Recently I watched a video by Seth Godin that talked about how things are broken, which, as well as being really funny, made me realise that so many things are indeed broken. Take the firefox extension update process for example. I appreciate it letting me know extensions are available automatically, but when it finishes it leaves you on a window with a single button saying “continue”. Why? If that’s the only option, then why not simply “continue” without my input?

Time for another round-up… The Ordnance Survey have revised the terms and conditions of using their OpenSpaces mapping API (via Mapperz), which is a step in the right direction, since they now allow adverts on your site. There’s still a daily limit to the number of views/address lookups that you can do too. However, there are a couple of points that need mentioning/clarifying… firstly there’s a strange condition that you can’t use this for “internal business administration”.

This week British Telecom ate our SDSL line, meaning we’ve been without phones, email or internet for 2.5 days. Thank goodness for Broadband dongles, though part of me feels uneasy at how impossible it was to do much work without being able to quickly check things on the internet or consult with colleagues. In the mean time though, there have been another set of interesting posts on my current topics of interest soap-boxes, namely file formats and the openness thereof, and open source business models.

Not wanting to miss out on the whole discussion about data formats, I was surprised to see people give up their control of their data quite so easily, as this comment and following post seem to suggest that we should. Imagine if we ceded so much control to the other people that sell us products. Software companies are only glorified shopkeepers, in the same way that people who sell us televisions and cars are.

Three good articles on IT/Open Source that I caught this week: Cory Doctorow writing in the Harvard Business Review on IT versus users. I sit on both sides of the IT fence from time to time, as both user and administrator. I can see both sides of the argument, and I hope we do give people the chance to experiment, but for every heretic there’s also the total nutter who infects all the pcs with viruses…

I attended (and spoke at) the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Technical Special Interest Group Open Source Event yesterday- down at the British Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge (I want to work there, they have skiddoos parked in their carpark). The event was designed to kick off the newly invigorated Tech SIG, after a hiatus of several years. I can understand why there was a hiatus- the other SIGs have a more defined focus, such as the Environment, or Crime and Disorder and so on.

Something I’ve noticed a lot recently, amongst the IT/Open Source crowd (not specifically geospatial), is the inability to answer a question in a constructive manner, if it can be answered in a “well you shouldn’t use that piece of software” kind of way. This drives me to utter distraction, as it’s not only pretty useless to the person asking the question, if they actually have a problem that they want to resolve, but it also creates a really bad impression.

I’ve been meaning to post for a while on Oxford Archaeology’s Open Archaeology Project, also known as our “Open Ethos”, then what do you know, Joseph posts about it and says it so well that I might just as well repeat his post verbatim. I won’t though- then you might go and read the other blog, and wander around on the internet for a while finding out interesting new things .