Hi there 👋

Welcome to my website. My name is Austin Godber. I am a Software Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer. I currently build and manage petabyte scale distributed systems for Terascope. I have a bachelors in Physics from Arizona State University. I have worked on DARPA sponsored computer security projects, helped start a Municipal WiFi company, assisted NASA’s Mars Spaceflight Facility in surviving the Slashdot effect, wrangled virtual penguins for JumpBox, operated cameras on NASA’s MER and MSL Mars rovers and now

Astrophotography - Getting Started

The above image is a smaller version of the first decent picture I took with my recently acquired astrophotography setup. It was taken on Feb 11th, 2019 from, my driveway in Tempe, AZ, in the middle of the Phoenix, AZ metropolitan area. The image is a composite of 19 x 30s exposures, stacked with the free Windows program, DSS, and a little histogram tweaking in Photoshop. The image is of the Orion nebula (M42) and M43. More info and the full resolution image can be found where I uploaded the image to Astrobin. ...

February 16, 2019

Experiment - Rogers Ruins

Recently, in my free time, I’ve been playing with VR/AR related technologies. My interests have mostly been building photorealistic scenes or models using photogrammetry tools like Agisoft Photoscan. I may start sharing more of my experiments, like this one, here in the future. In November 2017 friends and I went for a hike deep into the Superstition Mountains in central Arizona to 600 year old Native American Indian ruins called “Rogers Canyon Ruins” (GPS route). I documented the hike with a few 360 photos along the trail using my 2016 Samsung Gear 360 camera and used Google’s Marzipano to create this 360 Tour of Roger’s Trough Trail hike ...

December 9, 2017

Installing GQRX on OS X 10.11, El Capitan, for HackRF.

I have recently created two Homebrew formulas to help OS X users install GQRX on 10.11, El Capitan. Fortunately most of the dependencies are already available so all I had to do was create a formula for GQRX and Osmosdr. The source to these formulas can be found in my homebrew-godber github project. Though to install GQRX all you have to do is setup my ’tap’ and then install the package as shown below: ...

October 17, 2015

Open Source ANTLR4 Grammar for NASA's PDS3 Label Format

At the November 2014 DesertPy meeting I learned about ANTLR the parser generator and thought that would be the proper way to approach writing a parser for the labels of NASA’s PDS3 file format. I spent some time and read The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference (affiliate link) and have pieced together a grammar that works fairly well at this point. The ANTLR grammar and corresponding generated Python parser are Open Source, BSD Licensed and are available on GitHub: ...

January 17, 2015

Packages 404 Errors when using debmirror with ubuntu.

This is one of those blog posts a person writes in hopes of eventually finding it’s contents via a Google search when an error is encountered again. So, hello Austin, you have found the answer to your ‘debmirror ubuntu package 404’ error problem. I have my own Ubuntu mirror for precise and trusty packages. This mirror is maintained with the debmirror program. There are occasionally situations where it starts reporting 404 errors for Packages files when there are Packages.gz and Packages.bz2 files that it should be using. These errors look like this when running my mirror script: ...

November 26, 2014

Warping Brien - Image Reprojection with Python OpenCV

NOTE: This post was converted from HTML generated from an Jupyter Notebook to markdown so it includes discussion of using Jupyter notebook, I left this language in the post itself. Image reprojection My friend Brien is a bit of an artist and a bit of a tech nerd so he thought it would be a great idea to make a timelapse video of him drawing. So he put the CHDK firmware on his Canon S90 camera and set it up to take an exposure every 2-3 seconds. He reprojected the drawing portion of the image back into a rectangle and made a video out of it. He managed to do the original video using only ImageMagick command line tools. You can watch his Timelapse Drawing 1 on YouTube. ...

October 26, 2014

Using update-alternatives to make docker.io accessible as docker.

I’ve seen some people ask about making the Docker command docker.io on Ubuntu work like it does in the examples: docker. I found this inconvenient too, but fortunately, Ubuntu and Debian have had a solution to this for a long time, it’s called alternatives. In this particular case, there is already an Ubuntu package called docker which is why they are trying to de-conflict executable names by using docker.io in the first place. Ironically, the original docker package doesn’t even contain an executable named docker. Or at least it doesn’t as of Ubuntu 14.04. ...

August 2, 2014