Why I am so disapointed in the Black Panther…

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!

How safe do you feel?

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.

Trying to merge lots of big GeoTIFF’s

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!