At the Intercontinental Resort in Bali

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

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

Box seat at the Tour Down Under

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.