Not my own words, but copied verbatim from Chris Schmidt on the OpenLayers Mailing List. Change the name, and they are mostly applicable to any package, not just OpenLayers. Having been guilty of not following these instructions myself, I’d advocate that all new mailing list subscribers should read it before signing up… Many times, users have come to me, or asked questions in IRC, related to getting help with a particular behavior.

Well, since my last post, I discovered that my site had been hacked and was trying to install a trojan on people’s machines (thanks for letting me know, Bill). I got my account suspended by my web hosts as a result, and got into a bit of a spat with them about how they handled it (absolutely nothing on their support site about it, but apparently you’re supposed to tell them IMMEDIATELY when things like that happen).

I started off this week with the intention of resurrecting and upgrading a demo openlayers map of all our sites, that had been stuck in a sorry corner of our corporate website being neglected. This tied in with moving the map to a different server, upgrading all the components, and generally giving it a shave and a haircut (it is male, that’s for certain). For those people interested in our wms and wfs data- these will be online again soon, I promise.

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.

This is an idea that seems to come up every so often- what GIS programmes can you run from a USB stick. Well it appears that the list has just got longer. I’m probably the last person to realise it’s possible to do this, but I was really pleased to see that both GRASS and PostgreSQL can now be run from a USB stick, along with QGIS, XAMPP (inc Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache), and FWTools.

Archaeogeek is now back in the saddle/desk-chair after a few weeks break- firstly entertaining visiting parents and most recently scuba-diving in the Sound of Mull (Scotland) In the mean time I have a few projects coming to fruition, and have been catching up on a few things that I wanted to learn more about (hello google maps and database integration). Firstly, we at Oxford Archaeology have been fortunate to have the services of a very skilled and enthusiastic work-placement student called Matt Jones from the University of Southampton for the last few weeks and he has been helping up get our basic web-based mapping sorted.