Writing PhD thesis and living in a hole

I have finally moved house to a crummy student digs to go with the PhD writing mood. Most of my time is spent with WinEdt and latex syntax. I might think of switching allegiance to LyX since Bibus has added Lyx support, I wonder if it will mangle my tex files into LyX specific format.

I have also been doing some TerraSAR-X quad-pol data analysis and comparing decomposition results to dual-pol case. There is a very nice overlap, but some things seem more coherent when the cross-pol scattering is not taken into account - in my case tree trunks standing on water.

I did manage to sneak in some time for open-source and check out the great work Manuel is doing to incorporate Monteverdi support into Qgis. Monteverdi can pull the layers from Qgis open files list and process them. The results currently cannot be passed directly from Monteverdi into Qgis. This issue can be solved by using a custom otbprovider which pushes Monteverdi streams into the QGis view by producing an appropriate QImage.

We have also been wondering whether an application is running inside our outside a NAT, what would be the best way to check this. Say ping an external server outside the NAT and see which source address the request came from, if the source is one particular IP (we have a static IP) then we are inside NAT and need to use internal IP's to connect to certain servers, otherwise we are outside and public IP is fine.