For the past several months I've been having an unreasonable amount of fun. I've been spending almost all of my time coding, with very little time wasted on meetings and corporate rubbish. I've built a publish/subscribe cloud repository that deals with some of the oddities of dealing with streaming telemetry. All the usual replication/redundancy stuff. And I've been building a rich client for doing visualization. I'm totally in love with the WorldWind library from NASA. Totally solid and filled with a pile of features that make building complex apps is almost dead simple. I did have to do one bit of low level hacking: their line drawing primitives work well for a few hundred lines that don't need level-of-detail support. I needed to handle lines with 10s of thousands of segments with level-of-detail handling. Not hard, just fun. I've done a lot of library work that it probably makes sense to open source sometime.
I have actually been doing a lot of blogging, just not here on my personal blog. You'll find it at the PacX challenge site which I and several other folks contribute to.
The last engineering sign-off happened the night before last and yesterday morning the PacX wavegliders headed out of Monterey Bay for Hawaii. They’ll be collecting piles of data along the way. Every now and then they will pause to do a few laps around mid-ocean buoys to get sensor correlations. It’s been somewhat cloudy, so we’ve had to turn some instruments off to save power. This won’t be a quick passage to Hawaii: they travel at about the speed of a pleasant stroll. Think of someone walking to Hawaii… 24 hours a day, without pausing. Here’s a map of their progress:
If you're job hunting, check out our careers page. No software jobs, sadly...
One of the interesting sensors is the Datawell MOSE-G wave sensor, which calculates, among other things, the height of the waves that the robot is traveling through. The image shows the latest data from the shakedown cruise. There are some data dropouts (don't ask!) but if you look closely at the
data
you'll see some 6 meter (20ish feet!) waves on the way down to Monterey. Their course through the ocean didn't even wiggle. There are supposed to be some storms coming up this week, should be entertaining. The 'bots will probably just say "Yippee!"
Today we launched the four wavegliders for the PacX Challenge. We had a launch event in San Francisco. The robots got christened then sent out to sea on a fishing boat. They got dropped off at roughly where the water depth got to 100 fathoms. It's crab season in California and the seas up to a depth of about 80 fathoms are littered with crab pots, along with their pesky marker buoys and lines. The robots are streaming a pile of telemetry to data.liquidr.com. Folks with a geeky attraction to marine data can extract it in a variety of formats, from images to CSV files - all courtesy of a lovely server called ERDDAP from the wonderful folks at NOAA.
The data is "open source". Everyone from marine scientists to kids doing science fair projects is welcome to download and mine it for whatever they'd like.
In this image you can see the temperature reading from the glider, which is at a depth of about 7 meters when the robot is at sea. The map covers the trip on the freeway from the factory in Sunnyvale up to San Francisco. Then onboard the boat that launched them, then they're launched and swim separate, but parallel tracks.
Some folks from Bloomberg visited our engineering site in Hawaii and did a great video of the Wave Glider robot in action:
It's amazing to see how people react to the robot. There was an ocean engineering conference in Hawaii several weeks ago, not far from our engineering site. Most long-time oceanography folks listen to the pitch about our robot and it really doesn't make sense to them, if only because it doesn't have a propeller and can stay out at sea for a long time. We hired a local dive shop to take conference attendees to swim with the robot, and for many it was quite an epiphany: grabbing onto the robot and having it pull you through the water with just the power of the waves is quite an experience. The underwater wings are amazingly graceful. It's a very elegant piece of engineering.
If you're interested in joining the fun, we're having 4 Wave Gliders cross the Pacific and we'll be continuously publishing all the data on a website as they go along. Anyone: researchers, hobbyists, students... can grab the data and look for interesting things. It could make for an interesting science fair project. [the website will be up and running and populated with data as soon as I can get it done]
The bits and pieces of Steve Jobs's upcoming biography that have been coming out have been fascinating. One particular one that really rips me up is his rebuke of the board of directors of Hewlett Packard, and in particular, their leadership choices. I absolutely agree with Jobs. It's hard to describe the board's CEO choices as anything but completely insane. They've gone from one really awful choice to another. Hiring a CEO is a tricky thing, it often goes awry under the best of circumstances. But they seem to be acting so stupidly that they must be actively trying to tank the company. My wife worked for HP under Mark Hurd in the headquarters complex: the place got totally ground up. Apotheker did not understand any of HP's strengths and tried to turn it into something he was familiar with: a weak shadow of Oracle and IBM, which it had almost no basis to build from. What will Meg Whitman do? Try to turn it into an auction house? The board should fire themselves and put in place someone who knows how to build and run a systems company. There aren't many around, but they exist. The board needs to think in terms of investing in building HP up to being a strong and vibrant company. Not stripping it down into something that can be milked of its last pennies.
Who would I pick? I'm not completely sure, but the top of my list is not too surprising: Scott McNealy. Wall Street and the analysts hate him, having unfairly pilloried him for years. I've got my own set of issues with him, but he could drive HP to being incredible again. It's a world he understands better that anyone else on the planet. HP used to be Sun's opponent, but I doubt that this would be a problem for Scott: he's hugely into team sports and knows that whatever the color of the shirt you wear during the game, you play to win.
For the past several months I've been having an unreasonable amount of fun. I've been spending almost all of my time coding, with very little time wasted on meetings and corporate rubbish. I've built a publish/subscribe cloud repository that deals with some of the oddities of dealing with streaming telemetry. All the usual replication/redundancy stuff. And I've been building a rich client for doing visualization. I'm totally in love with the WorldWind library from NASA. Totally solid and filled with a pile of features that make building complex apps is almost dead simple. I did have to do one bit of low level hacking: their line drawing primitives work well for a few hundred lines that don't need level-of-detail support. I needed to handle lines with 10s of thousands of segments with level-of-detail handling. Not hard, just fun. I've done a lot of library work that it probably makes sense to open source sometime.
Today we launched the four wavegliders for the PacX Challenge. We had a launch event in San Francisco. The robots got christened then sent out to sea on a fishing boat. They got dropped off at roughly where the water depth got to 100 fathoms. It's crab season in California and the seas up to a depth of about 80 fathoms are littered with crab pots, along with their pesky marker buoys and lines. The robots are streaming a pile of telemetry to data.liquidr.com. Folks with a geeky attraction to marine data can extract it in a variety of formats, from images to CSV files - all courtesy of a lovely server called ERDDAP from the wonderful folks at NOAA.