VirtualBox

I have been testing VirtualBox both at home and at work.  From the VirtualBox Website:

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License GPL. See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction.

via VirtualBox

For running Linux, specifically Ubuntu, it has run pretty well.  At the office my experience has been a little more problematic.  I wanted to run VirtualBox in order to run different versions of GIS software.  Initially the software worked wonderfully, but problems arose with peripherals.  Many of our users are novice computer users and use USB drives and devices.  I thought I could configure VirtualBox to handle  a generic USB device and initail test seemed to confirm this.  Unfortunately, as my ussers started to conect various devices VirtualBox did not always recognize the USB connections.  With novice users it created a burden with support calls.

I have not given up using VirtaulBox, but I will need to do some additional research or find a better way to deploy it with my users.

GeoRSS

GeoRSS is the encoding of location information is RSS feeds.  There are 3 flavors of GeoRSS feeds W3C Basic Geo, Simple, and GML. According to W3C, W3C Basic Geo is for describing points only in WGS84 datum.  Examples at http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/#example

Simple GeoRSS can be used to describe point, lines polygons and bounding boxes. As with W3C Basic Geo,
Simple GeoRSS uses WGS84 datum in Decimal Degrees (Lat Long). Examples at
http://georss.org/simple.

GML GeoRSS is the most complex encoding format. It can be used to represent
point, lines polygons and bounding boxes in feeds. GML GeoRSS can also use a variety of
Coordinate Systems. Examples can be found at http://georss.org/gml.

References:

Wikipedia – RSS

GeoRSS ::  Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds

Fun with GeoRSS - Directions Magazine

Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary