Sydney Bushfire and More of Spring

Finally back home and went on a few more walks. Sadly there is an early start to the bushfire season in Sydney. I have been analysing using the RapidFire Modis site. Here are few pictures and details.

Spring is here

Finally the fresh sunshine of spring is here. With all the warmth and rich smells of flowers. I went for a walk and took photos of wildflowers and some in gardens to make a "spring collection". Here are a few unedited shots of what I think looks good.

Tomorrow I am off to Canberra for a Homeland Security conference, I hope I can find homes for rich and thin clients in government departments and gain support for partially home grown technologies. WorldWindJ may become available in Eclipse RCP making it much more fun as well as adding a "traditional" GUI to it.

ISS-Atlantis Docking

I have been following the Atlantis flight from launch. Obviously due to lack of anything better to do except check its postion against WorldWind satellite tracker. This screenshot shows it being exactly where it should be over South America and the orbital sunrise coming up. I have also been experimenting with some direct show and live video streaming into Worldwind from VLC. I will love to have Video on Terrain quite soon.

Friday night out

Went out on Friday night in Adelaide. Amazing how much fun you can have in a small town if you are bent on it.

I have been doing some web development for some extra cash. Basic blogging and news setup stuff for AADI. Not flashy at all but I am glad to see more and more corporations are following the employee expression philosophy.

On the Worldwind front Stephan has been doing some very good work on the Download/Texture loading optimizaton front. We may even end up with true streaming like Skyline or Google Earth use using ECWP or JP2K techniques. Adam Hill is taking up the WFS code I started and optimizing it. Nice to see such a good team coming together.

Also all praise Canon Australia, I sent my Canon IXUS I for repairs after it had an E18 error and they promptly replaced it with a brand new one complete with all the accessories. That is good service and warranty. Here are a few shots of some previous revelry I have been meaning to post. Aren't they pretty ?

Model Feature and Hybrid Machines

Having a hybrid portable machine increases productivity a lot. I can conceptualize on the tablet and code on the laptop and stay on the net via 3G .

Anyway after recoding on some prior work by Mashi I have 3D Textured Models. Just need to work on animations and pixel/vertex shader enhancements.

Finally "Somename"s via Geoserver WFS

I admit it's far from finished, but finally I am moving things along from the time they were stalled a year or so ago in terms of streaming Placenames from a WFS.

As ususal the major straw breaking the camel's back in terms of Placenames is the lack of unicode support on various fronts.

• Worldwind does not support Unicode Placenames


• Geoserver 1.3 on CentOS does not support Unicode Fields in Shapefile DBF

These problems only showed up since I started with Brazilian Placenames which have Portuguese characters.

I have made my best effort in these imperfect state of affairs. I hope the Geoserver crew and
the Worldwind rendering crew come to my rescue. Meanwhile you get "Somename"s over Brazil.

Placenames via WFS and Blogging from hilltops

The WFS placenames support in World Wind is nearly there. a few minor tweaks and fixes and we will have dual mode point data, from cache and from wfs, not to forget KML .

I finally found time to take all my toys together to a spot I like, on top of the hill overlooking the small town I live in. Nice and windy, in the shade of Eucalypts this post was written entirely using a GPRS Modem and pen input on tablet.