Spaced Out :: 03 2006

I thought I would write a short blog about my mobile phone. Sounds a bit sad really, but, much like your desk, your phone says alot about you! Unlike most of the population in the UK, I have not really found mobiles to be particularly exciting: they make phone calls. OK, if you like your Crackberry then they can do more than that, but if Im not at my PC then I dont want to “do” email. Ringtones: sad. Games: pathetic. Pictures: take a proper camera. So what do I use?? Well its a Motorola T180 (right). It was bottom of the range in 2001!!! I’ve had one replacement battery, which lasts all week on one charge, and nothing else. Its been accidently catapulted across the room countless times and still works fine. Does everything I want and keeps on working.

Whilst being a big user of GIS, I am NOT a fan of sat-nav or GPS for that matter. I am very much of the opinion that paper maps have a very specific domain and that the use of technology for the sake of it is not a good option. Being able to read a map and navigate to your destination is by far the most preferable option. This was reinforced to me recently when a colleague mentioned they had been following a sat-nav system and hit a road that was temporarily closed. At that point the sat-nav became useless, leading to a situation of “flounder-and-panic”. I also similarly think that, given the high quality topographic maps we have in the UK, there is no place for GPS in hiking situations. You need to be able to read a map. If you can’t, a GPS will be of no help. So please don’t buy an in-car sat-nav system; instead use your brain to navigate. This engages you as a driver and, when things do go wrong, you will actually be spatially aware as to alternative options open to you.

The Guardian continues its campaign to Free Our Data this week. Whilst Tim Berners Lee was the “headline” discussion, with further comment from Ed Parsons, what the article was really trying to get across was that the OS is being publicly hit again for restrictive practices with respect to its data. In particular the article reports on the Office of Public Sector Information’s review of the OS and its (to be frank “scathing”!) criticism of their licensing practises, particularly with respect to derived data. Any commercial licensee of OS data will be put off by the “we own anything you do with our data” policy which many commercial GI companies DONOT insist upon. So, the campaign continues….

In between all the legal filings last week, Google somewhat quietly launched Google Mars. And we thought they were content with just global domination; the universe beckons! Anyway, wrapped up in the standard Google Maps interface, Google has allowed access to three main NASA datasets:

• Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) - a near-global digital elevation model of Mars at ~500m resolution.
• Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) - a panchromatic sensor (1.5/230m).
• Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) - a VNIR multi-spectral sensor (18/100m).

OK so we cant really use this for quantitative work, but it again leverages the ability to explore large datasets very easily. I know we will be using it in our planetary science classes.

Given that I work at home as well as in the office, it is imperative that I maintain a single working “copy” of my data. To this end I realised a long time ago that some kind of synchronisation was necessary and, in the end, I’ve focussed on an external HDD, principally because of the speed/capacity benefits. What this means is that when I’m in the office I work straight off the drive (including my portable email client which has a 1Gb message base) and when I’m at home this gets synchronised to the main system, and I then work off that copy. As a side note that means I have two copies; the data directories get backed up daily to a single internal HDD and then this (and all the versioning) gets backed up once a week to another external HDD.

So the main HDD I use in work is a small 2.5” (as used in notebook PCs) drive which has the benefit of being bus powered. I recently upgraded from the 20Gb drive (formatted as FAT32) to a newer 80Gb drive (due to size I formatted it as NTFS); a problem of the gradual accumulation of both data and MP3s. It was at this point I came across a problem which took quite a while to solve.

THE SYMPTOMS: having refreshed all my data on to the drive I took it in to work. I could read and write to the drive, but I couldn’t alter data currently on the drive.

THE SOLUTION: A bit of poking around led me to the Security tab (on the file Properties dialogue) which showed me that only Administrators were allowed to modify data. A file settings problem then which would have to be repaired at home. At home there was no Security tab which, after a bit of head scratching, turned out to be because I am running XP Home at home. One of the subtle differences between XP Pro and XP Home. Further scouring of the internet led me to a “patch”, originally released by Microsoft for NT4, which adds the Security tab. Sure enough this worked on XP Home and let me add the requisitie file permissions to my drive.

All in all this was quite an accumulation of problems which would easily have defeated the average Joe in the street!