Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are by their nature data driven. The data comes in a wide variety of raster and vector formats. Rasters hold raw, continuous data recorded striaght from the real world. An example is Satellite/aerial imagery, this is a commonly held in an open format with broad support, such as GeoTIFF [...]

This post is a tribute to Linux Hater who sadly has retired. He was insightful and right about many things, although sometimes a bit too whiny.
Linux currently holds about 1% market share on the desktop. It has gained 0.5% in 2 years, whilst Mac OS X has gained 3%, and MS Windows has lost 4%. [...]

It all started with the Pidgin chat window, which is surrounded by several pixels of padding. To my eyes the padding doesn’t achieve anything, it just wastes space and detracts from the clean, minimalist lines of the Buddy List. After much fumbling, I managed to change it in the Pidgin source code . Bug 6987 [...]

On 31st March the British Standards Institute (BSI) submitted an updated vote of approval, on ISO 29500 (MS OOXML). The move surprised many, myself included.
In September 2007 the BSI had voted ‘No – with comments’, attaching a long list of reasons. The response had been prepared in the open over the web, using the BSI [...]

Several events for me  in the last fortnight converged almost perfectly on a common theme

On Thursday 28 March The Register reported from an anonymous source, that the British Standards Institute (BSI) would reverse their vote on the proposed DIS 29500 standard from ‘No – with comments’ to Yes. In response John Pugh MP, Liberal Democrat [...]