Indonesia here I come

Having a short trip to Indonesia next week. Really need a break, I have been pulling my hair out for a while.
Worldwind finally has a stable camera and filled polygons which will be nice to have.
The KML support for filled-extruded polygons is not at its best as the plasma shield above pentagon shows.
My Google Summer of Code Mentoring is going well. Looks like I will get a green T-Shirt like the google girls.
I am also thinking of extending the Global Clouds plugin into the future using predictive cloud maps.

Ejabberd

I have finally my own chat server. The light weight and clusterable ejabberd is up and works fine. Even made it federate with jabber.org. Erlang is an esoteric language I am not familiar with but it looks quite good.

Trying out Python and converting stuff from Python to Java. I wish Jython had asyncore it would make my life so much easier, but then again Java threading is quite useful as well. If I learn enough python I might even try making a Worldwind Python scripting plugin and switch RAT to numeric python. SAR processing in Python will be fun.

Worldcup is exciting as usual. Italy will be pretty tough to beat for Australia. Germany is thrashing Sweden.

Had my driving lesson today. Nearly perfected my U-turn hopefully will be doing 3-point turns next. Finally freedom in the wide open places of Australia.

Busy time .. lazy time

Staying up too late and living in other time zones has not been healthy even though I do my fair share of work. Was getting burnt this week for being late to work, should really get some sleep but I haven't updated my blog in a while and Fabrice just spent the whole day doing the same so why not.

I tried Imagine Autosync today on some EROS-B imagery.It works like a charm.Picked some 350 tie points in seconds and rewrapped the image. Working with overviews and multiresolution correlation makes it really efficient.

Talking about overviews.Nowak's dstile utility for tiling and building overviews in Worldwind format is now available for windows.Please give it a try and make notes of improvements and limitations.If someone wants to write a small man-page I will buy you beer.

Night at PJ's and DM Award

The award ceremony was mild but the before and after was not. I ran into Sil while rushing to the presentation.

Afterwards I had a beer with Adrian and Grant , plus a lot more in PJ's. On top of that I encountered a possum.

I am still alive but sick

Ok did not go to work today. Stayed home sick. So I finally have time to write stuff in my blog.
A lot of small things have happened in the past few weeks. Including me buying a car, setting up a server rack. Going to a few salsa parties and movies. Regularly working on WorldWind now. Probably will get more done if I had a Windows laptop or a laptop beefy enough to run windows on qemu or vmware.

Oh forgot to mention I am receiving the award for the best Integrated Circuit Design in my year due to fortutious circumstaces. The fact that Grant was on our team and that he could not sleep so he made a 136-lambda gate.Hopefully will meet up with some of the guys there.

Prawn Curry

I made pretty good Panang Curry with prawns tonight. Hmmm, can't imagine I can actually cook.

Weekend and Quiz Night

Finally had a big weekend out. Watched movies, read books, bummed around and had a fun quiz night. Not much work got done but I learnt a few new card games. I am now getting back to working on the WW-JOGL Terrain Accessor and marvelling at the heavily waternarked high res Globe Explorer Data.
Here is a photo of the winning BackPack Oz Quiz Night Team with the prizes of course.
I am rather proud of myself too since i managed to drive from office to home unscathed, learning to drive is fun.

WW2D and WW2DPlusOne

Hey hey Pat Murris has done it again. He has beaten NASA to a working JOGL-WorldWind. I got it running with jdk1.5.0 on Gentoo and jdk1.4.2 on Suse. After a bit of rebuilding.Vitaliy also seems to have a jar file and class loader based plugin structure figured out - working around the PluginBase class.
Enjoy a hot cup of Java. Hope this codebase is useful and does not muddy the waters of the current java version in the works at NASA.

Worldwind Donation and Driving Lesson

Hmm done a few good things lately.
1. Put the idea of Jabber based whiteboarding tool for QGIS in timlinux's head.
2. Donated $325 toward Nowak's Opteron 165(He is still whining about having to pay $30 for postage).
3. Learnt to drive and did not hit anything for nearly an hour.Very little on road driving though.Hopefully my steering and car control will get better with time.
Anyway just to stay consistent I have decided that this page will have links to the cool artwork from Inverloch and Earthsong. Great work girls.

Oakbanks

I finally made it to the world's biggest carnival race. Lots of people and it's busy as anything.Nice views. Pity I lasted only the first few races after a bottle and some more of Chardonnay.

Moving house

I have moved house to Woodside. Town with 1300 people and it's walking distance to the pub.The girl I am renting from has two red kelpies - they are really nice. The garden is a bit overgrown but can be cleaned up. Just provisioning ADSL. Hope I'll get net in a few weeks. Check out the nice moonrise photo as well.
Going to OakBank for the races over easter , I have bought my pass and hope to have some winnings. Take photos and have fun.

Melbourne Fleet Comms

Back from Melbourne after two days of staying on my feet for 6 hours at a stretch at the conference. The demo worked fine with Worldwind-Kamap and Video streams and Inertial GPS locators. All in all it was pretty impressive. Here is a photo of the setup. I admit the joystick made a few people sick.

ESRI - GeoSpeech

After looking at Open Source for ages I decided do look at some pay huge dollars softwares and what's happening in them at the cutting edge. The large software companies typically get so incoherent and fragmented that it is hard to find any exciting new stuff not tainted by huge amounts of promotional babble. Here is something interesting -> ESRI has been working on GeoSpeech and GeoChat. Good luck to them hope they provide a component model not completely tied to the ArcGIS desktop,

Geocoder and Cave Life

Someone is accusing me of being a caveman(I am having small encounters with the law) and I saw people working from their basement and being cavemen. Anyway I found some time to make a Geocoder. You can find it here.The base technology page is terracode. Last weekend I was at Matthew's farewell, and Fab is off to France too. Those rioters will be getting major backup. I swear the people in the photos are clones, look at the similarity of expression.
A WorldWind game seems to be in the works from ShockFire. We would like XMPP-Jabber support.Hence I set up wildfire. Look forward to insane joystick gaming and shooting satellites to real missions such as find Ithaca.

St. Patrick's Day

Friday and end of work. Leaving early and having a long night at PJ O'Brien's and everywhere else. Terrapages seems to be giving Sensis a run for it's money using G-NAF data. The photos are finally here too.

WFS-T WorldWInd and Corner Reflectors

Geoserver does a very good job with WFS-T making it ideal for collaboration tools. After adding carbon support i think I can use it easily for prebuilt geo-collaboration work which may need some extension for video , audio and full immersion collaboration that I want to work on.
Meanwhile I managed to use blender to make my first animation with camers movements and lense angle change. Will get into the advanced skinning and inverse kinematics as soon as I can. Meanwhile I checked out PovRay. Well they are way ahead. I'll go on and use anything I can for the sake of science.
The Landsat and Aster for WorldWind also seems to be gathering pace. I wish we could get some ALOS.

Bridging and Planetarium

I tried bridging and IP aliasing my interfaces so that I can stay connected to something all the time. Works if I do it by hand, Gentoo network scripts seem to have some sort of problem. This is the official linux bridging howto.

I braved the cold and went out in the night to look at the stars. Then I chicken out and played with stellarium and skycam instead.

MAR and NDISWRAPPER

Finally CISCO and its cheapy conterpart Linksys are helping out. My wireless card died so I went and got a LinkSys WPC54G. Works marvellously with ndiswrapper and the windows drivers that came on the cd. Upgraded my kernel to 2.6.14 and even got the nvidia kernel driver to work with xorg. Things seemed too good till I found this bug on the MAR. That is going to make my life harder.

DragonFly

This speaks for itself. I think i overdid the colors but fire has to go with dragons.

Blender & Yafray

3D Engineering is really cool ... really getting into it just as Fabrice is getting into video editing. Here is my low effort work in Blender. Now I can export that render directly to GL and play with it. Looking forward to play PlaneShift as well.