It's all about timing

I was invited to a community meeting in Kelara today, where officials from the forestry and other offices, people from BRI bank, and members of the community would discuss credit facilities for farmers. Not directly in my line of work, but I tend to go to these things as there's usually a lunch attached. The meeting agenda was set for a 0900 start.

Here's how the schedule actually went:

Night before: I fix a time with partner from forestry office: we'll set off at 0630. The meeting starts at 0900, and it's around half an hour away by motorcycle. Still, I think we may have preparation to do.
0630: I'm washed, dressed and breakfasted, ready to go. Partner says we'll go after he's taken his children to school. OK.
0700: Partner returns from school run. Decides to have breakfast.
0730: We're off. Travel for 5 minutes then stop on outskirts of Jeneponto. Partner tries to trace colleague who we're following to Kelara by mobile. No sign - there's an unconfirmed rumour that he's doing some photocopying.
0730-0830: Hang around by side of road. I watch some goats. 
0830: Colleague tracked down to agriculture office. We ride back into Jeneponto to find rest of colleagues from forestry office hanging around the agriculture office too.
0900: We're off again - a clear run to Kelara.
0930: Arrive Kelara, only half an hour late. No one else has turned up yet.
1000: Community members start to arrive.
1030: People from bank arrive, and the meeting is finally underway. I understand only little of what's being said. Each member of panel must speak for at least 15 minutes in a monotone.
1230: Close and lunch.
1330: Return to Jeneponto.

Attendance was interesting too: I counted 17 government officials, and 11 members of the community. So time and money well spent I think.











The panel at today's meeting - alert to answer any question.

Cheesy does it

I've not posted recently, as I've had nothing positive to say. But today, things started to get better. Why? I had a cheese sandwich.

It may not sound much, but I've been having a tolerably unpleasant time in Jeneponto so far - no work to do, finding the heat oppressive, and finding the culture difficult to adapt to. But yesterday I bought a fridge, and so today I could go shopping for luxuries like fresh vegetables. And cheese.

Prochiz, tomato and bread - the ultimate in western style foodstuffs.











As you might expect, it's not up to Melton Mowbray Red Leicester standards, but "Prochiz" is the only cheese available here. The tomatoes are a bit ropy too - things that would go into chutney or the compost bin if I'd grown them at home. But add the Indonesian white sliced loaf, and you have the makings of a luxurious lunch.


The final product - will somebody send me some Branston Pickle?











This humble comestible has made living here a little more bearable. My house is OK - a palace compared to one fellow volunteer's mosquito infested hole, and Glenda the Honda GLMax seems to be behaving herself, after some fuelling problems. I suspect the diet of cruddy petrol sold out of old vegetable oil bottles from roadside shacks has made her a bit grumpy - so I've treated her to some nice, clean stuff from the petrol station.

Now all I need is something to do at work...

The new house. The socks spell out "England expects every man to do his duty".












Glenda the Honda.

Tour di Bali

I've been cycling round Bali for a few weeks now. This was a little scary at first, but I've now got the hang of it. Here's how to do it:

1. Ignore road signs. If the sign says "Road close: We apologise for inconvenience your trip", and there's a big hole in in it - don't worry, you can still squeeze a bike through the busiest of construction sites. There's no health and safety here.

2. Junctions: ride slowly, and everyone will avoid you just fine. Close your eyes, if that helps.

3. Watch for dogs/potholes/Hindu offerings. A burning joss stick can cause punctures.

4. It can be hot at junctions while you're waiting for the lights to change. Stop in the shade - even if it's the wrong lane.

5. Taxi drivers will still try to offer you a ride, even if you're on a bike. Ignore them.

6. Smoking while riding is a good way of fitting in with the local culture. Make sure you fit an ashtray to keep the streets clean.

7. Improve the stability of your bicycle by attaching a crate of chickens to either side.

8. There's an optimum speed to go for - too fast, and it's hard work, too slow, and you lose the cooling breeze. According to local custom, the optimal speed is 2.6 mph.

9. Brakes aren't strictly necessary (see 2 and 8) - it will improve your road sense if you don't use them.

10. If the street is blocked with motorbikes, use the pavement. If that's full of motorbikes too, stop for an ice tea. The roads will be less busy tomorrow.

Where did all the trees go?

I had a conversation with the VSO programme director the other day about the environment in Jeneponto district where I'll be working. His best guess was that there isn't any forest left in Jeneponto - which may make my job as a forestry mapping advisor quite difficult, or ridiculously easy, depending on which way you look at it.

I'm travelling to Jeneponto at the end of next week, but it would be useful to have some background into what the area looks like before I get there. I've been playing around with MODIS imagery (http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/) with little success, and this week decided to have a look at Landsat data instead.

A quick not-too-techy guide to the differences. MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) has 30 something spectral bands, a 16 day repeat pass (if you use both satellites), but a best resolution of 250m. The most recent Landsat has7 bands at a resolution of 30m, plus a panchromatic band at 15m. The number of bands is essentially the number of "colours" the satellite can see, so MODIS is good for big things where you want to know the colour precisely, such as for ocean temperature, atmospheric aerosols, and sea ice. Landsat is better at seeing smaller things - and as some of the plantations and forest clearings may be only a few hundred metres across, this may be useful.

Landsat data can be downloaded here http://glcfapp.glcf.umd.edu:8080/esdi/index.jsp - this is the Global Landcover Survey, so only archives a few cloud free scenes rather than everything acquired by the satellite.

Each band is downloaded separately as a geotiff, so a bit of processing is required to turn these into a multiband image. I've done this in python using the gdal bindings:

from osgeo import osr, gdal 

src1=gdal.Open("L71114064_06420060822_B10.TIF") 

src2=gdal.Open("L71114064_06420060822_B20.TIF") 

src3=gdal.Open("L71114064_06420060822_B30.TIF") 

 

band1=src1.GetRasterBand(1).ReadAsArray() 

band2=src2.GetRasterBand(1).ReadAsArray() 

band3=src3.GetRasterBand(1).ReadAsArray() 

drv=gdal.GetDriverByName("GTiff") 

dst=drv.Create("Bands321.tiff",src1.RasterXSize,src1.RasterYSize,3,gdal.GDT_Byte) 

srs=osr.SpatialReference() 

srs.SetWellKnownGeogCS("WGS84") 

srs.SetUTM(50,0) 

dst.SetProjection(srs.ExportToWkt()) 

dst.SetGeoTransform(src1.GetGeoTransform()) 

dst.GetRasterBand(1).WriteArray(band3) 

dst.GetRasterBand(2).WriteArray(band2) 

dst.GetRasterBand(3).WriteArray(band1) 

dst.FlushCache()

As in other things, it's very important to flush before you finish.

[I'm going to sort out code highlighting soon, honest...]

Finally I wanted a vector land-sea boundary. This is picked out well in the infrared Landsat ETM+ band 5. Using command line gdal:

gdal_contour -fl 30 L71114064_06420060822_B50.TIF contour.shp

This generates a vector shoreline, after a bit of manual editing.

The results look OK. You can see the city of Makasar in the top left, and the scar left by the collapse of the Mount Bawakaraeng crater (centre right of image). I'm now playing with different infrared band combinations to see which best picks out forest and other vegetation. I'm also trying to merge the panchromatic band (15m resolution) to sharpen up the colour images (30m resolution). More to follow...

Yang seems to be the hardest word

A read of any Indonesian text will reveal that it's liberally sprinkled with the word "yang". My Indonesian - English dictionary helpfully describes this little word as a "nominalising particle" [I thought that was what they were looking for at CERN?], or "particle forming a specific adjective clause".

I kind of get the first one. "I want the blue one" would translate to "Saya mau yang biru" - "I want the one which is blue". The "specific adjective clause" is causing more problems. In "Saya tinggal di rumah yang kecil" - "I live in the house which is small" - the yang seems fairly redundant. My learning strategy at the moment seems to be to drop in a few yangs before random adjectives and see what the teacher says. Perhaps all will become clear - and if not I'll just stop using it.

Specific adjective clauses aside, the language is all pretty logical. You can construct a verb from any adjective or noun with appropriate suffixes and prefixes. This can lead to some very long words ("mengumpul-satukan" is over 3 times longer than its English translation, "unite"), but it helps that you can see the root within a word and so work out what it means.

The record so far for Indonesian-English letters ratio is "seorang", 7 letters needed to communicate the English word "a". I may need a new laptop keyboard before my two years is out.




















A hard day at the office

More monkey business

Just some photos from the monkey park in Ubud, Bali.

Motorcycle training in Denpasar

Vehicles in Britain tend to avoid each other. Perhaps it's something to do with our reserve, valuing personal space, or just a natural desire to not crash and die horribly every time we take to the roads. Bali's different - lane discipline is along the lines of "the more the merrier", drivers see the slightest gap in traffic as an opportunity for faster progress, and your blind spots are likely to contain at least one motorbike, a couple of dogs and a taxi.

To get us used to the slightly different road conditions here, we've done a weekend's training with VSO staff and guys from the Bali Riders' Club. We've done the usual pootling round a carpark avoiding traffic cones (you never see a traffic cone in Denpasar), riding over dirt tracks, and along a 30cm wide plank as slowly as possible. All very useful - I'm looking forward to the time that I'll have to negotiate a bridge formed from a scaffolding plank slung across a ravine. I hope I'm joking.

But as you might expect, it's the traffic that was most entertaining. For a biker used to European roads, it's disconcerting to be overtaken on either side by a scooter carrying two adults, two kids and possibly the dog too. There are some consistencies though - everybody obeys traffic lights, everybody ignores zebra crossings, and everybody wears flip-flops. I'm surprised you don't see more severed limbs and blood on the roads - but everyone seems to get along fine.

Takes me back to the feeling of negotiating Bristol's ring road when I first learnt to ride. Can't wait to get back out there though.

A trip to the Kantor Pos

Today's challenge was to post a birthday present to my friend Helen in England. After negotiating the busy traffic in the administrative centre of Denpasar on my bike (and meeting the little chap in the photo in a street on the way), I arrived at the post office, took a queue ticket and sat down to wait. For about an hour.

Fortunately it was air conditioned, and even more fortunately a very kind staff member came over to me and gave me the correct form to fill in while I waited. I'm slightly surprised that the form didn't ask for the names of both parents and my religion (most other forms seem to) – but perhaps the post office is trying to cut down on bureaucracy.

After a bit of confusion (and laughter) over their few words of English and my even fewer words of Bahasa Indonesia, it's in the post and I've been charged what I think is the official price. Result – I now have that sense of achievement that can only be gained through a successful trip to the post office. I might buy some commemorative stamps and a dog licence next time.

[Opinions expressed in this post may be subject to change if the package doesn't arrive].
[Update - the package has arrived!]

I've also found my favourite Warung so far – can't remember its name, if it has a name – that serves the best Mie Goreng (fried noodles) and ice tea I've had in Indonesia. All for about 70p. It also had the Indonesian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire?” on the TV – great for learning a few more words. I can't help feeling that this show is a bit of a con – 1m Rupiah is about 80 quid - perhaps we shouldn't take the name of the show literally.

Saya sedang belajar Bahasa Indonesia

[I am studying the Indonesian language, for those of you who don't speak Indonesian.]

In 1972, President Suharto announced certain orthographical changes to the language. One of these was to proscribe usage such as hati². Now in Bahasa, which doesn't have plurals as English speakers know them, doubling the word is use to indicate a plural, a comparative, or to add emphasis. So hati-hati would mean "be very careful!", and could be written hati-squared.

I rather like the use of exponents to add emphasis - and would be tempted, before 1972, to use higher powers. Hati³ in especially dangerous situations, for example.

I've converted to Buddhism

27-09-2010 18:36

[I've been writing some blog postings offline, so they'll tend to come in waves when I get internet access - so the dates above may not match.]

To obtain an Indonesian work permit, we have to declare our religion. From a list of 5: Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist. So atheist is not an option. While I'm not happy about this, I've chosen Buddhist as being closest to atheism - I just need to remember I've registered as a Buddhist and not make any accidental conversions during my placement.

The VSO staff have been great here - we've been chauffered around by Ujang, our Balinese driver, and shown around the local bars and restaurants by other VSO volunteers. They've been excellent at providing information, looking after our visas and work permits, and generally removing any minor hassles. Meaning we can concentrate on getting acclimatised and learning more about the programmes that VSO work on in Indonesia.

The VSO office also has one of the nicest smoking areas I've ever seen.




VSO staff and volunteer up on the roof terrace.

Greetings from Bali

I've arrived in Bali for in country training before starting my VSO placement proper.

First impressions of Indonesia? It's true, everyone is very friendly. Even the immigration officers at the airport were smiling and joking - compare that to the stony faced gatekeepers at any UK or US airport.

Met by VSO staff and volunteers at the airport, whisked to hotel and then local fish Warung - grilled snapper, rice and some mental chilli sauce, for about a pound. Hostel looks stunning even in the dark - rooms open onto a palm filled courtyard with chirping crickets and birds.

I've met some of the other volunteers on our 6 week language course - sharing a room with Paul, a genial dutchman working in disability. Beach games have been organised for tomorrow - let's hope I can withstand the enforced jolity.

So far no massive culture shocks, and I don't want to come home yet. So far, so good...

I'm in love with Xubuntu

I've just installed Xubuntu 10.04 - and it rocks. It's based on the Xfce window manager, which while it can do all the fancy stuff associated with KDE and GNOME, defaults to boring. So nothing fancy, just a classy looking interface with multiple workspaces.

One of the things I like about GNU-Linux is that the operating system tends to be far less CPU and memory hungry than other commercial OS, leaving your PCs power to be used on the stuff that matters (like the applications), rather than on a nice animated file transfer monitor, for example. But recent linux windows managers have included more and more of these bells and whistles, hoovering up CPU and RAM. What's worse, in Kubuntu the window compositor appeared to cause the system to hang sometimes.

In the 90s I was working with fairly simple IRIX and Solaris (and even Sun OS!) systems - in those days an operating system provided the ability to open windows, use multiple workspaces, and a clock, which is pretty much all you really need. Xubuntu provides this, in an uncluttered and accessible format - no plasma dashboards, cashews or pop up notifications.

[I still find it extraordinary that the concept of multiple workspaces hasn't been taken up by Microsoft - but then it did take them an extraordinary length of time to steal tabbed browsing from Mozilla.]

There are some advances in functionality too - wireless access works out of the box, rather than requiring 2 days of faffing about with wpa-supplicant as it did with Kubuntu 9.04. Perhaps most excitingly, I can now watch my best of the Two Ronnies DVD with Gnome MPlayer, which previous players have stubbornly refused to read.

There's a live CD downloadable from here - recommended.

Running Windows 7 in VirtualBox

I'd like to be free of Windows. Linux distros have made great leaps forward in recent years - especially in terms of hardware compatibility. Take wifi - trying the latest Xubuntu Live CD last week, even the wifi access worked straight away. Last year I installed Kubuntu 9.04, and getting wifi to work took several hours loading drivers, hacking scripts and crossing fingers. So it's getting easier to live without Windows - but I'll be working with people who run Windows, and I'm likely to need some software that can only be run on Windows.

Dual boot is one answer - but do I really want to reboot my machine just to look at an Excel spreadsheet? Virtualisation may be the way forward - run Windows under VirtualBox, and you can switch between operating systems at will. So I've just tried running Windows 7 in VirtualBox - successfully too.

I've had to install the PUEL (Personal User and Evaluation Licence) edition - this is available free from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads, with various installers for different Linux distros (I'm running Kubuntu 9.04). It's pretty much the same as the OSE (Open Source Edition), except it includes support for USB. This should allow the virtual machine access to USB devices - potentially very useful for me, as I may want to access printers and other hardware that aren't easily suppported in Linux.

After installing VirtualBox, I've built a new virtual machine and installed Windows 7 Enterprise Trial Edition (available from technet.microsoft.com). This will give me 90 days trial - enough to see if I can do everything I need to do in a virtual machine before buying a licensed copy. Windows claims to need 20GB of disk space for an installation - with just the OS, it's used up 5.5GB of the virtual disk.

Once the PUEL edition is installed and the virtual machine built, you'll need to enable USB for the virtual machine (enable USB and USB 2.0 EHCI in settings). I've added my linux user ID to the "vboxusers" and "plugdev" groups (using the KUser user manager) - seems to require a reboot for these to take effect (before rebooting you can see the USB devices but they are greyed out).

[After moving to Xubuntu 10.04, I also had to add my user ID to the "lp" group to be able to access a printer.]

Once I'd done this, USB support seems to work - by clicking on the USB icon on the bottom right of the virtual machine window, and checking the one you want to access in the virtual machine. The only difficulty is that it's difficult to recognise which device is which - the names they use may not be obvious ("Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd. CNF7047 [1324]" - eh?).

So it's quite straightforward to build a virtual machine to run Windows 7 on a linux box. I'm hoping this will mean not having to faff about with dual boot. It's also good to have a virtual machine to run dodgy bits of Windows software - if it all goes wrong I can easily destroy the virtual machine and build a new one - or use snapshots/clones to go back to a stable build.

Diary of an intrepid office explorer

Remember the good old days? When an explorer would hack off over the sea, through the jungle, or across the desert, armed with little but generous funding from wealthy benefactors, a wind up gramophone and several hundred native bearers? I've been doing the modern equivalent by exploring the island of Sulawesi from the comfort of my own office - using freely available geographic data.

I'll be off the Sulawesi in September to work with VSO on forestry management projects - and must admit to knowing little about the island. As someone working in conservation, hydrology and land use, I'd like to get an idea of what the place looks like, how much it rains, and how warm it is. Pretty much the sort of thing our pith helmetted forebears would be looking for.

To start - what does the coastline look like? Put away the sextant, we'll use this instead:

http://rimmer.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/coast/getcoast.html

This is a vector dataset of coastlines of the world, developed from various sources by the US Defense Mapping Agency. Unfortunately, this gives you data in a slightly weird format (text files of [x,y] pairs), which will take a bit of furtling to import into GIS. For the lazy explorer, the same data set has converted to shapefiles by some nice people at the Pacific Disaster Center in Hawaii:

http://www.pdc.org/mde/full_metadata.jsp?docId={32F5F3B8-1CF1-48C5-9B81-57885C0CA448}

There is also a lower resolution shapefile dataset derived from SRTM data here:

http://geoserver.isciences.com:8080/geonetwork/srv/en/metadata.show?id=244

This data set has a 1km resolution, so looks a bit "blocky", but is OK for large scale applications.

Now we'd like some topographic data - information on the land elevation is essential for hydrological modelling. Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is not the best accuracy (a few metres vertically) or resolution (90m, or 30m over the US), but it's probably OK for hydrological modelling in some places, and gives you easily accessible, near global coverage.

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/

A bit of faffing around with gdal will give you a DTM (Digital Terrain Model) referenced to your projection of choice (UTM zone 50S for west Sulawesi).

Finally, we'd like to know how wet it is - will I need to take an umbrella? WorldClim has a global datasets of rainfall, temperature and other climate variables at 1km resolution:

http://www.worldclim.org/

This is interpolated from climate station data - so the accuracy must be suspect where measurements are sparse.

Here are the results:



Coastline and SRTM topography Mostly volcanoes, with dendritic drainage patterns superimposed.





















Mean January Rainfall - note how the rainfall varies strongly with topography and coastal aspect, especially in the South Sulawesi peninsular.























So, 170 000 square kilometres of the east indies mapped without leaving the office. Leaving me time for a snifter before lunch at the Reform Club. Cheers!

I've just been wrestling with gmail - and after telling a fair number of people that my gmail account will stay active when I go to Indonesia, I discover the single most annoying email feature I've ever encountered - the conversation. This groups all emails with the same subject line together - so when two completely different people send me a mail with "Greetings!" in the subject line, it assumes they are related. Google thinks this is a good thing - I don't - and you can't disable it.

So I guess it's back to Thunderbird to access my gmail account - shame, because I did like the labels features, and it's handy to have a good web interface.

Unfortunately Virgin Media use gmail as their mailserver too. This miffs me somewhat further - firstly because I feel like I'm paying Richard Branson for something, and he's getting it off google for free. And secondly, Virgin Media webmail has conversations too. I'm starting to feel nostalgic for Telewest - and it's obviously not a good sign to feel nostalgic about ISPs.

Blogging starts here

This is my first post. Interesting...