Starting work at CSIRO - after a long holiday

It was been a great December and January. We have seen a lot of Tasmania, gone for a few great walks - 5 hour Freycinet loop and few hours up Mt. Wellington. I have made some progress on editing a chapter and lots of progress on making a connection sharing point for multiple USB modems on my BeagleBoard (not that the USB-Ethernet hub can sustain the juice multiple modems draw).

The key ingredient turned out to be the udev rule to automatically insert the modem driver (good old usbserial) when the device was detected on the usb bus:
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", MODALIAS=="v05c6p0015*", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe usbserial vendor=0x05c6 product=0x0015"

Beyond this the nm-connection-editor tool (from the NetworkManager coterie) was used to add a Vodafone connection with the relevant APN. Now whenever the modem is plugged in ModemManager kicks in and a ppp connection is established without any more fuss.


First couple of days at CSIRO have also gone swimmingly with a lot of help from my peers (Gary mostly). I spent sometime reading manuals and doing design decisions with GeoAPI. Got indoctrinated into the CSIRO way and spent sometime staring at stack traces from SAP. Otherwise I am really enjoying the shiny new Mac with lotsa RAM, time to kick around some shaders in WorldWind.

CMAR Community of Practice - day 2

On the 2nd day the concept of divisions in CSIRO has sunk in and I realize that this is the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Software Engineering community, I am over the me and them mentality as well and I am using the "We" pronoun more often.



The talks today started off with a review of XML and why it is not the solve all. The second talk explored the REST idiom for web services. There were a couple of talks about IMOS and TERN indexing disparate NetCDF and HDF data and allowing exploration + download of it via a portal. The inevitable scalability question came up and was left as the elephant in the room. A very detailed talk about Oracle databases and optimizations was an eye opener for me - somebody used to the relatively "just should work" world and PostgreSQL. The last talk felt like a major reimplementation of Google Docs in a semantic space, to easily digest arbitrary data from spreadsheets - the goal is lofty but the proof is in the pudding.

We tried to muster up some support for a visualization platform around NASA WorldWind for community wide acceptance and there was interest from a couple of people. After dinner the talk around visualisation reduced to (or built up to depending on how you look at it) rendering uncertainity both in observations and model output data. Making graphs with regression for my thesis, this has been a common request from my supervisor, I respond to it with error bars and regression confidence interval curves. How does this propagate to a resonable metaphor in worldwind without making every icon hairy with error-bars ? The kml support in WorldWind seems to have also encouraged people to test what can be best described as Google Earth compatibility, leading to these hairy images.

Openkinect with IR and CSIRO Cop Meeting

The IR sensor on the Kinect can now pull images illuminated by the laser. The camera needs to be initialized with a separate command to fall into IR mode, search is also on for higher resolution streams than 640x480. I have made some headway towards a v4l2 wrapper for the Kinect streams using AVLD. This involves capturing data using libfreenect and writing it to the pseudo-device created by avld.

This week I am also at the CSIRO Cop meeting at ANU in Canberra. There will be 1.5 days of chats and some informal follow-ons. This mostly a programming and data management community with a pile of Matlab, Unix scripters, web-service developers and database admins. The first talk was about eResearch and corporate infrastructure to support it. The second talk was from the legal section covering open source and open data, terms like encumberances, freedom to operate (FTO) and due diligence. This talk covered licences and caused a fair bit of discussion.

The third talk was about OffSiders, which feels like a new object based scripting language. It will require some experimenting to work out what it is good for.  The persistence is non-atomic and exists as a transaction as supported by the filesystem. It has a pure computer science glow and will definitely trigger some "what is like ?" buttons.