Confused Life - Reloaded

Last days in Hobart - Keeping little momentos

2012-01-29T05:25:00.000-08:00

I had an exciting last week in Hobart. I made a necklace from things found in the IXL courtyard just to take things from Hobart with me, it forms a grungy addition to the Ethiopian coptic cross.

Checked out of the nicest house I have ever lived in , Derek and Cate have been the nicest landlords imaginable. They helped me shift the high amounts of entropy that had accumulated in my apartment to the Hobart tip. Whatever I have left behind is not sufficient compensation for the amount of consideration they have shown me.

My precious bike and surfboards went to interesting new owners. Somebody planning to ride the bike around Tasmania is a worthy new owner at any time.

The last week was spent at the backpackers and strangely enough people from the recent past reappeared. I also met some nice new people , particularly Roscoe. I spent time dividing attention between the grunting coming from the screen (just tennis) and people drawing, cooking, reading and planning their trips. My old acquaintances let me capitalise on the trike ride David, a local tourist operator, had promised. It was quite a bit of fun.

On the 27th plenty of my friends turned up for my farewell, from various circles I have drifted around in the city - Salsa, CSIRO, arts and people I had met by chance at the bar like Mr. Leigh. Just a note to self - he has my "Small Antennas" book which I need to return to the library. Thanks a lot for signing my Frida Kahlo book guys and all the great times.

Last day of taking the MONA pill - learning to be Limitless

2012-01-22T05:42:00.000-08:00

The greatest deception that men suffer from is from their own opinions. - Leonardo da Vinci.

Last saturday was my last day at MONA. I have been taking the MONA pill for a year now and the course has made me realise a lot about myself that was latent. Drugs are inherently replicants or cocktails of natural neurotransmitters. External non-chemical stimuli like music or visual arts can have a drug like effect by triggering secretion of certain neurotransmitters. You do not have to take a pill to go to sleep, put on the sound of a water fall or your mother's heart beat and your body will learn that it is now safe to stop defending its existence and renew - sleep. Like the drug in the movie Limitless, the MONA drug works best on people who are already quite smart.

Without going into details of how things work I will recount my only verbal encounter with David Walsh, apparently formerly called Glenn. I was hanging out with a couple I had met at the museum, Perth town planner and his Fiancée - an artist and an air hostess with Qantas. We managed to miss the last boat while chatting at the wine bar and called a cab. Eventually a cab arrived, it was the wrong company in retrospect. We hopped in the back seat, it was apparently a cab David had called. He walked in, graciously let us ride in the back seat and cab share. He said - "You were visiting my place" , and realisation dawned. A lot of babbling ensued, I don't recall the exact details, but I do remember David saying - "I am a Mathematician". That explains everything.

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work. - Leonardo da Vinci.

Truth, justice and Edwin Howard Armstrong - SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T19:46:00.000-08:00

There is so much bruhaha going on about IP protecting and SOPA, PIPA and other supposedly good things designed to keep us safe, just as a straight jacket is designed to keep the violently insane safe. Whenever the topic of protecting your ideas comes up I always give the example of Edwin Howard Armstrong ( who I refer to as EHA), the genius who could explain physical devices other people had made and ended up being rewarded the patent for FM Radio.

Here comes the clincher, this patent made him an millionaire, but he also lost his millions defending his patent and ended up jumping out of a window. The system, in this case the legal system, is designed by those already in power to maintain the status quo i.e. they remain in power in perpetuity. When EHA's FM threatened the established AM empire, the emperor encouraged people not to pay royalties for the use of the FM technology.

Similarly if a co-operative content creation studio which uses a different (read more mental world as opposed to physical world) distribution and monetisation approach compared to the current studios, they will be victimised to a point where they will voluntarily defenestrate themselves. After all those living in the content creation Shangri-La live beyond the monetary system and trade in reputations instead, money is only really useful for getting things from those who do not really know you - Asiyekujua hakuthamini.

Analysing the Facebook Fisheries - Fishbook

2012-01-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

I had an economist for a housemate for a few weeks. Zidane is from Brest and he is doing a PhD on the French fishing system, quota allocation regulation etc. It would have been good to stay in touch afterwards since I am interested in control systems in general, even large ones like the European scale fishing quota system. Zidane has strong views about Facebook and does not subscribe to it, so email will have to do.

While translating his paper we developed a fishing metaphor for how Facebook operates and how it creates value in the market. The basic analogy is this:

Fish\Squid == Personal Information.
Bare site == Lure.

At this time of the year the CSIRO water frontage is crawling with people lure fishing for squid. The squid will bite anything shiny. If people want to fish for other species, they cut up the squid and use it as bait for bigger fish. Facebook operates in a similar manner. The basic site acts as a lure for early adopters who get hooked on anything shiny - Kipya kinyemi kingawa kidonda. Once their personal information is in the net e.g. their relationship status - others take the bait and release their information into the trawler.

Ultimately a big catch of personal data gathers in the net and after some statistical discard the nuggets can be sold to corporations or even the government.

The Swansea Adventure

2012-01-04T16:22:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago I volunteered to take a trip to Swansea for The Wilderness Society and promote a town meeting regarding the Inter Governmental Agreement. We had a stall at the market in the town hall, among hand made craft items, food and a campaign to save plovers run by a CSIRO colleague. Jeanette and Amy did most of the hard work while I was dancing around town letter-boxing. Amy took a spider out of the canteen area to save the children from this deadly beast and became a heroine.

The petrol stations do not like the wilderness society, at the Caltex I was simply turned away with a "We do not support the wildos", at the BP a longer conversation ensued:

Him:"Go away I don't like the greens"

Me:"Why not?"

Him:"You are sneaky, we have been logging for thousands of years"

Me:"You haven't been here for thousands of years"

Him:"What do you want us to do if we stop logging ? Sit by the roadside and weave wicker baskets ? "

Me:"You will leave basket weaving to people like me in the 3rd world ?"

Him: "What are you on dole from the government ?"

Me: "No I am a highly paid scientist"

Him: "Go away!"

Me: "You don't have to be green, your petrol station is" (Parthian shots are awesome).

On the other hand there are some great people in Swansea such as the owner of The Ugly Duck Out who are doing their best to balance the economics and environmental impact of their business. I guess some people do not realise that there is a thing called the triple bottom line and money is not the only thing in the system.

Fun with eutectic metals - Galinstan

2011-12-28T20:55:00.000-08:00

I have been doing lots of full-wave electromagnetic simulation as part of my PhD and most of these techniques are applied for antenna design (as opposed to backscatter estimation for very complex targets i.e. forests). So naturally I decided sideways into antenna theory and started exploring malleable liquid antennas. These antennas have the advantage of taking strain and being easy to electro-mechanically tune and fit to a lot of form factors solid metal antennas cannot cope with.

The dominant material in liquid antennas is Galinstan - the mongrel made from Gallium, Indium and Stannum (well Tin). It sounds like some country in Asia Minor, next to Afganistan and Pakistan, but in fact it occupies a spot somewhere near Hydrargyrum (Mercury) in electrical and thermal properties. It is also not as toxic as Mercury, which caused the Mad Hatter and Isaac Newton to become rather eccentric.

Galinstan is apparently also rather useful for its ability to generate electricity when compressed, rather like piezo crystals. This has led to applications in the infamous heel/toe strike device, with patent holders claiming upto 10w per foot. I am sure the shoe phone is not far away.

Holiday in Adelaide - Ghosts of Christmas past

2011-12-27T02:36:00.001-08:00

Last year was rather topsy-turvy for me, so this year I decided to jet back to Adelaide and spend Christmas with long time friends. The pre-christmas birthday party turned out to be a real blast. All the people I hadn't seen for years managed to turn up.

The hostel on Carrington is pretty fun as well, they laid out a Christmas spread, but I had an invitation to Hanukkah. Some drifting around the University, The SA Art Gallery and Glenelg ensued. I am still drawing away little things, learning scheme and swimming in the ocean.

The hostel has a huge collection of DVD's and books. I am burning through the massive Peter. F. Hamilton Tome - Pandora's Star, dragging it down to the beach when I can. Maybe I will finish it before I leave.

Time to move on and finish something

2011-12-06T16:21:00.001-08:00

I recently resigned from my position at CSIRO. It was a great year but things were not working out. Peter Oke my bosses boss puts it like this:

"
I'm glad that we had the chance to discuss things with you and to understand your reasons for leaving. I recognise that finishing your PhD while working full time is very challenging, and that being away from family and friends is also difficult. So I understand and accept your reasons for leaving.
"

I managed to learn a lot in this year. Particularly about NetCDF vagaries - it is a bucket, just stick some labels on and put bits in it. It so reminds me of formalin filled viscera buckets we used to have in CMC SFI (the CPM's students' wing) Hostel, labeled - lungs, hearts, guts etc. I learnt some thing about the data collection, assimilation and simulations which produce these nasty monolithic and often badly labelled NetCDF beasts. Some of the nicer output comes from SHOC, XBEACH and ROMS.

It is now time to head back to the electromagnetic world and do some microwave bending. I have a bit to code and write up on Chapter 3 of my thesis. Concerning mostly 2D FDTD modelling of tree stands with open canopy and resultant impact on the scattering centres at different polarisations. Since I have chosen to use MEEP, this will involve learning some more Scheme.

OSDC 2011 - MiniConf Redux

2011-11-15T16:54:00.001-08:00

Last couple of days I hung around Canberra attending the OSDC in ANU and drinking gallons of orange juice and tomato juice in pubs.

The morning was spent catching up on PHP. I learnt stuff like traits, hiphop (via Facebook), odata (via Microsoft),

On the first day I assisted Jody in running the Geotools workshop. Only a small fraction turned up with laptops, so it was a rather cozy session. I met some old acquaintances again - Matt Paget from CSIRO Black Mountain (TERN) and Kelvin from Adelaide Uni now at DSD.

We celebrated the after conference party at a quiz night, where team OSDC consistently got the lowest score and I learnt trivia like there have been 5 different images of the queen on the Australian coins. The second day was a mad Arduino rush. I acquired an Arduino Uno via Littlebird and lots of wisdom concerning making PCB's and making lights blink in fancier and fancier ways.

Apparently once you have fallen in love with Ferric Chloride you will never go back to anything else for etching. I now just need to find someone to come and have a look at my etchings.

Carbon Accounting and Mine Sweeping in The Tarkine

2011-10-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

Last week I had a super-long weekend thanks to the Hobart showday public holiday added to burning one day off my annual leave. Instead of enjoying the g-forces on offer at the show I went to the Tarkine with TWS to do some more community carbon accounting.

We stayed near Edith Creek , I obstinately refused to take a bed and occupied the drawing room floor. We covered 6 or so sites in a couple of days. The first day was mostly spent driving up and setting up camp. One of the most interesting sites was along a creek, the ground was full of burrows made by mini mud crayfish.

We also the proposed site of the Shree open cut iron mine and took some group photos.

The iGlobe project - Globe + N-d data + Intelligence

2011-10-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

Patrick at NASA is amazing at putting people together, he put CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research ( who provide my daily bread currently ) , ORNL , NOAA and NASA itself. This project aims to visualise space-time resolved datasets in the globe context. With proper planetary projections on any object.

We had internally started building blocks of a large modular data visualisation framework called TrikeND, this was a natural choice to attach it to the globe context via worldwind. Even though scientists often prefer to see the data in pure form without being attached to the globe, so we have alternative renderers such as VTK and Jzy3D in the sights in addition to iGlobe. The primary data source is NetCDF, but we also provision GIS formats via Geotools, I put in sometime experimenting with OSGification of Geotools, with lots of help from Mathieu and Jody. This is designed to carry on from our legacy product DIVE.

iGlobe focuses on addressing the following issues:

1: Streaming large datasets from where they sit to where they are viewed. We would like to use standard protocols where possible, especially WCS NetCDF profile and OPeNDAP.
2: Providing heuristics to identify the right fields to be visualised as scalars, vectors and tensors.
3: Different display techniques for rendering scalar and vector fields, including volume visualisation with voxel and slice based techniques, display lists, vertex array, VBO , true impostors and other usual suspects.
4: Coherent time-locked animations keeping all the layers in sync in real/model time domain.
5: Transparent analysis techniques running on small problems on the client side and calling on server resources for large problems. Varun has been implementing various data mining techniques including FFT, change detection and anomaly detection.

There is lot more to come including an opportunity run iGlobe as part of an experiment on the ISS.

The Hobart Giraffe hunt

2011-10-16T02:25:00.000-07:00

The other day while walking to salsa I met someone who likes giraffes. So I went on a week-long artistic giraffe hunt to please her. I acquired and made giraffes using various materials and metaphors, and I still have enough inertia to keep collecting, even though my muse has moved on.

First one acquired was a Kenyan wooden sculpture. This has been passed on to a very good friend in Adelaide.
I drew it up as a sketch, first in my new Moleskine - iCamera. This has been donated to the Ivory, great place to relax, have a drink and draw in peace.
I used the wooden giraffe sculpture and drawing as models and built a paperclip and random stuff sculpture. This one has gone to a sculpture student at UTAS.
Learnt that we have been invited to submit an experiment for the ISS and made an origami coin box giraffe (which was declared a Brontosaurus).
Walking back spotted the initial giraffe available at Despards Gallery and bought it up.
A soft and cuddly one from Teddy Bear store, this one got ogled on the way back to base and possibly jinxed the whole process. So I have donated it back to the jinxer. There is still a limited edition collectable hanging out in the store which I might get at some point in the future.
The papier mache giraffe made in Philippines that I picked up while drifting around in Spotlight. During this drift I also met someone who has been awarded a scholarship to create piece based on the Monomyth at MONA. This giraffe ended up acquiring a knuckle mark on one of my adventures around the xenophobic parts of Hobart town. I passed it on to my French housemate.

The lost generation of Tasmania - citizens of Xenophobart

2011-10-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a generation of lost Tasmanian kids, 18-25 drifting around in the streets.

Begging in the mall, fighting and very obviously picking on me. Since I tend to focus their
attention by being different, wearing funny hats never helps.

I have had a few conversations with older Tasmanians today ( and lodged the information about
harassment incidences with the police). The welfare system seems to have nurtured a generation
of value nothingers who think money comes out of a hole in the wall, as far as their limited ability can penetrate the financial system( lack of education seems to be a key), it indeed does.

They feel the world owes them everything, stuff will just fall in their path. The haves have to
hand over all they have to the can't-be-bothered-to-work-for-its.

Yet I have met some amazing older Tasmanians. I carpenter whose book is choke full of quantum
physics. Intellectual giants and pranksters at the Tasmania Wilderness Society.
Nick and Nancy, amazingly creative pair of people. Not to mention my superhuman colleagues at
CSIRO.

But where does all the sanity leak away at night ?

The night the night,
when the armies of emotions come out to fight !

What happened 20 years ago to produce this lost generation of Tasmanian youth ? They come to MONA, hook themselves up to the euthanasia machine and complain about not dying.

Carbon Accounting in Blue Tier

2011-10-02T03:50:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was full of veriditas, I did community carbon accounting with the Tasmania Wilderness Society. It was my first time bush bashing in through one of the older Tasmanian forests. The trip to Mt. Fields was way more touristy than this.

I had the privilege of wearing the Tasmanian Devil costume and posing in front of an imposing Eucalyptus Regnans. The rest of the two days involved dancing and scrambling through undergrowth measuring dead and alive trees, quantifying to the best of our ability the cycle of life in the forest.

The tools of the trade are - diameter tape, study area marker ribbons and data collection sheets. The work area is laid out along the slope with tape and compass and the perimeter of the stratified sampling sites marked with ribbons.

The accommodation was in a set of ritzy bunks at Weldborough, followed by a second day of crawling around in Macquarie vines.

I managed to fit in some Gargoyle mode headgear design using the XTion and Infra-red cameras to document the forest. I hope to have a functional prototype before the next field trip. With enough data we may be able to solve allometric issues with smaller species such as tree-ferns and vines.

Are you artier than a fifth grader ?

2011-09-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Once upon I time while I still used to watch TV (instead of the world go by, which is much more interesting), Rove used to host a show called "are you smarter than a fifth grader". It seems that it is still on. The show mostly tested textual and numerical skills or pure recall (very left brained). I have recently started experimenting with drawing techniques and I hear "My 5th Grader could have done that" quite often. It is so nice to see young talent, and I do indeed have some pieces from the open-sketchbook project proving the beauty of children's artwork.

So I am putting forward here a right-brained show in the same vein. Put an established artist and a 5th grader in the same stimuli field and let them each produce a piece. Then do a double-blind test with a jury of their peers (both age groups need to be represented since art is highly subjective), on which one is better. It may get hard to keep the stimuli field interesting for the adult and the child at the same time. I did one of my coolest subliminals while watching Final Destination 5.

I believe the education system currently established is very asymmetric and a right brained show may help highlight this or prove me wrong ( none are so blind as those who will not see). Just to keep it clear on my belief in children's abilities, the bits of TV (Time Tunnel) I do watch is recommended by kids I meet while walking to Salsa.

ESA SOCIS - Coding in the Space Space

2011-09-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

The summer of code pattern seems to have become rather popular, pity it is a mis-nomer for us Southern hemisphere folk, that's what you get for the earth being top heavy in landmass ( whoever decided they are on top anyway).

This year the European Space Agency (ESA) is running an SOC event, the catch line being a slight variant of the Copenhagen Interpretation. The two projects I am associated with are:

Orfeo Toolbox SAR Interferometry support - This one is academically of most interest to me, there have been several attempts to develop the interferometry chain in open source, but they have not been properly software engineered, have dubious licensing or other shortcomings. More on this project and the teething issues encountered later.
iGlobe NetCDF support enhancements - This one is professionally of most interest to me. Patrick at NASA recently put us (CSIRO) together with NOAA, NASA and ORNL to build and application tying NetCDF to WorldWind. We are planning to explore large data visualisation techniques and get best possible performance and accuracy. As well as include some analysis capability. The project is code named iGlobe.

These projects will bring my student supervision quota up-to 5 for this year, I have only had them for 3 months and there has been a huge amount work delivered. I wish I had this kind of free labour and velocity at the real workplace.

Making NetCDF Faster, microbenchmarks on macro .nc

2011-09-04T04:56:00.001-07:00

We have several very large NetCDF datasets with lots of variables to visualise. I have a gut feeling that file sizes are an issue and there is a bottleneck at the disk to RAM stage, but how do I prove it ? By writing a set of micro-benchmarks to test the various storage and access options. The options are:

1) Storage pattern - NetCDF allows vanilla NetCDF3, Lossy Packing, Lossless Deflation, Chunking and combinations of the aforementioned schemes for storage. If data fidelity is not an issue (as in the case of materialised overviews) , my benchmarks indicate that Lossy Packing is the best way to go.

2) Access pattern - The beast under scrutiny was 27GB RAMS Atmospheric model with 50+ variables. The biggest variable chews up 2GB of RAM if you load it all at once. Full data load takes 1000s, while 1/16th load in all dimensions takes 600ms. If just edges are read to perform a bounding box style render that is quicker as well. The exact access pattern used will depend on the volume rendering technique chosen. There are also asymmetries in accessing the beginning and ending of the variables. This indicates linear seeks across files.

3) Access Path - Still need to compare access via the C-library+JNA/JNI rather than pure Java. John Caron seems to have done it a while ago, but I am still agonising over how to activate this experimental code in the current version of the library.

PS: I have got the JNA code working with NetCDF-Java and started a dialog with John.

The opensketchbook project and drunk louts in Salamanca

2011-08-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

I suffer from a lot of ailments one of them is "Hypertransparency" - as one of the pieces in Experimenta Utopia puts it:

With hypertransparency you get a society of chameleons and octopi.

I have been involved in open source projects, then open hardware projects, now I am trying my hand at open artware. I just give my sketchbook out to willing hands with some material ( it has mostly been mechanical pencil, charcoal and calligraphy pen) and ask for a contribution. Sometime willing hands find my book lying unattended in a public place and ninja in some contribution ( others would derisively call it graffiti, but I like graffiti).

I have run the project in bars, clubs, at MONA and even in my colleague's office in Canberra. Thank you all for willingly contributing to make my blank white pages interesting. I am not aiming to curate, the sample here is merely the first contributions rather than any qualitative measure - art is a subjective personal matter after all.

I wish drunk and drugged people in Salamanca late on weekend nights would let me be who I am and not harass me for my skin colour.

Week of fun Hardware - Octocopter, Extruder, Kinect Poetry and MIDI 2 Life

2011-08-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

Last week was an amazing overload of gadgets (with some flying to Canberra and hanging out at a bar with E-Tax release manager thrown in). First highlight was the Octocopter at UTAS - it is indeed a massive beast with 8kg border line payload, paltry 5 minute endurance, but it gets the kit off the ground. I also saw some of the amazing work Arko has been doing with Bundler, PMVS and Meshlab.

The night before I went to Canberra, there was a Sound2Lights show in the Long Gallery with lots of cool gadgets. Including the aforementioned Rep-rap extruder printing out music (Joseph) , a Kinect you had to do a weird dance to get to put words in place (and possibly rhyme and form poetry - Aaron) and of course Nick's game of life with music controlling organisms rendered in Unity 3D.

Thursday early in the morning I flew off to Canberra to help deploy Australia wide terrain, but that is another story.

Sketching paintings and taking photos of sketches - metaart

2011-08-15T04:03:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been hopping around the world sketching a lot of things I see. I only got told off, actually mildly reprimanded for doing so yesterday at the Henry Jones art hotel. I have been practicing what I can best describe as meta-art or referential art (without repeating all of the title of this post), like this Picasso piece titled etudes. The work at the art hotel is on display for sale purposes and sketching them steals their soul and reduces value.

At least MONA does not suffer from such constraints and I happily reproduced different views of the fat car, plastic enhanced Porsche in pencil, together with glimpses of the surrounding material and carbon-dioxide sensors.

On the ferry back I ran into some very nosy Hobartian who have been snooping on our conversations at Dr. Coffee, but such are the charms of a small town. Now I know who to watch out for when expounding on the joys of Navier-Stokes.

Confessions of a Google Tourist ( via Stan)

2011-08-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday last week I managed to visit Emmanuel and get a guided tour of Googleplex. Patrick dropped me off and asked him to take good care of me. I got free lunch and free dinner - I consider that very good care.

Google is all about software engineering and scalability, now with G+ they are getting into some social engineering as well. As a contribution from the society of people priviledged to visit Google and if you use it file a bug/feature request mentality I get from open source, I started filing thing straight away:

The visitor registration screen asked if you were from Sudan(s), since sometime last month there is no more Sudan. The registration text needed updating.
The glass elevator needs to have the ability to play through time, so that I can show the Southern Surveyor arriving and leaving the docks outside work and the snow levels shifting on Mt. Wellington. I would also like it to have a roof and a floor (whatnick pavement view to be released soon) and seamlessly transition into streetview.

We then drifted off into philosophical discussions about software and refactoring being somewhat similar to Mandala's. Make it - learn about it - throw it away - do it again. The stroll down from Googleplex to the Mountain View Wetlands is great for taking in the squirrels and owls along with other wetland birds.

After the walk, we finished off the evening with stacks of crepe and conversation. The little boy seems to like the "Sterling Dervish" from Forkometry which is a good sign.

Life and Times of a NASA International Visitor

2011-08-08T18:45:00.000-07:00

Monday, 1st of August 2011, I officially signed in as a NASA visitor. Patrick gave me a grand tour of the place. Since photography would get us into trouble in most of the places I resorted to sketching things up. First stop was the Vertical Motion Simulator, which was simulating a VTOL aircraft (tilt-rotor) when we got there. We saw Hangar one (big blimp hangar), the uber Wind tunnel with hockey playing equipment strewn in front of it. We then discussed the past, present and future of WorldWind, Globe viewing client, scalable + distributed data serving, porting to Android platforms and much much more. We finally had a small timeslot to catch up with Mars Rover software team, heavy users of the Ardor3D Java based game engine. I have been building OSGi manifests into Ardor3D and I was preaching the use of the manifest enabled jars in their projects - Antares and Verve. I also discussed the differences between Clipmapped terrain (as in Ardor3d) and Chunked LOD (as in WorldWind) with Leslie and how we can merge the 2 techniques for large terrain rendering to make something scalable, accurate and aesthetically pleasing.

Day two I sat in on one of the WorldWind team telecons and got wind of the developments on Android and challenges of a multitouch interface user semantics, as well as scalability required to proxy and deploy Microsoft Virtual Earth datasets.

On Friday I had a joint showing with Bruce from Emxsys and caught up with Vince Ambrosia and team from the WRAP project. We discussed coupled fire models (terrain + fuel + wind + fire) and UAV derived information assimilation for training and operational fire fighting purposes. Another show-n-tell in NASA hangars followed (including ogling at Google Jets parked in there). We saw the mostly moulded carbon fibre hull SIERRA and discussed air-space management during fires to allow use of UAV's.

Over all it was a highly enlightening trip. One I would like to repeat as soon as possible.

Bumping into people in Mountain View - Part 1

2011-08-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

The last few days in Mountain View have been full of chance encounters. I better jot them down before they fade from memory. I walked into the US, literally, at Vancouver airport. The passport got stamped by US Customs and bits of Vancouver airport are technically US territory.

On the flight I sat next to a lady (librarian) with sons in Stanford and Twitter. Interesting discussions ensued regarding DNA untwisting and social sensing via Twitter. I caught a cab-ride from SFO to my hotel in Mountain View and promptly fell asleep.

Saturday I visited the NASA AMES' open to public show case and drowned in a sea of high-schoolers visiting under the SMASH umbrella. I listened to a bit of a talk on SOFIA - air-borne telescope. I piped up about seeing infrared with mobile phones and open source at NASA (in response to a student question). This earned me a new label - "mysterious stranger".

I strolled down Moffett Blvd towards Castro hunting for some dinner. A couple rode past on bikes and they were rather offended when I said I didn't know who they were (apparently local TV personalities). I was looking lost at a set of traffic lights and the Mac Outlook lead walked past with his wife and guided me. Some more dining and penciling in what I saw followed.

Sunday I took a trip to the end-of-line in VTA light rail, all the way to Almaden. Then tramped a few more miles to the old Almaden Vineyard site (now a bunch of houses), this was apparently California's first winery. I acquired some charcoal for drawing along the way and made another chance stop at the house of some kids I had met on the train to refill my water bottle. Almaden trip was rounded off by a scramble along the rocky edge of Almaden Lake.

The hopped off the return train to Downtown Mountain View and went into the wine bar at the station. I was trying out my newly acquired charcoal on some wine racks and a chandelier, when an ex-Lockheed employee walked in and talked about his work on the batteries on the Hubble space telescope. So a rendition of Hubble and his name got attached to couple of pages filled with wine racks.

On Monday I visited Patrick and couple of people from the Mars Rover team at NASA, but that is another post. No chance encounter took place.

IGARSS 2011 Vancouver - Redux (So that you don't fall asleep)

2011-07-31T01:16:00.000-07:00

It took a lot of messing around and changing flights to get there but thanks to the excellent folk at Flight Centre Melbourne Airport I arrived on time , left Melbourne 25th July Morning 10:30am and arrived in Vancouver 25th July 7:30am. Again proving the fact that a teleporter is indeed equivalent to a time machine.

This monday turned out to be full-on 48hour monday, lots of interesting sessions to go to. I attended the plenary by Shimada San introducing ALOS-2 and ALOS-3 with next generations of the great optical and SAR sensors we have come to expect from the Japanese. May be I can sneak into the CALVAL stage and score another trip to Japan.

More flight dramas continued in the background, the presentations blurred into a constant stream of words and diagrams on my sketchbook in the foreground. I learnt a lot about what has been done in the past year and what is coming over the horizon.

I saw science solving political problems with cross-boundary river basin monitoring with Poseidon, Jason-1 and in the future Jason-2. Important basins across unfriendly countries such as Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and the Mekong can be monitored by the international science community and appropriate alerts sent and action taken when one of the partner nations or the weather in the river basin begins to misbehave.

I saw the cold-gas (NO2) driven engines that keep TerraSAR-X and Tandem-X locked in their helical dance, not forever, only till the global elevation model project is complete or the gas runs out - whichever comes first. Some extra effort will be required to collect the elevation model of Antarctica, since the satellites will need to be rolled to face left. This is where the polar observation satellites - Cryosat-2 and more, will make a great impact.

I used the conference services a fair bit as well and got labelled "the troublemaker" - thanks people. If you want to get in touch with me just search for the troublemaker at IGARSS.

The real highlights of the week however were the impromptu dinner get-togethers. After the poster session on Monday I drifted off with SAR people from Spain and a few other places. Tuesday night was spent with the OTB team and a fun Columbian guy from ITC. Scientists on one night, engineers on another, we discussed the transition from Science to Engineering to Products, and the effort and mindsets it takes to go the next step, and how the last step provides continuing fuel for the first. The next night it was back to science setting up a collaboration aimed at just such a transition for the OTB ESA Summer of Code in Space (ESA SOCIS 2011). Thursday evening I had great stroll through the Sun Yat Sen garden, dinner at Shukaku and a movie at the Scotiabank Theatre - ultimate self indulgence. Friday, went to very few sessions and spent most of the time in Stanley park sketching totem poles, before catching a flight out. Thank you for a great time Vancouver - I will definitely be back.

Getting some fish into WorldWind

2011-07-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

Last few days I have gone back to biological data, well animal tracks. CSIRO has put together a very nice oceantracks website using the amazing Indie game engine - Unity 3D (amazing in every way except running on Linux). It runs on Android, so with some effort on GL-ES front it can be made to work on Linux.

Talking about multi-platform game engines the other impressive one is Ardor3D, not that OGRE or Irrilicht are bad. It is just easier to get going without getting platform specific binaries or needing to set up a large tool-chain. It is also easier to maintain the Java based game engine on top of JOGL and LWJGL instead of maintaining JNI bindings to a C++ engine (especially if your bindings are outside the source tree) . The other large draw from Ardor is the JOGL based rendering which lets us share the GLContext between Ardor and WorldWind, as I have done in jaxb-collada (lots of thanks to the original Ardor hack post and improvements from niccastel and brujito). Some pretty famous use-cases have picked Ardor up as their rendering engine including the Mars rover project, I hope to catch up with them in a few weeks. May be the local guys down here in Hobart will adopt it as a mission control system for the SLOCUM Gliders.

There are some altitude setting bugs in the Ardor3D+WorldWind code , and the animations key-frames are not enabled, but the models load nicely and will look great with some more water surface shaders and actual track data.