Processing TerraSAR-X in Python and R

Finally some 12GB of TerraSAR-X Quad-pol data finished downloading. I have essentially 3 PolInSAR capable sets (if the notorious X-band coherence holds up). I can process them in RAT but that requires converting them to floating point and more bloat, the TSX data is in a CInt32 form. Solution was to use GDAL's TerraSAR-X Cosar support and read subsets directly into Python. I took this opportunity to do some nice unit testing in Python. The result was the simple monstrosity here. It extends tsx_dual class I had implemented before.

Then I moved onto some phase difference statistics and encountered for the n-th time the nicely non-Gaussian von Mises distribution. Trying to use R Circular Statistics from Python became the bane of my existence tonight. RPy2 current code is unsupported on windows so I am lacking package import. At least I managed to hack it into compiling with the following tricks:

1. Copied Rinterface.h from R source distro
2. Hacked Rinterface.h to remove uintptr_t typedef
3. Hacked na_values.c to remove dynamic allocations (compile time non-constants)
4. Copied R dll's from "bin" to "lib" in R install

This makes rpy2 build and install, but I am left with - Assertion failed: PyType_IsSubtype(type, &PyLong_Type), file rpy\rinterface\/na_values.c, line 166  - at runtime obviously due to my hacks. Well I am missing this code block in my hand hacked things:

/* on some platforms these are not compile-time constants, so we must fill them at runtime */
+  NAInteger_Type.tp_base = &PyInt_Type;
+  NALogical_Type.tp_base = &PyInt_Type;
+  NAReal_Type.tp_base = &PyFloat_Type;
+  NACharacter_Type.tp_base = &PyString_Type;

Now to figure out where to put it and von Mises are in Python.

PS: So it is "Talk like a Pirate Day" so "R - ARRR in".

Writing JUnit Tests in Geoserver

In order to get a community module promoted to extension status I had to write a couple of unit tests with JUnit. Geoserver strives to be production quality software so unit tests are quite handy, for agile programming as well as regression testing. Making tests pass through taking short-cuts is quite easy but usually very unwise. I did have to take the copy-paste short cut route though, since the generic DefaultMapProducerTest was hardcoded with the "image/gif" output format and I was not in the mood to make core changes (outside my tiny module).

Well now a couple of tests are written and the module code passes them and works as expected in general, time to petition for inclusion as an extension.