Franchu’s Lair

Last month I had the chance to attend GEOSTAT2009, a summer school on spatio-temporal data analysis with R + SAGA + Google Earth that was held at MedILS in Split, Croatia.

The summer school was a great opportunity to get some hands on experience with R and SAGA, as learning them on your own can be a little bit tricky. We were also very lucky to have three teachers (Roger Bivand, Olaf Conrad and Tomislav Hengl) that have a lot of experience with those pieces of software and the field of geostatistics.

But one of the things I liked most of the course is that there was a wide variety of fields represented in the course as we had biologists, geologists, geographers, meteorologists, engineers and software developers! (I think I am still missing some fields…) It was an eye opening experience for me, as the same techniques can be applied to all those sciences and just the interpretation of the outputs differ to accommodate the processes involved in each discipline.

Given my experience in software development, I was able to grasp very quickly how to write the code to implement the steps needed to solve a problem. Nevertheless, my sub-par knowledge of geostatistics was the handicap I had to fight with during all the course. That is why I really enjoyed when we were doing the practical exercises and we were discussing with other participants. They always had the theoretical background to explain what was needed to do, and we were able to implement it faster than them. Symbiosis at its best

All this took place in a wonderful place, a former Tito’s residence (Villa Dalmatia), where one of the buildings of the complex has been reconverted into a life sciences research institute. We had our own private beach, basketball court, tennis table, and a great food catering with lots of variety. In such a wonderful environment it is difficult not to have fun and forge new friendships while learning really advanced stuff.

For the weekend, we went to Brac, an island that is in front of Split and we had a great day walking around to Pustinja Blaca (an old monastery in the mountains), and swimming in Bol.

You can see some of the photos I took during that week:

In the following days, work permitting, I will post some interesting interviews and ideas I got during the course.

Reading a post on Planet Geospatial by Sean Gillies, I found out that there is a great python package that allows you to run python in an isolated environment. That is really useful to install and play with libraries without breaking your main installation!

The package is called virtualenv and is available for installation with the setuptools.

To install it, assuming you have a working python installation with setuptools, and run an isolated environment you just have to do:

$ sudo easy_install virtualenv
$ virtualenv –no-site-packages nameOfFolder
$ cd nameOfFolder
$ source bin/activate

All the options are described in the virtualenv page

Hace poco me mandaron en un correo el videoclip de Christian Escuredo, un amigo gallego que tiene ya un par de discos publicados, y al que desde aquí quiero desearle todo lo mejor