Spaced Out :: 08 2007

Whilst on holiday in Norfolk over the summer we stopped at Castle Rising Castle. Whilst not belonging to English Heritage its preservation has been, at least partly, sponsored by them, so its on the “East of England” trail. And a mighty fine castle it is. According to EH:

“One of the largest, bestpreserved and most lavishly decorated keeps in England, surrounded by 20 acres of mighty earthworks. Begun in 1138 by William d’Albini for his new wife, the widow of Henry I, in the 14th century it became the luxurious exile-place of Queen Isabella, widow (and alleged murderess) of Edward II.”

So there you have it. It’s fun to look around, with corridors crudely hacked through the original 2m thick outer walls; done after the collapse of the main hall to allow access to rear upper rooms. The outer earth works provide good views and plenty of areas to wander around, including the original 13th century church which was probably torn down to make way for the castle.

Of course this is less important than the hugely impressive tea rooms in the village of Castle Rising. These are attached to the post office and are quaint and traditional. A definite stop for a freshly made cup of filter coffee or tea, along with a home made cake. Highly recommended!!

The Ordnance Survey have always maintained the trig point and benchmark network for those carrying out traditional ground surveys (leveling and or detail survey). In the past, if you wanted access to the precise co-ordinates of these locations you needed to purchase. With the advent of OS’s use of GPS and active/passive differential GPS network, trig points/benchmarks are either disused or dismantled. Whilst many liked the old survey network, it was expensive to maintain and so something had to give. However the good news is that all the (unmaintained) data is now free to use. Just go to the OS Benchmarks & Trig Archive and browse to your hearts content!

Now that Office 2007 is fully upon us, expect to be receiving the DOCX (and equivalent PPTX and XLSX) files from colleagues. These are the new OpenXML file format. And it really is just a plain text XML document in a ZIP wrapper. However I have an old Office 97 installation (meeting all my office needs) and have now converted over to Open Office 2 (which uses its own ODF, Open Document Format, and can read/write DOC files) which currently does not import DOCX (or derivatives). Plenty of people are working on converters or online services, but for the time being support is limited. That said, Novell Open Office does have an importer and this will apparently be fed in to the Open Office development at a later stage. For the time being the closest you can get to a DOCX/ODF converter is using the OpenXML/ODF Translator. It’s actually an MS Office plug-in to allow export, but there is a command line version which does the conversion as well. There are plenty of things it doesn’t support, but for simple documents it’s more than sufficient.

One of the nice things in virtual machines is that you can mount real, or fake, CDs on to the VM. So if you load a CD in to your own system, the VM can access it. Likewise, if you “rip” a CD to an ISO image, you can also mount this. In fact this is the best way to install a Linux OS in to a VM; just download the xubuntu or Fedora ISO image and let things roll.

Virtual Box also has extensions which let you share local folders and so access files on your own system, however it is a bit more fiddly to setup under Linux and doesn’t support all distributions. The “quick and dirty” fix is to actually turn whatever files your want to transfer in to an ISO and mount that as a CD.

Now there are plenty of commercial applications that can do this, but that isn’t good enough. I wanted a GUI based, open source, solution that can run from a USB stick. And I found it in the form of DoISO which is an open source GUI frontend for the opensource command line mkisofs. And it just works.

Well the world of virtualisation doesn’t stay still for long and I have now switched over to Virtual Box. Whilst not open source, the main product is free to use and is lighter and fast than Virtual Server (it also runs on Linux). More importantly, it runs both xubuntu and Fedora Core without any hitches at all. I’m using the former for playing around with GRASS, whilst the latter has been necessitated by using Pulsar for some radar image processing. Virtual Box is very easy to use which is nice. However, the more memory the better and if you have less than 500Mb things will be much slower.