Robots are cool

Last week was a varied one. Last weekend (Sat 14th), I headed up to the Angus Glens for my first proper mountain bike ride this year. I've been plauged this spring by some niggly injuries (hip and knee) that have been so frustrating and have stopped me running and cycling. Last Saturday was great though - I squeezed in 31km in the southern Cairngorms (Glen Doll to Loch Muick, up to Dubh Loch and back over Capel Mounth) with plenty of physical singletrack and some pushing thrown in. That was a little more like it and fired me up for some solid riding for the rest of the season.

Then on the 19th Sarah and I got the keys to our excellent new flat. It's right in the middle of town and we love it to bits - woohoo! Dealing with the bank and all the associated crap that goes with buying a house was rubbish, but the end result was worth it. The next day I went to the doctors to ask about the rash that had appeared on my armpit and chest during the week and was diagnosed with shingles. Fuck. It didn't stop me moving our stuff in the next day (massive thanks to all our friends who helped out - you made life much easier), but that evening I suddenly felt pretty crap. It was really sore, hot, itchy and stingy and I felt wasted. Yuck!

A couple of days on and the pain has subsided a fair bit - I'm even sleeping pretty well. My rashes are blistering and it's as itchy as it is sore now, but the worst part is the weakness - I'm shattered all the time! From what I've read been reading, this can last for quite a while and is what worries me the most. Bleh - surely after this I can get mountain biking done?

I'm pleased to say that I've just released version 0.1 of Nibbles, an alternative RSS and Atom feed reader for Maemo. A big thanks to the people who were kind enough to help out with the pre-release testing, you've been (and hopefully continue to be!) a great help.

Nibbles is quite stable, can parse a wide variety of feeds and is pretty bandwidth efficient. Nibbles is finger-friendly and does aim to be a good mobile feed reader, but things like downloading of full offline articles didn't make it into this initial release (I have some working code for that, but it's not working enough!). New users might want to know that the zoom in/out hardware buttons hide and show the feed and article lists.

Of course, since this is a first release, things aren't perfect. The biggest problem for me that I think people should be aware of is that Nibbles uses too much battery power. This is detailed in bug #2342 and is really a problem with ruby-gtk2 rather than Nibbles. As I said, with some luck, the next ruby-gtk2 release will fix this.

You can install Nibbles from the project page.

Tom Swindell (AKA alterego) created the Maemo bindings for Ruby and they're great. I'm writing a couple of programs with them, including Nibbles, my feed reader. Unfortunately, Tom seems to have vanished and I've not been able to find the source code for the bindings anywhere. Does anyone have it? I'd really like a copy.

In other news, I hear that a new release of ruby-gtk2 is near. This is excellent as it will hopefully fix the battery life problem with the current bindings where Ruby/GTK programs (and, therefore, Ruby/Maemo programs) wake up 100 times a second regardless of what they're doing. Happy days.

I don't really get on with the supplied RSS reader on my N800. It doesn't work like I expect and it lacks mobile features like offline reading that I'd like. So, I'm writing a feed reader for Maemo called Nibbles. It's still very early stages, but there's enough for a development release now, I think. Below is a screenshot of the current preview version, 0.0.4:

It seems to cope nicely with a wide variety of RSS and Atom feeds, despite my proof-of-concept code somehow making it into the app ;).

Currently it's quite bare of features and can be considered the simplest app that could work (for example, the feeds update at a fixed 30 mins). It will likely stay that way until I get a few bugs worked out and 0.1, the first 'stable' version, released. After that, I'll work on some more interesting new features. I'm still very open to suggestions though and all feedback is welcome, so please don't be shy!

If you'd like to play along and help the development of a better feed reader for your internet tablet, use the .install file. Please report issues to the Maemo Garage tracker.

You can make Nibbles the default feed reader by editing /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. You need to set hildon-news_reader=nibbles.install. This will allow you to tap on the feed icon in a browser window and have the feed added to Nibbles.

I've only specified that the app will work in OS2008, but I'm pretty sure it'll work in OS2007 too. Since I only have an OS2008 machine, I can't test it easily. If anyone is still using OS2007 and would like to help, please do get in touch.

I'm writing an application (more on that sometime soon) using the very nice Ruby bindings for Maemo. I've got some dependencies that are packaged as RubyGems that I wanted to be managed through the Application Manager, so I created some .debs for them. Here is their temporary home The rake, hpricot, feed-normalizer, simple-rss, atom and htmlentities gems are available in my repository. I didn't create the rubygems and librubygems packages themselves - I was sent them, but couldn't find them hosted elsewhere.

It took me a little while to suss out how to create the .debs so I've included the steps here in case anyone finds themselves in the same boat. This works for native Ruby gems and compiled C extensions.

1. Install the gem inside Scratchbox. Irritatingly, "gem install example" doesn't always want to do very much, so you may need to dowload the gem file and "gem install example-0.1.gem".
2. Make a new directory with the rubygems-<package>-<version> syntax (the rubygems- prefix seemed to make sense to me): mkdir rubygems-example-0.1
3. cd rubygems-example-0.1/ ; mkdir gems specifications bin
4. cp -r /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/example-0.1/ gems
5. cp /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications/example-0.1.gemspec specifications/
6. cp /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/example bin/ (if there are any bins)
7. Create a Makefile with this content (you will need to replace the spaces at the start of the lines with tabs):

   all:
   clean:
   install:
           mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/
           mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/     <------ REMOVE THIS LINE IF THERE ARE NO BINS
           mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications/
           cp -r gems/* $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/
           cp bin/* $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/     <------ REMOVE THIS LINE IF THERE ARE NO BINS
           cp specifications/* $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications/ 
   

8. dh_make -e you@example.com then choose the type of package.
9. Edit debian/control to suit. Make sure the section is something like user/Utilities, not just Utilities if you want the package to show in the Application Manager.
10. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
11. The parent directory should now contain rubygems-example_0.1-1_armel.deb

As a final note, /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/ may not be in $PATH, so you'll need to deal with that if you have files in bin/.

Just released rubylibcrack as a gem (0.1.1). I developed this teeny-weeny binding to the *nix password strength checking library cracklib at my work. Big props to my work, they totally get open source and the way things should be done.

The gem has only been tested on Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo and Ubuntu (all 64bit, I think), but I'd love to hear how it fares on other platforms. Here's a Gentoo ebuild for the package.

I'm using Mercurial to track changes in my latest project, a GTK mapping application. I couldn't find a build for my N800, so I made one myself. I'll host a .deb until I get around to putting it on the garage or creating a repository.

Edit: I've started a garage project.

To install python2.5-runtime I needed to add repository.maemo.org to the application catalogue to satisfy some dependencies. Tested with OS2008 beta on an N800 only.

So I’m writing this in some rare glorious sunshine in the gardens of the Gleneagles hotel while Sarah is inside getting a Swedish massage. Her birthday treat has gone down rather well. But, of course, how could it not? The whole experience has been as luxurious as you’d expect.

Between playing petanque and croquet, swimming, lounging around in the hot tubs, eating, walking around the grounds and enjoying the lovely room, it has been an awesome couple of days. The breakfast menu said the buffet was an experience in its self and it was right - we spent and hour and a half gorging ourselves. It lived up to the standard set by the lamb and wild salmon we ate last night. The whole thing is a far cry from the climbing trips I’m used to - eating bread and cheese and sleeping under the trolleys outside Morrison’s in Fort William - and I’ve enjoyed it just as much!

Everything is excellent here (except the enormous price of a round of drinks) - from the bedroom to the flower beds to the staff going a hundred times out of their way to be nice to you and help you out. It’s nice to see how the other half live and it’s a great treat (although I wouldn’t want to pay full whack!).

I’m off to play hacky sack now to a great backdrop. Then we’re going for a drive about to eat pastries and perhaps look at the Fortingall Yew. Magic.

Madness - our managed offices have just removed the toaster from the kitchen because it was deemed to be a fire hazard. Yes, just a normal toaster. The insanity has reached a new level. Euan said it nicely: “A toaster in a kitchen, I’ve never heard of such a thing!”.

As you might have guessed, I’ve just tried to toast something.

I love climbing hills on a mountain bike. It ranks as highly as awesome twisty singletrack in Spain. I especially enjoy climbs that feel right at my limit. It’s all pretty obvious, but just so that there are no disputes, here are my rules for going up hills:

• If you dab (put a foot down), you’ve failed
• If you grab the scenery, you’ve failed
• If you trackstand, you’ve failed - I really mean trackstands to make up for not enough fitness; brief pauses on steep and technical hills aren’t always trackstands!

In case anyone has been wondering "What's up with the ScottishClimbs server recently?", here's a wee explanation (I guess I'm saying, bear with us!):

Yesterday was interesting. I was up and about at 04:30 to catch a flight to London for a conference related to my work. With ten minutes until my taxi was due, I logged into the server to check my mail. BOOM - something was up! Funky "read-only filesystem" errors and more strange behavior all over the place - can't do anything. Check the logs, unmount the drive, remount it but still no joy. Five minutes to taxi. Reboot into maintenance mode and start running fsck. Answer "y", "y", y"... - should've used the "-y" option! Taxi rings, "y", "y", "y"; shit, he's going to leave! "y", "y"... done! Type "reboot"and run out the door. Phew!

Fortunately, it was all good (at least, as far as I'm aware - I wasn't online yesterday) - I'm pretty sure we didn't lose mail (the most important thing, IMO) and I'm assuming SC was OK too. I do think that this filesystem corruption ties into a deeper problem we have though.

You may notice that the server is slow to respond to things sometimes. The lucky devils with @sc mail accounts might have noticed similar slowdowns too. This is usually because the app that runs whatever you're trying to do is busy hauling itself out of swap space. I've spent the last few weeks tweaking the server in various ways - this is part of why things have been up and down recently. The sys admin at work and I have been trying to work out ways to optimise the system, but we're starting to run out of ideas. The fact of the matter is, the server needs more RAM. Put simply, 256Mb isn't cutting it. I'm going to continue to try to find ways to trim the RAM usage and stabilise the system (it's already a lot better than it was), partly becuase I'm really enjoying learning about this stuff but also because we don't want to spend any money we don't have to. I suppose ultimately though, we might need to just upgrade our service.

Note: yes, I realise RAM is very cheap. However, since we use a virtual machine we can't simply upgrade the RAM and need to upgrade our whole service proportionally. In this case it's pretty much doubling our costs which is why we're trying some other stuff first.

I got out and about on the hills at the weekend. Buachaille Etive Mòr is really a ridge of four tops and Buachaille Etive Beag, the smaller twin, is a couple of tops. They are probably normally tackled as two day walks, but they aren’t too savage and fit quite nicely together.

Since this was one of my first days out this year I was keen to make sure I felt strong, so I took it pretty easy up the tourist path. A few weeks ago I felt awful on an abortive Arrochar run and I wasn’t keen for that again. It’s pretty straightforward, if rocky, climbing which pops you out just below the top of Stob Dearg. Feeling fit, I cruised along the tops on the ridge (more likely because there’s hardly any ascent…) and back again to the Allt Coire Altruim for dropping down to the Lairig Gartain.

From here, I headed up on some wetter ground to get the Wee Buachaille’s tops. My lazy winter legs were feeling tired, but some food sorted that out and I was soon enjoying the awesome views to the north, taking in the Ben, the Grey Corries and the Mamores which are all part of a big day out I’m wanting to do later this year: Tranter’s Round. More on that later, but for now - see the note.

After absorbing the views for a while (and a few Penguin bars), I had a nice cruise back down to the Lairig and then more gently back to the car, all the while feeling like a fit mountain machine. I can’t kid myself, this was a pretty easy paced and gentle run, but that was point after the dismal attempt in Arrochar and things just felt right. In fact, I was totally psyched all the way home, marred only by getting yet more tick bites - I hate those little bastards.

Note: I’ve shelved plans to run Ramsay’s Round this year. I could say that since I’ve started going out with my totally snazzy new girlfriend, I haven’t been out as much, and I guess that is true, but to be honest I think realism has taken hold. Or is this all just a handy excuse to be soft?

I walked into a pub toilet at the weekend to overhear some guy doing a pee saying this to another punter:

Do you get a lot of people from Papua New Guinea here?

[pretending to be from PNG]: We eat each other, but we're generally small.

I'm cool with that man - I'm not from Edinburgh, I'm not from Glasgow. I'm from Crieff; small town, big people.

Then he walked out.

We've finally migrated the ScottishClimbs forums. We had been running PhpBB2.x for five and a half years and been getting increasingly frustrated with it for the last three! We've moved to Simple Machines and so far (somewhere around a whopping 48 hours) we're really impressed. Unfortunately, permalinks to the old forums have been broken by this change. Ah well, I have at least tried to keep old links working for SC over the years (sometimes more enthusiatically than others).

We have also migrated all of the written content to the wiki, which is better for everyone. Au revior SC2, you have served us very well. The NRDB and media sections haven't changed at the moment.

Since my work were nice and gave me a free afternoon off I've just spent a very pleasurable few hours browsing around some of the articles on the wiki and posts on the forums. I doubt our enthusiasm will ever be as strong as it once was, but this afternoon has reminded me of one thing: ScottishClimbs is pretty damn cool and definitely worth everything we've invested in it.

For me, the most consistently funny posts are from Pure Ned Brilliant. Here are some particularly choice parts for me:

From:

Don't do it. Keep your work and your re creation separate.

Al is absolutely right. After much deliberation, I started a job shagging supermodels at a thousand quid a day, and it put me right off gloriously abandoned heterosexual lovemaking. So much so, that apparently I am now one of Al's increasingly recurring homosexual fantasies.

From:

Imagine if you have been working a route for two years, and are just about to go for the lead when a passing orang utan cruises up it and then tries to shag the camera man.

From:

I struggle to see how you can find 'utter bollocks' in that statement.

A huge huge congratulations to pete Johnston for he has been moved from squad to team status on the Junior British Climbing team Awesome job pete well done mate keep up the good work

David, I think you're right, it may well be impossible. The best I can do is 'utter bollok'.

I'll have a consonant please, Norrie.

Class.

Tonight I finally got round to adding my photos to the Flickr mapping feature. I guess I got inspired by taking and uploading my first photo using Zonetags with my phone (Nokia 6680) and my Holux bluetooth GPS receiver.

Zonetags

Zonetags is a trivially easy-to-use beta-ish application for Series 60 Nokia smartphones that acts as a wrapper for the standard camera software. It can record the cell id (I think it uses the last known value if you’re not in reception) and attach it to each photo you take. You can also connect an external GPS device to add much more accurate longitude and latitude information to the photo. Once you have taken a photo you’re asked if you want to upload it to Flickr. If you do, Zonetags can optionally add action tags to do things like rotate your photos as well as suggestting extra tags based on your location and the tags that other people have given to nearby photos.

For example, when I uploaded a photo coming down from Snowdown at the weekend, “Caernarfon” and “United Kingdom” tags were added along with the geotagging and celltagging ones. Over time, this could get really smart.

Unfortunately, my camera can’t use my bluetooth GPS. I think as a workaround way of geotagging those photos, I might also take one with my phone and upload it with private permissions via Zonetags (to get the geotags into Flickr) and just replace the photo with the better camera shot when I get back to a computer. We’ll need to wait and see if that is too much of a pain in the arse to be practical when out in the hills though.

Flickr map

I’ve wanted something like this for a while now - being able to browse photos by location is nifty stuff. It’s super easy to get photos on the map (if you’re using a supported browser, of course…), but I find it is limited by the poor quality of the maps, at least for most of Scotland. Of course, Flickr can’t help this and it will improve given time, but it would all be so much cooler if the maps I use most were worth looking at! There are 3rd party apps that are more accurate or you can hand geotag the photos with the lat/longs yourself and import them instead, but I haven’t bothered looking at any of those options yet since my priority was to just get them all geotagged.

In some crazy alternate reality where I actually have some spare time, I will use the Flickr API in my desktop mapping software to give the same functionality in a faster and much more detailed environment. That’s after re-writing it so that it’s not just a prototype, adding in GPS tracklogging and a million other neat things… sigh.

The good

• Flickr map is very cool, I like it
• Zonetags is very cool, I like it

The bad

• Yahoo! Maps isn’t as good as Google Maps
• Yahoo! Maps is vastly inferior to Google Maps
• Scotland has pish quality maps - ces’t la vie
• Zonetags doesn’t allow you to change your mind and upload a photo you previously took with it - pretty poor
• My phone/bluetooth/software combination only allows one phone -> bluetooth connection at a time

The ugly

• The admin map interface doesn’t work in Opera - boo

From that list it looks like I’m not too positive about this stuff, but that couldn’t be further from the truth - it’s excellent and is going to keep getting better.

Update (26/10/2006)

I forgot to mention that I was a little annoyed that Flickr didn’t add geotag tags to my photos when I added them to the map. Last night I found this excellent bookmarklet which embeds Google Maps into Flickr, giving you much more accuracy. It totally rocks. Or, it will totally rock if it starts to work in Opera. For now it just rocks. It adds the geotags as well as giving your photos a link to Google Maps (you can see the singletrack!). There is a little discrepancy between Yahoo! and Google Maps (about 100-200m), but it is definitely preferable for me to use Google Maps for the forseeable future. Now I need to go back through my photos again…