The Confused Life

Discontinuing Blog

2008-02-15T22:32:00.003+10:30

I am considering discontinuing this blog due to change of focus, and too much attention drawn to it. May be I will join a developer blog where I can blend in with others.

PS: After a few years of talking to Google I regained control of the content here via mail redirect. I have been busy writing in the gap, the content here except this post are mirrored.

Back in Adelaide battling Trojans

2008-02-04T20:44:00.000+10:30

This seems to be the story of my life when returning from conferences - things are in a mess.

Otherwise this post was going to be about the magnificent trans-Bali trip to Mt. Batur and back. Since all the photos are somewhere in Germany I have more niggling issues that has to wait. I passed the citizenship test by the way, glad that's out of the way.

I am going to discontinue this blog due to ... cold and flu for a while.

Exploring Semniyak - Dining on the beach

2008-02-02T04:24:00.000+10:30

Today I caught up with Marieka who could not get a flight out and is stuck here till Sunday. So I at least have some quality company for a few days. I got to introduce her to Kelapa Muda which she apparently had never had before.We occupied a gazebo for dinner near the beach and planned an outing to Ubud tomorrow.
Then I hot the classy Hu'u bar in Semniyak and indulged in some Lychee martini's and a sisha.

After conference - Life in Kuta

2008-02-01T13:26:00.000+10:30

So after nearly 4 days of hard conferencing I have settled in Kuta to relax for a few days. If you can call partying all night relaxing. I am staying in a small beach side hotel called Melasti , it has nice old buildings and garden and a couple of pools. The beach is a stone's throw away as is the mall. The nightlife is a short taxi ride and you can stagger your outing properly to hit the right spot at the right time.

I started with dining on the beach while watching the sunset and moved onto Poppy's and Bounty. Big aussie crowd here - not hard to make friends and across the road there was a band playing. Most of the time was spent dancing in front of the air-con and fan for position. When Poppy's died down I headed to MBarGo and ran across a few familiar faces seeming to have a lot of fun with the locals.

When I ran out of steam a short cab ride dumped me right on my bed.

At the Intercontinental Resort in Bali

2008-01-27T19:10:00.000+10:30

So I have finally arrived at the conference. The balcony has a superb view over the garden. The rooms are quite stylish too. Here are a few photos to whet your appetite.
The long-long queue at the airport was definitely worth it. I again got into trouble over my dog-eared passport, can't wait to get a new one.

Off to Bali

2008-01-27T12:01:00.001+10:30

Stealing a minute .. boarding flight to Denpasar in Perth. See you on the other side.

Box seat at the Tour Down Under

2008-01-23T15:16:00.000+10:30

So I caught too early a bus out of Adelaide after doing my test. Since there are like 6 buses to Woodside per day I have to wait for an hour for my connection. By the way the test went well the only thing I am unsure about is who has the right to free speech in Australia, Australian citizens only or everyone.

Meanwhile sitting on the dirt by the roadside I have prime view of the tour down under. All the peletons going past for the steep and windy hill climb just ahead. So found a shady spot and settled in for the wait. May be I will capture a bike pile-up, fingers crossed.

Still waiting to have an Australianity check

2008-01-23T11:49:00.000+10:30

After all the hard reading for weeks, I can recite the Australian Citizenship book by heart. So, ask me anything .... When did Abel Tasman visit Van Diemen's Land ? When was the Eureka Rebellion ?

Unfortuanately I cannot do the test, I have been waiting for an hour or so, the Australia wide testing server is down. Surprise, surprise they do not have a backup hardcopy test. So I will spend a fair bit of time here waiting and getting hungry for lunch, till I cannot think anymore. May be its their strategy to make the test more difficult, frustrating your attempts at doing it. Leave alone a paper based test, why cannot they have a fail-over server ? Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. I keep asking them to take the book and ask me questions, they would not take up on the offer ... DIMIA ....

On the brighter side apart for some legal hassles my PhD enrollment seems to be going through, I have also got my P2 licence so I do not have to carry those ugly red P's around.

Hopefully it will be ready today, otherwise it will be a day wasted.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

2007-12-22T23:11:00.000+10:30

So the holiday season is finally here, but I have burnt up all my leave and my spare cash going to Kenya and buying a car. So time to sit tight and haunt people's houses for free meals which they will gladly provide in this time of the year when generosity and goodwill rule their thoughts, otherwise the ghost of Christmas will haunt them every year instead of just me. Not that I can't cook, with sites like Cooking for Engineers to help me, it is not hard. Tonight's special was Prawn Jalfrezi, with prawns you have to be careful not to overcook them or they become tough like hard boiled eggs.

I am still studying for my Australian Citizenship Test. Paul if you are so eager you can do this one here, it has answers unlike mine where I am too mean to provide answers. Only the question about which is the political party currently in power needs the answer to be revised since Kevin Andrews is no longer holding down that particular plum job. All hail the separation of power now that the Federal Court has reinstated the Haneef visa. I hope they have a question about how arms of the government tangle with each other.

Also test drove RAT TerraSAR-X Driver and INSAR capability, it was a breeze producing unwrapped phase. Just need to quantify the baseline and extension to spaceborne platform position information to allow accurate DEM generation.

CNES(Pere Noel) releases ORFEO Toolbox 2.0.0

2007-12-19T18:16:00.000+10:30

Pere Noel from CNES has presented his eager Remote Sensing children with OTB 2.0.0 this Christmas. Orfeo Toolbox is part of the Orfeo Accompaniment Program for the upcoming Pleiades and Cosmo-Skymed sensor constellations. This toolbox provides an Open-Source framework for processing and exploiting SAR and Optical imagery.

From the OTB 2.0.0 Release announcement:

A major release like this one happens once a year. The OTB Development
Team has worked very hard in order to make available a robust library
with plenty of very interesting things. Thanks to Emmanuel, Thomas,
Julien, Romain and Cyrille for the good work.

Thanks also to ITK, OSSIM, GDAL, 6S, libSVM and BOOST developers for the
good software upon which OTB is built.

Be careful: with OTB-2.0 you can build powerful applications easily and
for free. You can for instance produce a pan-sharpenned, ortho-rectified
Quickbird image in a few lines of code. This can hurt sensitive people.

Other key features include:

- Radiometric calibration using the 6S radiative transfer code. - Image registration with parametric geometric transformations. - Demo applications for change detection, road extraction, visualization, etc. - All existing features of version 1.6: segmentation, classification, feature extraction, spatial reasoning, change detection, etc.

OTB tends to lean towards being monolithic at times with internal source tree copies of ITK, Boost and Ossim, but it keeps people away from having to separately download and install dependencies. The only external things to install are CMake - it makes multi-platform builds a breeze, a pre-built binary copy of GDAL from FWTools and FLTK, a simple GUI toolkit which trades speed for aesthetics. Personally I would prefer a nicer GUI Toolkit such as Qt but FLTK works just fine, and the whole approach is library oriented so it will be easy to plug-in your own GUI.

After a few false starts I built OTB with MSVC++ Express and NMake files from CMake. Here are the basic screenshots.

Basic Viewer Manager:

Diaporama (ENVI Style viewer with transitions):

Interactive Change Detection:

New Car for the New Year

2007-12-16T23:00:00.000+10:30

So I finally I got myself a new car. It is a very well maintained Toyota Camry, looks like an oldish Mercedes and drives very quiet, accelerates smoothly and has a lot of power. Quite a bit bigger than my last car , I hope to have this one for a bit longer. Just that it is dark colour so I will have to drive it with the lights on.

Using Sqlite with QGIS-Grass Toolbox

2007-12-16T10:57:00.000+10:30

Now that I have slogged together a lot of database drivers for Grass and GDAL it is time to put them to good use. In this article I will demonstrate how to create a Grass vector map with attributes stored in an Sqlite embedded database. I am using my Brazil mapset since the data is cities and roads in Brazil.

First open a suitable mapset in Grass from QGIS (follow the QGIS-Grass tutorial) and connect the mapset to an sqlite database by choosing sqlite driver from the dropdown box as shown below. Edit the database location so the it is created in a directory that exists, I suggest removing the already suggested dbf folder(meant for the dbf driver) and replacing it with sqlite.db. In the future this should be auto-suggested by QGIS.
Then open a suitable Shapefile or other OGR supported vector format for import into Grass. Your screen will look something like below.
Now import this dataset into Grass using the Import Vector from OGR command as shown below. You can also use the Grass shell to ensure that your attribute table gets created in the Sqlite database. After this step your vector is ready for use in Grass and all the attributes can be manipulated using SQL in the Sqlite database to perform joins with other tables or any other operation you can dream up.
The final map with various classifications produced from the Brazil dataset after importing it into Grass is shown here.

Using MingW-Fu to link to MSVC dll's and lib's

2007-12-14T23:14:00.000+10:30

Lately my MingW-Fu has improved vastly thanks to the attempts at building Grass, GDAL and Qgis with all the possible dependencies and drivers. Here are some lessons I have learnt :

Don't trust libtool - Libtool in MingW is rather hobbled and needs to be fixed for long link lines using a the sed command described here.
Use -no-undefined - MingW linker does not like linking to libraries with some undefined symbols, use that linker flag when compiling dependencies.
Create shared libraries not static ones for dependencies.
Learn you way around the reverse engineering tools for porting from MSVC built static and dynamic libraries, specifically reimp, pexports and dlltool. Sometimes function call definitions need to be renamed using sed or added with @4 or @32 at the end (not sure what purpose this serves), I picked it up while building MySQL libraries for linking.
Edit any autoconf or pkgconfig scripts to use MSYS style include and libs location(Those nasty slashes will get you otherwise).
Any of these tricks may fail if you have specific name mangling, assembly code and other fancy things in the MSVC libraries. I have still not managed to make a linkable version of libecwj2.dll (ErMapper - Leica ECW/JPEG2000 library), mainly because it contains some of the above features.

New things - Computers and Scholarships

2007-12-12T23:32:00.000+10:30

This week is turning out to be quite good. I got a new machine, Quad-core Intel with Nvidia 8800 graphics card and double 22inch monitors. I spent a couple of days setting it up. Then today I got a reply from the University of Adelaide saying that I have been given the APA scholarship to study for a PhD in SAR over 3-years. You have a few bad months then things turn around. I am planning to buy a new car over the weekend , then I will have to zealously guard the 1 remaining demerit point I have.

The Gold Qgis release build with grass compiled with ODBC, Sqlite, MySQL and PostgreSQL. I could not get GDAL linked with the same MingW being second class citizen in the GDAL world and libtool being annoying and limited as always. The current one is available here. Hope it works for you. May be one day we will have a Platinum release.

ImageLinker , the Ossim image processing GUI is now nearly fully ported to Qt4 and builds and runs fine if you do not try to optimize too much and strip symbols.

Releasing Qgis 0.9.1

2007-12-09T23:00:00.000+10:30

Qgis releases seem to be coming along fine. Now even my photo is in the official developers list. What an honour !!

The windows installer is available here for testing till an official release is announced. It includes latest grass release candidate, but misses Xerces and hence GML support. Living on the edge has cost me, GDAL Xerces detection to longer picks up my Xerces and Expat. I hope this will be resolved by the time we make a full release. I will try rolling back GDAL until it works but this is the latest of the latest code based release.

Who wants to be an Australian ?

2007-12-07T02:10:00.000+10:30

So I am finally at the stage of preparing for the Australian Citizenship Test, the resource book is quite detailed but living here and reading wikipaedia is even more instructive. There are some sample tests that allow you to practice, but require signing up. Since on sample test page they say the Minister for Immigration is looking for professional question setters, I took it up to make my own flash-card like test practice application. It is simple HTML-JavaScript-PHP with the questions in a text file and no answers, once I have built it into a decent set I am planning to add it facebook as an application so that Australians can check their Australianity.

Back in the Saddle - Qgis 0.9.1 with MSVC

2007-12-03T04:08:00.000+10:30

I am back in Adelaide in space , but not it time. My body clock is all messed up and keeping me awake at night. At least it is some other time of the day somewhere else so I can be productive. Qgis seems to making great progress towards a full MSVC build, that may not sound so good to Open Source purists, but on Windows MSVC offers superior compile time and debug capabilities than MingW does at the moment.

Tim has put together a short-cut bundle of binary dependencies so that you do not have to build everything (but building stuff is my favourite passtime anyway). The build works fine without Python-SIP, which will be easy to add and GRASS which will be slightly messier to add.

Adelaide via Bangkok and Sydney

2007-12-01T09:28:00.000+10:30

Finally back in Adelaide after flying around and waiting around in airports for 3 days. I had a 12 hour stop over in Bangkok, which I spent snooping on wireless networks and recruiting for my Metal Gear on PSP using AP Scan. Some shopping ensued as well, but being cash strapped does not bode well for that activity. The security check queue got huge and amorphous, it was funny watching people gulping down bottles of mineral water to avoid having the fluids check. Someone should really drink a lot of water and take diuretics on-board.

The flight from Bangkok was a bit delayed - 20mins, that nearly made me miss my connection to Adelaide and my luggage did not make it. So I spent an anxious evening in the city waiting for it. Then I spent 30mins in the taxi queue, they have made it really hard for taxi's to get into Adelaide Airport. Eventually I managed to go to Sosta for dinner, been meaning to go to an Argentinian Restaurant for a long time. The roasts were fabulous and so much that we had to take some home.

Camping in SweetWaters

2007-11-27T05:40:00.000+10:30

Tonight I am staying at the SweetWaters Tented Camps ( these are first grade tents with running water and furniture) in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy on the Laikipia Plateau, nestled between Mt. Kenya and the Abderdares.

The conservancy houses orphaned/rescued chimpanzees from Congo, Cameroon and other parts of central and westerm Africa. It was founded by Jane Goodall. There are also breeding populations of Black and White Rhinos, various other rare herbivores are also conserved. I got to pet and feed sugarcane to a tamed black rhino called "Morani". Here you can just sit outside in the dark with a small ditch separating you from the animals at the water hole, it is a great experience indeed.

Watching Elephants from TreeTops

2007-11-26T02:08:00.000+10:30

After all the excitement of last week I am relaxing this weekend in the Aberdares, watching elephants and buffaloes from the windows of the wooden lodge at TreeTops. We also went for a game drive but visibility hampered by the dense thicket in the park. Stay in the hotel , up all night spotting game and chatting with people is more fun.

I did a fair bit of chatting last Friday as well doing an interview with Bertha from Nairobi Star about growing up and education in Kenya and life afterwards. I demonstrated the the time based refugee tracking in WorldWind at UNHCR-Somalia which happens to be in the same building as Nairobi Star.

NASA and its value to the people

2007-11-23T01:37:00.000+10:30

Since its inception NASA has tried to justify its raison d'etre, in the beginning it was the space race with the Soviets, but with the warming up of the cold war that incentive has evaporated. These days the public want real deliverables from NASA and the perception is that it is over-funded and under-performing. This is where NASA needs to communicate to the populace how it will directly benefit them much like the national education (NASA has much to educate people about) and health agencies (Space observations can track pollution levels) . This article brings out the discrepancy between people's perception of NASA funding and the reality.

"In a survey ... NASA’s allocation, on average, was estimated to be approximately 24% of the national budget (the NASA allocation in 2007 was approximately 0.58% of the budget.)"

Misconceptions indeed ....

Visiting FAO-SWALIM, UNHCR-Somalia and Wananchi Online

2007-11-21T23:49:00.000+10:30

I set myself up for a busy day on Tuesday the 20th. Running around Nairobi all day and visiting various contacts Maurizio had dug up. I also had to get to Loita house by 6:00 pm for a talk to SkunkWorks, a Nairobi gathering of techies.

First visit to FAO-SWALIM was fruitful, Craig was eager to embrace the OpenSource ideas and spend their limited budgets on setting up infrastructure in Kenya and capability development rather than on expensive software license purchases. They also have a lot of satellite and thematic data to share and are taking steps towards making it publicly available.

Next I went to UNHCR office for Somalia, John Marinos was trying to publish the data peace keeping, protection forces and aid agencies gather on displaced populations to Google Earth. A small bug in GE due to the asymmetry of KML import and output was frustrating his efforts. This bug is basically discarding the thematic palette information for KML icons when multiple KMZ's are being aggregated. So I had to script the aggregation myself and send him a master KML which can be kept updated with monthly data, ultimately I hope the database will be able to automatically generate proper KML's for distribution. These KML's had folder based time-tags, so I went ahead and extended the WorldWind KML Parser to respect these. Now the TimeController can be use to play through series and fully appreciate the grim reality of life in Somalia. I will try to add a time slider as soon as possible.

The final meeting was at Loita House - Wananchi Online. A selection of SkunkWorks members turned up, my talk on satellite sensors - SAR and Optical went without a hitch. People really perked up when I started demonstrating WorldWind. Lots of questions arose on performance in low bandwidth, age of data, data costs, methods for acquiring street data and building heights: there seems to a lot of need in Kenya for base mapping data and few very expensive sources.

Open Source SAR Analysis - Story of RAT

2007-11-19T02:30:00.000+10:30

I have a few more minutes at the airport, the flight is delayed. This is a good time as any to announce that now I am an official RAT - Radar Toolkit developer with commit access to the berlios svn. My contributions so far are only in the "IO" segment, ALOS-PALSAR CEOS, TerraSAR-X COSAR and XML metadata loaders. I am hoping to contribute some dual-polarimetry analysis tools as my skills develop.

SAR is a very specialized sensor without wide spread application, as such good SAR programs are few and far between. Most so called commercial packages are half-hearted commercialization attempts from university research groups. RAT is a robust open-source alternative chiefly developed by the enthusiastic Andreas Reigber at the Technical University of Berlin. IDL is the language of choice for these folk, it is similar to Matlab, high-level and and mainly procedural. Obejct and events support are sort of patched on. Other attempts at similar toolkits have been by Atlanta Scientific-Vexcel-MDA using Python-C base and an OpenEV viewer and by ESA in TCL (PolsarPRO) but neither of these in my opinion offers the easy extensibility and ease of use of RAT, provided you somehow procure an IDL licence. I similar parallel toolkit in Matlab will also come in handy, but the development of this has been sporadic, I really need to dig up the bits I wrote during my undergraduate work and start something going.

One of the best SAR features in RAT so far in my exploration is the LLMMSE Speckle filter, it produces a clear image from the standard speckled SAR image.

Final day in Mombasa - Amenities Failure

2007-11-19T01:53:00.000+10:30

For the last day in Mombasa, Kenya struck back with vengeance. The power and water failed for the day. We were glad to be getting out as the five-star service tore apart at the seams. The only cooling was the pool. I did however manage to go to Kilifi and see the swahili huts and a beautiful pristine super white sound beach with clear blue water. The best part was it was totally unpopulated, except for a few sand-pipers and crabs.

Now waiting for the flight back to Nairobi and roaming the net, GPRS is such a boon.

Weekend in Mombasa - Life on the Beach

2007-11-18T03:24:00.000+10:30

Here continues the greatest monologue in my life. I am spending a 3-day weekend in Mombasa , in the Sarova Hotel with a white sand beach just outside the window. Spending time with the family is a delicate balancing act, when you get around it life on the beach is a lot of fun. When you are not losing the rooms keys attached to giant fish in the pool.

Having drinks in the beach bar, lazing about in the pool, taking morning dips in the sea-weed encrusted water. I took a ride on a camel and we went looking for sea-life among the corals, the tropical fish and echinoderms ( starfish, sea-urchins etc.) are beautiful and find a great habitat among the coral. You have to dive or at least snorkel to fully appreciate them. The family insisted on recording every activity with forensic precision. Mombasa feels like some old asian town, with its mostly swahili and arabic population, lots of somali have come in recently as well. We ended up in a packed narrow-lane in the old town looking for a "Kanzu"-traditional swahili long dress. I felt like I was back in the cloisters of chandni-chowk in Calcutta.

I have one more day here, the plan is to see Fort Jesus (old Portuguese Fort), Mamba Village (Crocodile Farm) and Haller Park. Lets see what happens plans never turn out as planned.

Mobile Net in Kenya - Vodafone VMC with Safaricom SIM

2007-11-13T23:38:00.000+10:30

Restless while being disconnected from the net I took the first opportunity to get my Vodafone Mobile Connect Card from Australia working here with Safaricom. Safaricom is the local representative of Vodafone, the operate the network while Vodafone does all the back-end, billing etc. I am not exactly sure of the relationship, which seems to be fraught with confusion and corruption allegations. As long I can get the net I will bear any back-hand deals, they are for the greater good.

Since Jerry works for Safaricom now I called him up and got the relevant APN and PAP/CHAP authentication details to make my Huawei hardware work properly. He came into the party a bit late, but I definitely owe him a drink.

Pyramids better wait - Story ni Ndefu

2007-11-11T23:28:00.000+10:30

So I am finally in Kenya, having fun here but the pyramids have to wait a few more years in addition to the thousands they have for me to get to them. Unless some ultra-religious group comes to power in Egypt and decides to knock them down like the Bamiyan Buddhas. The visa from Kenya did not materialize.

Meanwhile I have been shuttling around Nairobi-Thika-Juja trying to stay in touch with people and see the sights. Today we ended up in Lake Naivasha, riding in a small boat, spotting birds and hippos.

The other major event was a giant get together of all my friends from Mang'u , after some 7 years. People have moved ahead and become lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, pilots and one is even standing in the Kenyan elections. We went on expanding and taking over Kengele's until there were nearly 50 people. I nearly burned a hole in my wallet buying everyone a round of drinks. Catching up was fun and there were excited groups swapping mobile numbers. I need to do this more often.

On my way

2007-11-04T16:27:00.000+10:30

Leaving Australia on another grand adventure to Nairobi then hopefully on to Cairo. Wait for me pyramids.

Backporting Interactive Compass - Reflector and Obfuscation

2007-10-28T17:44:00.000+10:30

Recently a Brazil targeted version of WorldWind was released, called GeoPortal-3D. Chad talks about it in his blog. The main additional features are Brazil specific placenames and imagery, the other useful new feature that quickly meets the eye is the interactive compass. This behaves in a manner very similar to the Google Earth navigation widget, just does not fade out to a normal compass when not in use, I guess we can merge one of WorldWind's existing compasses to achieve the same result. Anyway since WorldWind already has a few navigators another one which is familiar to people will do no harm and offer more choice.

Thus began the effort with Reflector and FileGenerator to create the same plugin in the WorldWind core tree. After a few fixes due to code upgrade and path changes the plugin works without a hitch. Useful new addition to moving around the globe. Other than this there are a few more plugins added in GeoPortal with some database features which would be useful to backport.

Back-porting from binaries raises the specter of intellectual rights protection and code security, I guess this is where assembly signing can come in for authenticity verification and this nasty bit of obfuscation can be used to deter the not so eager disassembler.

Qgis Release - with Grass 6.3RC1

2007-10-27T16:36:00.000+09:30

Finally went out for a night in town to celebrate the hard work and final release of Qgis 0.9.0 . The night ended with a predictable crash brought on by too many shots of vodka-midori-cointreau, called "What's That".

Before that I had to spend a few nights relinking Qgis and GDAL with Grass 6.3 Release Tag. Thanks to this a lot of advanced GIS functions are now available in Qgis. The relink brought on a dependency hell which I had to resolve using Dependency Walker. It is a great tool for windows release builder, helps to make sure the user gets all the components bundled in the installer. Just makes the installer very big, but hey it works. If you want better package management use Linux or BSD.

New World of SAR - A round-up of SAR Systems

2007-10-23T17:58:00.000+09:30

Recently I wrote an article with the same topic for a magazine that shall not be named, and received claims from editor that it was too biased. Since I can't make the deadline for a new article and the editors left it too late to pass on their opinion, I am going to use this soap box to stand and narrate my perspective on the current state-of-art in SAR Systems, commercial and research based, the rest (presumably a lot of them military) are not common knowledge.

Air-Borne Systems

Commercial - Very few commercial players exist in this field

Intermap IFSAR - Operational X-Band single pass Interferometric System with proven track record and very large archive of proven quality data. The P-Band system feature foliage penetration but is repeat-pass based.
Fugro-EarthData GeoSAR - Newly operational for X and P band single pass interferometry. Available data archive is limited and data validation is not wide-spread. Theoretically should produce good quality DEM's using P-Band but this may conflict with the X-Band results, needing reconciliation. The system is ex-NASA. The accuracy in the system is achieved by redundancy/repeat flights. A good set of samples can be obtained at the NOAA site.
Orbisat InSAR - A Brazilian system with InSAR capability in X and P bands.

Research - A fair few research systems exist operated by space agencies and educational institutions, the data from these systems has limited availability is based on pre-planned campaigns. A suitable summary is on the POLSARPRO site. In addition to these a lot of institution have the aspiration to operate a SAR system, it is a highly prestigious club to belong to.

AIRSAR(NASA/JPL) - The elder statesman of air-borne systems, last known campaign was in 2004. The last time I accessed the AirSAR site was offline.
EMISAR(DCRS) - Technical University of Denmark dual-band(L/C) fully polarimetric system.
ESAR(DLR) - Quad-Band(X/C/L/P) fully polarimetric system with very high quality data used for Insar, Polsar and Polinsar research. This system served as a template for the TerraSAR-X sensor.
Pi-SAR(NASDA-CRL) - JAXA Airborne L-Band system, the inspiration behind JERS and ALOS-PALSAR.
RAMESES/SETHI(ONERA) - Someone in France must be obsessed with Egyptian history and pharaohs, or may be it is related to the sand penetration experiments with these systems.
SAR-Convair(CCRS) - Polarimetic X/C-Band system used as a test-bed for Radardat 1 and 2 sensors by the Canadians. Mainly used for research in ice-monitoring, because that's all Canadians are interested in.

Space-Borne Systems -Recent years have seen the launch of numerous SAR sensors, both civilian and military. I have started to lose track of the military ones, here are a few: SARLupe-1 and 2(Germany) , YaoGan(Chinese), Cosmo-Skymed 1 and 2(Italy) and many more. The systems of interest to me are those that have readily accessible data, are currently operational or will be near future(which can mean anytime in the next 5 years given the nature of the space industry - you can really feel the relativistic time dilation, we must be near a black hole).

Currently In-Orbit Systems - These are either old die-hard systems, long past their scheduled expiry date or recently launched top-of-the-line sensors.

RADARSAT-1 - The long lived Canadian SAR system operating in C-Band HH.
ENVISAT-ASAR - SAR sensor on the multi-sensor Envisat bus. The data from this sensor is accessible for research from a rolling archive over the last 15days. The sensor can operate in alternate polarization mode.
ALOS-PALSAR - The first fully polarimetric L-Band space borne sensor. The data from this sensor is heavily consumed by the Kyoto and Carbon project for global forest monitoring. It collects on a fixed schedule over all land-mass. The data is highly affordable and of good quality.
TerraSAR-X - Newly launched poster child of the SAR world, first commercial SAR sensor to provide upto 1m resolution. Alternate polarization mode is operational, full-polarimetry and along track interferometry are some of the research modes available.

Planned/To-be-launched-soon systems - These are the bad boys, getting to school late or the toddlers which show great promise. Not yet in orbit but will be nice to have data from them.

RADARSAT-2 - The naughtiest of the bad boys, showing a lot of promise but not sitting for the exam. Long planned, but delayed in launch, it will be the first fully polarimetric C-band spaceborne system.
Sentinel-1 - Follow on to the aging ENVISAT system mentioned above, with upgrades with new technology in C-band. Unlike its predecessor, it will be a smaller and dedicated SAR bus, other optical sensors will have to find their own rides on Sentinel 2 and 3. It is due for launch in 2011.
TerraSAR-L(Cartwheel) and Tandem-X - The novel concept in SAR systems is a constellation, this will allow single pass along-track and cross-track interferometry.
MAPSAR - An L-band joint program between INPE(Brazil) and DLR, due some time the next decade.
RADARSAT Constellation - Another program due next decade or after that(if RS-2 is anything to go by) designed to provide daily global coverage using SAR.

That is my summary for today. Those that have attended more conferences than I have may have encountered a lot more exotic ideas and sensors. I hope this will attract comments on those sensors not mentioned here and their capabilities.

TerraSAR-X format support in GDAL

2007-10-22T18:28:00.000+09:30

SAR data is so out of this world that they always have to invent new data formats to put it in and present it to the end-user. Terrasar-X is no exception, with a new satellite comes a new format. Thankfully DLR has ditched the ever so complicated and CEOS format , which is as not standard as it could be, with simple georeferenced tif files with XML metadata.

This approach is very similar to the data format for RADARSAT-2 , which is quite elegant and richly supported in GDAL (betraying the Canadian roots of the principal author). Now everything would be fine if RADARSAT-2 weren't more that 5years delayed and still scheduled to be launched in this year December.

For the complex data in all modes DLR invented a new format - COSAR. Specifications have been out for a while but no format support was worth building till TerraSAR-X won the race for next generation space-borne SAR sensor in X-Band. Now ironically, another Canadian has added TerraSAR-X format support to GDAL , using the specifications only, which works perfectly for stripmap cosar data. Time to move onto supporting the orbital information and slant-to-ground range conversion.

Wrestling Xerces on MINGW - Qgis GML support

2007-10-18T18:35:00.000+09:30

With all the fuss about using XML based standards, GML is becoming increasingly popular as the medium of vector data representation in the GIS community. For the rest there is always KML /KMZ and for the old-timers Shapefiles. The zip and gzip compression algorithms compress text very well and compressed XML based formats are less bandwidth hungry compared to binary formats. GeoServer can produce all these formats for distribution from various datasources, GML is the primary format. GML2-GZIP fares best in terms of size and speed of creation.
After struggling for weeks to link GDAL with Xerces-C on MINGW I ran across this little nugget, a compiler flag that simply and cleanly allowed static linking to parse GML. Xerces-C is not the most elegant, lean and fast XML library, but it is used in GDAL and conversion to another library, possibly Expat which is also a GDAL dependency will require developer resources not currently available. So finally after all the fiddling around I have GML loading in QGIS and hopefully better luck with WFS servers providing it.

Saving World Wind .NET Sessions - The long xml road

2007-10-14T20:26:00.000+09:30

XML can be a blessing and a bane. It is the rose that is full of prickly thorns. Original World Wind XML configuration engine used Altova for marshalling and unmarshalling objects. Since then the parsing got moved to MSXML using XPath to remove the Altova dependency, but the configuration saving is not tied cleanly to .NET object serialization system leading to the need the a long-hand major layer parameters-to-file scheme I am working on. May be this can be extended to plugins once there is a common repository for them.

Hopefully this will be standardized to something allowing saving-restoring and network transmission of World Wind sessions, allowing people across the globe to view the same "world" in their respective World Wind installs.

Quaternions, Embedding Python and just passing time

2007-10-13T22:50:00.000+09:30

Quaternions are an old and elegant mathematical concept. Superseded in higher dimensions by tensors and other associated constructs but still holding sway in graphics and gaming and mechanics. I have had exposure these fun representations of rotation through both graphics in WorldWind and lately, satellite mechanics, through implementation of optical models in Ossim. There is talk of implementing matching and stereo analysis solution for terrain generation using the optical models within the ossim framework, let's see where it leads.

The other thing taking up my time is getting a Qgis release out. The one with Python bindings is proving to be a real nuisance, making installers in Windows is such a pain mainly due to lack of coherent location of all the dependencies and mess in the registry for locating them even while they are there. Hence the windows package inherently gets larger and larger as I struggle to throw all but the kitchen sink in to ensure all the stuff needed is there and the user does not fall into dll-hell. So far I have packaged Qt,Gdal,Grass,Msys-Mingw,Gpsbabel,PyQt4 and who knows what else into it. I might also have to include an optional embedded python, just in case Python is not cleanly detected on the system. So far Gary Sherman has managed to coax it to work on Windows Vista and Aaron Racicot on Windows XP.

Here are revised steps:

Install Python 2.5
Install PyQt4
Install Qgis with Python bindings - will replace some PyQt4 binaries with compatible ones.

The whole beast is now some 62MB-20MB is PyQt4 I had to include. I am looking at adding SIP as well, to get rid of step 2. If need be a simple python distro to rid of 1 as well. Since this will bloat things up there will be a Python-less installer too, as a compromise. I simply wish windows had a better system for binary reuse ( well outside of .NET and the evils of the registry).

When the installer is not building in NSIS I have been raking up gold and monster corpses in Dungeon Runners, lucky it is a fast hack and slash. Cheap ($5 p.m), totally unaddictive (unlike WoW) and free from gold farmers since you can't drop the gold.

Finishing off Polygons - Area Measurement in World Wind

2007-10-11T20:41:00.000+09:30

Back on the theme of polygons , another common problem is measuring area of 2d and 3D polygons, polygons on an ellipsoid and polygonal meshes (think realistic farm area measurement for a large farm with hills and valleys).

World Wind now has simple sphere based area calculations suitable for roughly measuring countries, states and something of similar scale. I have finally hooked up the calculations to the measuretool display. The goal is still to allow access to the triangulated terrain mesh and calculate areas with known accuracy for personal properties.

The simple area measurement produces passable results for Metropolitan France ( area 543,965 - 551,695 km² according to wikipaedia article) as shown:

Qgis 0.9 Release and Religion in Space - The re(li)gion outside Earth's Atmosphere

2007-10-11T18:03:00.000+09:30

Finally managed to put together a working Qgis installer with GRASS and PyQt4. The major issue was binary incompatibilities between the MSVC builds of PyQt4 released by Riverbank and the MSYS-MINGW builds of QGIS. With the MSVC build of QGIS going ahead these issues will probably disappear by the next release. Aaron Racicot has been nice enough to provide constant feedback and help me fill the holes in the installer.

Coming to the other niggling topic - that of practicality of Earthly religions in the heavenly frontier (or just space). Most of the religious dogma is built with earth-bound mortals in mind. At the ISS in polar orbit with 15-16 sunrises a day fasts and prayer times become rather irregular, as does prayer direction. There have been a few articles about this issue with a Malaysian astronaut heading to the ISS. The official "how-to-behave-guide" bases things on an initial condition/launch site perspective rather than dynamic time. I was disappointed since I was dreaming up a gyroscope stabilized Kabba facing prayer mat for orbital. Anyway it is good to see dogma and rites being shredded by zero-gravity and fast-moving space-time and the core of the belief system being exposed. This is in the wake of reading some Richard Dawkins evangelism, he is just as bad and narrow minded in his way as the rest of the religious folk.

New solutions to old problems - Point in Polygon

2007-10-10T23:14:00.000+09:30

Some algorithms in computer graphics and topology never get a satisfactory solution that is both fast and logically simple to implement. One is line segment intersection , the other is the classic point-in-polygon (PIP) , fundamental to object selection / picking. I was attempting to make an implementation for World Wind for generic PolygonFeature picking.

Polygons rendered can be quite complex with holes and are curved to the earth's surface. 2D-topological solutions may not be adequate in all cases and DirectX based object selection may not be accurate. There are multiple strategies for PIP solution, here is the summary of a few:
1: Ray-Trace Test
2: Winding Number Test
3: Successive approximation using grids and bounding boxes
4: Triangle test

Not all strategies work for complex polygons(re-entrant,concave, with holes and what have you), and need to be carefully chosen for intended use and efficiency.

The strategy I am proposing for World Wind will be bounding box checks then rigorous checks using winding rule for holes and outer ring, that is if I don't get lazy and choose to use NTS instead, or just tag any quads being rendered using Direct-X ( filled polygons at altitude) and use DirectX picking.

Visiting the Hurt - RIP Little Green Frog

2007-10-06T12:54:00.000+09:30

I have been trying to distract myself by trying to get a working Qgis release ready and writing my PhD proposal. Other than that I am on a tight budget and visiting the sick at the hospital. I may go broke paying reparations.

I visited the tow yard to pick up stuff from the car and the full extent of the damage sunk in. Here are some disturbing images, not meant for the faint hearted. If anyone has any contract jobs , I am happy to take them on. I am badly in need of a new car and some extra cash.

Car Crash - The Aftermath

2007-10-04T19:10:00.000+09:30

1 word of advice, DO NOT crash your car, especially with a passenger. It has been a terrible week so far. Crash, trouble with Visa for Holidays, uncertainties in PhD application.

I have been wading through knee deep in forms for personal injury and damages to 3rd party's car. Paying towing fees and fines. Hopefully the insurance will honour the claims and I will not be in debt for the next few years. Also hopefully no demerit points will be taken and I will keep my provisional licence.

The visa may just get delayed enough for me to be unable to get it before I go on holidays, canceling half of it and hitting me with the hotel bill where I will not be staying. It is just not my week.

The Crash

2007-10-01T21:55:00.000+09:30

No it's not the server. Rain and my bad driving skills have set me back once more. I turned right in front of a car going 80kph. Ended up being spun out of the road into a ditch , I walked away unscathed but the car is a write off and a friend did not fare so well - broken wrist and hip. I spent the weekend at the hospital.

To add to the spookiness it was the birthday of the driver in the other car and a magpie was eying me strangely while I got into the car, it would not fly away , it stood right at my feet looking up. Talk about signs ...

So happy together - GYM side-by-side

2007-09-27T18:10:00.001+09:30

Finally overcame all my prejudice and added the Google Geographic Search to the World Wind PlaceFinder via the REST API. It is all quite nice and simple to interface and highlights the theme of World Wind as a geographic data browser, to stand shoulder to shoulder with all the html-browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and oh-so-notorious Internet Explorer. In the same spirit it should offer equal footing for all the major players to have a presence, we don't think twice about having MSDN, Yahoo Movies and Google Search open in tabs next to each other. An independent geographic browser should offer similar visibility and democracy to those willing to publish data in an understandable format. FlashEarth and OpenLayers demonstrate this bringing together with the imagery as well as the search API, but I guess World Wind will never be able to publicly do the same due to legal wrangles.

A geographic browser should allow server side(image servers/feature search/routing/traffic) applications as well as client side extensions(scripts/plugins/xml layers/movie making) and World Wind to most extent fits the bill. The .NET version is the Firefox of the geobrowsers, with all features thrown in but left open to change(or is it SeaMonkey), while the Java version is Gecko, a barebones multi-platform geographic data rendering engine that you can drop in where you wish.

Now coming to the head-off between the 3 geographic search API's , having them side by side like that is really neat for a comparison. In my personal opinion Google allows the best free-form entry of addresses , producing valid and very accurate results. Here are a few things I tried:

Incomplete entry - Try calif instead of California , Google reads your mind and delivers.
Misspelling - Google does a spell check and suggested correction
Different address format - 182 Murray Street, Tanunda S.A. 5352 ends up in USA in VE but in the place I wanted in Google (possibly because they are tracking my IP, time to get paranoid later).
Post Office accuracy - Google consistently located post offices when supplied just town names, where as Virtual Earth picked a random spot in the town.

Not that I am biased , just do your own tests and see which placefinder gets you what you want, another excuse to try new World Wind where you can find them all side by side.

Google-Digital Globe Repositioning

2007-09-27T01:03:00.000+09:30

Digital Globe is now in a strong position with a successful launch of a functional new high-resolution satellite. Google has got some unwarranted free publicity out of it as well. This has led to some market positioning and jostling between the two entities , with Digital Globe trying to push their new acquisition GlobeExplorer as a direct imagery access service. Everything seems to be resolved now, but Digital Globe seems keen to get back to their tried and tested money from imagery sales business model, this time peddling access to global mosaic with a few extra ribbons such as online processing instead of individual QuickBird Scenes.

The heavily watermarked public WMS works cleanly with World Wind for those pining for QuickBird data, albeit a bit slowly ( we are thinking of putting a tile-cache in front of it). Here is what it has to offer over Sydney.

Engineering Awards Night

2007-09-23T16:36:00.000+09:30

Another occasion to suit up and flash the red-tie - Engineers Australia Annual Awards Dinner. It was quite fun with acrobats from Cirque du Soleil and comedian waiters. I renewed my acquaintance with a few friends I had met last year at the dinner ( I must be a hermit , I meet people once per year).

Then the rest of the night was spent dancing Swing and variations at Boho. Turned out to be quite fun after all.

Merits of doing a PhD

2007-09-22T00:01:00.000+09:30

I am considering doing a PhD on L-Band Polinsar . There is quite a bit of groundwork now in this field with the repeat pass systems from DLR E-SAR and ALOS-PALSAR. I have worked with data from both of these sensors in the past and doing a PhD will be natural continuation.

On the other hand there are disadvantages of doing a PhD too early in the career without an explicit academic bent, or even worse a PhD constrained by commercial interests( not that anything in life is ever unencumbered by it). If anyone wants to offer me any free advice to help me make up my mind feel free to do so.

WorldView-1 Launch and what to do with it

2007-09-19T23:42:00.000+09:30

The big news today in satellite imaging circles is the launch of WorldView-1. The launch videos are on the Boeing site. The not so cognizant seem surprised that WorldView-1 is a panchromatic only sensor. Panchromatic captures greater energy due to the broad filter and uses it to produce higher resolution. WorldView-1 probably had a MultiSpectral sensor as well which is rumored to have suffered some sort of accident during the build and was not replaced due to time and budget constraints.

The imagery will go on priority basis to NGA , people-friendly colour can easily be obtained via fusion with the high quality MultiSpectral from Quickbird via virtually automated chain in minutes if need be. The only problem will be temporal decorrelation producing artifacts due to:

Moving objects (cars,boats,people - they will be clearer at 50cm)
Shadows due to different sun angles
Cloud position differences

Hollywood was still popular in the black and white days as long as the actors did their job and there was a reasonable plot. I have little doubt about the popularity of WorldView-1, the quality of the colour products will depend on the orbital match with Quickbird and that will become clearer once the TLE's are published and both of the satellites are being tracked.

Sharpen-Blur and Brightness-Contrast via Pixel Shader 2.0

2007-09-12T23:10:00.000+09:30

Using pixel shader 2.0 more complex operations can be performed on World Wind texture tiles.

The spectral contrast stretch operations involve converting from RGB to HSI space and adjusting the intensity with a multiplier and offset, then converting back to RGB. This involves a quite long and complex pixel shader. The results are shown here.

Spatial enhancements such as blur,sharpen or any other convolution oriented operations involve look up using texture coordinates and are dependent on texture size. I have implemented blur and sharpen, hopefully arbitrary 3x3 convolutions soon with parameterization of the matrix. Notice how the jpeg artifacts are affected by sharpen and blur.

Quick and Fast Image Processing in World Wind - via Pixel Shaders

2007-09-12T00:01:00.001+09:30

After a brief foray into GLSL shaders and suffering a beat back from the not so good GL support on my laptop graphics card I went back to HLSL and .NET World Wind hoping to implement some simple image processing via pixel shaders and expose the shader parameters via the QuadtileSet properties GUI, much like in NVIDIA FxComposer.

It must be noted that with little hard drive space limits and high bandwidth it is possible to have full-resolution imagery in World Wind as zipped dds, png or even tiff tiles. These can then be processed via a pixel shader to perform a range of enhancements. Spatial operations such as sharpen, blur or unsharp-mask will require reverse texture coordinate lookup and Pixel Shader Model 2.0, but a lot of high speed in your graphics card enhancement of imagery is possible.

I tested out an old shader from Stephan demonstrating multitexturing and started on one for dynamic some brightness-contrast enhancements on a per imagery layer basis.

Weekend in Barossa - Happy B'Day Fleur

2007-08-27T18:05:00.000+09:30

Just back from the weekend of camping in the Barossa Valley Wine Region, organized by Fleur for her birthday. Happy birthday Fleur!! I definitely recommend her as a travel organizer/tour guide.

Saturday I had to wake up early and drive for an hour and a half through the scenic Adelaide and Barossa hills to get to the campsite in Tanunda. This is the longest non-stop drive I have ever done in my car and that was quite exciting. I sped about like crazy with the car loaded up with camping gear. It took time setting up all the tents and buying food for dinner.
The rest of the day was spent winery hopping and the night was spent around the campfire talking non-sense to random people. When I finally went to sleep, I just barely felt that my feet were very cold.

The next day we went for a spot of real wine tasting, mostly because I was driving and could not drink any just smell and swirl it around in my mouth. We found some really good wines at Rockford. It is a small winery with lots of old barrels lying around and a cobwebbed ceiling, but they make very fine wine. Then off to Grand Burge with beautiful sceneries matching the great wine. Some of the aged wine was apparently just found in the cellars from times they did not have permanent records, it was at least 25 years old and tasted delicious. I am sure that will not stand up to a breathalyser test, but luckily I did not have any. Finally we passed the Craneford winery which is owned by Fleur's family for some personal attention, and some jockeyed for mates rates. Now I am back home but the camping gear is still filling up the car, the wine is out and is safely in the dark corners or the fridge as appropriate.

May be I will get some real coding done thanks to the break. Drifting off into vertex and fragment shaders from the land of wine and olives.

World Wind Java and Shader Trickery

2007-08-23T23:36:00.000+09:30

Just to keep up my end I have been doing regular release builds of Qgis lately. Then I had a look at some of the prettier shader applications in World Wind Java. Now I have new goals. I pulled out Render Monkey and the big thick GLSL Tome.

I have the following on my list:

Layer opacity control via fragment shader
Gradual layer transitions as user zooms in, basically eye distance based opacity
Raster enhancement operations - such as RGB to Grayscale, sharpen, contrast stretch etc.
The old favourites sun shading and day-night, this already seems to be there is a simple way in render monkey.
Global fluid water layer, hopefully a simple spherical mesh with a simple vertex shader or varying bump map.

Meanwhile I am waiting for the 0.3.0 release to get a stable start, a lot seems to have been already achieved. At some point I need to start on some decent KML support, I already have a schema based parser from castor, pity so little KML in the wild actually follows the schema.

Qgis 0.9 Preview Installer up

2007-08-08T21:32:00.000+09:30

I put together an NSIS based installer for Qgis 0.9 Preview 1 with some primitive Python detection support for testing, it will complain while loading the Qgis Python bindings if PyQt4-Sip are not located. It should work with the Binary package for PyQt4 available here. I will try to add auto-install of PyQt4 soon.

Post after Long Silence

2007-08-07T23:43:00.000+09:30

It has been a while since I last posted, why ?

Well I changed browsers, Firefox was taking up too much memory making it hard to perform those giant ossim links, so I switched to Opera and Blogger has pathetic support for Opera.

Anyway in this offtime I managed to attend a charity dinner, fall flat on the dance floor, get on the Qgis release team and contrary to popular misconceptions got Qt 4.3 to work with MSVC++ Express Whidbey(patches) and compiled OssimPlanetQt on this platform. It works just fine.

The Qgis 0.9 Ganymede ( my name of choice is in !) Release is undergoing tests and you can pick up a zip archive of binaries here. There are some issues with the PyQt bindings , please leave feed back on your experience here or on the Qgis mailing list. I am working on automatic detection and install of Python2.5+PyQt in the NSIS Script, any snippet suggestions for doing this are also welcome, especially from the PyQt folk so that I know where I am standing.

Generation-Y Employees

2007-07-14T14:49:00.000+09:30

I have never been really keen on generation nomenclature. I am never sure whether I am in generation X or Y. But I am concerned when surveys show a certain bias towards people of my generation. This came to my attention through my Engineering Association newsletter. So I dug up the original article from smartcompany.com.au.

The gist is that younger employees have a high technical skill level, but lack corporate slick. Their bosses increasingly rely on them to provide technical solutions and solve the problems that were impossible 1year ago but are probable now( due to pace of technology movement). The bosses then complain about the high expectations and low loyalty of the younger employees.

Over all the article is not all negative and puts forward a few useful suggestions for making the most of Gen-Y employees.

''The key issue for employers, then, is not whether to hire a member of Gen-Y, but how to make the most of them.''

BigTiff support coming to LibTiff 4.0

2007-07-14T14:16:00.001+09:30

Thanks to the input from Joris and others various enhancements from the BigTiff proposal are now part of LibTiff. Hopefully it will soon get the blessings from Adobe, who own the Tiff Standard and become part of the official Tiff spec and encourage wider adoption.

Adobe seems to be aware of the issue with the 4Gb Tiff barrier and looking into already implemented enhancements such as by Aperio. John Nack points to it in his Adobe Blog. Hopefully Photoshop will soon take this up and implement a tiling scheme for images bigger than 30kx30k pixels.

Meanwhile I am busy shuffling BigTiff into my processing stack. Testing it with Gdal(Support works fines) and Ossim(Support not yet stable). If anyone wants to help in the testing with other applications grab some sample images here.

Qgis 0.9 to be released soon

2007-07-12T00:33:00.000+09:30

Tim is warming up to release Qgis 0.9 before FOSS4G 2007. I am happy to report that it builds easily and cleanly in windows thanks to CMake with all the goodies and the much anticipated Python support via PyQt-Sip.

The Python API makes quick development and debugging of Qgis plugins as breeze. Quite a few have already been made to show the possibilities. To support the release ( and to plug my name choice for the release) I made up a new splash screen. I will welcome any criticism of my design's shortcomings.

Sweet and Sour Pork ... return to World Wind coding

2007-07-03T00:03:00.000+09:30

I have been taking a break from coding World Wind. With the Java version building up and a lot of things on my plate, I was not sure where to concentrate. Knowing the code base well enough I can quickly solve problems and add features in the C# version. So I touched up a small section of KML Importer today for Image Overlays, now hopefully all sorts of image overlays work(local,over http and embedded in kmz). The rotation tag still needs working and I would like to add handles for editing the overlays as well from the Image Overlay plugin. The other nice upgrade would be support for multiple KML files.

Anyway to celebrate this small achievement I tried out the recipe for sweet and sour pork. The results were delicious and rewarding.

M-Party

2007-07-01T18:50:00.000+09:30

Went to Marine's farewell M'Party. The dress up was hilarious , including those not willing to dress up and turning up as 'Me' . Overall there were some pretty good costumes and I attracted plenty of attention strolling home in my magician gear across the crowded Saturday night streets, pity I had to give away my and wand and kanga-rabbit.

The party was taken over by Martians of both sexes and Mummies till the MIB came to rescue.
But they let their hair down and messed up, even the 3 Maids could not get the alien dust off.

Clubland and Thief Land

2007-06-25T10:06:00.000+09:30

This weekend was spent in the city crashing various parties and going to the preview screening of hilarious and well acted Clubland.

As a side effect of leaving my car parked in the same spot for 2 days I also managed to get it broken into. Luckily I have nothing in the car and the car itself is not worth stealing, they even left my street directory behind. Next time I should a note saying ":Thank you for looking:".

TerraSAR-X up and running

2007-06-22T22:40:00.000+09:30

So there was a launch and it reached orbit safely, now TerraSAR-X is providing nice images even in stripmap mode. Spotlight mode is going to be as good as most of the Optical systems, well samples remain to be seen. Here are links to the news item on the DLR site and a launch video.

Vision and Remote Sensing Image Processing

2007-06-13T20:56:00.000+09:30

I started in the world of Image Processing through medical image processing, now I see increasing convergence between various Medical and otherwise Machine Vision algorithms and Remote Sensing Image Processing of data from Space and Airborne sensors.

3 Open Source projects illustrate the state of Open Art and probably most of art in this field:

Orfeo Toolbox - This project developed with blessings from CNES for processing the data from Cosmo-Skymed and Pleiades constellation. It pulls together ITK from the Medical Image processing world and various remote sensing libraries such as ossim and gdal to provide comprehensive image exploitation capabilities.
NASA Vision Workbench - Mainly a machine vision library intended for the Mars Rovers with some Cartographic functionality thrown in via the ever present gdal. The generic camera models - Pinhole(CAVHORE) and Line Scanner are implemented allowing expansion to both ground based and aerial/spacebased sensors.
Ossim-OpenCV extension - Ossim extension for the well known Intel OpenCV Library. This is a nascent project shows some promise in bringing the myriads of tried and tested ideas from the Machine Vision field to Remote Sensing. May be soon we will have real time face recognition and location from satellite images available to everyone - not just the NSA as shown in the movies.

Wine Tour

2007-06-12T21:37:00.000+09:30

Finally back from the seafood and wine festival. The day went like a dream. Nice weather, sunny and no drizzle even in winter. Lots of happy people on the bus. And lots of good wine, did not pay much attention to the food. The Grenache and Fortified Shiraz were outstanding, as was the craziness from everyone on the way back.

MGS Portable Ops and Gram-Schmidt

2007-06-06T00:25:00.000+09:30

Time now to tackle the next "boss" in the Portable Ops. Playing it in Japanese does not make it any easier. I have to make assumptions about the meaning of the mission briefs in addition to doing the missions, even after reading the rush guide. Grabbing and building up an unpaid army is always fun though, as is creating soldiers from Access Points Scans, brings new meaning to war driving. There should be a PSP Kismet.

I also tackled a complete ossim build with VC++ Express Whidbey and Microsoft's compiler runs significantly faster than the mingw-gcc. Had to deal with various vagaries though such as non-embedded manifests and small errors in the system headers. Congratulations to the ossim team for getting 1.6.8 out. With the build in place I experimented with implementing Gram-Schmidt algorithm for fusion. This tries to solve linear equations to model the relationship between panchromatic and spectral data and infer the right weighting to apply. Here are some preliminary results compared to Brovey - hey at least it works.

Leica Titan and FaceBook Networking

2007-05-30T00:42:00.000+09:30

I finally signed up to Facebook. I seem to be doing all my networking lately on the net. It must be the winter effect, don't feel like going out much. It evened hailed today, small rain drop sized hailed. The temperatures fell rapidly too.

Going along with the networking theme( I feel like a TV news caster doing a bridge), Leica has released its 3D globe application - Titan allowing users to network and share data and views, a very similar concept Nigel is trying in the World Wind white boarding plugin, with perhaps a deeper implementation since it comes from a commercial software house. All existing Leica customers may take it on board. Though terrain detail seems to be missing.

Leica might also be taking on board new customers from the acquisition of Australian based ER Mapper. ER Mapper is well known for the very popular and now Open Sourced ECW format and their Image Web Sever is one of the best for serving ECW's and supporting true streaming(a bit like progressive jpeg seen on websites) - the image can be viewed as it is being transmitted using the ECWP protocol. Time for JPEG2000 might really be here.

Open Source Satellite OS

2007-05-29T19:37:00.000+09:30

Open Source is finally making it big into space. Not only in delivering data over the internet, helping in processing imagery but powering the core OS of satellites themselves. Terrasar-X, which should be launched today from Baikanur(Star City), is powered by SCOS-2000. An Open OS for satellites developed by ESA. The source is of course not classical open source and is in limited circulation, it still makes news.

Imagery Cross Pollination

2007-05-21T00:27:00.000+09:30

It is official now via a press release. Google is replacing the 15 metre Landsat mosaic from EarthSat with 2.5 metre pan-sharpened product from Spot Image. On the other hand Digital Globe's newly acquired subsidiary GlobeExplorer is bringing the Quick Bird archive to Microsoft Virtual Earth. With all these distribution platforms imagery temporal and spectral resolution can play a part as well as spatial resolution. Satellite imaging is slowly becoming ubiquitous.

Cooking Stir-fry, Area Measurement and Qgis-0.9

2007-05-20T20:46:00.000+09:30

Analytics indicate a lots of hits originating from the keyword cooking. So just as a publicity ploy I will include some of my cuisine which have recently included Kangaroo steak marinated in yoghurt and Chicken Stir fry today.

I also did a few test-builds of Qgis 0.9 using mingw with Postgres and Grass support. Both seem to work fine. I would like to see this release named Ganymede(just a suggestion for insert moon here).

Also inline with adding more simple GIS functionalities in World Wind. I started doing an Area Measurement Tool. Just need to add ellipsoid and terrain based area calculations so that no farmers come after my blood for making their plot smaller.

WorldWind Java SDK

2007-05-11T23:00:00.000+09:30

World Wind Java as Patrick always points out is API centric and wrapper applications are a matter of the developer's imagination.

This is very true and it insulates the average user from taking full advantage of the current World Wind Java release. Though some exciting applications such as an F-16 Flight Sim and Car Tracker have already appeared showcasing the flexibility of the SDK.

The source release is a breeze to import,build,test and run in Eclipse. Hopefully some Eclipse RCP applications will be making appearance soon. May be it can become the 3D tab in UDig.

World Wind Java is out

2007-05-10T19:22:00.000+09:30

Well finally World Wind Java has had the big splash release at the Java One conference. So now the Java programmers have a 3D Globe "Bean" to play with, set properties and fly around. Any of the multiple Java Windowing Kits (AWT, SWT or Swing) can be used to obtain Multi Platform functionality out of this. Some of the performance junkies may want to do an FPS count of using JOGL versus using Google Earth in native mode(often GE does not pick up hardware acceleration, especially on Linux) or ossimPlanet. I will do one once I have time.

Meanwhile enjoy the video. Access to the code will soon be here.

Perfect Poles, Borrowed WMS Dialogs and Merging Icons

2007-05-08T00:11:00.000+09:30

I will take a break from vaguely philosophical posts and write something useful. In a perfect example of Open Source cross pollination, ossimPlanetQt has borrowed the look and feel of the WMS Import funtionality from QGIS.

There is also another very desirable functionality of ossimPlanet I would like to transfer to World Wind, perfect poles using cube segmentation. Due to the use of triangle fins, World Wind (and Google Earth) end up with singularities at the poles, this is not the case in ossimPlanet. But I believe it will require a substantial overhaul of planet rendering to duplicate. Various alternate planet rendering techniques were tried by Chris at one point, but none was as simple as the UV sphere in use now.

Due to various behaviours expected from icons, World Wind had ended up with 3 distinct icons classes. Now they are happily merged together into one concrete class with all the functionality. Hope we did not miss anything.

Valuation and Human Exchanges

2007-05-07T18:52:00.000+09:30

This starts from the premise: How likely is code I write today to keep me fed in a year?

Human psyche is tuned to 4 types of exchanges (Quoted from The Blank Slate):
1: Communal Sharing - Where members of a community give and receive without keeping track of things.
2: Authority Ranking - Where things are given unquestioningly to members of a higher class or people in power, presumably in return for security and livelihood.
3: Equality Matching - Exchange of goods and favours at an equal level. More like barter and I will scratch your back if you scratch mine. Low level trades fall here.
4: Market Pricing - The firmament of modern economy, a complex global system of perceived value. The individual psyche is at loss to grasp the full breadth of it. Strange and asymmetric pricing may develop due to information bottlenecks, profit maximization strategies, government protection or artificially generated scarcity/abundance where there are only very few global producers.

I am very much at ease with Communal Sharing (working on Open Source projects) , but Market Pricing is the most interesting in its dynamics. How does the world value the efforts put into the shared pot by a community and how are they willing to pay for it ? How do individuals in the community benefit from it ? A value cannot be assigned to each man-hour or thousands lines of code. Instead value is in the perception of utility, primarily created by wide-spread application and bolstered with marketing glitz.

Microsoft and Open Source

2007-05-06T13:15:00.000+09:30

Writing software is ultimately an artistic and creative activity. It requires imagination, analysis and creative insight to produce elegant code. Not much creativity can come out of a group bogged down in commercial maintenance and patching, or under tight deadlines to deliver a product. Such people engage more in just hacking code together to fill the holes in the leaky OS made at Redmond or adding glitter to the long delayed Vista, rather than producing true leaps in technology.

Most creative and ground-breaking work is done in start-ups which eventually get acquired by larger corporations which are in what I would call maintenance mode with their existing code-base. SeaDragon the maker of PhotoSynth , now part of Microsoft labs is one of favourite illustrations for this argument.

Other than a start-up exciting new work may be done by individuals working on various Open Source projects. Microsoft has been trying to foster this with Codeplex and Shared Source. It has already borne fruit, IronPython is being adopted my Microsoft as an extension scripting language. I believe Microsoft also uses Codeplex as a recruiting ground.

Though not very accurate Ohloh offers some very insightful metrics on Open Source projects. The valuations are quite revealing. Worldwind is valued at 6.9million, GDAL is valued at 8.1million and the Linux Kernel is valued at a whooping 87million. Some companies may have this kind of money off-hand but it will save them a lot of time to exploit or bolster an existing solid codebase than make their own from scratch.

Blogging Guidelines

2007-05-04T18:07:00.000+09:30

I was researching corporate blogging policies and came across this post on Official Yahoo Guidelines.

There is also a simple summary in one of the comments:

Okay, if don't be stupid is too short and simple, how about "When you blog, think about reading the text out loud to your parents, your current and future bosses and colleagues, your friends, and your significant other."

Most of the tech heavy companies encourage their employees to blog, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft leading the way. Some Northrop Grumman employees from the shadows are also secret bloggers. A lot of start-ups maintain development blogs. In some cases it is free low-cost publicity and in other cases it might hinder the philosophy of security through obscurity.

Information is currency and needs to be carefully controlled, I paraphrase again from the Yahoo policy blog:

"....And realize that once a cat is out of the bag, you can never get the damned thing back in. The blog world is incredibly efficient at spreading rumors, secrets, rants, hyperbole, and your mistakes.

You'll make mistakes. We all do. Just try to be smart about it."

I need to keep this in mind when making every post.

OssimPlanet strikes back

2007-05-03T00:36:00.000+09:30

Want multi-platform Open Source Earth Viewer, backed up by a powerful image processing library, coded in C++ with a QT Gui, then ossimPlanetQt is your product.

I did a fresh build on windows today with mingw. It now supports World Wind imagery layers via a plugin (WMS is supported as well) and allows drag and drop import GDAL supported raster( a functionality I added to World Wind recently). It also does blend, swipe and other image operations on the GPU and uses an accurate ellipsoid model of the earth. The only hitch is streaming terrain but that is being worked on. Who cares about filling up a harddrive with SRTM tiles when you can run this on 20+ screens?

Flickr Plugin Pop-Ups

2007-05-02T14:45:00.000+09:30

I have not touched it in a while but it does have good potential. It is like the Google Earth Panoramio layer with Tag based search options for the area you are looking at.

I worked some of the KMLImporter code into it while merging World Wind Icons and Icons that behave like icons in Google Earth. Here is a sample Camel, obtained using Flickr and a search based on the keyword "Camel".

Taking a break helps get things done

2007-04-26T18:27:00.000+09:30

Last Saturday I had a lot of fun, went out on town and won small dance off's at Zhivago. This helped me settle down and I took ANZAC Day to fix the small bug that was plaguing Dstile (promise this is my last dstile post till I get the drag and drop terrain import working). So it can now import MultiSpectral and Panchromatic Imagery Seamlessly and save them as .png tiles. It is of course a bit slow with World Wind showing off all the direct-x graphics goodies at the same time, but it works. Till terrain import gets done have fun with this one.

Dstile using GDAL-SWIG C# API

2007-04-08T21:14:00.000+09:30

Dstile like functionality has finally been made programmatic in World Wind allowing run-time tiling of imagery and quick import of file based formats such as Tiff, Imagine, ECW and MrSID into World Wind. ESRI ArcSDE formats will soon be supported by GDAL as well.

While implementing it I ran into some API bugs as expected. These need to resolved before the functionality is ready for prime time. The bindings are also a moving target. The developments in GDAL will need to be tracked to keep this functionality current.

As WWJava develops it will benefit from the extensive Java based format support in JAI, GeoTools and GDAL Java API.

Dstile and Imagery Drag Drop

2007-03-25T13:51:00.000+09:30

Some may think Super Overlays are cool, but you can do the same in World Wind by just dragging and dropping georeferenced imagery. The tiles are built using the windows version of the same tool that tiles the imagery on the server. A simple front end figures out what options you will need to add the imagery and produces a corresponding xml. The tiling takes some time to build to full resolution, and reproject.

For instant gratification I am considering doing a quick thumbnail of the reprojected image and loading it as an Overlay. This will also allow georeferencing by hand of ungeoreferenced imagery.

Most of the heavy lifting is done by the GDAL C++ API which are used in Dstile. I am planning a migration to the C# bindings as they mature.

Kyoto and Carbon SAR Mosaics

2007-03-22T22:04:00.000+10:30

I have been tic-tacing with the Kyoto and Carbon science team to bring their PALSAR mosaics to World Wind. At one point there was a note that World Wind has no support for KML. So I made a KML Ground Overlay with one of the Jers Mosaic scenes available at the GRFM(Global Rain Forest Monitoring) Site. The kml can be found here. It works fine in both Google Earth and World Wind.

World Wind does not have extensive support for KML, but to say it has no support is a fallacy. There was some discussion on the mailing list about this too. I am planning to get all the free JERS data from GRFM and serve it via World Wind , even if it is just to prove a point.

The best and broadest user reach can be obtained through hosting a WMS server which is supported in a lot of viewers.

Last Night in Jakarta

2007-03-18T21:12:00.000+10:30

So Friday night out after more work. This time we started with dinner, watching belly dancing and smoking shisha in a Lebanese restaurant. Then moved onto CJ's with a fantastic live band playing latin music and lots of gorgeous people.

I am going back tomorrow. Need to manipulate situations so that I get to come back.

In Flight Cake Service

2007-03-18T00:43:00.000+10:30

I have been bouncing around Asia quite a bit these days. I was flying Singapore Airlines on the 14th which also happens to be my birthday. Work had set quite a surprise for me , they had a cake ordered for me on the plane. I walked through check-in and immigration being wished happy birthday at every step.

Had quite a bit of fun once in Jakarta as well. Went with a few friends Fabrice has made while there to Aphrodite. More nights of action in Jakarta coming up.

Night in Tokyo

2007-03-10T21:59:00.000+10:30

Finally managed to get away for a day to loiter about in Tokyo. Started in Akihabara again. Passed by Ginza and the Kabuki Theater. Got to go there for a show sometime. Finally ended up in Ruppongi hills with panoramic view of the sprawl of Tokyo.

Mori museum and the Tokyo city view are good counterpoints. The current exhibition shows some Japanese Scrolls and Panels of life in Japan as it used to be an looking out of the balcony you can see Tokyo as it is now - a river of light.

Back to Jakarta in a few days hardly any time to breath. Of course I would be doing JAXA a discourtesy if I did not include some of their very nice and affordable 2.5m product here.

2nd day in Tsukuba - Road to the poor house

2007-03-06T23:39:00.000+10:30

The second day of conference is nearly over. I have done my presentation with usual flourish and some colourful SAR images. Then I went to Tokyo-Akihabara with Kostas from DLR. Spent some time admiring the lights and trying all the ATM's in sight. I was feeling rather poor , till I realized the only international ATM's are the Post Office - something to be really careful about next time I am in Japan.

There was some interest in using World Wind to display imagery from a Global PALSAR mosaic built up every 4months (Over land and cloud free - it's SAR !!) from the Kyoto and Carbon initiative. They have been fiddling with Google Earth since that's all they know off but World Wind can push in on this, since adding all the KML's to show imagery in Google is a real pain. Hope we can attract the Scientific community on the Envrionmental and Global Warming issues more with this data.

Singapore-Narita-Tsukuba

2007-03-04T22:51:00.000+10:30

Finally I am at my destination. After flying around for 13 hours. The time difference is only abut 1 hour from Adelaide but it is winter instead of summer. It is getting warmer in Tokyo though, nearly spring.

Tsukuba Centre is about an hour train ride from Akihabara. It has got quite a few science and research setups and a giant rocket overlooking the city. I did the first two things i had to do: went on a Manga shopping spree and got the latest chapters of Bleach and had as much Sushi and Sashimi I could handle. The eel tastes the best.

Clipsal 500 and Night before Japan

2007-03-03T11:20:00.000+10:30

Finally I am on the long awaited trip to Tokyo. So I decided to go wild on the friday night before. Plenty of people in town for the Adelaide Clipsal 500 and showgirls in plenty. I went off with a random group of builder and had heaps of crazy fun. Talked to a showgirl about Freud and Oedipus complex, she is first year psyche. It was quite refreshing.

Finished off dog tired dancing at Sugar - with girls pulling me around, and aggressive guys threatening to throw me out. Barely got out of that one ... Phew!

Now on the long flight to Narita. See you all on the other side.

Guilty of Web Design

2007-02-28T00:16:00.000+10:30

It is often said that programmers should not do Graphic Design. Now I know why. If I can get away with toying with vertices in Blender, I can't get away with toying with colours in CSS. This bright yellow page is my handiwork. I am getting better ... slowly. I need to tone it down.

Soon I will be willing to do web design for beds and other things in kind to put in the bed with me ....

Ironclad World

2007-02-26T19:31:00.000+10:30

So finally we have an Iron Python console in World Wind thanks to Ranen Ghosh. It is called TerminallyIll but you can do some sick cool scripting and toying around with it. Like ... it will be trivial to make model spin around with 1 line of script code. Here are few lines showing changing over from BMNG Bathymetry(default) to plain old BMNG.

Sydney Landmarks

2007-02-24T11:37:00.000+10:30

I decided to give the IDE a break for a few days and took up Blender to make some simple models in .x format for use with World Wind Model Feature. Here are the results of a few hours of labour, a couple of simplistic models of Sydney Landmarks.

This is a call to all aspiring modelers to add some contributions to our collection. Various global landmarks are appreciated. Failing that, be selfish and model your own house or office. Help us grow World Wind.

World Wind Video with Cinematic Effects

2007-02-21T16:35:00.000+10:30

Fabrice has come up with a nice World Wind Video complete with lens flare and cloud transitions. The idea is to deliver the world to the palm of your hand.

Viva Las Vegas

2007-02-21T14:36:00.000+10:30

The most detailed Planet 9 Model available for World Wind - Las Vegas works in version 1.4 with a simple camera fix and boy it looks good. I could not resist. Here is the best of Vegas, money comes from 3G's Girls, Gambling and Games.

World Wind 1.4 and 3D Cities

2007-02-17T14:42:00.000+10:30

It was a long and painful labour and at times the parents threatened to shoot the doctor, but finally World Wind 1.4 is out of the SVN as a release. I cross posted on the Google Earth Boards hoping to get some flame, but not much luck yet. There might be new forums for GE, need to check that out.

It is good to see more creative and progressive companies using World Wind as delivery platform for their creations and ideas. World Wind has similar potentials as Second Life in this respect and can create a significant trading ecosystem. Planet 9 Studios which specializes in 3D Modelling of buildings and cityscapes has several cities available in World Wind. The World Wind team is working to turn this into a suitable business idea for paying clients.

How Now Brown Cow ?

2007-02-10T22:42:00.000+10:30

So now we have an integrated Collada parser which constructs a mesh from the vertices , but Textures are not there yet. The Object selection code is also half way there, so someone can make a plugin with farm animal noises, click on the cow and it says ... moo! No better way to teach animal sounds to kids.

Here is a Collada cow staring at the stars and pondering general relativity.

TV Tuner and Curried Sausages

2007-02-05T19:52:00.000+10:30

My flatmate got a new all black mac book pro with a TV Tuner card, so in a fit I dug up my old TV Tuner card and watched the Australia-New Zealand match. It only works halfway with an external antenna. I really need a better card and antenna. Luckily Australia won. So it was worth my while.

I also managed to watch Al Gore's documentary, "The Inconvenient Truth". Apart from the obvious political spin, he does make some valid points about Global Warming our responsibility. So Withak's Global Flood Plugin is rather timely. It still has some Z-Buffer issues and I am looking at adding the transparency and wave shaders for localized water to it. Otherwise it does a good job.

I also tried a new dish - sausages curried with red paste and mustard. It turned out pretty well and goes with a nice beer. Now time to enjoy the Australian Summer and wonder why the weather is suddenly changing from Mediterranean to Monsoon.

GDAL PALSAR Complex Driver

2007-01-28T20:30:00.000+10:30

About 1 year ago I wrote the ALOS-PALSAR Driver for RAT in IDL. Since then I have replaced IDL with scientific Python in my kit. The objective is to eventually get RAT functions implemented into a Python Based Radar Toolkit which will attract greater developer and user base.

GDAL has a quite usable Python API and is great for getting Geographic Rasters into code for manipulation. So with some help from Frank Warmerdam and following the minimalistic tutorial I wrote a driver for the PALSAR Complex Level 1.1 products. Level 1.5 products are already supported in GDAL via the generic SAR_CEOS driver. I am planning to add the gcp support to the driver next so that polarimetric processing information can be interpreted in real world coordinates.

Australia Day and JAXA presentation

2007-01-27T12:13:00.001+10:30

Happy Australia Day to everyone , well even though it is a bit belated. My neighbour had an ultra noisy party so I could not forget it was Australia day even in my sleep.

I have a chance to go to JAXA to present on the work I did on ALOS-PALSAR calibration. Mostly checking the reflectors were pointed at the satellite and analysing the data in RAT. Here is a sample analysis result and the location where the reflectors were. They are of course not there anymore.

RC-Heli

2007-01-20T14:03:00.000+10:30

On an impulse I bought a Venom Night Ranger II heli. Now I can't stop dreaming up ways of toying with it and hooking up a feed to World Wind. I am still getting use to steering it. Quite easy to take off, but a nightmare to fly. Since it is new I am really scared of crashing it.

For a worldwind feed I will need readings from the builtin Gyro and will have to hook up Camera,GPS and some link gear. Getting it all in weight will involve plenty of looking around , but I am sure it is possible. If anyone has experience drop me a comment.

Cases, Races and Moonlight Cinemas

2007-01-17T20:18:00.000+10:30

Yesterday was a fun day, the case monkeys are off my back and I am a free man. I also managed to stumble into the Tour Down Under Adelaide Sprint.

Finally I watched the slightly mind bending "Scanner Darkly" in the Moonlight Cinema - Botanical Gardens.

The other thing is that I have managed to get myself an RC - Chopper. Expect live feed hookups to Worldwind soonish.

Farewell at Glenelg and Comets

2007-01-14T23:34:00.000+10:30

One of my friends is heading off to Canberra next week for work, sort of relocating for a long time. Since ACT is sort of land locked and all they have for large water body is a large lake he decided to have a farewell at the beach since beaches will be pretty rare in Canberra.

The day went pretty well with lots of running around in the water and on the sand, while facing the wrath of a disgruntled old lady who got hit by our ball.

We finished with dinner on the grass and sighting of Comet McNaught at sunset. All this was topped off with gems about every number being special and 1729 being extra special.

Take care and stay in touch Peter. Sorry about the bad astrophotography with the phone camera.

OssimPlanetQt first time from CVS to mingw-windows

2007-01-13T21:23:00.000+10:30

To those not in the know , OssimPlanetQt is yet-another globe viewing application. Written using the cross-platform QT Windowing Kit and OpenSceneGraph , the rendering is done using OpenGL.
The main programming language is C++ and it can use the Worldwind Servers as data source as well as standard WMS's.

I am apparently the first one to compile and run it on Windows using the mingw compiler toolchain and the QT 4.2 kit from Trolltech.

A howto will shortly appear on the ossim wiki. Just to draw a few parallels - Google Earth is also C++/OGL based and uses the QT Windowing system and draws most of its data from Digital Globe.

Flickr Plugin

2007-01-07T23:04:00.000+10:30

The last act during my x-mas/new year "break" is a semi-working Flickr Plugin for Worldwind. The GUI is still missing for the user's access code entry and tag/date/camera based searches, but that will be easy since the caching and rendering mechanisms are working. Here is a screenshot, guess which tag I used to search. No looking at the code ( Yes it is hard coded at the moment!).

Eventually the photos will show up as textured rectangles, hopefully someone nice will work out something to make it work with Photosynth which looks bare at times and without context/content. Worldwind can provide a Global Context and Flickr can provide Global Content.

New Year and New Measure Tool

2007-01-04T03:56:00.000+10:30

Well I have finally got over the New Years with minimal drinking and dancing on New Years Eve. I did manage to polish off a whole bottle of Bordeaux and dance with a girl while her boy friend glared. I know when not to push my luck too far.

Just getting back into coding Worldwind. The Release candidates are doing fine. I am coding up the MeasureToolNG with Withak utilizing the enhancements in the core rendering API. This tool will also support terrain profiling and area calculations.

I have also got my name down in another open source project. Qgis release is out , and I helped Tim put together an MSYS build environment to build it on Windows.

And of course my new year resolution is to not have any new year resolution and let the universe surprise me.