Digital Globe and Google

I understand that Google Licences its High resolution satellite imagery from Digital Globe and being in the Imagery field I know that raw Imagery cost a huge lot being the major barrier for access to it for ordinary people and even people in emergencies.

This barrier is artificially kept in place by Satellite vendors such as Digital Globe and GeoEye. They only bend back for the large scale customers such as Governments and Corporations who buy 1000's of scenes and use up the capacity on the satellite. This is a good and working business model but is not certainly flexible enough for a retail user, as I would call a person purchasing a single scene. The Imagery market place needs to evolve to be friendlier to the retail user. Google with its data delivery capacity is a step in the right direction. Digital Globe should see the opportunity that exists here and exploit the marketplace. The profit margins may be slimmer but the populace will be hooked to Imagery as they are to Webcomics or Phone Ringtones. This will bode well for the Next Generation satellites such as Worldview.

Frankly the Imagery business could use a lot of streamlining and less back biting and misunderstandings on licence issues.

String of misfortunes

This week is just not turning out right. First the dread call, next the barrel of my canon IXUS broke with an E18 error which is quite painful. Thankfully I have warranty on it. The lens mechanism is apparently quite fragile as I have come to find out from various posts.

Hope to get it fixed soonish. Not feeling like spending any money since I can see big expenses in the horizon. Save me from the clutches of the lawyers.

Proxy Tilers and Linking Policy

Google maps explicitly states that if you embed Google Maps on your site and expect heavy traffic you have to notify them.

This does not stop Manifold from using it in their application and boasting about it. So what is the acceptable use policy with regard to Applications/Desktop clients using Google Maps data. It must be somewhere. If you leach too much Google will die on you and claim that you are a virus, which they are right about since bandwidth is being chewed up by freeloaders eager to see theirs and everyone elses house.

But, if an Open Application such as Worldwind transparently uses this data with acknowledgement and brings it to more people who probably cannot use Google Earth due to low bandwidth connections or want to operate in remote areas in offline mode, it should be encouraged since it brings the benefit of this great dataset to more important uses such as Emergency Response rather than just the Desktop Globetrotter. The community can also add bandwidth they have bought to the Dark Fibre Google owns to further ease the use of the imagery.

Parties,Life and World

Ok great do on Friday. Jive and Barbecue and Drinks. Happy birthday Helene.
It was perfect till I got a dreaded call I have been expecting for a while. Hopefully the storm will blow over.
KML Support in Worldwind is coming in leaps and bounds so are graphics goodies.


Sun shading


KML support

I am also planning to bring the RAT project to sourceforge and a wider community.Watch out for simple folks knowing SAR.

Worldwind Forks

There seems to be a plethora of Worldwind forks cropping up left right and centre.Here are just a few.It seems to be getting a life of its own. I am holding my breath for a Linux Distro wars like scenario.

That cannot be bad, in fact it will make more choice available and make the 3D-Globe world a richer place.

• Punt


• Dapple


• SERVIR Viz


• NEXTIMAGE


• TOPAZ

Oceanography in Worldwind

I have been trying the Oceanography addon. The data from NOAA and SeaWIFS looks very good and provides tonnes of clues on where ocean currents occur and how weather patterns affect the Ocean. If only these could be obtained real time.

Telstra for has very long international APN that got me into trouble.
APN: telstra.wap.mnc001.mcc505.gprs

Better Worldwind Buidings

I have made buildings in Worldwind using KML , but there are definitely better ways of doing it as Skyline(textured buildings), OsgPlanet or this one using WorldWind show. I like the shading on the buildings makes them look more realistic.
Frankly I am jealous.

Jakarta and Jakartans

Jakarta is a nice albeit dirty crowded and smoggy city. What makes it so nice is the people. They are friendly polite and in the right night club super fun.

In my 1week in Jakarta I spent 2 complete nights dancing away and going to meetings the for the day in other ones.

Had a trip to Pulau Putri as well with beautiful white sand beaches and clear blue water and is typical of me i forgot to bring swimming gear.

Singapore Airport

Nice wireless here makes blogging on the move a breeze. Changi is the biggest airport for cargo in South-East asia the passenger terminal is huge too. Tonnes of duty free shopping and general indulgence.
Pity I am only in Singapore for 3 hours. Been here before for months , I absolutely loved it. I want to come back here sometime and look at CRISP.

The Fog

At most times life and future are very foggy. You can never be sure something will just work out. Consider the gadget trials of today, we get it on the last day we have no connector cable and on top of all this it does not work, FANTASTIC !!

Well I hope these lovely fog pictures will portray the beauty of uncertainty.
Nice drive to work after a great weekend.Salsa , Superman and Philosophy all you could ask for in a weekend really. Plus the apprehension of going on a trip overseas.

On the Worldwind front the fantastic new camera has sent me on a bug hunting trip looking for all the zillions of things that could be broken, but the rock steady camera is worth the pain.

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.