Off to Camp Roberts this Week!

This week I’m off to Camp Roberts again for this quarter’s RELIEF exercise.  FortiusOne has been participating for the past year or so in RELIEF, which is a crisis response integration exercise.  Essentially different groups get together to hack on things and make them work together.

The first of these exercises that FortiusOne participated in was last August, but only remotely.  That was the start of our involvement running an offline geo-stack for humanitarian relief.  Since then Todd Huffman has taken the prototype to Afghanistan and the tools worked on at that exercise have continued to be developed.  Of course these events have been minor compared to the effect of the earthquake in Haiti.  The importance of collaboration in crisis response has been long stated as a necessity, but Haiti really showed how powerful it could be.

One really minor feature I’m really excited about t is no longer using subdomains in our Mac Mini deployments.  This means that if the offline instance URL is http://geoiq.local for example there is not extra configuration to access Finder and Maker.  Previously the URLs looked like http://finder.geoiq.local and http://maker.geoiq.local, in the absence of DNS this necessitated adding 3 hostfile entries.  Now the URLs look like http://geoiq.local/finder and http://geoiq.local/maker for example.  This means just an IP address can be used or a single hostfile entry is required.

One addition to RELIEF that I want to work with is Stewart Long and his balloon photography.  Two weeks ago at WhereCampSoCal he made this photo using an inexpensive camera and a weather balloon, then careful stitching.  After processing imagery this week I plan to tile the imagery and put it into the offline GeoIQ instance I built and derive vector data within an OpenStreetMap instance set-up for the exercise.  Working through the whole process is important to work out integrations before there is a crisis.  Look for more updates throughout the week, I promise to not get so consumed by the hacking and collaboration that I forget to post.