2011 - An Apple Year

(Photo by net_efekt - CC-BY)

Just for the record, 2011 was remarkably plentiful of apples in European part of Russia. So I ate a lot of apple jam this winter and even tasted a home made apple wine.

Maybe there will be another apple year in future and it will be possible at least to try to estimate an interval for this phenomenon.

Winter is the Best Cooling System

My CPU never was so cold:

Methodology for Assessment of Environmental Risk Caused by Fires at Illegal Dumps

It's actually already two month old news, but my research "Developement of the Universal Methodology for Assessement of Environmental Risk Caused by Fires at Illegal Dumps" (download in RUSSIAN), that was made special for Fire Monitoring Challenge (by GIS-Lab, Microsoft, NEXTGIS, several universities and GIS/spatial data corporations), was  awarded the 2-nd pace. The prize consisted of the fancy diploma, Lenovo IdeaPad G560 (thanks to all the gods it became much less uglier when I've installed openSUSE at it and applied an OSM sticker ;-), a wireless mouse (my wife was happy to grab it) and a nice book on remote sensing for children.

Instead of abstract:
Developed methodology for assessment of the fire probability in dependence of spatial location and actual area of illegal dump. It is applicable for any part of the world. Software used: QGIS, R.

Spatial component of the probability of the fire at illegal dump in Leningrad region, Russia

I was lucky to present this research at two conferences and today I've received a printed "minor" publication of the article (it is beta-version of the paper available at the link above). So it is possible now to cite it as:

Yury V. Ryabov (2011) Razrabotka univercal'noy metodiki rascheta veroyatnosti vozniknovenia pozhara na nesankcionirovennoy svalke // Sbornik nauchnih trudov molodyh specialistov, prepodavateley i aspirantov po resultatam provedenia Tret'ego molodezрnogo ecologichescogo congressa "Severnaya palmira", 21-22 noyabria 2011, Sankt-Peterburg. - SPb NICEB RAN - pp. 93-106.

To Do: develope formula for composition coefficient calculation; translation to English; major publication.

P.S. If you are interested in this research and do not speak Russian don't hesitate to contact me and ask for general translation.

OrbView-3: offline imagery catalogue available

OrbView-3 high resolution imagery became available as a public domain recently. One can access it via USGS's EarthExplorer.

GIS-Lab decided to make a shp-file catalogue for the available imagery to have quick access to the metadata and coverage. You can download it here.

OrbView-3 coverage

PS. I'm glad I was able to help a bit with that.

QGIS: visualisation of the directions of the roads

I was asked about the possibility to visualise directions of the roads in QGIS. Actually it is quite simple assuming that your data is topologically adequate. That means that the directions of the poly-lines representing one-way roads are the same to corresponding roads directions.

So you need a right layer with a field named like "ONE_WAY" with "yes"/"no" values. Then just check Categorised symbol in New Symbology and classify the layer using "ONE_WAY" field. Obviously you will have 2 categories: one-way and both directions.

For a one-way road create a style lake at the picture below:

Style example for a one-way road

The direction of the line in "Symbol Properties" is from left to the right, i.e. -->. In this stile I used two layers: a simple line and a marker line. An arrow marker is already present in your QGIS installation so you don't need to add anything. Such stile will represent the direction of the one-way roads. Now you only need to assign a stile for the roads wit both directions. For example the same simple line but without marker layer.

Rally against mr. Putin 24 Dec in St. Petersburg

Rally 24-th of December 2011 in St. Petersburg

The rally in St. Petersburg was far not as big as in Moscow unfortunately. There were about 3,000 of people but they came and leave constantly, so the actual number of participants might be 6,000 or so.

The problem is that there is no leader amongst the opposition and actually the only thing that they have in common is a wish to get rid of Putin and his gang. Also the opposition (al least that was presented in St. Petersburg) have no stomach. The shouted: "Put Churov on trial!" and only "Putin to resighn!" when it is obvious that Churov is a Putin's puppet! So Putin is the main criminal and he must be jailed! But I deed shouted: "Put Putin on trial!". I really hope that some day he will pay for all his crimes against Russian people.

Pulseaudio: 6 channels issue solved

I hate Pulseaudio! This piece of crap never worked ever out of the box as it should. Usually I just disable it or remove completely. But in openSUSE 12.1 disabling or removing pulseaudio didn't work.

The issue: my 5.1 system sounds crappy (and subwoofer doesn't work) when I use Amarok (or flash audio from the web) and pulseaudio is enabled; but VLC and other videoplayers are able to play nice 5.1 sound. If I disable pulseaudio Amarok sounds great (and subwoofer works), but videoplayers are unable to play 5.1 - only stereo (VLC claims that audio device is busy and no workaround form web were unable to fix it).

So I decided to stick with pulseaudio, and had to make all 6 channels to work for stereo files. I've made following changes in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:

enable-lfe-remixing = yes
default-channel-map = front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe