Bytes and Bikes

SWIG and fstream

2010-12-14T15:39:00.002Z

I have a love/hate relationship with swig.
I have had some success wrapping C and C++ libraries so they can be called from python. The real plus with swig is that is not invasive to existing code, with a little work you can usually create good wrappers without having to change underlying code.
However, when it fails it can be hard to spot why. I've found that looking at the C++ wrapper code that swig produces can help a lot, but still there can be a lot of thrashing around.
My latest battle was with fstream. I had a method that need a C++ stream to read from and I wanted to open a specific file, so I needed fstream. Unfortunately, I had no joy wrapping the fstream header file. Some googling suggested that C++ streams are one area where swig struggles.
In the end, my solution was to just create a function that takes a filename and returns an istream:

%inline %{

#define SWIG_FILE_WITH_INIT

istream & open_stream(const char *filename) {

istream *infile = new ifstream(filename);

return *infile;

}

%}

istream & open_stream(const char *filename);

Armed with this I can open files and get the istream objects I need to pass into methods that read streams.
I'd be interested to hear of any better solutions.

Wikileaks: most startling revelation

2010-12-01T18:57:00.001Z

The dump of diplomatic cables from wikileaks has provided some interesting insight into diplomatic communications. So far I've not really heard anything earth shattering.

The most surprising thing I've heard is that 2.5 million US citizens had access to all this data. Now if I was one of the diplomats involved I'd be more than a little miffed that what I considered confidential conversations were being dessiminated so widely.

This piece explains some of Assange's motivations in publishing this material. I had originally thought he was just interested in exposing illegal and immoral behaviour in governments, but his motivations are much wider than that, hence the dump of data rather than publication, allowing others to mine the data.

Whilst nothing I've heard so far seems to threaten security seriously (although some of the revelations re: Saudi Arabia might have potential to increass tension in the Middle East). My guess is that most of the data just confirms stuff that people already suspected. In many cases, it actually might increase trust between nations, since they now have confirmation of what they have up to now only suspected.

However, it is going to be hard for diplomats to be so candid in the light of these revelations. The US can actually help heal this damage by accepting that the wide internal dissemination of this information was itself a breach of trust.

Meanwhile, there are some pretty scary ideas about how to deal with the perpertrators of the leaks.

Update: this piece in the Guardian sums up what I was trying to say above.

Upgrading cable modem with built in wireless router

2010-11-30T18:41:00.002Z

I had a cable modem with built in wireless router. Unfortunately, it did not support the faster wireless protocols. Since I want to use it to stream video from mythtv I needed to upgrade.
Now the simple (famous last words) thing to do was just to get a new wireless router and then just use the old one for its cable modem.
Of course, it isn't that simple. I had hoped I could just take a lead from one of the modem LAN ports and plug it in to the wireless router's WAN port.
What did work was the following set up:

Set both routers to use the same private network (192.168.0.*)
Have the modem serve DHCP, with local IP address 192.168.0.1
Set the wireless router IP address to 192.168.0.50 (really just anything to avoid the modem IP address)
Turn off DHCP on the wireless router.
Cross fingers

This seems to work ok. New machines connecting to the wireless router get their IP addresses served by the modem, which happily sets the default gateway, DNS etc correctly.
The only downer is that I'm forced to use the modem configuration for firewall etc. and its firewall configuration is less powerful. Also, it doesn't seem to support assigning static IP addresses in its DHCP set up.

Maverick Meerkat initial impressions

2010-10-15T17:43:00.001+01:00

I am not really a fan of reviews where the reviewer throws on a new distro, plays with it for 3 hours and then does a write up. I find it takes much longer to get a proper impression about a new distribution.

So, having said that I'm nonetheless going to give my initial impressions of Maverick Meerkat. I started switching a couple of weeks ago.

So far I have upgraded (or re-installed) 2 laptops, a netbook and 3 mythbuntu boxes. All bar the netbook have gone pretty smoothly (more on that below).

The new installer has some good improvements, such as doing work in the background while you are still answering questions, resulting in faster installs.

shotwell has replaced f-spot as the photo manager. I'm finding shotwell much, much faster than f-spot and all round a pleasure to use. Migration from f-spot is trivial as shotwell has an "import from f-spot" option. This worked a treat for me.

Ubuntu Software Centre has two new features I have already found very useful. History allows you to see the history of your package installs. Installed Software splits stuffup according to which repository they have come from. I've already found both these features invaluable.

Software sources has been moved from a standalone entry in the System->Administration menu to being part of the ubuntu software centre. You will find it under the Edit menu.

I do think Ubuntu releases could do with some more comprehensive release notes which list changes like this, it took me a while to track things down.

Upgrading the Acer Aspire, 11.6" ZA3

The problem with this netbook is that it has the poulsbo video chipset. Despite being an intel chipset, the drivers are closed source. However, there is now reasonable support and repositories with the necessary fixes were already available.

After upgrading, just:

add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa

and install the poulsbo goodies from there.

My upgrade on the netbook ran into a few problems. First, the installer told me it could not figure out the upgrade and told me it was probably due to third party stuff I had installed, but gave no clues as to which. If only I'd had the new softwar centre to allow me to browse what I'd installed from strange sources.

Happily, synaptic has a similar option. Using that, I guessed that it was the poulsbo goodies causing problems, so removed them and then fired up the installer. Success!

Now the install was going ok until I looked at the netbook and saw that everything seemed to have frozen. The window manager had crashed. Note to self, don't do a gui based upgrade after removing a bunch of the packages that your X server is using ;)

Sadly, I ended up killing the upgrade before I found the window asking me some question about which version of a config file I wanted. This had been hidden behind another window and, without a window manager running I couldn't see it.

The good news was that I was able to complete the upgrade using apt-get commands from the command line. A reboot got me to a console, I then added the poulsbo goodies, rebooted once more and all was good.

Thanks Ubuntu

2010-09-15T16:00:00.001+01:00

Mark Shuttleworth recently responded to criticism of the Ubuntu project with a very thoughtful piece: "Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption"

As someone who has been using Ubuntu for mary years (since Breezy Badger), I have nothing but admiration for what Mark has enabled the Ubuntu people to achieve.

Sure, there have been problems along the way, but the result is an operating system that is a pleasure to use. A few years back I introduced my sister to it, she's been running it fine on her laptop for some time. Just this weekend I helped her fix a printer issue using the desktop sharing in empathy (she is in the UK, I'm in Canada).

This weekend I installed Ubuntu on a friends laptop and an old pc tower. The laptop was taking 15 minutes to boot into windows (probably malware issues, but I'm not the person to fix that). So I installed Ubuntu along side, had it import the user's documents and settings and now they are delighted: 30 seconds and they have a machine that is snappy and fun to use.

The pc tower was her son's. Or at least that was what I thought. It was failing to boot at all. It booted fine from a Lucid Lynx disc, so I asked if it was OK to wipe the disk and install. He said, "Yes, go ahead". So about an hour later it was up and running. Only later that day did I discover her son had two pc towers, one was his, one a friend's he had in his room. No prizes for guessing which one I'd upgraded. Oops. Happily, the friend came by later and was delighted with his new, snappy computer, loaded with useful software.

Thanks Mark and everyone involved in Ubuntu.

Nexus One and Orange UK pay as you go

2010-08-29T19:04:00.001+01:00

I am currently in the UK. Last time I was here I bought an Orange UK pay as you go card.

First off, the deal with Orange is pretty good if you are an occasional visitor here. I can get 250MB of data for £5.00. In fact, if I'd subscribed to Dolphin as my Orange animal I'd get this for free with a £10.00 top up each month.

However, when I put the SIM card in the phone I got no data connection. The display just showed the signal strength indicator with no 3G, G or E indicator.

Initially, I assumed this was due to incompatibilities with the frequencies that Orange uses and those my handset can use. I have the version that works on the Rogers network in Canada. See this article for more information on that.

However, when I put my Rogers SIM in the phone, selected Orange as the network and turned on data I got a GPRS connection.

So it seemed the problem was something to do with the Orange SIM card. A long support call didn't provide any solutions, just lots of frustration. The Nexus One wasn't on their list of phones and the support person hadn't heard of it, so I was pretty much on my own.

Today, I made it into an Orange shop. Initially, things weren't going much better, but just as I was about to give up the resident Android expert came to help.

He was excellent and explained I needed to configure an Access Point Name for the 3G and GPRS to work. Sure enough, once I went to:

Settings->Wireless & Networks -> Mobile Networks -> Access Point Names

and added an access point with Orange WEB as the name and orangeinternet as the APN, the phone got a full 3G connection.

So, I can confirm that the Nexus One, Rogers Canada version works fine on the Orange network.

World Cup miscellania

2010-06-14T18:42:00.001+01:00

Happily, CBC has the World Cup coverage here in Canada.

This leads to my "Getting things done" tip of the day: watch the football in the gym.

If I head for a run 20 minutes from the end of a game I can watch the game and run at the same time.

Only problem is I have a slight tendency to try and kick or head the ball, not ideal when on the treadmill.

Tim Bray's blog is an unexpected source of good World Cup punditry.

Music industry: how being sensible makes you money

2010-05-11T14:12:00.001+01:00

So this morning I came across this Ubuntu video.

Someone asked in the comments if the Twisted Sister track is available in the Ubuntu Music store.

Sure enough it was. With the music store nicely integrated with rhythmbox on Ubuntu it was trivial to purchase.

So, this video has achieved at least one sale.

No doubt there'll be a take-down notice shortly ;)

Electoral reform

2010-05-03T14:17:00.001+01:00

With the UK election likely to produce a hung parliament there is likely to be much discussion of electoral reform there. Indeed, the Liberals are likely to demand this in order to form a coalition.

To my mind, this is long overdue. I'm not sure of the exact figures, but for the last few elections a 30% share of a 60% turnout has given a huge majority in parliament. Now, whilst you can argue that those that don't vote don't deserve their views to be represented, it can't be right that 80% of the population end up with their views not represented by the party in power.

Proportional representation would be a good start. A single, transferable vote system would certainly improve things. One key benefit of this is that it largely eliminates the need for tactical voting, each voter can express their preferences, in order of preference, rather than have to guess which parties actually have a chance of winning and voting tactically.

PR though is just a beginning. The opponents of PR point out that it will lead to hung parliaments. Well, yes it will if there is no clear majority for any one party in the population. Now the problem here is that a minority party can then have more influence than maybe they should in a coalition.

A second problem is that even with PR, suppose there are just two parties sharing most of the votes, one has 52% share, the other 48% share. The 52% party will get a majority in parliament, the significant minority won't have their views represented.

The problem is that once in parliament, simple majority rules.

How can you address this?

Well one way is as follows. Once the election is complete, any group with 5% of the MPs can select a representative to go to a meeting. At this meeting the 20 representatives come up with an agenda for parliament and pick a prime minister.

Each MP is allocated a number of votes for the session. The MP can place as many votes as they want on each issue, so if there is one issue they really care about they can put all the votes on that issue.

In this way, minority issues can get an airing and can get pushed through once on the agenda.

The key to this working is of course the meeting of the representatives. At this meeting there will be a need for debate, consensus, compromise etc. I'm not sure current politicians are capable of this, but if they were I believe it would result in much better goverment.

350% increase in Ottawa Ubuntu in just 6 months

2010-05-01T18:09:00.002+01:00

Last night was the Lucid Lynx release party for Ottawa.
The attendence was up a massive 350% on the Karmic party, just 6 months ago.
At this rate we'll need to book the new Ottawa congress centre for the 11.04 release.
Here are some photos from the party.
A good time had by all celebrating a great release.

Lucid Lynx Beta

2010-04-05T13:35:00.001+01:00

I upgraded my primary machine to Lucid the other day.

So far I've been pretty impressed.

I'd heard a lot of stuff about the 'me' menu and the messaging integration, without really knowing what it is all about.

Under karmic, my experience with empathy had been more than a little disappointing.

With Lucid, things are much better. The envelope in the top panel which goes green when a new message comes in is working really well for me.

The Super-m keyboard accelerator takes me to the messaging indicator and allows me to switch easisy if I want to talk to a contact.

I took a look at the code, the Super-m key binding is hard-wired into the indicator code, so I've had to re-train my fingers which, since I've had that bound to minimize windows.

Super-s takes you to the logout menu, again no way to configure this though.

On balance, I'm a big fan of keyboard support for everything.

This is probably one reason I don't really care about the buttons moving to the left. I don't use the things as a rule (I use the keyboard). One thing I do like on the buttons is the close window one is red -- easy to spot and hit if I need to.

In other news, so far sound has behaved itself. Hopefully the days of 'killall pulseaudio' are numbered.

What do you do if your gas pedal gets stuck?

2010-02-09T03:34:00.003Z

So the press is having a field day with Toyota's gas pedal problems.

Maybe I have missed it, but I haven't come across any advice from the press (or Toyota for that matter) as to what you should do if you encounter this problem.

I've heard a few tails from people who did, most recount tales of having both feet on the brakes trying to slow the vehicle.

Putting the car into neutral would seem a good option, failing that I would think the thing to do would be switch off the ignition, but then you have to worry a bit about power steering and steering locks.

So why isn't the press interested in educating the public?

The Pants Bomber

2010-01-02T01:25:00.001Z

Another (failed) terrorist attack, once again the solutions being proposed involve more inconvenience, more invasion of privacy and little in the way of true increased security. Chalk up another round to the terrorists.

It is more than a little annoying that having had to give fingerprints to travel to the US, submitting all those details they so love, with talk of countries passing on credit card information and the like, that this attack was done by someone on their 500K list of people to watch.

See this article for more on the information that was available about the terrorist. It seems that this attack was an intelligence failure, as indeed was 911: there was information out there that might have stopped the attack if the pieces had been put together.

Of course, it isn't quite this simple, with hindsight you can look back and find the pieces that needed putting together. 500K is of course rather a lot of people to keep an eye on, OK as a table that computers can check names against, but you're not going to be able to keep track of them all.

It would be interesting to know where in the 500K people he ranked in terms of risk. A single list is less useful than a prioritised list, 500K might be manageable for singling out for special searches (depending on how many are frequent flyers). It is no use having so many on the list you can't afford to check any of them at an airport -- some prioritisation is in order.

Fancy new search equipment isn't the answer to stopping someone on your high risk list getting on a plane, that stuff is there to catch the ones you don't know about yet and to discourage the nutters. Sure, it helps when your intelligence fails, but the solution to an intelligence failure is not to beef up plan B.

Good news from Jamaica

2009-12-25T18:37:00.000Z

As mentioned in an earlier post I left my Acer Aspire One with a guy in Jamaica.

He has been having his challenges getting all the stuff he wants working on that machine. He has asked a few questions, but has mostly found his own solutions.

He's been trying hard to get the video conferencing (with empathy) working. Not much joy there, I've had trouble myself, tends to be a bit hit and miss + the AAO can struggle a bit with voice and video.

Anyway, this mornig I got a video call from him :)

Some Italian guy from the Ubuntu forums had helped him install the latest pidgin, talking him throught a bunch of terminal stuff.

Ubuntu you are awesome.

Copenhagen shows what can be done if you are serious about supporting cycling

2009-12-15T12:12:00.001Z

The video here shows what can be done if you are serious about promoting cycling in your city.

Some of the things they have done:

Lots of double width cycle lanes
specially designed junctions to cut down serious accidents
LED's to warn right turning vehicles about bikes
traffic lights co-ordinated so bikes travelling at 20km/h never have to stop
bike counters to a. monitor and b. let everyone know how many bikes there are.

Such a refreshing change from the world's worst bike lanes. Hopefully, other cities will start to catch on.

Karmic Koala on Acer Aspire 11.6" ZA3

2009-11-30T01:40:00.003Z

I left my 8.9" Acer Aspire One behind with a really great Jamaican guy on a recent trip there.

It had Ubuntu Karmic Koala on it, so far the guy is doing pretty well, I've been impressed by his resourcefulness in trying to work around problems. One of the early questions I got was something like, "This wine stuff is a bit complicated".

Meanwhile, time for a replacemen beastie for me. There is a Canadian Computers store just up the road from me. The staff there are pretty clued in and helpful with it. The 8.9" acer has been excellent. Good points were the long battery life, light weight, compact size. I've found myself wanting a larger screen some of the time, but the plus points have offset this.

The 11.6" aspires were too tempting. Similar weight, half inch bigger all round, but 1366x768 screen resolution and 5 hours battery life. Perfect.

Only problem is the Poulsbo chip set used for the graphics driver. On the plus side, this is the chip that combines lower power consumption magic with the high resolution. The big problem is it is proprietary, with closed source drivers. At first sight, it appears to be an Intel chip, but it turns out they have done a deal with a third party, so the usual rule of thumb, where Intel really do play nicely with open source goes out of the window.

Nonetheless, Karmic installed from a USB stick without problems, bar the screen resolution. This thread provided the solution to the resolution problem. The scripts from lucazade worked like magic.

The only remaining issue is I have a choice between working sound and using the compiz 3-D effects. I'm sure someone out there has the answer to this one.

I was a little concerned tha the Atom Z520 processor might be a bit under-powered, but so far all is ok. I do have to keep an eye open for runaway firefox processes though -- occasionally it starts the cpu racing and then of course performance nosedives.

Meanwhile I've installed the Google Chromium browser with these instructions. I'm really finding it very slick on this machine. Added bonus is Chromium extensions are starting to trickle in, so it is becoming a viable alternative to firefox for me.

First snow flake spotted in Ottawa

2009-11-05T00:51:00.001Z

From snow and balloons

Actually, this gets a fail as a snow flake. The real thing should be here any day now, so the baker can go and check what they really look like.

In other news, I went to a Halloween party as balloon boy at the weekend. Since then, I have carefully adjusted the balloons payload so they hover about the apartment. It is a bit worrying how much entertainment I'm getting from this.

From snow and balloons

Ottawa Karmic Koala Release Party

2009-10-30T13:59:00.001Z

It probably wasn't the biggest release party, but a good time was had by all anyway.

I went along to the UMI Cafe in Ottawa for the Karmic Koala release party I had advertised.

On arriving at the cafe I was happy to see that the laptop that myself and Ralph Pitchie had set up there for anyone in the cafe to use, running Jaunty Jackalope, was being used. Since neither Ralph nor myself had been to check on the machine since early September it was great to see it still running without problems.

It looked like it was going to be a one man party for a while. I had assumed that the Karmic T-shirt would tip people off that this was where the party was, but it seems the fronts of these shirts are a bit too subtle -- it wasn't until I got up to take the photo below of the laptop being used that George saw the back of the shirt and realised who I was.

From Karmic release party

I decided not to try and upgrade the cafe laptop, as I expected the Ubuntu servers to be a little sluggish, due to the release. I'd already upgraded my netbook, as had George so we just ended up chatting about each other's linux use.

From Karmic release party

Later the party moved on to the Royal Oak (aka The Sooty Oak) on Bank Street.

From Karmic release party

Karmic Release Party, Ottawa

2009-10-26T17:23:00.002Z

I've just put myself down to organise a Ubuntu Karmic Koala release party at the UMI Cafe in Ottawa.

With the help of Ralph Pitchie (Ralph did most of the work), I helped set up a laptop there running Jaunty, giving free web browsing to anyone using the cafe.

So the plan is to have a release party 7pm onwards on Thursday 29th. We will no doubt migrate to a pub later in the evening.

I'll have USB sticks with the release candidate on them (might have the distro itself so long as the torrents are working ok on Thursday).

Will try and upgrade the laptop whilst I am there.

Karmic Koala release candidate

2009-10-24T16:57:00.002+01:00

I just upgraded my LG P300 to Karmic Koala release candidate. To be precise, I did a fresh install.

I have /home in a separate partition. I followed my usual Ubuntu upgrade procedure is as follows:

Take backups
Install OS to a new partition
Test it
Mount the old /home.

The desktop CD booted no problems. The install went well.

On reboot I ran into this bug. The good news was that moving /etc/X11/xorg.conf out of the way was enough to get the machine booting into X without problems.

Once in X I was able to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and all has been good.

I decided to convert my home directory to ext4.

This is where I ran into a bit of fun. First of all, I'm a plonker and when I partitioned my disk a while back I created too many primary partitions and did not leave enough space for the one extended partition I created.

Once I had karmic running I decided to backup my jaunty partition, then do some re-partitioning, then copy the jaunty install back into a fresh partition.

Now karmic comes with grub2. One nead thing with grub2 is you can just run:

sudo update-grub

and it does just that, including scanning for other OS'es on your system. This nearly worked for me. Unfortunately, I hit this bug. Probably a pretty rare situation, but would be good if the OS probing could cope with this one.

With a little hand editing of /boot/grub/grub.conf (yes, I know you are not supposed to do this) and fixing up the UUID's in the fstab the old jaunty install was up and running again.

In the course of this I discovered: /dev/disk/by-uuid/

This is a folder with links named by the UUID's to the actual partitions in human readable form. Very handy.

What is new?

Empathy

I had mixed feelings about the switch to empathy from pidgin as an IM client. I've never been 100% happy with pidgin though, so I was prepared for a few rough edges. I really haven't used empathy long enough to give a fair assessment, but so far it is doing the job nicely.

Added bonuses are voice and video support. Voice also working to people running gtalk within firefox on OS/X.

Update: video also working from empathy on Karmic to gtalk running in firefox on OS/X.

Firefox 3.5

This seems very much snappier than firefox 3.0. I was using firefox 3.5 (shiretoko) under jaunty but that was sluggish compared with the karmic firefox3.5

Pulseaudio airtunes support

Pulseaudio now comes with support for airtunes.

You will need to install: padevchooser, pulseaudio-module-raop and pulseaudio-module-zeroconf.

With these it should automatically spot any airtunes devices you have on your network.

You can then fire up padevchooser, configure the local sound server to 'Make apple airtunes devices available locally'.

Now from the pulseaudio volume control, go to the playback tab and you should be able to select your airtunes device as the sync.

Lloyds online banking is a bit crap

2009-10-21T20:06:00.002+01:00

Actually, it is a bit unfair of me to criticise Lloyds online banking as I've never actually tried it.

I've been going through a kafkaesque process since July trying to set this up. So far the only real beneficiaries are skype and Canada Post.

Now I see that even if I do get the thing set up it might not work for me.

It is 2009 and I'm afraid I never thought to check if they support firefox.

Update: The internet banking was finally set up today! Only taken 3 months and as an added bonus it seems to work OK with firefox on linux. So it appears that far from being a steaming pile of dung, Lloyds TSB is a wonderful organisation that really gets the net. My apologies for any confusion.

Karmic Koala -- sexism

2009-10-16T23:57:00.001+01:00

There has been a lot of fuss about sexism in the Ubuntu world of late. I'm not going to comment on that, more than enough has already been said.

However, as far as I can tell these Karmic Koala T-shirts are only available as men's T-shirts.

How am I supposed to explain to my wife what I do if she can't even buy the T-shirt?

Karmic netbook remix on Acer Aspire One

2009-10-03T01:58:00.001+01:00

I've just upgraded to Karmic and so far the experince is excellent.

Firefox very much snappier + I suspect the wireless driver is working much more smoothly.

An added bonus, the light that indicates wireless activity now works too.

gwibber (twitter client) keeps crashing on me, but other than that, so far so good.

Pharmaceutical Mathematics

2009-09-20T19:35:00.001+01:00

So today's question is:

If a 40mg tablet costs $x how much does a 20mg tablet of the same drug cost?

In the case of Astrazeneca's nexium the answer is a surprising $x.

So why don't people buy the 40mg tablets and split them? Well apparently they are not designed to be split like that.

I suppose we are supposed to be happy that Astrazeneca have decided those that need a large dose of their drug should be subsidised by those requiring a smaller dose.

I'm wondering how prevalent this sort of pricing is.

Mixing bikes and pedestrians

2009-09-17T16:34:00.001+01:00

It has been a bad summer for cycling in Ottawa, another cyclist died yesterday.

Over the summer I have read a number of pieces suggesting increasing tension between cyclists, pedestrians and drivers.

I've seen claims that cyclists and pedestrians don't mix any better than cyclists and cars.

One wrote that there is little difference between a cyclist doing 30km/h plus car doing 60km/h or a cyclist doing 30km/h and a pedestrian doing close to 0km/h.

I have to disagree with this. First off, 30km/h is top end of the range for cyclists, 0 bottom for pedestrians and 60km about par for a car, assuming 60km/h limit. Realistically thoug, the cyclist will be doing more like 20km/h and the pedestrian 6km/h, so the speed difference is as 14km/h in that case and 40km/h car to cycle.

The relative speed is of course a factor in generating accidents, but then you have to consider the damage when there is an accident. The energy involved is proportional to the square of the velocity. So, even if you ignore the mass of the car, there is 4 times the energy in a car/bike collision than bike/pedestrian. Throw in the mass of the car and it is off the scale.

Now on Sunday, I went for a run along the canal. It was a lovely sunny afternoon, some of the trees just starting to turn colour with joggers, cyclists, walkers and people casually strolling all mixing with no problems at all. Cyclists were courteous, ringing their bells to warn of their approach, slowing if necessary. Walkers were keeping to the right side of the path, aware they are sharing with others. Lots of give and take, everyone having a safe and fun time.

If only there was the same give and take between cars and cycles.

Multi-tasking

2009-09-10T17:50:00.001+01:00

On a moped, smoking, drinking and phoning

Watching the final day of the Ashes

2009-08-25T15:48:00.003+01:00

I spent a great afternoon watching the final (actually 4th) day of the Ashes at the Oval. Well not actually at the Oval, rather in the local pub in Sheffield.

Despite the Aussies needing 546 to win it was still tense, if any team can snatch defeat from victory in that sort of situation, England are the ones.

There was a friendly crowd in the bar. Everyone getting increasingly tense until Freddie threw the stumps down to run out Ponting. After that it was a steady procession of wickets, just when you felt it was starting to get tense again another would fall.

Great win for England, but credit to the Aussies and Ponting in particular for being dignified throughout this series. The series could have gone either way and the Aussies probably had the raw end of umpiring decisions this time.

Looking forward to Australia 2010/11.

More pictures here

Revenue on line (ie)

2009-08-19T17:59:00.002+01:00

I just had to log onto the Irish revenue site to renew a digital certificate.

I was greeted by the a message to the following effect:

Security on this site is provided by software from The legion of the bouncy castle.

No link to bouncycastle.org was provided, so I ended up googling to check the thing out. It was all seeming a bit pythonesque.

Turns out it is all fine, an open source set of tools for cryptography.

So, after a slight fright I went ahead and renewed.

More annoyingly, the ROS service still does not support linux as a client. So whilst they use open source software for their site they still insist that you pay the Mac or Microsoft tax to file your taxes

A day late, but better weather

2009-06-23T02:06:00.002+01:00

The clouds were a little more cooperative tonight. As well as that I lowered the exposure somewhat and so in many of the photos you can pick up the position of the transmitter.

You can find all the photos here.

I'll have to get a tripod for next year.

Summer Solstice

2009-06-22T01:52:00.002+01:00

There I was thinking I live in a condo block. It turns out I'm living in an astronomical clock, used to signal the summer solstice.

The picture above was taken on the evening of 21st June 2009, looking towards the Gatineau Hills and the mast shows Ryan Tower at the top of Camp Fortune in the Gatineau Hills.

The above photograph was taken a few minutes later as the sun crossed the horizon. Unfortunately the picture did not capture it, but Ryan Tower was exactly bisecting the sun in this shot (next year I'll lower the exposure somewhat).

Now the question is, will my condo block last as long as Stonehenge?

Version control wars come to registration plates

2009-04-11T18:51:00.002+01:00

Spotted this the other day. I'll have to see if GIT has been taken yet.

Eeebuntu on an Acer Aspire One

2009-03-03T18:17:00.004Z

I recently acquired and Acer Aspire One. I wanted to put a Ubuntu based distibution on it, mainly because I'm familiar with Ubuntu and wanted the wide range of ubuntu packages available.

My first attempt was to install the Ubuntu netbook remix. This installed well and worked perfectly. The only issues I ran into were that it set the architecture to 'lpia' rather than 'i386'. I know the former is technically correct, but many repositiories do not have packages for 'lpia'. This prevented me from installing skype from medibuntu and I also could not get BBC radio to play due to inability to find a suitable version of realplayer.

I considered doing a generic intrepid install and then adding the netbook interface, but after doing some googling read that the intrepid kernel does not have support for the wireless care in the Acer Aspire One. Whilst there are good instructions on how to work round this I decided to wait for Jaunty.

However, I then discovered EeeBuntu. Reading around there were reports of it working out of the box on the Acer Aspire One.

So, I decided to install the netbook remix (NBR) version.

The install process was pretty straightforward.

The process is as follows:

Download the iso from here.

Put the iso onto a USB stick

Boot your acer from the usb stick

If all goes well do the install.

Stage 2. is probably the trickiest. Since I was running Ubuntu
Intrepid on the machine I downloaded the iso to this was actually
quite straightforward.

There is a package, usb-creator, that will take an iso and turn it
into an appropriate usb stick. If usb-creator is installed, it should
be available from the menu under "System->Administration->Create a usb
startup disk".

Just Plug in a USB stick (a 1G stick should be plenty big enough).
Start the usb-creator, select the iso you have downloaded and the
stick to copy to and you are done.

If you don't have usb-creator available the best bet is probably to use unetbootlin. This is a utility similar to usb-creator that has versions for both linux and windows.

Once the stick has been created, just plug it into the netbook and go
into settings at boot to select booting from the usb stick.

If all goes well your netbook will boot into a Ubuntu live, running
off the stick. This allows you to check everything is working before
doing a full install.

If all is well, you should probably take a back up of anything in your
current home directory that you might want to preserve (again, usb
sticks are good for this).

Once you have the backup you should find an option to install under
System-Administration.

The install itself went pretty smoothly, the only things I did
different was to choose custom partitioninng so that I could specify
that ext2, rather than ext3 should be used for the filesystem. My
netbook has an SSD drive and the story is that ext2 performs better
and does not result in so many repeated writes to the disk. I'm not
sure if this is a practical issue or not. Also, I chose not to
allocate any space to swap. Again, this reduces disk writes.

The install went very smoothly. If you are not confident with
partitioning then I would suggest just picking the option to use the
full disk.

Once installed networking was working as was sound (including BBC
radio). I added the medibuntu repositories and was able to install
skype, which again worked well.

Since the initial install I have discovered that the wireless is a
little flaky and have had some sound glitches. My current plan is to
live with these and upgrade to Jaunty when it comes out.

Meanwhile, if you have an EEE pc then I'd expect this distro to work
really well. For the Acer Aspire One it is also pretty close.

IRMA Threatens Irish ISPs

2009-03-03T18:06:00.005Z

Blacknight has this response to a letter from the IRMA, with RIAA type threats demanding they take action against infringing users.

The letter explains that going through the courts is impractical because, ".. as a logistic matter they could only identify a finite number of infringers while meanwhile the infringement was going on wholesale."

I'm puzzled by this. Are the lawyers really suggesting there are an infinite number of infringers? If so, it is rather pointless them trying to pursue a few of them.

How can they get away with complaining that the courts can only deal with a finite number of infringers?

Obama in Ottawa

2009-02-21T02:25:00.005Z

Barrack Obama visited Ottawa yesterday. I had intended to walk up to Parliament Hill to see him arrive, but got delayed and by the time I went out they were stopping people at the end of Rideau Street. This ended up being not a bad place to watch the motorcade go by as it has to slow a bit for the corner.

There's a 50% chance he's in the photo above, though could well have been in the second limo which I only got a partial picture of.

Later in the day he made an unscheduled stop in the Byward Market, visiting the baker I normally get bread at to buy some maple leaf cookies.. now being sold in vast numbers as "Obama cookies".

More pics of the visit here (the Whitehouse), here (CTV) and here (mine).

You can now write ubiquity commands in python

2009-02-11T01:22:00.001Z

See here for details.

A cool blackberry

2009-02-08T22:18:00.003Z

Never really thought of Blackberries as cool until now ;)

Winterlude

2009-02-08T17:15:00.003Z

The annual winter festival in Ottawa started this weekend.

It has been a good weekend so far, relatively mild. Last night in fact was a bit too mild, +6C, for the ice sculptures.

OC Transpo bus spotted in its natural habitat

2009-02-08T04:17:00.002Z

Spotted the above today in Ottawa. Previously thought to have become extinct at the end of 2008.

Good to have the buses back at last.

Openpistemap and Mt Tremblant

2009-02-02T14:13:00.004Z

I've done a bit of work on the tracks I collected at Mt Tremblant and started working on mapping it for OpenStreetMap.

I found JOSM a little painful at first, partly because I did not really know what I was supposed to be doing.

Switching to the latest version proved a good move, as the Ubuntu Intrepid version had a bug making the preferences dialog too small to change the things.

Anyway, with some help from the IRC channels, you can view the results here. Still rather a lot of pistes to add though.

UPDATE: the map link was showing my changes earlier, but they've now disappeared. I'm sure the rendering stuff will catch up again soon.

GPS and skiing

2009-01-31T15:30:00.004Z

With the winter weather I'm unable to feed my GPS and cycling obsession. The good news is I've found a new obsession: OpenPisteMap. This is part of the OpenStreetMap project.

The idea is to map out ski resorts. I've been using JohnJohn to collect tracks of my recent ski trips. The results have been a bit mixed. One problem I've run into is that many ski hills are north facing, which means the GPS satellites tend to be below the horizon, giving a poor fix at times.

However, I am collecting some reasonable tracks. Below is some data from a trip to Mt Tremblant earlier this week. By plotting altitude, speed and direction (with matplotlib) you can get a reasonable feel for what is going on: I go downhill faster than uphill, you can see some lifts are faster than others etc etc.

Next job is to load the data into JOSM and see if I can create some sort of map.

Obama

2009-01-26T23:10:00.010Z

A bit late, but here is a pic of me toasting Obama last week.

The T-shirt is one I had made with an image I'd created myself and it has a hidden message.

To see the message, here is the raw image.

Obama's inauguration brought back memories of Tony Blair being elected in the UK, which was a happy day for me for other reasons. People were optimistic about change, but it didn't quite turn out like that.

The image was created thanks to the Python Imaging Library and a few lines of code (see below).

I tried using the GIMP, but I'm afraid I don't use it often enough to be able to do anything non-trivial faster than I can write PIL code.



import optparse
import Image

import ImageFont
import ImageDraw

def get_weight(xoff, yoff, width, height, image):

    total = 0
    count = 0
    for x in range(width):
        for y in range(height):
            try:
                total += image.getpixel((xoff+x, yoff+y))
            except:
                continue
            count += 1

    if count == 0: count = 1
    return int(round(total/count))

def get_rgb(xoff, yoff, width, height, image):

    rr = gg = bb = 0
    count = 0
    for x in range(width):
        for y in range(height):
            try:
                r, g, b = image.getpixel((xoff+x, yoff+y))

                rr += r
                gg += g
                bb += b
            except:
                continue
            count += 1

    if count == 0: count = 1

    return int(round(rr/count)), int(round(gg/count)), int(round(bb/count))


def make_image(options):

    obama = Image.open(options.obama)

    options.width, options.height = obama.size
    scale = options.scale
    options.width *= scale
    options.height *= scale

    image = Image.new('RGB', (options.width, options.height))

    print obama.getpixel((10,10))

    text = options.text

    font = ImageFont.truetype("/home/me/.fonts/arial.ttf", options.font)

    draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
    width, height = font.getsize(options.text)

    xpos = ypos = height

    offset = 0
    total_offset = 0
    red, green, blue = options.red, options.green, options.blue
    
    while ypos < options.height:
        while xpos < options.width:

            for char in options.text[offset:]:
                wchar, hchar = font.getsize(char)
                if opts.rgb:
                    rgb = get_rgb(xpos/scale, ypos/scale, 1 + (wchar/scale), 1 + (hchar/scale), obama)
                    draw.text((xpos, ypos), char, font=font, fill=rgb)
                else:
                    weight = get_weight(xpos/scale, ypos/scale, 1 + (wchar/scale), 1 + (hchar/scale), obama)
                    draw.text((xpos, ypos), char, font=font, fill=(int(weight*red), int(weight*green), int(weight*blue)))
                xpos += wchar

            offset = 0
        ypos += height
        xpos = height
        total_offset += options.offset
        offset = total_offset % len(options.text)

    image.save(open('blair.png', 'w'))

def get_parser():
    """ Get an option parser.
    """
    parser = optparse.OptionParser()
    
    parser.add_option('--width', type='int', default=426)
    parser.add_option('--height', type='int', default=640)
    parser.add_option('--scale', type='int', default=2)
    parser.add_option('--offset', type='int', default=15)
    parser.add_option('--font', type='int', default=9)
    parser.add_option('--obama', default='obamagrey.png')

    parser.add_option('--red', type='float', default=1.0)
    parser.add_option('--green', type='float', default=1.0)
    parser.add_option('--blue', type='float', default=1.0)
    
    parser.add_option('--rgb', action='store_true')
    
    parser.add_option('--text', default="Please don't do a Tony Blair ")

    return parser

if __name__ == '__main__':

    parser = get_parser()

    opts, args = parser.parse_args()

    make_image(opts)

Socks and awe

2008-12-20T19:43:00.002Z

Following last week's shoe throwing incident in Iraq someone with too much time has created this sock and awe game, presumably for people with too much time on their hands.

Meanwhile, here is a related pic of the US embassy in Ottawa:

Prorogue

2008-12-06T15:04:00.005Z

Word of the week is prorogue. The PM here in Canada asked for Parliament to be suspended, to avoid losing a confidence vote.

I'm feeling a strange sense of deja vu here. I first came to Canada in June 1993, within 3 months there had been three prime ministers: Mulroney, Kim Campbell and Jean Chretien.

I just moved back here and and since then there has been an election and now this week's excitement.

Meanwhile, OJ is back in the news, just like he was when I arrived here in 1993.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm stuck in a time warp.

Tim Henman finds his level

2008-11-27T18:07:00.002Z

If you've been wondering what Tim Henman is doing nowadays, the good news is he has found his level at last.

Credit crunch solved

2008-11-18T13:00:00.002Z

I just bought some electronic equipment and took a look at the bill:

It seems that even though my credit limit is zero, I have $1001 shy of $99 trillion of credi available.

So if my local electronics store has access to this sort of financing, is there really a credit crunch?

Book meme

2008-11-12T00:17:00.002Z

Some people on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu are doing this meme

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

It was not until the fourth day of the campaign that a major
labour movement figure spoke out in defence of Scargill and
Heathfield

This came from The Enemy Within, Seumas Milne

Meanwhile, I'm wondering if this is a way to index geek books within
the bounds of fair-use ;)

Emphasizing safety reduces the number of cyclists

2008-08-28T10:26:00.002+01:00

The Irish Times has an article on cycling safety

The basic thrust of the article is that enforcing use of helmets and recommending reflective jackets just creates a false perception of how dangerous cycling is.

In cities where cycling is more the norm (Copenhagen and Paris are mentioned) there is less emphasis on helmets and reflective gear. People ride in normal gear and there are more cyclists.

There is even a website devoted to cycling fashion in Copenhagen

Having ridden in Dublin I have to say I'd be wary of not using a helmet there. Whilst there are bike lanes they are not well thought out, they invariably come to an abrupt end just where a cyclist needs protection. The roads are in poor condition in many places and there are many wheel swallowing potholes to contend with. Finally, drivers are not really cyclist aware or cyclist friendly.

The contrast when I was in recently Paris was marked. Parisian drivers are not noted for patience and care, but like most French drivers they are very aware of cyclists and invariably treat them with care and respect -- the Tour de France no doubt plays a part here.

I'd guess it is a slow process changing the cycling culture in a city from what it is in Dublin to what it is in Paris, but as the Irish Times article suggests, the authorities can really help by emphasizing cycling as a safe and healthy activity.

I was also interested in the "slow bicycle movement" mentioned in the article. One of my pet hates in Dublin is cycling behind some racer who doesn't have mudguards -- or worse still one who has one of those flimsy guards that protects himself, but does nothing for the poor cyclist behind.

Dove rescue

2008-08-27T16:10:00.003+01:00

This poor dove managed to get itself stuck in the drainage outlet of the pool where I am staying at the moment.

Fortunately, my wife spotted it. It was in a pretty bad way at that point. The following pictures were taken over a period of about four hours, during which it slowly stopped shivering and eventually started to groom its feathers, before finally taking a little walk and flying off.

Check your software license before you park

2008-08-21T07:43:00.002+01:00

We don't want your cars here if they use that stinky GPL license ;)

Paris free bike scheme

2008-08-21T06:59:00.002+01:00

I'm currently in Paris. As I love all things two-wheeled, the free bicycle scheme was something I had to try.

For 1 euro you can get a day pass to use the bikes. For that, you can use bikes for free, so long as you return it to a velib station within half an hour. You can get a weekly pass for 5 euro, or a full year for 29.

Here is a velib station:

The stations are rarely more than 300 metres apart, but tend to be on side-streets and can be a bit tricky to spot as you ride through the traffic. The velib site has pdf maps to help you find them.

Here are some pics from a recent site-seeing tour:

For those concerned about riding in the Paris traffic, there are a lot of fairly quiet side roads you can use. Further, the Parisian drivers seem to be very aware of cyclists and more considerate than most.

Since you can drop a bike off at any station, bikes do tend to migrate downhill, towards the river. I'm staying in Montmartre, and the ride out there gets a bit sweaty on a hot day, so it is tempting to bike into town and get the metro back.

To combat this, the Parisians have invented anti-gravity:

How to stop Vernon Coleman killing you

2008-08-03T17:43:00.001+01:00

Vernon Coleman is a prolific writer, much of what he writes is complete nonesense.

This piece in his latest book on peak oil, gives a good idea of what his writing is all about.

One of his more popular books is, "How to stop your doctor killing you". The book rambles on repeating the same ideas. Whilst it has some interesting comments, such as the extent that drug companies influence the medical profession, it contains a lot of dangerous ideas.

Unfortunately, my 77 year old father read this book a little while back. He picked up a number of crazy ideas from the book. He became very concerned about cancer (if you're 77 years old and haven't got cancer yet, then actually you probably don't need to worry too much about your diet -- much more important to get a good balanced diet than follow the Coleman diet).

Vernon argues against having unnecessary X-rays. Yesterday, my father was seriously ill, bleeding internally and needed 10 pints of blood during the day. The doctors urgently needed to do an X-ray. Five doctors could not persuade him to have it done. Fortunately, my sister was there and managed to persuade him to have the X-ray.

Vernon Coleman, as the title of your 1994 classic goes, "I hope your penis shrivels up".

Controlling the fan on a Dell

2008-06-05T22:11:00.001+01:00

A couple of days ago the fan on my Dell Latitude D410 (running Ubuntu Hardy) started behaving strangely.

Once the fan started up it would stay on. Very annoying.

I did the usual checking for runaway processes but there were no such problems.

So I then checked the CPU temperature:


   cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature

Next I discovered that the sensors screenlet can be used to display the temperature.

Watching this the cpu temperature steadily rose, the fan clicked in, the cpu cooled but the fan never shuts down.

A bit of googling looking for others with the same laptop and this problem came up with the dellfand project.

This is a simple daemon to control the fan on Dells. Works great, and now I can control just what temperatures the fan clicks in, goes into high speed and shuts off.

I'm still puzzled what broke/changed the other day, but at least for now I can control the problem.

OpenSSL security issue and Ubuntu response

2008-05-13T19:45:00.002+01:00

The big news of the day is the openssl security issue with debian based systems.

A bit of an embarrassing story, the code involved in generating keys was patched to stop valgrind complaining about some uninitialised memory.

Unfortunately, this resulted in less entropy feeding into the key generation (as far as I can gather) and so there is an easy attack on the vulnerable keys.

Now whilst this is unfortunate, I think some praise is due to the way Ubuntu has handled the issue. After hearing about the problem this afternoon, I just fired up the update-manager and checked for updates.

Sure enough, there was a full set of openssl and ssh related updates to install.

I installed these and was greeted with a helpful dialogue which explained that the host key on my machine was one of the weak ones and had been regenerated. Further, it pointed me at a new command, ssh-vulnkey which can be used to check for bad keys.

So, whilst it is more than a little unfortunate that this problem has been around 2 years, kudos for getting out the fix so quickly and for the pain free way it has been rolled out.

Prism apps in Hardy Heron

2008-05-03T09:56:00.002+01:00

I've been using the Google Prism apps since moving to Ubuntu Hardy.

This blog has a good summary of how to install these applications in Hardy and what they are good for.

The short version is that prism runs web based applications as standalone applications.

I've found these prism apps a mixed experience. On the plus side, having gmail, google reader and the like separate from the browser is handy:

No longer accidentally closing the tab for one of these

More real estate for the application

Icons in the panel for the individual applications

Able to launch the apps from launchers such as gnome-do

The big down side is that you no longer get all the functionality that you get in the browser. For example, keyboard accelerators to increase/decrease font sizes. On the other hand, this can be a good thing if the web application itself is really well designed, since it is no longer restricted to the key and mouse events that the browser doesn't grab.

One other down side I've found is opening links from these apps. Sometimes they open a new prism window, sometimes they open in my browser. I haven't quite figured out how to control all this and it can be annoying not being sure where and how things are going to open.

Hardy Heron goodness

2008-04-20T10:54:00.000+01:00

I've been using the Hardy Heron betas for several weeks now and it has been a joy to use.

I used a different strategy to previous Ubuntu upgrades. This time I did a fresh install with a fresh home directory (in a separate partition) too. I then created links to the key directories in my old home directory. In this way I was able to use Hardy, without worrying about clobbering old config files and so have been using on the machine (Dell Lattitude D410) I use for work.

Some highlights:

xrandr at work I dock the laptop and have a 1280x1024 screen. This is the first release where I have been able to suspend the laptop, head into work, issue a few commands and have the X session change resolution and use the external monitor. Added bonus I can get it to use the laptop as a secondary display, all using compiz fusion.
gnome-do I'm finding this really useful and fun to use. Love the way it spots the things you frequently launch. After using it for a few weeks most of the common things I launch can be fired up in 2-3 key pushes
tracker I've tried google desktop and beagle in the past, but found them hogging resources too much. Tracker seems to be indexing stuff well without hogging the cpu
pulse audio is the new sound server in Hardy. I don't know too much about it, but one feature I really like is you can use it to configure machines to enable network access to the server. Other machines on the network using pulse detect available servers and you can then use any available machine as the sound sink. To configure this I had to aptitude install pavucontrol and fire it up. This gives you an icon in the notification area that you can use to select the sound sink. So I can now play music on the laptop and have the sound use the decent speakers on my desktop system.
firefox3.0, much snappier than 2.0.