On the day after Christmas in 2016, I went with my family to see the Port de Sète. Here are photos of our
kids at the helm of the tour boat.
I was surprised and disappointed by the high level of support for the National
Front in Sète during the 2017 election: 28% in the first round and 44% in the
second.
Both of these numbers are higher than the average for the Hérault Department
and twice as high as Montpellier's FN vote. 26% of Sète's voters abstained in
the second round, and I'm guessing that most of them had voted for Jean-Luc
Mélenchon, the anticapitalist candidate, in the first round.
We got snow a few days before Christmas, not a lot, but thanks to the cold it
stuck around and we've picked up another inch or so since yesterday.
Front Range mountains have received up to 18" of snow since Sunday, which is
good news. Snow remains thin: Eldora Mountain has 20" on the ground at its
summit, Cameron Pass 30. This week I need to take our skis in to a shop for
tuning and acquire some boots for the fast-growing feet in our family so we can
ski in January.
We spent Christmas morning at home unwrapping gifts, went for a walk around the
neighborhood, and then spent the evening feasting with friends. The parents of
our hosts were in town, and treated us to some gorgeous and sublime Persian
rish dishes. I made a reverse-seared prime rib roast
that was excellent and we drank a few bottles of wine which we brought back
from France: a 2013 Castelmaure Cuvée No. 3 and the same cooperative's Grande
Cuvée (its number 2 wine). We were in the neighborhood of
Embres-et-Castelmaure
quite often last year. There's a nice write-up aout its wines
on the Taste Languedoc blog. Being able to share an excellent meal with family
and friends is something that I appreciate more each year. Good health and good
company are priceless and worth celebrating.
Last Friday, I finished a post for the Mapbox blog:
https://blog.mapbox.com/build-for-the-cloud-with-rasterio-3254d5d60289. It was
a pleasure to write about a new industry best practice, give some props, and
toot my favorite open source project's horn a bit. I'm pleased that it's been
well received.
I had fun coming up with the thesis that the cloud-optimized GeoTIFF format
developed by Even Rouault (at
https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/CloudOptimizedGeoTIFF) and evangelized on
a new web site by Chris Holmes (http://www.cogeo.org/) is not just an image
format, but an internet application media type and that GDAL's
curl-based virtual file system is practically a web browser. I especially
enjoyed pointing out that I think that systems using cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs
can be much more in the classic REST style than most of the "REST APIs" we use
today. In most geospatial REST APIs, the data format is of minor importance,
relegated to a f=format parameter in a query string. In the architecture
emerging around GDAL and cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs, the GeoTIFF representation
of a raster plays a major role in directing the GDAL browser. It's not just one
of many roughly equivalent flavors of imagery.
On Twitter today, I floated the idea of registering a media type for the
cloud-optimized GeoTIFF format that would distinguish it from ordinary TIFFs.
It could be interesting to collaborate on this with other folks in the
business.
Finally, I don't know when Charlie Loyd discovered an old man yelling at the
cloud in Landsat imagery near Darwin, Australia, or why he saved it until my
blog post, but I'm grateful he did.
It's a common problem in GIS to have a shapefile that was encoded using
a character set other than the standard iso-8859-1 but lacks any record of what
that character set was. Some shapefiles lie about their encodings. You could
make an educated guess at the character set. Your decoding may fail. Worse, it
may not fail, but contain garbage when printed out. The Japanese term for this
is Mojibake. Ned Batchelder
introduced me to the term in his Pragmatic Unicode presentation. It's easy to
demonstrate in Python.
Fiona's open() function has an encoding keyword argument that is
intended to let developers override the missing or erronenous information for
a shapefile. There's been a regression in Fiona recently and users began to
report unexpected mojibake symptoms. They were using the encoding argument
property but seeing garbage displayed. This regression has been fixed in Fiona
1.7.11. Upgrade as soon as you can.
For a time I was in disbelief that users were reporting a real problem.
I chalked this up to dirty data, compilation of GDAL, DLL Hell, anything but
a regression. In the end, I think what got me unstuck was facing this note I
recently added to Fiona's issue template:
You think you've found something? We believe you.
Something I added to make the project more friendly to first-time contributors
ended up being a note to myself.
While working on a blog post at work last week I became fascinated with
Ounianga Kébir and Ounianga Sérir, the Lakes of Ounianga. Elimé, the largest of
the 10 lakes in Ounianga Sérir (below), is 4.2 square kilometers and is filled
from an aquifer with water that fell on the Sahara region 5000-9000 years ago.
Today the annually averaged precipitation in the region is less than 2 mm.
Landsat RGB (true color), Ounianga Sérir, Chad. Landsat imagery is courtesy
of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and U.S. Geological Survey.
At this scale the surface of Northern Chad appears streaked, as though it has
been washed with a brush. I suspect that it might stand out even more in images
made with different Landsat band combinations.
I had never looked before and was pleasantly surprised to find that Mapbox has
pretty good coverage in the area. The imagery is from DigitalGlobe.
Fuschia Dunlop's recipe for smacked cucumbers in garlicky sauce, from "Every
Grain of Rice", has changed the way my kids think about cucumbers. My youngest
asked me to make this dish for her birthday dinner tonight, and I was more than
happy to do it. It's delicious and fun and easy to make. I'm going to show you
how.
The first step is to assemble the sauce. Or dressing. Call it what you like.
I've been using one large garlic clove and 1/2 tsp of sugar per cucumber. To
this I add a teaspoon of crushed chilies fried in oil, soy sauce, and
a generous splash of vinegar or some other tangy liquid. My kids are sensitive
to Sichuan pepper, so I crank the grinder just a tiny bit.
Today I used some bottled Ponzu dressing, but I've also used rice or sherry
vinegar (or both). This chili oil has peanuts, which I'm careful to omit
because my kids do not love peanuts. Whatever: more peanuts for me!
After putting the dressing aside, it is time to smack the cucumbers. Contused
cucumis sativus may be a culinary cliché, but this technique is too good to
dismiss. It turns ordinary, hard, crunchy cucumber (not a bad thing) into
succulent, but not gross and slimy, mildly bitter melon. There's nothing to it:
you lay unpeeled thin-skinned cucumbers flat on a cutting board and swat them with the
flat of your chef's knife or cleaver just until they crack.
I scraped out the one seedy cucumber, quartered them both lengthwise, and then
chopped them diagonally. There's no point in trying to slice them into matching
1/8" thick pieces, smacked cucumbers don't give a damn about rules.
Toss the chopped cucumber with salt and let it rest for 20 minutes. The goal is
to get them to shed water so the sauce doesn't get diluted. These two cukes
gave up about 1/3 cup (80 ml) of liquid tonight.
When the time's up and you're ready to eat, drain the cucumbers, transfer to
the bowl of dressing, toss well, and serve along with other Sichuan dishes or
on top of buckwheat noodles.
Due to a persistant ridge of high pressure over the western U.S., it has been
and will continue to be unseasonably warm and dry in Fort Collins. We have had
little precipitation this season and I spent some of Saturday watering our
less-established trees and shrubs so they don't croak.
Suburban singletrack of Fort Collins
I've also been trail running on consecutive days for the first time since the
Blue Sky Marathon. For the past 8 weeks I've mostly quit running in favor of
biking, yoga, and muscle-building with a trainer.
My knees complained a bit about the extra pound per week I've gained from
gourmandizing, but overall it felt great to be back running on rock and dirt.
On Jan 7, I'm going to start training for the Quad Rock 25 in Lory State Park on May 12, 2018.
I hope I'll be able to get in the right mindset to train when Winter finally
arrives.
