Author: clint

Visualising OCO-2 XCO2 in R with DeltaRho

NASA JPL’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) was launched into sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth on July 2, 2014. It carries 3 grated spectrometers for measuring the spectrum of sunlight reflected off the surface of the earth, which is used to calculate the average concentration of Carbon Dioxide in the column of atmosphere beneath the satellite (XCO2). It takes 16 days to provide full coverage of the Earth’s surface.

I am using the R packages datadr and Trelliscope from the DeltaRho project (formerly called Tessera.io) to explore and visualise the XCO2 observations from the OCO-2 Level 2 Lite version 7R data product.

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus Ex is widely regarded as one of the best computer games of all time, thanks to its immersive dystopian future setting, RPG-style character development, and a story that begins with a New York terror attack (before 9/11 happened), a genetically-designed disease outbreak (before CRISPR), and real conspiracy theories like global internet surveillance (before Snowden).

Deus Ex, 2000
Deus Ex, 2000

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Onion routing explained

When you visit a website on your computer or mobile device, you are potentially sharing that information with advertisers, hackers, co-workers and governments. Even though the content you are viewing is likely to be encrypted with HTTPS, your metadata (including the URL and IP address of websites you visit, your IP address, the time and date, information about your web browser and computer hardware) can be collected and stored by anyone eavesdropping on the wire between you and the web server, to be used against you in targeted advertising campaigns, phishing scams, profiling, and soon robot assassination.

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Preventing VPN leaks on Linux

A Raspberry Pi running OpenVPN with a D-Link DUB-1312 Ethernet adapter
A Raspberry Pi model B running OpenVPN with a D-Link DUB-1312 Ethernet adapter

If you connect to the internet through a public WiFi hotspot, or at school or at work, the metadata and contents of your online communications can be intercepted and viewed (or altered) by the network operator or another malicious party on the network. One of the ways to protect your privacy is to send all of your internet traffic through a Virtual Private Network.

Unfortunately a lot of personal data can leak out when you join a new network but have not yet connected the VPN. This guide shows you how to configure the Linux iptables firewall to block all normal outgoing connections, and only allow connections to your VPN server.

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Testing a Titan

We recently acquired a Nvidia GTX Titan graphical processing unit (GPU) for statistical computing at work, specifically double-precision floating point operations on the CUDA API. Before I lock it away in the server room I would like to see how it compares to my primary GPU at home – a Nvidia GTX 680, and my older GPUs – a pair of AMD Radeon HD 5770. This act of comparison is called benchmarking – running a number of standard tests and trials in order to assess the relative performance of a piece of hardware or software.

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The Australian Panopticon

The Panopticon is a theoretical prison designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The shape of the prison places every inmate within view of a watchtower. Although it is physically impossible for the watchman to observe all cells at the same time, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched, effectively changing their behaviour.

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R on Hadoop with Tessera RHipe

This tutorial will show you how to perform parallel computation on a Hadoop cluster in R using Rhipe, with CSV files as input and output.

The EVE Online computer game universe consists of 5201 solar systems for players to explore and conquer in virtual spaceships. Each solar system is connected to an average 2.6 other systems by jump gates which allow instantaneous travel between systems.

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