha, I’m a Wizard of OS http://bit.