I’ve just wrapped up a small job refreshing teaching materials for the Australian National University Centre for Water and Landscape Dynamics – an innovative group using remote sensing tech to address landscape-scale analysis of things that matter for assessing the state of the environment (see, for example: http://wald.anu.edu.au/data_services/data/continuous-and-comprehensive-national-environmental-reporting-australias-environment/). The task? convert a MATLAB and ArcGIS-based…
Cartocrafting
Digging deep into my my own history here, I left high school full of confidence that I would become an illustrator and spend my life drawing things for science! I didn’t make the cut for art school. And went to science instead – there’s a long story about why I didn’t just leap straight into…
An open source point cloud infrastructure part 2: oceans
If you haven’t read part 1 of this miniseries, go take a look. To really briefly summarise, it tells a short backstory about why the PDAL + Entwine needs to be on the radar for anyone considering massive point-cloud based data management; and provides a couple of terrestrial examples. Here, we tackle hydrography. The GEBCO…
An open source point cloud data infrastructure: introduction, and land.
I’ve recently been exploring the Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL) and Entwine ecosystem a lot. For work, and for proving some ideas that have been kicking around for a few years now (see my EGU poster from 2016, or FOSS4G talk in 2017). These are not new ideas – other people have had them for…
FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018
In late November 2018 the inaugural FOSS4G SotM Oceania conference took place – as one of the organisers it is still completely surreal that it was real, and we made it happen! To me, it feels now as if a few enthusiastic people had a conversation about a year ago, someone waved a magic wand,…
More sea ice reconstructions
Because we all focus so hard while writing workshops for FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018, right? Here are a couple more ‘fun with sea ice’ visualisations. There’s nothing really scientific about these, they’re based on some proof of concept work which is very slowly iterating toward science. So, just enjoy! Firstly, SIPEX II Ice station 7…
Open AgTech – a prelude
I recently attended to a workshop on AgTech innovation, hosted by the Canberra Innovation Network and the US Embassy. It was a fun and really useful day out – hearing stories about what drives the agriculture sector, what they see as innovative, and how niches in the sector are filled by innovators literally ‘on the…
FOSS4G 2018: wait, what?
In late August I went to FOSS4G2018, held in conjunction with the HOTOSM summit in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. I’ve been privileged to attend three of these events in a row now, and this one is incredibly difficult to wrap up neatly and put a bow around. Why is this so? Phew. The first question is…
When one door closes, another opens
I’ve wrapped up full time work for Synthesis Technologies – we had a fundamental disagreement about my role in the company. Which is OK – this happens in any job. After 12 months, we had a good idea of where we worked together well and where we didn’t. It became obvious that a long term…
Business penguins
I’ve been to Antarctica four times, and seen a lot of penguins. I’ve also worked in various places for more than a couple of decades now, and seen a lot of penguins. I am also trained in behavioural psychology – so I observe things about behaviour and see patterns. I can’t not! Anyway. One of…