General questions and comments from a new user

[Kurt Schwehr]

Hi All,
   I just started working with grass at the beginning of last week.  In
the last week and a half grass I've gotten a lot done.  I'd like to know
if other people are working on projects similiar to mine.  I'd like
to share hints and tips with anyone who is in similiar situations.  I'll
just go through the project I'm working on briefly.

   I ftp'ed the sgi binaries and got them running in one day, which was
awesome.  I was expecting to have to try compile the code (yuck!)  Has
anyone compile grass for IRIX 5.? and gotten it working?  Most of the time
I have been working on Iris Indigo XS/24's which work wonderfully.  I've
done a couple demo's on a skiwriter (4 processors).  Running SG3d on that
machine made my jaw drop!

   So far I've worked with two different data sets, both from JPL/USGS:
the Kilauea volcanoe and Mars from Viking.  I've been taking both off
of CDROM.  It's been pretty easy to get the Planetary Data System(PDS)
formatted data into grass.  It seems like the conversion should be 
fair straight forward to automate.  Has anyone tried to build tools
to help speed the process along?  So far I've only written a couple
10 line c programs to help me out.  Also, is there a way to let
grass georeference stuff on mars or will I have to stick to keeping
the data in xy?

   Pretty soon I'm planning to start working on two other datasets - 
Mars Hill in Southern Calif. and some of my geology data that I've
yet to try and convert from Arc/Info.

  The goal of my work is to allow people in the lab to provide a tool
that lets people in this lab quickly get at their data.  I will be 
trying to setup grass so it can be used to import sections of data
into the virtual reality systems that are being used here at NASA Ames.
Currently, it's a royal pain to get data into the systems.  I also
need to start figuring out how to precess images and data on the
system to do more basic gis and image processing tasks.

  I'm really having a great time working with grass and hopefully
I'll get to do some programming with grass library in the near 
future.  Drop me a note by email or back through the mailing list
if your working on similiar stuff.

Kurt Schwehr
schwehr at cs.stanford.edu
Intern at NASA Ames.


p.s.  i.rectify flipped east in west in my Kilauea utm dataset.  Did
I muck something up or does grass have trouble with certain parts of
the globe?