The only reason I even knew about the Dev8D un-conference was from the events page on the OSM wiki. It’s for developers working in education and the idea is to have a core skills session in the morning, a lunchtime meetup and then a more specialised module in the afternoon, followed by an ‘open session’. If you wanted to be involved in a particular challenge such as Jorum, you could hang out in Basecamp (conveniently equipped with a perpetual buffet of the usual geek delicacies such as chocolate bars, biscuits, crisps and cola. As before, I’m just going to write up a selection of the most interesting sessions I attended:

I eased myself into Tuesday with HTML5 (even if you know something fairly well there’s always new stuff that pops up). Next was a session I had been looking forward to very much, about PostGIS apps development. Except this was more of a pre-session to iron out many people’s various installation hiccups. My MacBook insisted that StackBuilder was not available for Snow Leopard, however this was apparently down to the flaky wifi connection at the venue and got sorted once I tried again at home.

Image analysis and manipulation are very useful to know if you’re in web design & GIS, so I joined the Computer Vision Techniques workshop in the afternoon. OpenIMAJ is a Java library and even though I know next to nothing about Java, the session was very well organised. With a LiveCD, an extensive tutorial booklet and two friendly instructors, what could go wrong! Except maybe for the framing of my speech bubble overlaid on an image looking a bit lopsided…

Then back to Responsive Webdesign, the ability to make sites look good on any device from a tiny Smartphone to a 20″ screen. This was followed an excellent presentation on Landmap Linked Data – EXPOsing the rich ISO standard geospatial metadata as Linked Data, which I believe was also done with Java. And finally some exciting conversation about one of the current hot topics, paywalls to academic publishing, while waiting for the reception to start (more food).

a selection of Landmap aerial photography postcards

Wednesday began with website accessibility and how to do ‘guerilla’ usability testing. I found myself drifing a bit more between workshops on the second day as I did before. The organisers called this ‘the rule of two feet’ (if it’s not useful for you it’s okay to leave quietly and join another session), unfortunately this doesn’t work if you’re a Python newbie and arrive an hour after the Python session has started.
Another familiar but very useful session was Dev Tools for Chrome, covering many familiar sites such as HTML5 boilerplate, as well as tools I had not used before: CodeKit, CSS3Please.com, the confusingly-spelled colllor.com, codeschool.com and feature-detection tool modernizr.

In the Open Mapping Project Zone, I was introduced to Leaflet which is similar to OpenLayers. I will definitely be having a closer look at the GeoJSON multi polygon and leaflet vectors functionality.

Thursday was spent between two conferences, but I came back to Dev8D in the afternoon. Just in time for the tail end of the PostGIS apps development, I didn’t think I missed much as I already have experience of loading spatial data into PostgreSQL. The Awards and Closing session was thereafter and I was reunited with some old friends and acquaintances, including bumping into someone I’d met at OSGIS Nottingham, who had given a presentation on the Kenyan Map Kibera project last year.

Lastly, there was our bi-monthly Geomob meetup, not to be missed as it featured riveting presentations on the Domesday map, the Vauxhall mind map mashup and Mapquest’s Tile architecture. Some of Mapquest’s code is now on github. A quick pint in the pub and it was time to head back to Hampshire (early start the next morning).

Part 2 about London Citizen CyberScience Summit – coming soon.

The second UK OSGIS conference, 21-22 June 2010, was different from most of the academic-centred conferences I usually go to as most of its participants seemed to be drawn from the industry/public sector. The first day had a range of full-day training courses to choose from and true to my vocation, I went for web mapping workshop. Using a Linux live CD to trick the university’s Windows workstations, Jo Cook from oaDigital gave us a crash course in how to get spatial data onto a website. We started off by loading data into a PostgreSQL database and then displaying it in QuantumGIS, a desktop GIS. where we where able to perform some spatial queries. Moving on to MapServer, we learned how to visualise layers of map data in a browser by using the correct map file syntax. Once this was mastered, we could use php to create our own web maps with the OpenLayers library – not only to display various layers but also elements such as zoom controls and custom viewboxes.

In a similar but slightly more proprietary vein, there was the Ordnance Survey OpenSpace workshop in the evening on how to use the OpenSpace API. By using an API key and javascript, we were able to display OS map data and add pins and text boxes. I had a lot of fun doing some pair programming but sadly we only got through the first tutorial, although the other two OpenSpace tutorials also promised postcode search, custom pins with video bubbles and boundaries with hover control. All easy enough to follow in the comfort of your home!

The second day was packed with lectures, a great opportunity to get up to speed on the latest in OSGIS. Some introduced academic geospatial institutions and current research and important theoretical considerations. Quite a number of presenters were from Spain, often referring to gvSIG, a GIS environment originating from the local transport department in Valencia. There was a lot of opportunity to hear about the work of small independent consultancies and the many products OSGIS developers were addressing current technical issues with. Here just a selection of a few topics I found particularly relevant to my work:

Arnulf Christl, speaking about the outlook of the OSGeo, started his presentation by reiterating tools every OS web cartographer should know about: MapBender, GeoMajas, MapFish – and also mentioned the extJS web app development tool, which ties in with the increased use of jQuery. He also stressed the importance of web mapping code sprints such as the one at the OpenStreetMap developer conference 2008 at the Linux Hotel (code sprints as in: BarCamps or hackathons). He appealed to users to simply ignore software and data that is restricted.

Some presenters also made some insightful presentations on the direction Open Source is taking from a business point of view. Mark Vloemans, chairman of the Dutch open source software suppliers OSSLO, used the phrase ‘Soldier, Tailor, Tinker, Spy’ (taken from the title of the John le Carre novel) to described the four phases that open source GIS was going through: from a technology- and supply-driven approach, to supply-and-demand driven, then getting a competitive edge and finally ‘jumping the curve’. He pointed out that in the last phase the competitive edge lay within providing a service such as support, hosting or consulting – and that open source could branch off into hybrid source (a licensing model where the open source element can be time- or version-limited).

Turning to the role of OSGIS in developing countries, we heard from Jorge Sanz how the GIS infrastructure of Venezuela was built. Tim Waters of OpenStreetMap talked very memorably about disaster mapping after the Haiti earthquake. He pointed out that in order to bring relief to the population, the locations of spontaneous camps needed to be fast determined. Within a space of several weeks, the OSM map of the Haitian captital Port-Au-Prince went being as empty and bare as GoogleMaps and Yahoo, to suddenly acquiring an impressive amount of detail – thanks to the many aid workers which were issued with GPS devices.

On a completely different topic but one a little closer to my past work, Antony Scott presented how he used Quantum GIS and GeoServer to build a system for energy conservation management. This had to be suitable for small organisations with little funds and useable by consultants with little technical knowledge. He described an easy way to estimate energy consumption by viewing houses on StreetView without the need to visit. The GIS resulted in a good visualisation in OSM, invovled no scripting and contained an export function for Excel for further easy processing.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stay for the AGM of the OpenSource Geo user group as I had a train to catch, but I’ve been following their Twitter feed for a while to keep up to date. If you have a look on the UK OSgeo site, you will find a long list of software for all your open source web mapping and other GIS needs. On the whole I enjoyed the conference and the networking very much (even met some alumni from my degree course!) and hope to make it to next year’s conference.

the solution: rather than buying a new SATA harddrive and ebaying the old one, you purchase one of those handy little SATA converters for a fraction of the price. The plan is to attach it to that pesky IDE hard drive so that you can effortlessly hook it up to the SATA connectors on the motherboard.

another hitch… Even though you can tell by the little green light that the converter is working, you boot up and…nothing. The second hard drive still isn’t being recognised, because the BIOS needs to be told that it is connected to a full SATA drive. Normally the converter tells the motherboard that the drive attached to a converter is an IDE – even though it fits into a SATA connector. But attach more than one IDE drive at the same time and the motherboard starts complaining. So you need to set all your connectors to masquerade as SATA drives.

the instructions which work for the Phoenix AwardBIOS and may or may not help with other BIOSes too: Reboot your PC. When it starts up press the DEL key to enter your BIOS setup. You will get the following screen:

Go to menu item ‘Integrated Peripherals’ and press ENTER

press ENTER again, selecting ‘OnChip IDE device’

scroll down to On-Chip Serial ATA and make sure ‘enhanced mode’ is selected

if not, press ENTER and select the correct mode

Save and Exit out of the BIOS setup. Now when you reboot you can clearly see that not only the first hard drive shows up – here shown as IDE channel 1 Master – but also the second Maxtor drive: