Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

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.

I do have one thing to say… if you’re using winbind, remember that it can take at least 20 minutes from startup to work properly. If I’d known that a couple of days ago I’d have posted this much sooner, if you get my drift!

Things that have crossed my path over the last few days that are worth a look:

• Duh everyone has heard about this one already- Radiohead go open source and geospatial. If I liked their music, they’d be my favourite geeky band for sure. I’m certainly going to use this as light-hearted example of fun GIS things in courses.
• Leif finally posts again with a very thought-provoking article on misrepresentation and whether archaeologists should provide support to the military in conflict situations. It’s quite long, but worth hanging on for, and as archaeologists we need to think about this kind of thing if we are to be taken seriously and have any chance of protecting the cultural heritage of areas under conflict.
• Leif (again) and Paul and Tom from Wessex Archaeology finally have their paper on computers in archaeology publically available. Go read!
• There’s also a couple of interesting white papers floating about. Activestate have one that debunks 10 myths about open source for businesses. I think it could be more positive about open source, and in particular the strength of the community and the lack of vendor lock-in, but (let’s be honest here) they are selling support. Finally, Microsoft have a beginners guide to map projection- it’s a nasty aspx link so apologies if it dies. It’s a shame that it’s not available as a pdf (not that you can’t save it as one, of course).

Someone (thanks Bruce) has alerted me to a mistake in Portable GIS, which luckily requires a very minor patch- so minor that I am not going to release a new version now and force everyone to download it again, although it will be fixed in the next version. Basically there is a line in the apache config that doesn’t update it’s drive letter because the slashes are the wrong way around.

To fix:

Go into .\usbgis\apps\xampplite\apache\conf\httpd.conf with a text editor and find the line (should be right at the end of the file):

SetEnv PROJ_LIB N:\usbgis\apps\FWTools2.1.0\proj_lib

Where you might have a slightly different drive letter. To fix, change the directions of the slashes in the file path from \ to / and change the drive letter to whatever your current drive letter is, and save the file. Then when you change the drive letter in future and run the xampp setup, it should automatically update.

Thanks for your patience, thanks again to Bruce for pointing it out, and thanks to everyone for downloading it!

I was contacted by someone who has downloaded portable GIS, very sensibly asking for information on the postgresql connection details. When I tried to respond to this person, their email address bounced back with a permanent failure, so I thought I’d better write something here so he doesn’t think I’m not replying!

Now, I was sure that I had included a readme file specific to the postgresql installation, but it looks like the pixies might have eaten it. Anyhow: the very secret local username and password for postgresql on the USB stick are: postgres and grespost. Please take the opportunity to create your own username and password if you are concerned about security. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The next version (in a couple of months) will have better documentation- I promise. The trouble is that as every developer knows, creating documentation is the longest part of any project. If I had waited until I had some decent documentation I wouldn’t have released it at all, and believe me I’m glad I did, the reponse has been fabulous. I won’t, however, be including  documentation about how to use the programmes, as the majority of them already have pretty good user manuals online- I will include links to them though. You can hold me to that if you like!