Kurt's Weblog

My first real day back at UCSD/SIO after flight ops. It's very disconcerting to switch from Mars operations back to my thesis and TA Earth 001, "The Planets."

Still need to work on switching to svn and using Qt.

The Independent Qt Tutorial

How to write a systems paper by Roy Levin and David D. Redell

Three mile island accident

Apple iPod patent application

I am getting close to releasing my new DEM/Terrain tool. As of this morning it passes the Vicar gen4x4 tests that Steve Levoe made for me. Need to get some sample DEMs in Vicar from Jeff Hall to see if the code can handle the real thing. The GMT reader was amazingly easy. In 2002, I spent a couple days trying to figure out how use the GMT libraries to read in a grd netcdf file. This time, the whole process took just a couple hours from start to finish. I used grdinfo.c as my documentation for the API. I discovered that it has a mode where it reads all the data. So I fashioned my code after that. Just had to make sure that I initialized all the global variables by calling a couple mysterious setup functions.

Still working on the PovRay writer. It produces okay geometry, but the normals are not working and I'm having a little trouble figuring out the camera. Up has to be perpendicular to the lookat direction, so I just need to do some math. I might just use the right vector since it is the result of the cross product of the up and lookat vectors. So it is pretty trivial to compute.

Also, still need to write a gnugetopt interface for the whole deal.

Thanks to Steve Levoe, Myche McAuley, and Jeff Hall for sample data sets to test my Vicar reader code on.

Digital Library for Earth System Education [NSF]

ImageMagick tutorial [IBM]

Why not manned exploration - Good reading. I would love to be an astronaut, but do really want to fly on the space shuttle and the space station when we can send all kinds of cool robots to the planets right now for a small fraction the cost?

(Update: 2008-08) Python 3D Software

was http://www.py3d.org/py3d_zwiki/Python3dLinks, but there is nothing there.

Getting started with povray
povray examples Planetary Atlas
MGS ... product search
http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Atlas/search.pl?INSTRUMENT_HOST_NAME=MARS_GLOBAL_SURVEYOR
Make sure you turn off popups or you will not see thumbnails..

First morning with a press conference where I'm not really doing anything. How strange. Can wait to see it on TV.

San Diego Diebold - Electronic voting for the first time, by jrenken:

On March 2nd, I was a poll worker for this year's California
primary election. More specifically, I was a Systems Inspector in San
Diego county, whose problems with voting machines and procedures
received some coverage in the national media.
.
This was San Diego's first election using electronic voting machines -
specifically, Diebold AccuVote-TSx stations. Previous elections in the
county used punch cards. The county failed to make the mandated
upgrade prior to the last election, and a federal court ordered that
it be done for this primary.
...
Previously, precinct boards in the county were made up of an
Inspector, an Assistant Inspector, and clerks. As of this election, a
Systems Inspector and an Assistant Systems Inspector have been added
at each precinct. According to the Registrar of Voters, this is
because a four-hour training session would have been required in order
for Inspectors to learn both the general procedures and how to operate
the machines. Instead, most of the technical details are left to the
Systems Inspectors.
...

Still looks like cygwin is not quite to the point where it is transparent. I'm having lots of issues with window resizing and updating is not nearly as easy with a working debian type system, ala fink. The only way I could figure out to do package stuff was to re-download the setup program. And then, I couldn't find svn/subversion. The install forces the window to not resize. Arg. It's tiny. But still, it does make windows much more usable to me.

Internal Waves - This article features the Eel River area at the end. It has arrows not too far from the location of two of my cores for my thesis. Uses the same EM1000 data from STRATAFORM.

2008 Update: Internal Tides and the Continental Slope Curious waves coursing beneath the surface of the sea may shape the margins of the world's landmasses by David Cacchione, Lincoln Pratson

For many of us, a drive to the ocean is, at the very least, a yearly
pilgrimage. Imagine for a moment what it would be like if, during one
of these trips, you arrived at the beach to discover that the water
was gone. After getting over your initial disappointment, you would
probably decide that exploring what had been hidden territory would be
just as much fun as playing in the surf. So you'd drive on cautiously,
wondering what was in store.
.
At first it's easy going: You are traversing the continental shelf-a
nearly flat plateau made of sediments eroded from the land. To the
left and right, you might spy relict river channels, which were formed
during former ice ages when the buildup of glaciers lowered sea level
by more than 100 meters, exposing the continental shelf to the open
air (truly). Here and there on this largely flat plain, you could
happen on fields of ripples or maybe even dunes, which were created by
the motion of waves and current in the now-missing ocean.
.
Driving farther, you eventually arrive at the edge of the continental
shelf. Depending on where you are in the world, this change could come
just 5 kilometers out from shore (as it does, for example, off central
Chile) or more than 100 kilometers (the situation for much of the East
Coast). Here, where the ocean used to be more than 100 meters deep,
you stop your car and get out to take in the magnificent view. Before
you is the continental slope, which descends some 3 kilometers
vertically as it ramps downward toward the abyssal ocean floor. This
incline represents the seaward face of the vast pile of sediments
eroded from the interior of the continent and deposited along its
watery edge by rivers, waves, currents and, in some regions, glaciers.
.
As with the continental shelf, the surface of the continental slope
varies from place to place. There are spots where the shelf drops off
precipitously and where the descent to the base of the slope is quite
rugged. This is generally the case where submarine canyons-some of
which are larger than the Grand Canyon-cut into the continental
slope. But between these chasms, the ground falls away much more
gradually: If you were to climb back in your car and drive down such a
slope, it would be like descending a steep highway pass out of the
Rockies or the Appalachians.
.
What is perplexing (and thus intriguing) for marine geologists is the
question of why the continental slope is not any steeper. When only
gravity acts on them, sediments piled underwater can easily maintain
stable slopes of 15 degrees or more. Yet some 80 percent of the
continental slopes around the world dip downward at less than 8
degrees, and their average incline is only about 3 degrees. Acting
alone, the constant influx of sediment eroded from the land would tend
over time to steepen the grade, so, clearly, one or more natural
forces are ensuring that these slopes remain low. We believe that a
primary factor-one not recognized before-is something called the
internal tides: submerged waves largely hidden from view that pulse
through the body of the ocean with the same twice-daily period as the
normal lunar tides.
...

I am now off the press conference cycle for MER. Mostly documentation left to take care of. Things are starting to easier to do on the whole project. I really, really gotta write a responce to Sun's MER add on slashdot.

Linux MER. Okay, so this one talks about Linux on MER. Well, yes we use linux all over the place. But who the heck is Speedera Networks? I worked on the web delivery infrastructure for MER and I don't know who these people are and I didn't see any HP Linux boxes. We had lots of generic Dell boxes that were converted to RedHat 7.3 and rack mount systems from PSSC and Western Scientific.

Vote.com

SugarSonic - Craig is in the band that did the theme song.

kiddopop

Usability

This one is for Aurelio and Matt D... Wicked cool shell scripts

Or more likely, some day I'll build a make file that you can do this...

make coffee
make news   # for jzw
make mail
make solar-system
make thesis
make httpd

The Command Line

What may have happened to Beagle [newscientist]

Beagle Spotted? [cnn.com]

Unable to dent flat rock [cnn.com]

Hair Palynology -- Will I ever get a good handle on those hairs in the cores?

I need to start working with python XML readers... here is a starting point. I need to get a good RML parser going (robot markup language?). XML in OpenOffice, AbiWord

Friday's press conference was crazy. We had some serious internal network issues so the middle part of Zareh's animation didn't show. But Shigeru pulled through and did a splice just in time so it looked great! I did my first showing of an RML video and did all with some help from Eric B in under 30 minutes from start to being ready for on air. The guy who submitted it never appeared or responded, so I don't know if there was a story there or not. We ended up with the biggest stack yet of candidates, but even then we had to find/create 3 or 4.

I'm starting to leave active development and press conference support and entering into documentation phase. I'm trying to make sure that it is possible to do what I've been doing if I'm not available (e.g. in the middle of TA'ing Erth 001, the Planets).

Mysql/php... I wrote my first php/mysql database app last week. Just built a table for Steve's SVG slate generator, but it's still a start. Too many interesting things to learn!

Arg. Just went and voted in SD and discovered that California has gone for the Diebold voting computers. That sucks. I put in the ballot box asking that they not use closed source and un-secure systems for my vote! I have no problem with electronic voting, but I'm not going to trust something that has not been thrown to the security experts and torn apart. That last public audit when the source leaked shows the source was horrible. How can I know that it really is okay now and does not have backdoor options and that my vote will be recorded okay? The guy at the desk said he had emails from the some high up state official that said it's all okay now. What ever. I want to see security reports on the web on this thing! Crap, this is the basis of our government that is now being help secret.

Found out that today's big NASA press conference will only use about 10% of the images that we put together over the last couple days. I really pushed hard since Friday to do a great job on this. I hope they use the Opp. pan to close pan to MI to flyover. That movie is so cool. Thanks to Mark L., Shigeru, Jeff H., Bob D., Jim B., and... for help putting it all together.