I’m delighted to announce that Portable GIS has been accepted as an official OSGeo Community Project! From a technical perspective, this is the culmination of several months work behind the scenes getting the proper code repository set up here, creating the website, improving the documentation, and formalising the open source license. As a colleague said recently, Portable GIS has moved from being (effectively) freeware, to proper open source. So, there are now official guidelines on how to contribute to Portable GIS development, and on the license terms under which you can use and contribute.

I’m pleased to announce the latest release of Portable GIS. This version (v5.6) has the following changes: QGIS 2.14.1 LTR By popular demand: Geoserver 2.8 You can download the setup exe and the md5 checksum here. Older versions are still available but have been archived to avoid confusion. As always, please let me know of any problems via the Portable GIS google group. Note that I will shortly be publicising a GitLabs repository for the changed files, along with developer and user documentation, to allow people to roll their own versions or contribute to development.

I’m pleased to announce the latest release of Portable GIS. This version (v5.2) has only a couple of changes: QGIS 2.8 (I’m going to try and do a release to coincide with each long-term release of QGIS) Loader has been updated to the latest version You can download the setup exe and the md5 checksum here. Older versions are still available but have been archived to avoid confusion.

I’m pleased to announce not one, but two new releases of Portable GIS! The first, version 4.2, contains QGIS 2.4 and PostGIS 1.5 and will be the last release to include that version of PostGIS. The second, version 5, contains QGIS 2.4 and PostGIS 2.1 and all future releases will be based on this. Get them here: Version 4.2 plus md5 Version 5.0 plus md5 There are two important things about these two releases.

Here’s a quick and overdue announcement to say that I’m making a new version of Portable GIS available today, including QGIS 2. Consider this one a beta release, since I really want to upgrade PostGIS and GDAL when I get time. Additional upgrades in this version: Astun Technology’s Loader has been upgraded to the latest version, and Psycopg2 is now included. Before you click on the link, please take time to read the main Portable GIS page, and also do me the favour of reporting any problems that you find at the portable GIS google group, or via Twitter.

A work in progress I threw together some notes on installing PgRouting on Ubuntu last year sometime but I haven’t really had chance to come back to it and do anything meaningful, until a chance conversation with a client got me thinking about trying again with some Ordnance Survey ITN data. If you do a google search on actually doing anything with ITN data you’ll quickly find out that most people are using ESRI Productivity Suite, or various other components, even if the end result is data in PostgreSQL.

UPDATE: Shortly after submitting this post, up popped another from Paul Ramsey that does a really good job of explaining why things are done they way they are. I recommend you read it! Via Paul Ramsey, this post popped onto my radar the other day and got me thinking. My initial impressions about the post were quite negative, and to be honest some of the points still mystify me, but after further investigation, at least some of the issues do make sense, so perhaps there is some room for improvement in our favourite spatial database.

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.

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.