Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I’m off to stuff myself silly with mince pies and red wine now, so a very Merry Christmas to everyone!

Well, since my last post, I discovered that my site had been hacked andwas 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). So, apologies if anyone got infected by visiting archaeogeek.com, I do apologise. I know archaeologists are dirty sorts (it’s all that playing around in the mud), but we’re not supposed to be contagious!

I have also had a great week exploring mapfish and openlayers, as I discussed a couple of weeks ago. It’s been great fun (in an intellectually challenging sort of way) because I have come from a position of almost total ignorance of things like javascript, to being reasonably happy with the map that I’ve produced, and more importantly, I feel as if I understand what I’ve done. This is a break from tradition for me- my normal approach is to take code that I don’t fully understand and hack it till it works. Not this time though! It’s on an internal dev-server at the moment, but as soon as I get an external URL I’ll post it for comment.

I’ve also been exploring google chrome a lot more. When it first came out, I was quite disappointed in it. However, when doing web development and using all those essential firefox extensions, like firebug, httpfox, and webdeveloper, the browser can get a little bloated. So I’m using chrome as my standard browser and firefox for development work. I’ve decided that it’s not that bad- though somehow the time it takes to initially load a page (when it goes through resolving the host and all that) still seems longer than I would expect and I do grow impatient with it. I had also trained myself to use ubiquity, and to “ctrl-space” anything that I wanted to look up, but of course that doesn’t work at all…

I love it when two mutually contradictory posts land in my reader. To be fair, you can argue that they are not, but then where would be the fun in that? 

Number One: Speedy Hire (UK equipment hire company) saved 1 million pounds by moving to Microsoft Everything from linux-based pcs running open office etc. 

Number Two: Massachusetts Geographic Information services have gone over to open source GIS to cut costs (amongst other benefits).

The first article is a fantastic piece of fluff, and it’s worth reading considerably deeper (ie the whole case study) rather than just relying on the press release. To put it briefly, Speedy Hire went from antiquated end-of-life pcs, with a non-gui order system that couldn’t be integrated with anything else,  and a custom-built email system. They didn’t have any decent internal IT support. Not only that, but they had recently acquired a bunch of other companies, and non of their systems were fully integrated either. So, they replaced all their pcs, put in the same software across all the depots/offices etc, and upgraded their order system. I would certainly hope for a decent return on that kind of investment, whether they chose Microsoft Everything or an open source solution. However, the article concetrates entirely on the lack of performance they had with their old system (blaming this on open source rather than because the pcs were antiquated), and the difficulty of opening documents in open office (we all know exactly how difficult that is). 

On the other hand, MassGIS are finding that they prefer the flexibility and capacity that going open source brings them, along with the enterprise-support they are getting from OpenGEO. Simply moving over to linux-based virtualisation products has allowed them to save considerable amounts of money, without taking (the lack of) licensing costs  into account.

I’m not naive, I know microsoft do this all the time, and the two case studies are not all that comparable, but it does make me mad to see this kind of whitewash going on, when it would better if we could see some genuine like-for-like comparisons.

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.

While I now have a site up again, pretty much ready to go bar the shouting, I’ve had an interesting time playing with some new toys in the process, so here’s a quick run-down:

• Mapfish and GeoadminSuite: A funky framework for widgetising openlayers. Geoadminsuite connects mapserver, openlayers and mapfish to manage data and create really nice mapfish applications. Way cool. Progress so far- it’s all up and running, though GeoadminSuite had teething troubles that have hopefully been sorted in the latest svn release.
• Openlayers: OK, so I’m just catching up with the latest release after ducking out for a while to do “real work”, but I have to say I like the new(er) features. It was nice to be able to do popups without needing to re-write the code for every version of every flavour of browser. That’s not openlayers’ fault of course, just issues with “standards” for things like DOM, which I don’t claim to understand.
• Openstreetmap WMS data from Wheregroup: Comes in free and paid-for flavours though details on pricing and terms of service for the commercial version were sketchy on a first skim of the website. This could be really handy to use as background mapping data for web maps, although there are issues of completeness (as always) and it probably needs running through our own mapserver to sort out the styling. This is definitely a goer- I just need to figure out which of the 50 or so layers they publish are really necessary and at what scale. And some kind of completeness metric, so we know how reliable the data is for a given area…
• Openstreetmap shapefiles from Cloudmade: A reduced dataset for the UK, with less layers. This might be a better option for us to use as we can control the styling better at the source. As a cheat, I’m going to load it all up in Quantum GIS, style it there, and use the mapserver export plugin to quickly build my map file.
• Mapnik: One of my colleagues would very much like us to create our own openstreetmap wms server, and use mapnik. I’d love to, as the cartography is really good, but after diving into it today, I have to say I think I need some hand holding before I can actually make it serve maps. We’ll see…

Also rans:

• Ordnance Survey have changed the licensing for their OpenSpace product: You still need a license to use their data, but you can download the development kit from sourceforge. The license has also been changed to have more “clarity” in terms of the ownership of derived data. It would be churlish to suggest that this has anything to do with the “Show Us a Better Way” mess up, wouldn’t it? The problem is, you still need to pay for the background data, so we’re back up to points 2 and 3 above…
• Amazon launches public datasets: This, in my limited experience, seems to be a duplication of ideas that are already out there. That’s fine when it’s software, and you want to stomp all over your rivals, but wouldn’t it have been nice for them to give their support to an existing data repository?

Things to play with next:

• Openaerialmap: Also has a wms service…