Robots are cool

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.

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…

I’m checking out Mephisto just now, RSS/Atom readers might have just got some double posts - sorry! I’ve written some more mod_rewrite rules so most of the important old URLs should work fine and, to be honest, I don’t care about any of the more obscure ones.

Recently, I’ve hardly had any time to write here and I hate switching blog software - so why have I done it yet again? Mostly to abandon the downright abysmal Typo and Mephisto offered a simple migration process away from that. So far so good, but we’re a whole two hours in…

We’re also (thankfully!) at least considering using Rails for some projects at work and every little helps when getting back in the swing of things.

Fast forward is a totally wicked feature in Opera which allows you to use the forward button/gesture/whatever to navigate to the next page in a sequence. Something like the next lot of search results or the next page in a tutorial. You can also use the space bar to page down and it will automatically forward you to the next page when it hits the bottom. Pretty cool.

A file called fastforward.ini provides the config for this (in Gentoo it is in /opt/opera/share/opera/ini/). In order to make fast forward work properly with PHPBB based forums (I want fast forward to go the next page in the thread, not the next thread), I brought the weighting of the next <link> to below 100. This seems to fly in the face of the default setup which ranks it with the highest score. While this is understandable since the link element is for navigation, I’m not that convinced by some of the poor uses of the link element I’ve seen.

I was using xmodmap to re-map the caps lock. I’m not sure why – a better way, which means it also works on the console, is to alter the keymap file. For me (using Gentoo, UK keymap) this was as simple as:

1. cd /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty
2. gunzip uk.map.gz
3. vim uk.map (change “Caps_Lock” to “Escape”)
4. gzip uk.map
5. loadkeys uk.map.gz

I upgraded my phone yesterday. Although I was due for an upgrade a month ago, it’s taken this long to muster the courage and enthusiam to go into the phone shop. To be honest, if my old phone battery could survive being on for a couple of days I wouldn’t have bothered, but it was becoming frustrating.

It was all going too well – I had decided what phone I wanted and I was totally happy with my current contract. No problem. Then I was told the phone I was after was only free if I was a new customer. Seems like Orange (or any of the others, I’m assured) don’t value their existing customers as much as new ones (although I ended up sticking with Orange, so maybe they’re onto something). The pain began.

The sales drone explained how keeping my old tariff was tantamount to genocide and proceeded to rattle off deal after deal – minutes, texts, magic numbers, traffic TV (WTF?), free photography (WTF?), this for 2 months, that for 6 months, something else for 12 months. Urgh – it was all too much to take so I bailed out to absorb all of this nastyness and sort out what to do.

I went back an hour later with a clear head and told the guy exactly what I was after – I wanted to sign up for the maximum 24 months. “Excellent, sir! Which part of the offer made you choose that?” he asked, surprised. “None of it.” was my honest reply. “I hate this experience. It’s horrible. I’ve spent far too long trying to work out the best way to give you my money and I realised that if I can delay it for another year I’ll be doing well.”.

He was a little stunned and apologetic, but it wasn’t his fault – he just works there. The entire industry stinks and I hate every second I spend dealing with any of it. I’m sure I’m not the only one. I remain convinced that there is a market for a phone company that is staightforward, honest and doesn’t make me feel like I’m getting marketed something for the sole benefit of making the salesperson some commission. That said, I wouldn’t take on the task.

Wicked – I won’t be dealing with this crap again until mid-2008.

Right, enough! Running in Snowdonia recently was the final straw – my current camera has been great but it’s pretty old now, which means that it’s bulky and poor quality by modern standards. I’ve had enough of not having a camera with me when I should, so I ordered a new one. Woohoo!

Waiting for things you’ve ordered sucks.

Thanks to Jonathan for pointing this out, it may save someone some frustrating hours.

When setting up port forwarding (to route traffic on a certain port from the public internet to a specified machine on your LAN), the port forwarding will not work if you try to access your public IP from within your LAN. I haven’t found a good explanation of why this is, only that the router is unable to loop the request back to the local machine. Actually, that’s not entirely true – some routers do loopback and allow the forwarding to work, but from what I understand, most do not.

Who can guess what I spent ages trying to get working over the weekend? To be fair, I was getting confused because SSHing from a shared webhost into my local machine would work, yet trying to access any Apache served pages on my machine wouldn’t work and would on occasion crash the router. This definitely counts as one of those ‘pokey’ problems.

Excuse the photo – it was sunny and Stuart and I had been drinking wine! The other day my iPod crashed quite entertainingly. I used a linux program that I hadn’t used before to add and remove some songs and it all seemed to work fine. Then I plugged it into Jonathan’s Mac to charge it up, but after a few hours iTunes popped up and told us that it had detected a new iPod. All a bit strange and we also noticed that the iPod was getting very toasty, so we unmounted it and pulled the plug. I had a quick look to make sure everything was still intact (you know, just in case), but it wasn’t! I couldn’t see any music and resetting the device didn’t help. The ‘About’ screen told me there was only 1.2gig free and (usefully) told me that the iPod had renamed itself from “Mark’s iPod” to “Trashe~1”, which I take to mean “Trashed”. I don’t know what caused this – the linux program, or plugging it into the Mac (I’d be surprised, even though it is FAT formatted) but I guess there may be a case for either. Maybe Apple have a sense of humour if nothing else.

Apple stuff really is as good as everyone says, it even knows when it’s screwed. </sarcasm> ;)

Like many, I’ve been checking out the Ruby on Rails framework. Jonathan at work had reckoned that it was worth investigating to see how good it is for quickly deploying content managed web apps. For the last couple of weeks I have been developing a project management thing for us to use internally in Rails and I’m starting to get a feel for how things are pieced together. It’s really quite nice and getting something quick and simple up is Formula 1 fast. Once things become more complicated the development slows to a more sedate Subaru Impreza speed. Still quick. I know that it’s something that could be done in other languages, as some blog posts have pointed out, but that is missing the point – it hasn’t been done before, at least not as nicely as this. I’m certainly no expert on develpment frameworks, but the array of built in functions and facilities is impressive, and growing. This is the nicest thing about Rails – it allows you to get on with programming the site, rather than buggering about setting stuff up and performing database queries. And what a joy programming it is, largely thanks to Ruby.

Ruby is a pleasure to use and, in many ways, I’ve taken to it more than Rails. After a couple of WTF? hours at the start, things started to make sense. Then I got hold of The Pickaxe and things really started making sense. The more I poked and prodded Ruby, the more I liked it. Small and concise blocks of code started doing some pretty smart stuff. I ported a wee PHP-GTK program that I have written over to Ruby and it was around 30% smaller – not bad for programming a new language, day 1 (this is a testament to Ruby, not my talent). Ruby is a beautiful object-oriented language – it’s the best thing since sliced linux.

Recently at work I have had to develop some sites remotely, via FTP – a nasty practice that I don’t enjoy. It hasn’t been made easier by the fact that I’ve been unable to find any decent FTP program for KDE/linux (a minor untruth – Kasablanca is nearly OK). So I have decided to write my own, using Ruby and Korundum. I’ll write more about this little project later, but I will say that it’s a complete pleasure to write an application after writing websites. No browsers, no CS-fucking-S, ahh….

Another KDE thing that is on the horizon (but, for some reason, hasn’t had as much coverage as I would have expected) is the forthcoming Mozilla/Gecko Kpart. This should give the ability to swap between using KHTML and gecko for rendering at the touch of a button in Konqueror (or any other Kpart aware browsers) and should be a great feature for web developers, or anyone who likes one browser, but prefers the rendering in another etc… Very cool.

I’ve been running Gentoo and KDE 3.4 on my new laptop for a week or two now and am super-impressed. Since I installed KDE 3.4 RC1 onto my new laptop, I assumed that the whole desktop was looking so nice just because of the wicked screens that Sony put in their computers, but having read a few reports from others that it generally looks way nicer than before shows that KDE has made big improvements too. There’s nothing really in particular that you can pick out, but the whole thing just feels right, if that makes any sense. I liked 3.3, but this is a major improvement for me. It’s fast too, although how much of that is down to my new processor if hard to say.

I tried Kmail in 3.3 but found it horrifically unstable when using IMAP. 3.4 also suffered from this when I used normal IMAP, although I’m happy report that the “disconnected IMAP” settings are at least fifty times more stable (at least for me). Kmail is the best e-mail program I’ve ever used – very cool. I’ve never used Kontact before, but it’s pretty nice. Last year Akregator was in beta when I used it and, to be honest, it’s not all that much better now. It’s got potential though, there’re just a few little things that are holding it back a bit. Konqueror is much faster on this machine for me (still doesn’t touch Opera for speed). I use it as my main browser now, mainly because of the way everything interacts so damn well. This is the clincher for a lot of KDE programs IMO and it makes the whole KDE thing so good. Kate, Kopete are both pretty damn cool programs too.

Plastik is in the default themes now, yippee. Although they removed the best feature of Plastik – being able to close a window with your mouse in the very top right of the screen – WHY?

I’ve finally got my new Sony S3XP laptop to the stage where I can use it as my main machine. Although it arrived on Tuesday, it’s taken this long just to get the main components working the way they should under linux. What a hassle – nothing has been easy! Somewhere in there I had a day of mixed emotions:

In the morning I finally resigned myself to the fact that, without the correct driver, my Nvidia graphics card wasn’t going to display widescreen and I would need to wait quite a while until the driver was released. Not cool, I got the laptop for the screen. So I decide to bail and go kitesurfing with Ross because it’s north-westerly and there’s swell. I was obviously far too excited because as we collected our kites from the shop I realised that I’ve forgotten loads of stuff, including my harness. Bugger. Once we’re back at the flat, I suddenly realise that I’ve lost my wallet. After a bit of a think, it dawns on me that I drove away from my flat (the first time) with it on the roof. Cock, cock, cock. I’m pissed off – not just because my wallet is missing, but because this isn’t the first time I’ve driven away with stuff on the roof. We bugger about looking for it for a while, but have to write it off and head back to the shop to cancel my cards (where Stuart wasn’t making the situation much more pleasant by taking the piss – completely fair play, really). Well annoyed, we head to the beach.

Once we’re there, it’s looking great. Small, but nice surf and cross shore wind. Once we launch though, it’s not so good. I’m on a little inflatable and Ross is on a bigger foil. I spend the first five minutes cursing myself for putting up too small a kite, and then spend the next ten minutes watching Ross getting teabagged all over the place as a big squall comes in. Just as well I put up a small kite. Once the squall has passed the wind doesn’t improve and I give serious thought to giving up kitesurfing forever (but that could fill a whole other post). We pack it up and head home, no less pissed off. I’ve had a shite day.

But then things change. I go the police station in Edinburgh, just in case – they’ve got my wallet! I check my email as soon as I get in and have two emails from another Nidia 6200 owner who tells me that the drivers for our cards were released a few hours ago. Woohoo! All of a sudden I’m totally hyper and end up finding it quite a struggle to get to sleep. Although I’m sure it hasn’t come across in this lame prose, it really was a wild day of peaks and troughs. Ross – thanks for putting up with my nonsense :)

I’ve been using linux for a while now and think it’s really good. I’ve been using SuSE 9.2 on my laptop and Mike has kindly let me borrow his little iBook for a while to use Gentoo as well – thanks mate! Anyway, here are five programs that I think kick ass in linux.

1. Screen – SSH is great, but using Screen via SSH is way better than great. Really useful for starting remote downloads, compilations or whatever.
2. Portage – Gentoo package manager. Makes installing, updating and removing programs total piss. Wicked. Hammered home how good it is when I tried to install PHP-GTK on Gentoo and a SuSE back to back recently. I din’t bother finishing the SuSE install…
3. MPlayer – easily the best movie player I’ve found for Linux.
4. Kopete – nice little instant messenger program for KDE.
5. Dia – cool program for drawing diagrams.

Thunderbird is a really nice mail, news and RSS client, despite being occasionally slow, but it doesn’t seem right in that list. I’m also sure there is a text editor out there that should be in my top five, but I haven’t found it yet.

I’m not a tattoo person. Not at all, not even a teeny little bit. This one though, that I spotted on BoingBoing is definitely one of the best ones I’ve seen. Geeky as all hell, but undeniably cool.

Like most boys, I played a few computer games when I was younger. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was, without doubt, the best game ever on the Gameboy. I hadn’t played a computer game for a few years when I broke my back, but got hold of my old Gameboy and Zelda while I was lying about in hospital. The game was still brilliant.

A quick search told me that a new Zelda, as well as two of the older NES Zelda games (which look crap), was released for the GameBoy Advance last year. Which is just about enough to make me buy a GameBoy Advance. Just about, but not quite.

I’ve been running SuSE 9.2 Professional as the sole operating system on my laptop for more than a month now. I had intended to run both Windows XP pro and SuSE, but decided against it (OK, OK, I made an arse of the partitioning!). I have long realised that Linux has the potential to be a really good desktop operating system for me, but the last time I had tried it out was with Mandrake and SuSE 8.0ish – both of which were a total nightmare to configure for my hardware, and that was with a desktop machine. Mr Redpath’s own struggles with a laptop and Mandrake at the same sort of time had also frightened me enough! Recently, however, I had the chance to have a quick play with SuSE 9.1 as well as get shown a few cool things by Alex (who has forgotten more than I know about Linux!) which really convinced me to try it out again.

I’ll be making some comparisons with Windows XP, becuase that’s what I had been using before Linux. However, unlike many people who switch to Linux from Windows, I didn’t do it out of some strange and intense hatred of Windows. In fact, I like XP Pro very much, I’ve just found that I’m liking Linux more.

KDE

Stuff

Konqueror

I have been a long time Opera fan and, on Windows, used it for browsing, mail and RSS feeds. My natural instinct was to use Opera again in KDE, and I did, but increasingly I found myself using Konqueror more and more. Not because I preferred browsing with it (I still prefer Opera), but just because of the the way it integrates with the other things in KDE. Konqueror is everything that the Windows Explorer tries to be, only implemented much better. File and network browsing, the web, audio CDs, bluetooth and lots more are all handled, generally very well, by Konqueror and the rendering engine is also very good.

KMail

Cool feature – if you talk about an attachment, but don’t have naything attached, it will alert you before you send the message!