Click here to view the embedded video.

But the minimum interval is 30 seconds, making it useless for timelapses of people moving about. Also the quality of the sensor and the lens is not as good as my dSLR. With gTimelapse I can control the interval to anything I like. gTimelapse is rather new so there’s a bit of fiddling involved, to be able to build it under ubuntu 9.10 you need these packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgphoto2-2-dev libwxbase2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev

From then on it is pretty straight forward, connect your camera (make sure it is in PTP mode) also ubuntu nowadays mounts it automagically, gTimelapse doesn’t like that. So unmount the camera using the filemanager and start gTimelapse. Depending on your camera you get all kinds of settings you can fiddle with. (side note I discovered that if you first start gTimelapse and than attach the camera none of the settings appear, but the application still works). Once you’re happy you can press start and sit back.

Creating a movie is still a lot more complicated I’m afraid. I still haven’t found a decent movie editor for linux. Kino is nice but only supports DV camera’s as far as I can tell, dragging something non-DV gives an eternal Kino Import progress bar kdenlive looks promising, but it kept freezing so I gave up on it for the moment. To just get a short movie I threw mencoder at them:

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=2:dia=2:vmax_b_frames=2:vb_strategy=1:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:preme=2:qns=2 -o test5.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=5 mf://@files.txt

Where files.txt was a list of the filenames of all the images I wanted to include. This resulted in this movie:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This means it possible to create timelapse movies with linux, but postprocessing is still difficult. The next timelapse project I’ll probably shoot with linux and edit on my mac

To visualize these tracks I used Processing, ‘an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.’  There are lots of plugins to read different data formats, an interesting one for this project is the gpx library. The plan was to render the tracks of each person in a different color, tracks which happened at the same time should be drawn at the same time. This way you can see which people are at the same time at the same location. Each track would fade out in time, leaving a thin line for past tracks.

To do this on a track-basis however turned out to be quite difficult for my limited knowledge of Processing and the time I had available. So instead of using the gpx module I created a flat table with all locations sorted by time. Each row of the table contains lon,lat,color-id,time. The program iterates through all 42000+ rows and draws the locations as a dot. The size of the dot depends on how ‘old’ the point is. The last 200 points are drawn with a diminishing size, creating the worm-like effect in the animation. Note that it doesn’t take into account the actual time between points, just if it is next in line.

A few tweaks were added: Holland in unprojected lat-lon looks odd to dutch people, so I implemented a simple projection library to reproject the points to a semi-RD (dutch projection). Also I wanted to dynamically zoom to the action (not everything was happening in Amsterdam). I did this by calculating the minimum and maximum X and Y for the last 200 points. I wanted the location of our office building to be in view all the time, to provide a point of reference.

The source code can be found here if you are really interested. There are three files: Table.pde as written by Ben Fry for his book Visualizing Data, Soprojection.pde, written by Steven Fruijtier at my request and Drawing.pde is hacked together by me. This is a very crude and brute-force approach to render a series of tracks, so please use it with care. Since it needs to recalculate each point for each frame it tends to become slower as it advances through the table.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Geoserver 2.0 (SNAPSHOT downloaded 8 december 10.19UTC)
• Mapserver 5.6.0 (MS4W Base installer v3.0 Beta 7 + MapServer 5.6.0 release Upgrade)
• Deegree 2.3rc1 (Apache Tomcat 5.5.28)

To find out what the problem exactly was I’ve done some testing. I’ve taken a GeoTiff and configured all three the WCS applications to serve it. Gdalinfo gives us the following information, basically it is a GeoTIFF in epsg:3035 with a native resolution of 100m/pixel.

My test sequence was:

1. request the full extent in native resolution
2. request the full extent in a 10th of the resolution
3. request the full extent with the same size as the original data (256×256)
4. request part of the data in native resolution
5. request part of the data in non-native, non-multiple resolution

I’m not going to show all the results here, because that would result in an unhealthy long document

To verify the results I loaded the original GeoTiff in Quantum GIS and highlighted a specific feature to show the possible offset of the different results.

Corine GeoTiff

1  request the full extent in native resolution:

deegree: http://localhost:8080/deegree-wcs1/services?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&resx=100&resy=100&format=GeoTIFF gives a three band(!) GeoTiff of 262,674 bytes with a shift of around 40m:

Deegree result

MapServer: http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserver56/mapserv.exe?map=maps/corine.map&service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&resx=100&resy=100&format=GTiff gives a three band(!) GeoTiff of 197,477 bytes without a shift:

Mapserver result

GeoServer: http://localhsot:8081/geoserver/ows?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=corine_merge_gtiff_proj_121_108&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&resx=100&resy=100&format=GeoTiff gives a single band GeoTiff of 8,848 bytes with a shift of  around 50m:

Geoserver result

Note:

Deegree both shifts the data and returns a multi-band image; Mapserver doesn’t shift the data, but returns a multi-band image; Geoserver shifts the data 1/2 a pixel (50m), but does give a single band image.

2. request the full extent in a 10th of the resolution

deegree: http://localhost:8080/deegree-wcs1/services?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&resx=10&resy=10&format=GeoTIFF produces a 26,237,726 multi band GeoTiff which shifts the data the other way than the first request:

Deegree result on a tenth of the resolution

Mapserver: http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserver56/mapserv.exe?map=maps/corine.map&service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&resx=10&resy=10&format=GTiff produces a multi-band GeoTiff of 19,681,941 bytes with no shift.

Geoserver: http://localhost:8081/geoserver/ows?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=corine_merge_gtiff_proj_121_108&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&resx=10&resy=10&format=GeoTiff gives a single band GeoTiff of 158,802 bytes with a shift of around 50m, though there is a small difference with the previous result.

Note:

Mapserver and Geoserver both produce a bigger result (as expected) with the same location as the previous request. Deegree shifts the data differently than previously and also produces a bigger result.

3. request the full extent with the same size as the original data (256×256)

geoserver: http://localhost:8081/geoserver/ows?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=corine_merge_gtiff_proj_121_108&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&width=256&height=256&format=GeoTiff produces exactly the same image as in the first request.

mapserver: http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserver56/mapserv.exe?map=maps/corine.map&service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&width=256&height=256&format=GTiff produces exactly the same image as in the first request.

deegree: http://localhost:8080/deegree-wcs1/services?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3539200,3402400,3564800,3428000&width=256&height=256&format=GeoTIFF produces a slightly smaller image than the first request (262,674 bytes) with no shift!.

Deegree result with width en height

Note:

Since the request is a different way of describing the same data one would expect that you get the same results. Mapserver and Geoserver do so, Deegree does not, somehow using resx and resy in the request results in shifted data.

4. request part of the data in native resolution

deegree: http://localhost:8080/deegree-wcs1/services?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&resx=100&resy=100&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3550000,3413200,3554000,3417200&format=GeoTIFF has the correct left-top location but the size of the pixels is wrong, producing a shift of the data which increases as you go right/down:

Deegree result for a part request

geoserver: http://localhost:8081/geoserver/ows?service=WCS&request=GetCoverage&format=GeoTiff&version=1.0.0&coverage=geodan:Corine&resx=100&resy=100&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3550000,3413200,3554000,3417200 produces an image with almost exactly the same shift as the first request.
mapserver: http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserver56/mapserv.exe?map=maps/corine.map&service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&resx=100&resy=100&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3550000,3413200,3554000,3417200&format=GTiff produces an image with almost exactly the same location as the first request.

Note:

Mapserver and Geoserver shift (or not) the data similar to the first request, Deegree has once again a different shift than any of the previous ones.

5. request part of the data in non-native, non-multiple resolution

deegree: http://localhost:8080/deegree-wcs1/services?service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&resx=30.0&resy=30.0&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3550000,3413200,3554000,3417200&format=GeoTIFF shifts data:

Deegree result for non native, non multiple resolution

geoserver: http://localhost:8081/geoserver/ows?service=WCS&request=GetCoverage&format=GeoTiff&version=1.0.0&coverage=geodan:Corine&resx=30.0&resy=30.0&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3550000,3413200,3554000,3417200 shifts data and adds a black border to the left and top of the result:

Geoserver result for non-native, non-multiple resolution

mapserver: http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserver56/mapserv.exe?map=maps/corine.map&service=WCS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCoverage&coverage=Corine&resx=30.0&resy=30.0&crs=EPSG:3035&BBOX=3550000,3413200,3554000,3417200&format=GTiff shifts data:

Mapserver result for non-native, non-multiple resolution

Note:

This request was my initial prompt to find out why all WCS applications shift the data in the results. However this is a false conclusion. What’s happening here is that the service has to extract 30m wide pixels from 100m wide source data, since 100 divided by 30 isn’t a whole number it will add the remaining 10m in an adjacent pixel. If you overlay the result and the source data you get a pixel problem, data of source pixel 2 will most likely end up in result pixel b, which is partly over source pixel 1, resulting in a data shift:

Overlapping 100m with 30m

Conclusion:

Geoserver has a bug feature which offsets all the results by half a pixel, this is a known issue with the definition of the location of a pixel. Added to this there’s the no-data border which appears with non-native, non-multiple requests. I presume that will be gone once the pixel issue is resolved. (update: apparently I’ve misunderstood the Geoserver developers; there’s an issue between pixel placement according to standards and real world implementations, where Geoserver adheres to the standard).

Mapserver doesn’t offset the data unless it is physically impossible (non-native, non-multiple resolutions, extents which don’t snap to source data) but produces a multi-band (this was a configuration issue, thanks to FrankW for spotting this – proper config is IMAGEMODE BYTE) geotiff where the source data is single band.

Deegree has a bug which offsets some of the results, but I don’t know what causes it and although it is resolution-related I don’t see a pattern. It also produces a multi-band geotiff instead of a single band.

Configuration files and source data can be found here.

We’re involved in both ESDIN and EGN and we decided to use the latter as a trial for the first. Together with our partners we’ve setup a series of servers to fulfill the needs of the projects. The main standard used is the latest WFS and GML versions, which have the annoying disadvantage that there are few clients available.

To be able to show nicely (as in not an XML file) that everything worked I was asked to build a webclient which would show a map and the data from the EGN service for that area. I figured that this was once again a good reason to look into the latest developments for OpenLayers. I quickly discovered that the released version (2.7) doesn’t support WFS 1.1.0 so I asked on the mailinglist if people already tried to implement it (and if not, pointers how to do so). Luckily people already did the work and created various patches for the support. (thanks tschaub, bartvde and others)

The most important patch is the one which implements protocols for WFS: ticket 1648 and its wfs.patch The main disadvantage of this patch was in my case that it tried to minimise the number of requests to the WFS server (which in general is a good thing). It requests all the features which are within twice the size of the viewport and it doesn’t request new features when you zoom in. However our server is limited to 10 features per request this results in very interesting behavior. For a starter all the 10 feature could be outside your viewport and also very funny is that shown feature might dissappear when you move the page too much (it requests new features in that case and the first 10 might be outside the viewport). A second patch, on ticket 1830, provided a more aggressive feature update: each zoom action triggers a new request and I set the request-boundingbox-ratio to 1, meaning only those feature within the viewport are requested. This means that every action triggers a new request, which is heavy on the server.

However this is just a reference implementation and hopefully for actual implementations they remove the 10 feature limit. For those interested the reference implementation can be found at http://research.geodan.nl/egn

Still I’m very much excited by the prospect of creating beautiful GIS applications and so far I’ve had enthousiast reactions from developers as well.

For EduGIS we figured that it might be easier and more scalable to serve all tiles from S3, using the bandwidth and storage space of amazon, instead of buying more servers and bandwidth ourselves. Already we use tilecache in a test setup and the initial idea was to replace the diskcache for an AWSS3 cache. This was we could tap into the vast storage space of amazon, however, since every request had to be forwarded to S3 and back, the bandwidth-load was doubled. So instead of hosting the TileCache on our server we moved the TileCache instance to a virtual computer on Amazons EC2 platform.

To do this, I picked a sample machine-image of a small, headless, ubuntu 8.10 setup. Installed tilecache (apt-get install tilecache ) and changed it to use mod_python instead of the default cgi in apache. Since this means that the machine-image is changed, you need to bundle it into a new machine image and register it with amazon. this way you can easily create multiple instances, also if you powerdown your machine it gets destroyed so you loose all your changes.

So once I mastered the art of cloud-herding I pointed our test environment to TileCache in the cloud to see if it would work at all and how quick the bill would increase. After a few days and some seedings I noticed that the AWSS3 backend uses a simple dump in a single folder backend. This quickly produces insane amounts of files and it becomes impossible to have a quick look at the status of your cache with tools like S3fox. So I wrote a patch for the AWSS3 cache module to store the tiles in a TMS style folder structure.

Now all we need to do is to create a tilecache.cfg with all 200+ layers we have and start seeding.

Unfortunately today was slightly less successful, apparently quite some presenters couldn’t make it after all and three of the talks I was looking forward to weren’t there. SO hopefully the BOF on openlayers and extjs will be better. Interesting projects to look into at home so far are: QGIS-mapserver and Mapfaces.

I’ve reinstalled, rebuild and rebooted netatalk on the server and I kept getting this error:

“The operation cannot be completed because one or more required items cannot be found. (Error code -35)”

Googling this error didn’t give me much and it took me a while to realize that googling for: error code -35 will give you no useful results do to the minus sign. In the end I discovered that it is not ubuntu but Apple to blame for the error. Apparently at some point in time the globalpreferences get fcked. So the solution is:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

Dark skies are looming over me

But in general I think this is a good thing and OpenLayers will grow even faster, it is a great package after all.