I often find myself using Julian days as a simple method to represent dates in my code. It’s nice and easy, because every day is simply an integer (the number of days since the beginning of the year) and any time during the day can be represented as a floating point number (the fraction of […]
If you are creating maps then for goodness sake Use sensible colours! I was helping some undergraduates with some work the other day, and they decided to use the following colour scheme for representing river depth: Deep water: Red Medium-depth water: Bright green Shallow water: Pink Why did they do this? Well, either they were […]
I’m starting a new series here on my blog about interesting and somewhat out-of-the-ordinary applications of remote sensing. So…here is number 1. An analysis firm called Remote Sensing Metrics LLC has been using satellite images to predict changes in the profits of firms such as Walmart, and thus help predict share prices. How does this […]
When doing a course in Computer Vision last year I was introduced to the Lena image: This was originally a scan from Playboy magazine in 1972, but has taken on a life of its own as a test image in the field computer vision. The (very interesting) history of it is described on the Wikipedia page and […]
Many fields have a collection of rules of thumb – tacit knowledge that isn’t often talked about, but is often used in the field. Some of these rules have come from published information (papers, books, presentations etc) and some has just grown up over the years. This post isn’t anywhere near done yet – I’m going […]
As part of the OS Open Data initiative the Ordnance Survey has released a free version of their 1:50,000 scale gazetteer. This lists all of the names shown on the 1:50,000 scale OS maps, linked to information such as their location (in both Ordnance Survey grid references and WGS84 latitude/longitude pairs) and type (city, town, water […]
I’ve just been to my first ‘grown-up’ academic conference – the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society Conference 2011. I learnt a number of things from this conference that I thought I’d share: 1. Conference presentations are not like undergraduate lectures In an undergraduate lecture you go in, listen to someone talk for a long time, […]
I’ve just discovered something that I feel I must share here – partly to make more people aware of it, and partly so I don’t forget it. In the IDL programming language you will sometimes find your program interrupted by a line saying something like: % Program caused arithmetic error: Floating divide by 0 Sometimes […]
If you use Python you should use iPython. If you use iPython, particularly if you do work with matplotlib or with parallel programming, you should use the latest release. It. Is. Great. For those who don’t know, iPython is a replacement console for Python that offers many improvements over the standard console. For example, everything […]
As part of my research I do a fair amount of data collection in the field. Some of the instruments I use are very modern and connect to a computer via USB, interacting with custom-written client software which allows such luxuries as timed logging, triggered logging and local calibration. However, a number of the instruments […]