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 Older versions are still available but have been archived to avoid confusion.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 Older versions are still available but have been archived to avoid confusion.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.

Earlier this week I did a couple of presentations for the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Welsh Group, along with my colleague Matt and a couple of people from Dotted Eyes, another company doing a lot of work with Open Source here in the UK. I did an introductory presentation on open source and the OSGeo “stack”, and then one demonstrating the capabilities of Quantum GIS. You can see my slides here and here.

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).

It seems like all I’ve posted about recently is very quick updates on conferences that I’ve been to, and not a lot about what I actually spend most of my time doing. The principal reason for this is being too busy, but that’s getting a bit lame. Once upon a time I used to post lots of tips and tricks about things I’d figured out- sometimes just as a aide memoire after days of trawling through mailing lists and forums.

This week I have actually been doing some real GIS work for a change, rather than going to meetings, writing bids, writing reports, fixing computer problems and showing other people how to do stuff. I think this is the first time in approx 2 years that I’ve done this, and I was pathetically excited about the prospect at the beginning of the week. It has also been an opportunity for me to really put my money where my mouth is, regarding using open source GIS, since last time I did some real analysis it was with the Redlands offerings.