We’re off to FOSDEM next week. I’ll be in the Janson room moderating talks on Sunday morning, but beyond that I’m not sure.
A little bit of web design
I was looking at Mark’s my365 page as he’s also doing a daily photo project, and rather liked his presentation on there.
So last night I put my mind to developing a few lines of code to try to put something similar together. So a bit of Perl code to parse the XML from the RSS feed (yes it’s technical, but fun in a geeky way) from my flickr oneaday feed and I was able to put together a web page of my own which automagically updates whenever I add a photo to the oneaday set on my iPhoto album on my mac (which synchronises with flickr).
Suzy helped me out today with the CSS for laying out the page and in the end this tutorial on floats was also very helpful to end up with my oneaday gallery.
I’l probably tidy it up a little in the future, but it’s not bad for a few hours of work, especially when I consider how long it is since I coded in Perl and php. Definitely a worthwhile exercise, it helps to keep the coding muscles in trim, and I’m teaching web development tools in a couple of weeks.
Join the FSFE
Are you interested in Free Software, then why not join the Free Software Foundation Europe?
I’ve been a member for a number of years now, and it keeps you in touch with the goings on in Free Software with a European emphasis.
If you want to join, then click the link here: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php?ref=richship
Oh, there is a little bit of a competition at the moment to refer new members, and the winner gets a cooking session with the Fellowship Coordinator, and that sounds kinda fun.
Interesting Disk Latency problem
iPhone iPhoto popup woes…
Whenever I plug in the iPhone, iPhoto used to open. This is a pain, and there’s a lot of complaints about it on the web. Most people advise turning off the application to open when a camera is connected in the Preferences of iPhoto, but I came across this in the cooments section, which made more sense…
“A simpler solution that I use is to create a new smart album that consists of all of the pictures from an iPhone. Just set Camera Model – is – Apple iPhone in the smart album. Then, in iTunes go to the Photos tab, and include the iPhone smart album. That way you can import all of your pics to iPhoto, and they will immediately pop back up on the iPhone, no fancy hacks involved.”
The original post is http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/02/25/restore-sanity-stop-iphoto-from-auto-launching-with-iphone
It works for me, and is a nice elegant solution.
IRC in aber
Especially for freshers…
There is a technology called Internet Relay Chat, which for many years was one of the few ways of interacting with your friends and colleagues around the world on the internet. Now we have lots of IM clients and protocols, but the cool kids all still use IRC.
There is a long and colourful history behind IRC at Aberystwyth, but to summarise (you can read the gory details in other places) bitternet is dead.
IRC is alive and well at irc.aberwiki.org.
Get yourself onto a Sun machine, start up a terminal window and type the following…
$irc
*** Connecting to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server
*** Unable to connect to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server: Unknown
+host
*** Use /SERVER to connect to a server
/server irc.aberwiki.org
… lots of joining stuff here…
/join #fresher
… stuff…
Hello I am a newbie
You may find yourself in a quiet empty channel, or it might have other folks around. If you feel really brave you might want to try joining #aber, but beware, here be dragons and *shudder* graduates of the department. You need to have a well developed sense of humour to survive for long on #aber, but it is worth the effort getting to know the regulars.
You may want at some point to graduate to another client with different features, but before using scripts, beware they may get you kicked or banned.
Also, get aquainted with http://www.aberwiki.org/ it is a fount of useful (and pretty useless) information.
Enjoy, and see you around
Richard
The Telegraph has an artice on how a band called The Get Out Clause used CCTV cameras to create their own video.
They then used the Freedom of Information Act to then get hold of the footage. What I find worrying is that only a quarter of the organisations who were asked for the footage deigned to provide it…
Kill Software Patents
http://www.killsoftwarepatents.com/
Pieter Hintjens new website on Software Patents launched during his talk at FOSDEM. Actually still being edited, live during the talk now.
FOSDEM geek-fest
Sitting here at FOSDEM, nursing a slight hangover from lots of Belgian beer last night at the Delerium Cafe in Brussels. they reputedly have over 2000 beers on the menu, but that’s still not enough for every one of the 4000+ geeks here to have a different one each!
It’s already been an interesting weekend, and it’s not lunchtime yet on Saturday.
The talk on How a Large-Scale Open Source Project Works is about to begin, so I’ll post this, and update later.
Arduino I2C Wire library
I’ve spent most of the evening trying to get I2C working between the Arduino and a couple of I2C devices (a LCD output and a relay board) from Robot Electronics. I finally had to look at the source code for the Wire library that implements the TwoWire serial protocol for the Arduino, and found that the library correctly bit shifts the address one bit towards the MSB, but that means that you have to do the reverse bit shift to quote the address on the bus when making the library calls. It all has to do with the fact that it’s a 7 bit addressing system.
I did finally manage to get it to work by dividing all the addreses by two, so that’ll make it easier when I actually get the 6-7.2V supply working for the servo board for controlling the turnouts on the layout.
Bedtime now.