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The Zanzibar Mapping Initiative

  • 7th October 20187th October 2018
  • by Frederick Mbuya

The Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar (RGoZ) with the support of the World Bank has been developing the Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) with the aim of supporting evidence-based and innovative solutions to better plan, mitigate, and prepare for natural disasters.

Zanzibar is part of the Southwest Indian Ocean Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative (SWIO RAFI) which seeks to address high vulnerability of the Southwest Indian Ocean Island States to disaster losses from catastrophes such as cyclones, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis. These threats are exacerbated by the effects of climate change, a growing population and increased economic impacts.

The Zanzibar Mapping Initiative (ZMI) is a cooperative project between the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) and the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar (RGoZ). COSTECH agreed to provide its in-house expertise and drones to support the creation of a new aerial base map of Zanzibar for the Zanzibar Commission for Lands (COLA).

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Why I am so disapointed in the Black Panther…

  • 23rd March 20182nd January 2019
  • by admin

I am probably going to get allot of flack for this post but I have been thinking this since I was about 30 mins into the movie.

First of all I almost never go to the movie theater, prior to going to see Black Panther I had not been to the movies in over 3 years.

However both my wife and I thought that this could be a really good movie that we could both enjoy.

Onto the point however, why I think that the movie was a huge disapointment and such a missed opportunity, I will keep it brief and to the point …

  1. The premise that a nation of Africans would exist in Africa and choose not to get involved or intervene in anyway as they see there fellow African brothers and sisters being used and abused by much of the rest of the world. Fine this is not something that is highlighted in the movie, i.e we do not see the Wakanda during the period of colonization and slavery but it is something that for sure came to my mind when thinking about the backstory. I must also say that this is something that I could have looked past and “ignored”, creative license and all that, if it was not for the rest of the issues with the movie.
  2. The fact that the story the movie tries to sell is that the concept of “helping the rest of the world”, came from a Wakandan who had been living in the states, who was then killed by his own brother the king, (hope I am getting that right). Then years later its the son of the slain brother who returns to Wakanda, (as the villain), and single handedly manages to overthrow the current king and is intent on using the Wakanda technology to make the Wakanda an active dominant world power. Ofcourse the villain never wins and the rightful king gets power again. Such a missed opportunity, why not make the cousins, (i.e the rightful king and the “villain”), end up uniting and together have Wakanda take its rightful place in the world and leverage its technology in a positive way to help the world?
  3. So we have morally questionable Wakanda’s who have allowed their brothers and sisters in neighbouring countries suffer without intervening, I say “morally questionable” because in my opinion standing by and allowing your fellow humans to be abused and suffer when you have the means to help is “morally questionable”. And the villain who manages to take control, but then as all good stories go looses to the rightful king in the end. These events however were seemingly enough to wake up the Wakandan people to the need to help their brothers and sisters in the world who are suffering. So where do they go to help?…. inner city USA!

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Working on the edge…

  • 8th March 20182nd January 2019
  • by Frederick Mbuya

Problem…

UAV data has been collected over a large area +1,500 sq/km. The UAV’s used were small and as such the area was divided into 200+ zones each of which were then processed into individual Geotiffs. The data was collected without absolute accuracy and as so although the data within a given zone is relatively accurate there are varying degrees of edge matching issues when attempting to put all 200+ zones together.

Attempted solution…

A post processing process that would attempt to take individual zones and automatically do adaptive filtering of zones and then attempt to match using edge matching.

Test Data…

A 27 Zone section was selected as the same dataset.

Preliminary Result…

3km x 3km Zone.

pre post

at a glance it looks good, so lets look a little closer…

We selected two zones…

 
zone 117 zone 118

 

Zoomed to 1:1000 Scale

pre post

 

Zoomed to 1:5000 Scale

zone 117 zone 118

Zoomed to 1:1000 Scale

zone 117 zone 118

1km x 1km Zone

pre post

Zoomed to 1:5000 Scale

pre post

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How safe do you feel?

  • 16th May 20172nd January 2019
  • by Frederick Mbuya

I have been noticing with more and more concern the increasing amount of what looks to me as VERY young police officers on the streets carry what look to me like AF-47, (I don’t know much about guns!!!). When I have seen what feel to me like “gangs” of them on street corners I have honestly asked myself if I feel more or less comfortable. Fact is they make me nervous as hell, and part of me has been comforted by the fact that I figured that probably most of the guns are none functional or not loaded. I came across a video yesterday that confirmed that I should be very afraid, AND that my hope that the guns are not loaded or not working was crushed.. indeed they are loaded, they do work, and unfortunately looks like the police are somewhat lacking in their training.

 

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New Firewall

  • 17th April 20179th May 2017
  • by Frederick Mbuya

A few months ago my home firewall, (pfsense) died, was built in an old Dell Optiplex 755 that I picked up second hand for about 300,000TZS (150USD), it had served me perfectly for over 2 years so was not too upset when it died. I threw in a Zyxel UG20 firewall device that I have had hanging around, and I have not been happy, but more on that in another blog post. So today I decided to go through some of the junk I have around to see if I could not build another pfsense firewall, anyone who knows me knows I have lots of junk. I settled on an old HP chassis I have, major overkill as its 8GB and even found a SSD in it. This used to be my primary workstation, (after our office was broken into about 10 years ago and my very very very special machine was stolem 🙁 ), it then became my home server, and then about 2 years ago was retired, (figured I at the time I would repurpose it, but did not think it would take this long).

So yes its major overkill for a home firewall, but I will put a whole bunch of other networking tools on it….

13:09

So firewall is installed and in place, now for some quick iperf tests but figure it might be worth documenting, (as I always have to do a refresher, on what to expect)…

Network Core Which is.. And means in theory the fastest you can transfer data is…
 10Mbps  10 megabits per second  1.25 MB/s
 100Mbps  100 megabits per second  12.5 MB/s
 1000Mbps (1Gbps)  1000 megabits per second  125 MB/s

The iperf test was run between the new pfsense server and one of the pfesense boxes that is only 5 hops away:

------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to X.X.X.X, TCP port 5131
TCP window size: 65.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local Y.Y.Y.Y port 7131 connected with X.X.X.X port 5131
 ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 5.0 sec  6.00 MBytes  10.1 Mbits/sec
[  3]  5.0-10.0 sec  6.00 MBytes  10.1 Mbits/sec
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  12.0 MBytes  10.0 Mbits/sec

A second test using www.speedtest.com, also show a max transfer of 8mb/s up and 10.1 down, so its safe to assume we are being capped at 10mb/s. Now though I would like to find out if that is a ISP cap, or there is a 10Mb physical link somewhere…

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Trying to merge lots of big GeoTIFF’s

  • 4th April 20172nd January 2019
  • by Frederick Mbuya

The idea was to merge into 1 geotiff 28 irregular shaped geotiffs which ranged in size from 1g up to 13g and making up a total of 113g. Why? Because I then needed to cut the resulting geotiff into multiple irregular shaped individual geotiff’s. This took a couple of days, and I was quite keen to come home today as this morning it was at 80%, you can only imagine my disappointment when I checked and found…

0...10...20...30...40...50...60...70...80...90..Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gdal_merge.py", line 540, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/usr/bin/gdal_merge.py", line 526, in main
    fi.copy_into( t_fh, band, band, nodata )
  File "/usr/bin/gdal_merge.py", line 270, in copy_into
    nodata_arg )
File "/usr/bin/gdal_merge.py", line 63, in raster_copy
    nodata )
  File "/usr/bin/gdal_merge.py", line 105, in raster_copy_with_nodata
    nodata_test = Numeric.equal(data_src,nodata)
MemoryError

This as you can imagine was very frustrating, and I just assumed that the output was junk but figured what the hell, its created a 301G file lets see what it is. Started the process to load into Qgis, and since I figured it would take a while started this blog post. It seems though that output might be useful as qgis eventually loaded the file, and it actually looks like what I expected. So first things first I have set qgis to now save the file under a new name… Its going to take a while, currently at 12.2G and I actually expect it to end up bigger than the initial 301G

… a day or so later …

So it turns out the merge worked, I will revisit why the error later, but the file saved by qgis had the exact same size, and has the same result using gdalinfo. AND i have just done my first clip BUT  it seems I made a mistake the command I used was

gdalwarp -dstnodata 0 \
-q -cutline shape_file_to_clip_to.shp -tr 0.05806 0.05806 \
-of GTiff input_file.tif \
clipped_file.tif

Which resulted in a file the same size of the input file, and the same dimentions, what I should have done, I think, is:

gdalwarp -dstnodata 0 \
-q -cutline shape_file_to_clip_to.shp -tr 0.05806 0.05806 \
-of GTiff input_file.tif \
clipped_file.tif

Which is what I am running now, the previous command took about 3 hours!

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Tanzania Parliamentary Committee Visit COSTECH

  • 23rd March 20172nd January 2019
  • by Frederick Mbuya

The Parliamentary Committee on Science and Technology visited COSTECH on the 22nd of March 2017. Uhurulabs took the opportunity to showcase some of its UAV’s and explain how we have been working very hard with COSTECH to explore the various ways that UAV’s can be of benefit to Tanzania.

At the same time in Buni (The COSTECH hosted Innovation space), Uhurulabs was training a group of young girls on how to make a good pitch.

Check out all the photos from the day…

Tanzania Parliamentary Committee Visit COSTECH / Google Photos

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Recent Posts

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  • The Zanzibar Mapping Initiative
  • Why I am so disapointed in the Black Panther Movie
  • Working on the edge…

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