After conference - Life in Kuta

So after nearly 4 days of hard conferencing I have settled in Kuta to relax for a few days. If you can call partying all night relaxing. I am staying in a small beach side hotel called Melasti , it has nice old buildings and garden and a couple of pools. The beach is a stone's throw away as is the mall. The nightlife is a short taxi ride and you can stagger your outing properly to hit the right spot at the right time.

I started with dining on the beach while watching the sunset and moved onto Poppy's and Bounty. Big aussie crowd here - not hard to make friends and across the road there was a band playing. Most of the time was spent dancing in front of the air-con and fan for position. When Poppy's died down I headed to MBarGo and ran across a few familiar faces seeming to have a lot of fun with the locals.

When I ran out of steam a short cab ride dumped me right on my bed.

At the Intercontinental Resort in Bali

So I have finally arrived at the conference. The balcony has a superb view over the garden. The rooms are quite stylish too. Here are a few photos to whet your appetite.
The long-long queue at the airport was definitely worth it. I again got into trouble over my dog-eared passport, can't wait to get a new one.

Off to Bali

Stealing a minute .. boarding flight to Denpasar in Perth. See you on the other side.

Box seat at the Tour Down Under

So I caught too early a bus out of Adelaide after doing my test. Since there are like 6 buses to Woodside per day I have to wait for an hour for my connection. By the way the test went well the only thing I am unsure about is who has the right to free speech in Australia, Australian citizens only or everyone.

Meanwhile sitting on the dirt by the roadside I have prime view of the tour down under. All the peletons going past for the steep and windy hill climb just ahead. So found a shady spot and settled in for the wait. May be I will capture a bike pile-up, fingers crossed.

Still waiting to have an Australianity check

After all the hard reading for weeks, I can recite the Australian Citizenship book by heart. So, ask me anything .... When did Abel Tasman visit Van Diemen's Land ? When was the Eureka Rebellion ?

Unfortuanately I cannot do the test, I have been waiting for an hour or so, the Australia wide testing server is down. Surprise, surprise they do not have a backup hardcopy test. So I will spend a fair bit of time here waiting and getting hungry for lunch, till I cannot think anymore. May be its their strategy to make the test more difficult, frustrating your attempts at doing it. Leave alone a paper based test, why cannot they have a fail-over server ? Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. I keep asking them to take the book and ask me questions, they would not take up on the offer ... DIMIA ....

On the brighter side apart for some legal hassles my PhD enrollment seems to be going through, I have also got my P2 licence so I do not have to carry those ugly red P's around.

Hopefully it will be ready today, otherwise it will be a day wasted.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

So the holiday season is finally here, but I have burnt up all my leave and my spare cash going to Kenya and buying a car. So time to sit tight and haunt people's houses for free meals which they will gladly provide in this time of the year when generosity and goodwill rule their thoughts, otherwise the ghost of Christmas will haunt them every year instead of just me. Not that I can't cook, with sites like Cooking for Engineers to help me, it is not hard. Tonight's special was Prawn Jalfrezi, with prawns you have to be careful not to overcook them or they become tough like hard boiled eggs.

I am still studying for my Australian Citizenship Test. Paul if you are so eager you can do this one here, it has answers unlike mine where I am too mean to provide answers. Only the question about which is the political party currently in power needs the answer to be revised since Kevin Andrews is no longer holding down that particular plum job. All hail the separation of power now that the Federal Court has reinstated the Haneef visa. I hope they have a question about how arms of the government tangle with each other.

Also test drove RAT TerraSAR-X Driver and INSAR capability, it was a breeze producing unwrapped phase. Just need to quantify the baseline and extension to spaceborne platform position information to allow accurate DEM generation.

CNES(Pere Noel) releases ORFEO Toolbox 2.0.0

Pere Noel from CNES has presented his eager Remote Sensing children with OTB 2.0.0 this Christmas. Orfeo Toolbox is part of the Orfeo Accompaniment Program for the upcoming Pleiades and Cosmo-Skymed sensor constellations. This toolbox provides an Open-Source framework for processing and exploiting SAR and Optical imagery.

From the OTB 2.0.0 Release announcement:

A major release like this one happens once a year. The OTB Development
Team has worked very hard in order to make available a robust library
with plenty of very interesting things. Thanks to Emmanuel, Thomas,
Julien, Romain and Cyrille for the good work.

Thanks also to ITK, OSSIM, GDAL, 6S, libSVM and BOOST developers for the
good software upon which OTB is built.

Be careful: with OTB-2.0 you can build powerful applications easily and
for free. You can for instance produce a pan-sharpenned, ortho-rectified
Quickbird image in a few lines of code. This can hurt sensitive people.

Other key features include:

- Radiometric calibration using the 6S radiative transfer code. - Image registration with parametric geometric transformations. - Demo applications for change detection, road extraction, visualization, etc. - All existing features of version 1.6: segmentation, classification, feature extraction, spatial reasoning, change detection, etc.


OTB tends to lean towards being monolithic at times with internal source tree copies of ITK, Boost and Ossim, but it keeps people away from having to separately download and install dependencies. The only external things to install are CMake - it makes multi-platform builds a breeze, a pre-built binary copy of GDAL from FWTools and FLTK, a simple GUI toolkit which trades speed for aesthetics. Personally I would prefer a nicer GUI Toolkit such as Qt but FLTK works just fine, and the whole approach is library oriented so it will be easy to plug-in your own GUI.

After a few false starts I built OTB with MSVC++ Express and NMake files from CMake. Here are the basic screenshots.

Basic Viewer Manager:



Diaporama (ENVI Style viewer with transitions):



Interactive Change Detection: