Last week, I put together a quick write-up of the possible sources of trouble for AIS messages. It doesn't go into the needed depth on topics, but I would appreciate technical feedback and any links to people doing deep dives on any or all of the issues.
Apparently, there are units available that will track 120 simultaneous channels across all the available systems (this comes from Dave Wells). Not having a unit in my possession (and never having messed with Rinex before), I'll have to take his word for it.
It's nice to see some of my work come to light. I created prototypes for this back a few years ago with Google Earth and GDAL for the Bathymetric Attributed Grids (BAG) file from Hydrographic Surveys...
http://youtu.be/7fOTlqqQ5O4
Or build a visualization yourself using the code:
https://github.com/schwehr/bag-py
Yes... most likely the patent office won't discover your invention in their research as most of their searching is in prior patents. So you will find yourself paying big $ trying to get the patent invalidated.
I've got all but one of the presentations (ppt or pdf) from the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Jan 2010. Two of the talks had to be approved by the White House. There need to be many many more of these types of events, but at least it is a start.
http://tinyurl.com/BpLessons
Do whatever you can. Documentation, packaging, training, whatever
Consider even just small steps... e.g. posting small examples of using FOSS can help a lot. I use my blog to help NOAA accomplish its mission indirectly. One instance is how to use QGIS to read data directly from a PostGIS database:
This often comes purely from what the teaching faculty knows... which causes a lot of teaching of excel (+ maybe visual basic) too. If you don't know it, you can't teach it.
I've had a similar question for Hydrographic Offices in various countries that have to produce Coast Pilot/Sailing Directions documents. Except in their case, this is a document that has 100+ years of revisions and is looking to 100 more years. How do we get them into a process where they can track all the changes and reference where material was submitted from?
I tried to think through some of the options for this kind of stuff here:
I use Verizon's EVDO and am not very satisfied. I uses two mac laptops (ppc and x86) and suddenly started seeing a ton of kernel panics, where I had got years without trouble. The connection client is really lame. Also lame is the 5GB limit for the "unlimited plan". At least now they will not disconnect you if you hit 5GB in one month. They will "just" limit your througput. I'm out in NH and the service is come and go as with the verizon voice coverage. In San Fran, the coverage and usage was excellent. I used it on trains going through tunnels without trouble. It's annoying to have this adapter hanging off the side of the laptop all the time. Also, once in a while the network flays on "re-registering" and it locks me out of the system for 3-6 hours while the network thinks that I am trying to connect from two machines at the same time. They say that it is only for standard web browsing only. I haven't tried skype, but ssh, irc, and all http(s) all work fine. This sumer, I will also be getting a DSL or Cable link, cause I can't take this much longer as my only connection. Sometimes at my house, I get 3 "bars" and other times I go hours with none. I wish this client would log signal strength so I could see if there is some pattern to the outages. Tech support has been responsive, nice, and more friendly than most. Still, it is easy to run past their knowledge of how the network works.
Over all rating: so-so
No kidding. A friend and I got one ticket each in the span of 1/2 an hour outside of Dallas. I'm sorry, but they were just making money, not helping the public good. Or how about the cop hidding in the orange grove in the central valley of Calif. Thank goodness I was driving a federal vehicle so I could prove to the insurance company that I was driving for work. The cop was sure that I had stolen it. Now why would I steal a minivan?
Yet every day here in SD, I see people really dangerous manuvers (right turn from the left hand land, and visa-versa) right in front of cop cars and NOTHING?
That's enough of a rant for now. This law would seriously suck.
This is basically Etherman with the nodes placed geographically (which is nothing new either). To the USPO, WTF? Etherman has been around since 1993. It is too bad they never released the source. Those guys in Australia wanted $1000 for the source. As a result an awesome tool fades into obscurity.
The free binary version of this program was a life saver for to help manage network problems with some NASA mars rover practice missions in 1996 and 1997.
When I was last in Antarctica, we used to hold our laptops over the stove before powering it on. And keeping batteries inside your jacket. Once things are running, life is pretty good even when it gets really cold... unless you get ice inside your devices (whoops!)
I had to use solaris on my last flight mission (MER) and it reinforces my feelings that I never want to use solaris again. It is a solid operating system with some really powerful stuff here and there, but it is like pulling teeth without anesthetic to administer. If it weren't for blastwave, I would have been crushed. Give me debian or give me fink.
I have 4 sun blades and they are continuous trouble... so much work to maintain. And why does the patchset take 8 hours to install on a new install. Come on! It took 10 minutes to download. Now if I can get openafs onto a mac cluster w/ integrated linux boxen, I will be a very happy camper.
didn't mean to knock other ways of doing things. just meant to give some options... I used texshop when I wrote a paper with latex recently
In my.emacs file I have
(global-set-key [f1] 'compile)
Which lets me do fn-F1 to run make. then I can type what ever and use the up arrow to get previous commands. was a long time using emacs before i discovered that there are may history like features running through emacs. there is probably a way to do explicite commands, but i'm not that great of a lisp hacker. You can set a default command for compile other than make -k by putting something like this in your.emacs
(setq compile-command "make ")
Someone who is better with emacs want to jump in?
It's pretty amusing (and not always the most fun) to be required to use lisp to configure my editor. But for me it's worth it. Just turned someone buying me a copy of BBEdit Pro.
Often when I teach new unix users emacs, 1st they hate me. "Why do I have to use that evil program" Then a couple weeks later, I usually get a thank you (or they ignore me for ever after:) It's definitely not worth learning if you will only being using it just a little bit. Just don't use the IRIX jot program -- I really hate that thing.
"And this all depends on the situation. Take something like iTeXMac. To compile a tex project with it, I hit Cmd-Alt-T. Much faster than switching to another terminal, typing pdflatex my_proj.tex, waiting for it to finish, typing pdflatex my_proj.tex again until it reaches its fixpoint, then refreshing my view of the resulting pdf."
How about M-x compile (which I alias to C-x C-e), put in the pdflatex command once with && open my_proj.pdf at the end. Then Apple-Tab back to X11. Works wonders.
CLI for some, gui for others... I spend lots of time editing in emacs and then telling the GUI from the command line to show me the results. M-x shell then open foo.html. It always get frustrated when I finally have to resort to photoshop or illustrator. How many times I have I spent hours to make a figure just right, when the advisor says, why didn't use include these other data points over here? Could you redo it with those... if everything I did was CLI based, it's just a quick matter of re-running the bash script. If it's Illustrator/Photoshop, it's an hour of wrist pain with the mouse.
How about solar wind stripping? Hydrogen is super light and rapidly ends up at the top of the atmosphere which is being hit by the solar wind (no magnetic field to shield the atmosphere).
First, get rid of VxWorks. That OS is killing the design of better robotic vehicles. Why do managers insist that I go buy a $20K OS when it has less functionality than linux or bsd based OSEs and from my experience, the VxWorks board support packages (BSP) tend to really suck. Why do I have to reimpliment atan2 so it works right when I paid $6K for an extra slow computer and BSP? And try asking wind river how many cycles a particular function call is supposed to take on their REALTIME OS? I have always gotten the "We cannot comment" response. At least with linux or a BSD, I can go read the source and see exactly what has to be done for a paricular system call! 80% of the research time for a particular unamed AI for mars robots project was dedicated to dealing with VxWorks and BSP problems. I love it when a vendor emails my boss complaining that I'm obviously a beginning programmer without a clue. 6 months to get VxWorks to kinda work sometimes, often crashing BEFORE any of my code loads compaired with 1 week from getting a linux box & frame grabbers, ratchet strapping it on the back of the robot, and having it up and running all our code reliably while driving the robot around.
As for getting the AI on the robot, a big hurdle is the science team. They (rightly?) do not want to give up control of the vehicle. If they see for example a rock that is the rosetta stone of their particular scientific questions and the rover decides on its own that it has got to motor on, we'll have some pretty pissed off scientists on our hands!
Hmmm... lets see...
Put a P5 headless computer on the back of an ATV in the artic. I was up to my waist in mud. Once I discovered that one one of the PCI cards had come unseated from the twin otter drop off it worked great for two weaks in the artic.
Took the same system to yellowstone... worked great right next to some huge guysers. (why did I think it would be smart to weak tevas there?)
Took a laptop to antarctica. Tried to download data from a remote outdoor station during a blowing ice store. After a half hour, the powersupply died, but after getting a new powersupply it worked great.
We took an SGI Indy to the remote Arizona desert and the high Chilean desert. That's when we realized that optical mice rule. The mechanical ones freak out. You do have to remember to dump out the sand from the computer every couple of days.
Last one... on board embedded computer on an ROV in lake tahoe... flooded the first day there. One night with a hair drier and the next day it worked more reliably than before the flooding. No troubles with the Amiga 1000 control station setup on a chair on the beach.
So does this thing show up as a/dev/tty.something son OSX so that us old unix types can write software that uses it? I've been using a keyspan to talk to serial devices which is nice as they just appear as/dev/tty.USA... Just open and read.
Slashdot Mirror
Last week, I put together a quick write-up of the possible sources of trouble for AIS messages. It doesn't go into the needed depth on topics, but I would appreciate technical feedback and any links to people doing deep dives on any or all of the issues.
GPS spoofing possibly seen in AIS data: http://schwehr.blogspot.com/20...
And before that I've written quite a bit on the insanity that is AIS:
AIS Integrity and Security - Part 0: http://schwehr.blogspot.com/20...
Apparently, there are units available that will track 120 simultaneous channels across all the available systems (this comes from Dave Wells). Not having a unit in my possession (and never having messed with Rinex before), I'll have to take his word for it.
If you are talking astronomy, you've left out http://yt-project.org/
It's nice to see some of my work come to light. I created prototypes for this back a few years ago with Google Earth and GDAL for the Bathymetric Attributed Grids (BAG) file from Hydrographic Surveys... http://youtu.be/7fOTlqqQ5O4 Or build a visualization yourself using the code: https://github.com/schwehr/bag-py
Yes... most likely the patent office won't discover your invention in their research as most of their searching is in prior patents. So you will find yourself paying big $ trying to get the patent invalidated.
I've got all but one of the presentations (ppt or pdf) from the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Jan 2010. Two of the talks had to be approved by the White House. There need to be many many more of these types of events, but at least it is a start. http://tinyurl.com/BpLessons
Do whatever you can. Documentation, packaging, training, whatever
Consider even just small steps... e.g. posting small examples of using FOSS can help a lot. I use my blog to help NOAA accomplish its mission indirectly. One instance is how to use QGIS to read data directly from a PostGIS database:
Using QGIS to view PostGIS data
Now, how do I convince the NOAA IT folks that QGIS should be on more peoples machines?
$ cygrunsrv -I cron -p /usr/sbin/cron -a -D
$ net start cron
Or... install some linux distro and get the real thing
This often comes purely from what the teaching faculty knows... which causes a lot of teaching of excel (+ maybe visual basic) too. If you don't know it, you can't teach it.
I've had a similar question for Hydrographic Offices in various countries that have to produce Coast Pilot/Sailing Directions documents. Except in their case, this is a document that has 100+ years of revisions and is looking to 100 more years. How do we get them into a process where they can track all the changes and reference where material was submitted from?
I tried to think through some of the options for this kind of stuff here:
Managing distributed XML document editing for nautical publications
I use Verizon's EVDO and am not very satisfied. I uses two mac laptops (ppc and x86) and suddenly started seeing a ton of kernel panics, where I had got years without trouble. The connection client is really lame. Also lame is the 5GB limit for the "unlimited plan". At least now they will not disconnect you if you hit 5GB in one month. They will "just" limit your througput. I'm out in NH and the service is come and go as with the verizon voice coverage. In San Fran, the coverage and usage was excellent. I used it on trains going through tunnels without trouble. It's annoying to have this adapter hanging off the side of the laptop all the time. Also, once in a while the network flays on "re-registering" and it locks me out of the system for 3-6 hours while the network thinks that I am trying to connect from two machines at the same time. They say that it is only for standard web browsing only. I haven't tried skype, but ssh, irc, and all http(s) all work fine. This sumer, I will also be getting a DSL or Cable link, cause I can't take this much longer as my only connection. Sometimes at my house, I get 3 "bars" and other times I go hours with none. I wish this client would log signal strength so I could see if there is some pattern to the outages. Tech support has been responsive, nice, and more friendly than most. Still, it is easy to run past their knowledge of how the network works. Over all rating: so-so
Why not just blog and let archive.org pick it up? For example, take a look at one of my pages: http://web.archive.org/web/20070705205748/http://s chwehr.org/blog/archives/2005-10.html
Or maybe looking at the URL, is it not archived?
-kurt
No kidding. A friend and I got one ticket each in the span of 1/2 an hour outside of Dallas. I'm sorry, but they were just making money, not helping the public good. Or how about the cop hidding in the orange grove in the central valley of Calif. Thank goodness I was driving a federal vehicle so I could prove to the insurance company that I was driving for work. The cop was sure that I had stolen it. Now why would I steal a minivan?
Yet every day here in SD, I see people really dangerous manuvers (right turn from the left hand land, and visa-versa) right in front of cop cars and NOTHING?
That's enough of a rant for now. This law would seriously suck.
This is basically Etherman with the nodes placed geographically (which is nothing new either). To the USPO, WTF? Etherman has been around since 1993. It is too bad they never released the source. Those guys in Australia wanted $1000 for the source. As a result an awesome tool fades into obscurity. The free binary version of this program was a life saver for to help manage network problems with some NASA mars rover practice missions in 1996 and 1997.
This has is broken with 10.3.6 and 10.3.7. Just get a blank metalic window. If anyone has it working with either of those, please post!
When I was last in Antarctica, we used to hold our laptops over the stove before powering it on. And keeping batteries inside your jacket. Once things are running, life is pretty good even when it gets really cold... unless you get ice inside your devices (whoops!)
I have 4 sun blades and they are continuous trouble... so much work to maintain. And why does the patchset take 8 hours to install on a new install. Come on! It took 10 minutes to download. Now if I can get openafs onto a mac cluster w/ integrated linux boxen, I will be a very happy camper.
In my .emacs file I have
.emacs
:) It's definitely not worth learning if you will only being using it just a little bit. Just don't use the IRIX jot program -- I really hate that thing.
(global-set-key [f1] 'compile)
Which lets me do fn-F1 to run make. then I can type what ever and use the up arrow to get previous commands. was a long time using emacs before i discovered that there are may history like features running through emacs. there is probably a way to do explicite commands, but i'm not that great of a lisp hacker. You can set a default command for compile other than make -k by putting something like this in your
(setq compile-command "make ")
Someone who is better with emacs want to jump in?
It's pretty amusing (and not always the most fun) to be required to use lisp to configure my editor. But for me it's worth it. Just turned someone buying me a copy of BBEdit Pro.
Often when I teach new unix users emacs, 1st they hate me. "Why do I have to use that evil program" Then a couple weeks later, I usually get a thank you (or they ignore me for ever after
How about M-x compile (which I alias to C-x C-e), put in the pdflatex command once with && open my_proj.pdf at the end. Then Apple-Tab back to X11. Works wonders.
CLI for some, gui for others... I spend lots of time editing in emacs and then telling the GUI from the command line to show me the results. M-x shell then open foo.html. It always get frustrated when I finally have to resort to photoshop or illustrator. How many times I have I spent hours to make a figure just right, when the advisor says, why didn't use include these other data points over here? Could you redo it with those... if everything I did was CLI based, it's just a quick matter of re-running the bash script. If it's Illustrator/Photoshop, it's an hour of wrist pain with the mouse.
"open" rocks
How about solar wind stripping? Hydrogen is super light and rapidly ends up at the top of the atmosphere which is being hit by the solar wind (no magnetic field to shield the atmosphere).
2 comments...
First, get rid of VxWorks. That OS is killing the design of better robotic vehicles. Why do managers insist that I go buy a $20K OS when it has less functionality than linux or bsd based OSEs and from my experience, the VxWorks board support packages (BSP) tend to really suck. Why do I have to reimpliment atan2 so it works right when I paid $6K for an extra slow computer and BSP? And try asking wind river how many cycles a particular function call is supposed to take on their REALTIME OS? I have always gotten the "We cannot comment" response. At least with linux or a BSD, I can go read the source and see exactly what has to be done for a paricular system call! 80% of the research time for a particular unamed AI for mars robots project was dedicated to dealing with VxWorks and BSP problems. I love it when a vendor emails my boss complaining that I'm obviously a beginning programmer without a clue. 6 months to get VxWorks to kinda work sometimes, often crashing BEFORE any of my code loads compaired with 1 week from getting a linux box & frame grabbers, ratchet strapping it on the back of the robot, and having it up and running all our code reliably while driving the robot around.
As for getting the AI on the robot, a big hurdle is the science team. They (rightly?) do not want to give up control of the vehicle. If they see for example a rock that is the rosetta stone of their particular scientific questions and the rover decides on its own that it has got to motor on, we'll have some pretty pissed off scientists on our hands!
Took the same system to yellowstone... worked great right next to some huge guysers. (why did I think it would be smart to weak tevas there?)
yellowstone operation photos
Took a laptop to antarctica. Tried to download data from a remote outdoor station during a blowing ice store. After a half hour, the powersupply died, but after getting a new powersupply it worked great.
We took an SGI Indy to the remote Arizona desert and the high Chilean desert. That's when we realized that optical mice rule. The mechanical ones freak out. You do have to remember to dump out the sand from the computer every couple of days.
Last one... on board embedded computer on an ROV in lake tahoe... flooded the first day there. One night with a hair drier and the next day it worked more reliably than before the flooding. No troubles with the Amiga 1000 control station setup on a chair on the beach.
Hope those were entertaining :)
So does this thing show up as a /dev/tty.something son OSX so that us old unix types can write software that uses it? I've been using a keyspan to talk to serial devices which is nice as they just appear as /dev/tty.USA... Just open and read.