Letter from the President

Letter from the President
By Pat Sanders
It’s Hot at HYPACK! Damn hot! With the thermometer hitting over 100 degrees, it seems
everybody made it into the air-conditioned office for work. It seems from my previous
comments that I have made certain makers of hydrographic survey equipment hot under the
collar. So be it. If you don’t want to prove to me that your stuff can meet certain standards out
in the real world, don’t expect me to go along with your inane claims. Somebody asked me
recently if I was getting old and cranky. Damn right!
HYPACK 2011 has turned out to be a very stable release. (I can tell because the
Minesweeper scores of the support staff are at an all-time low.) I put it down to a better
testing program. John Lindberg and the support staff have developed testing guidelines for
each HYPACK® program. Before they sign off on a program, it has to prove that it can read
certain files, generate certain outputs and be verified that the outputs have not changed
(unless for a noted reason).
3D Visualization in HYPACK®
SURVEY. One of the things that our
competitors have done better than us
is visualizing multibeam data in a
real-time 3D presentation. (Hey, at
least I’m honest! I’ll be happy to start
reciting the things that we do better
than them [including costing you a lot
less.]) Lazar Pevac has been
updating HYPACK® SURVEY for
2012 with a real-time 3D Matrix
window that would bring our real-time
visualization up to speed. We are
continuing to work on a real-time
MTX SERVER application that would
create matrix files ‘on the fly’ and
allow multiple applications to fill and
read MTX information. It’s still up in
the air if the MATRIX SERVER will be ready in time for the 2012 release (Jan 2012), but the
3D MTX view in HYPACK® SURVEY will definitely be in the release.
The 1st Test!, but work remains….
Dynamic ENC: Bill Bergmann of HYPACK has been working to allow users of the ENC
EDITOR to use the program as a predictive ENC. It can modify the shallow water and safety
contour, based on the draft of the vessel, a safety margin and the current tide condition. The
idea was to provide pilots with a tool to see where the safe water exists for different loading
and tide conditions. The routine requires a lot of contours and depth areas in your ENC chart,
but HYPACK® can already help you with that. We also can now hide contours which are
prominent. Once we get some feedback from pilots and mariners, we’ll check out building it
directly into SURVEY.
July / 2011
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FIGURE 1. Optional Green (Safe), Yellow (Caution), Red (Don’t Enter) Display from HYPACK’s Dynamic
ENC Routine.
CLOUD 2012: Ken Aiken of HYPACK has been doing some major work on our CLOUD
program. It will be issued as both a 32-bit and 64-bit version in HYPACK® 2012. It turns out
that a lot of our users are utilizing CLOUD for their final review and editing of multibeam data.
We started to get complaints about CLOUD being slow to update as users were cramming
more and more points into it. Ken has modified CLOUD so that it can display either all of the
data points, or a subdivided set of data points. You can create a grid of n rows by m columns
and then quickly display and edit the points in each grid cell. After selecting a cell, it is back-lit
in grey to show that you have already examined that grid cell. We’re going to hold off sending
this one out until the 2012 release.
FIGURE 2. The new Cloud Control window (inset) in CLOUD.
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QPS-IVS Merger. Someone was recently asking me my thoughts about the merger between
QPS (QINSY) and IVS (Fliedermaus). To be truthful, I’m not losing any sleep over it. QINSY
is a decent hydrographic collection/processing package (although a bit expensive) and IVS is
an excellent visualization product. Never in the history of mankind has the merger of two
software companies resulted in a better product for the end-user. Maybe these guys will be
the first to ‘pull it off’ and I’ll soon be collecting an unemployment check (or picking up golf
balls at a driving range), but it’s not going to be easy merging two technology companies,
each one with their own ideas and methodologies. (The only thing that might be better for
HYPACK is if a multibeam company bought one of them. It seems every time a multibeam
company buys a hydrographic software provider, the software disappears within 3 to 5
years.)
By the way, that’s Humphrey Bogart from the Caine Mutiny. It was between him and the
Skipper in Gilligan’s Island (Bob Hale) for the picture in this newsletter. Bogie won.
Pat Sanders
25 July 2011
July / 2011
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