I guess a lot of people will have seen the article on slashdot pointing to an article on a Stanford/Harvard paper on how businesses can win against open source software/technology. I don’t want to get into a debate about how the authors are in fact the spawn of the devil, as you can read the slashdot comments for that. Personally, I started off being slightly disappointed by a number of points that they made, and then quite up-beat about the prognosis for open source as a result.

I’m off to the AGI conference tomorrow, ready to give my talk about Open Source GIS in the UK on Wednesday. (What kind of nutter agrees to give a talk about open source GIS at a conference supported by ESRI, Autodesk and the Ordnance Survey, amongst others… if I don’t post again you’ll know that I have been “removed” or something). Anyhow, if anyone wants to meet up, and perhaps huddle in a corner somewhere talking about OSGeo local chapters, or even, I dunno, non-gis things, then catch me there!

The title says it all really, Archaeogeek’s second birthday snuck by the other day without me even noticing. Mr Archaeogeek says this means I have to take him out for dinner. I’m sure he has it the wrong way around, but maybe he needs rewarding for putting up with me! Anyhow, happy birthday to Archaeogeek. I’m even more astounded than I was this time last year that my attention span has lasted this long, given that it has actually been a pretty tough year around these parts.

Suddenly, in a couple of aggregated feeds that I subscribe to, I’m starting to see feeds of people’s comments, and individual posts from mailing lists. This doesn’t work for me in the slightest, as they are both snippets of conversations or threads, without real context when seen on their own. If people are interested in comments to a given post then surely they will subscribe to them anyway? Solution- unsubscribe from the aggregated feed and go through and subscribe to the individual feeds that I’m interested in.

After a week away on the Isle of Skye in Scotland (with no computers, no phones, great weather and gorgeous landscape, but more midges than any sane person really needs) I had over 1000 rss feed items to read, most of which appeared to be about google (photos of the olympic site or streetview), but a few little gems did stand out: For the historians and literary types amongst you, the diaries of Samuel Pepys and George Orwell are being syndicated, one entry a day.

Two Mondays ago I came into work in the morning to find one of my windows servers no longer booted. The short version is that all the data was fine, but the windows partition had got itself corrupted. I now have a linux server, and know more about samba and winbind than I ever thought I would need to. No big deal, you might say, but it has been a learning experience for me, and I’m very grateful to my colleagues for their patience whilst I dropped everything else and flailed around in the dark trying to learn the intricacies of samba config from scratch.

Via the seasite mailing list, this article about the difference between underwater archaeology, salvage, and treasure-hunting really got me thinking. I started off as a diver, then a marine archaeologist, and often came into contact with the strange point of view that if you find something underwater, like something from a wreck, it’s OK to prise it off and take it home to display proudly on your wall, yet you’d hardly go and break the wing-mirror off someone’s car.

It would appear that we are having a little issue with our downloads site, where portable gis is hosted. Not sure exactly whether the cause is human intervention, voodoo, or accident, but it would appear that portable gis is not currently available to download, even though it’s there when I ftp in. Ho Hum. Anyhow, I’m off for a couple of days diving now, in sunny Scotland, so unless my colleagues miraculously fix the issue over the weekend I won’t be able to sort it until next week some time.

Does anyone else see the irony in these two statements, which fortuitously popped up in my feed reader one after the other? It’s so depressing when people talk about phasing out paper maps. It seems to be part of a general feeling that all maps are for is getting from point A to point B on the road. Does your sat-nav point out interesting things you maybe ought to detour for?

A few things from the last month, some slightly off-topic and some just plain geeky: I’ve been fake ed’d… honestly, there’s no one I’d rather be called an idiot by Ever seen emails being sent to donotreply.com- this guy owns the domain (via 43 folders) Our work with openmoko makes it to the Independent- though the title is a little over the top Ways in which my government embarrasses me part 1, and part 2