Daniel Staudigel

dstaudigel at gmail dot com

Programming : CruiseWatch

On the ALIA expedition, I put together a software package that displayed the current ship position, and some information about the ship, including heading, wind speed, etc. It also included a dredge-tension monitor that activated when the dredge was deployed. It is still available for viewing (though with old data). Sometimes it breaks because the old data is just that, old. Since the ship is no longer available to me, I can't really rectify this. When it was running, it looked like this:

It still works from time to time, so you might just end up lucky, and able to view it. It is available as a link from the ALIA homepage.

Nerdy Details

I wrote this software with Processing, a fantastic tool for making simple, graphical Java applets. I set up a series of cron jobs on the ship which polled the ship's data centers and slowly trickled the data to a SDSC (San Diego Supercomputing Center) server where the applet would grab the data with a 40 minute delay. This was a pretty tough thing to get working, because the ship I was on was one of the first research vessels with an internet connection.