The other day I built a computer almost from scratch. I can admit it, I can nerd it with the best of them when pressed, ok I don’t even need to be pressed. I had a bunch of components lying around, a not too old processor, a bunch of fast RAM and a laptop hard drive all I needed was a case. That was easy to rectify as I’ve always fancied building a little PC and Shuttle do some excellent barebones machines. Now the premise of this post is not the coolness of my new computer (although it is quite nice) but the ease at which it took to build. When I was Young. When I was young and the ‘internet...

As we all know the pace of change in technology shows no sign of abating for good or ill. In software terms it’s a continual moving walkway of new patches, version and features, usually for the better sometime not so. I’m both lucky and cursed to be able to install a wide variety of new software where I work and at this moment installing a beta of ArcGIS 9.4 (or 10 as it will soon be) onto a new copy of Windows Server 2008 R2. I’ll soon be downloading and installing a copy of Visual Studio 2010 onto that virtual machine as well. Lucky eh? Well yes and no, lucky because I get to try out new...

It might come as a shock to many of you, but often on the internet the world is flat. Yes I know that you thought this whole debate had gone out with the ark (or actually a little later), but after years coming to terms of the world being a sphere, cartographers everywhere needed a method of putting that world  down onto paper. Now this was fine for many years until 2nd May 2000 the US decided to turn off Selective Availability and whole world seemingly brought into WGS84. The difficulty here though is the fact that WGS84 and Longitude and Latitude coordinates are an approximate representation of...