Witterings – Page 5 – Steve's Blog

Look out Maine…. here we come!

Well not until some time on Saturday but we’re on the taxi-way.

The house is pretty much cleaned up and de-fluffed and the parents will be here later this afternoon to house and cat sit whilst we’re away.

Cameras are just about packed, and I’m sort of half done on my packing, which I suppose I should finish off so that I’ll be ready to drive us down to Heathrow on Friday night. We’ve got a good deal on a hotel room with parking, and its a lot less stressful driving down the night before than getting up at something like 4 am to get down to get the coach from the bus station over to Heathrow when you always end up clock watching and every single slow down turns into a minor panic about getting there on time.

We’re flying with BA from Terminal 5, so it will be interesting to see if its really as impressive as they claimed and as it looks on TV. We’re actually arriving in Boston at a sensible time and we’ll see if my electronic visa paperwork has actually made it through the system: they say you don’t need to keep a copy of the confirmation that its valid or take it with you, but we’re not risking it. Then its just a matter of hopping on the Concord bus service to Portland where we’ll be picked up and taken up to Kathy’s mums.

We’ve not got a lot planned: A weekend in Kennebunkport with friends, Thanksgiving with Kathy’s family, and hopefully just a lot of time relaxing, well relaxing for Kathy, I’m hoping that I just wont be sitting round the house all day, I do enough of that at home.

Of course, I nearly forgot : there’s a wedding to go to as well 😆 Rick and Jill are tying the knot the Thanksgiving weekend. Its been a far from easy year for both of them but things seem to be getting better and I’m sure everyone is looking forward to it and all Jill’s planning will all come together.

Weatherwise : well its Maine so everything from bright sunshine, through rain to frost and snow, so we’ve packed hats and gloves and a mixture of clothes, but I don’t think I’ll bother packing the sunscreen or my shorts… but now I’ve said that 😆

Right, that’s enough for now, I think I probably need to go and finish off the vacuuming!

Cats have feelings too

It feels odd being in the house without Kathy, I know I spend a lot of time during the day by myself normally but its in the evenings that I really miss her. It seems odd cooking just for me and the evenings drag on and when it comes to bed time it really does hit home.

But I’m not the only one missing her. Most of the cats, like Chester and Munchkin, don’t really seem to be bothered, and Chester only really gets bothered when we’ve got the suitcases out and mum and dad turn up because he knows something is going on. But Bandit really is missing her.

Bandit was a cat we didn’t plan on having. When we went to get Pixie, who is a black cat, Bandit was the only kitten left from the litter who hadn’t been adopted and he was the runt of the litter and so we took him home along with Pixie.

Here is a photo of him taken as soon as we got him home back in August 2006 (the fuzzy black in the background is Pixie) :

Bandit, along with Pixie, is a quite photogenic and when he was settling in here he just gave us a lot of photo opportunities:

Those being just two from a large collection of “cute” photos.

As Bandit grew (and boy did he grow) he really bonded with Kathy and sometimes he seems to behave more like a dog in that he followed Kathy round the house and he loved carrying things round in his mouth too. In the evenings after supper he often hopped up into Kathy’s lap to get some attention and he “patty paws” her. Bandit is really Kathy’s cat and he never grew out of the habits he showed as a kitten.

He’s now three and is a big solid cat as can be seen from this recent picture where he is relaxing on the doormats we brought back from the boat for cleaning (the ears in the foreground are Pixie’s)

He might be a big solid cat but he’s really missing Kathy and when I go to bed at night he hops up on top of me and miaows and demands lots of attention. If I ignore him then he headbutts my hand or my arm until I give him tickles. If I put my arms under the covers then he lies on me and stretches out his left paw and pats me on the chin, and if I ignore that then he resorts to licking the end of my nose. Then when he’s had enough tickles he goes to the bottom of the bed and goes to sleep down there. When Kathy is home he tends to sleep on her side of the bed.

Now I know that you’ll probably just say that its a cat and he doesn’t care where he gets his tickles from but its only in the early evening that his behaviour changes. During the day he’s doing just what he does most days, sleeping on our bed or out in the utility room on the boat mats. Its when it gets to about 6:30 which is when Kathy usually home that he starts prowling round the house more and he miaows a lot more too.

Both Kathy and I know what he’ll be like when she gets home, she wont be able to go anywhere in the house for days without him sticking to her like glue and any time she sits down he’ll be there in her lap demanding attention.

Getting to grips with Latitude

Warning: This post contains material of a technical and mathematical nature, if you start reading and feel dizzy or nauseous then stop reading immediately and go and lie down.

Google Latitude is an interesting little app which allows you to advertise your location. On the Android G1 the GoogleMaps application comes with the ability to update your Latitude location directly from the phone.

The usual way of displaying your Latitude location is using the iframe that Google provide which looks like this:

Part of the integration work that I’ve done to link the blogs here to my brother’s CanalPlan website (which is based very loosely on work I did for my ‘O’ Level computer studies way back in 1981/82 – and yes we did actually have microcomputers back then) involved using his list of locations to allow you to insert links easily into the blog post . I then extended that to allow you to easily embed Google maps of those locations into your posts. For example Wigan Pier :

So the next logical step was to link Latitude locations back to CanalPlan locations.

first of all I looked at scraping the contents of the iframe but its a complete mess, and apparently against the Google TOS, and I was struggling of finding a neat way of getting data from Latitude. Then I found that Google provide two “feeds” for third party applications (i.e. its acceptable under the TOS to take data). The support extracts in JSON and KMZ formats. I choose the JSON one (http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=-2983480754731033286&type=json) because I’m already parsing JSON data from my brother’s site so I could just re-use some of the code. So that’s brilliant, I now have my Latitude and Longitude from Google Latitude and I have a list of Canalplan places with latitudes and longitudes so in the words of Aleksandr Orlov, Simples, just match the two and the problem is solved.

Actually its far from simples because the locations inside CanalPlan are for very specific points and the chance of ever being on exactly the same co-ordinates as the CanalPlan location are pretty damned slim, especially given that a lot of the locations in CanalPlan are derived from other data sources. But it would be really nice to able to show the nearest Canalplan location to your current Latitude location wouldn’t it? Especially if you were on the boat and moving.

There is a solution: Geospatial functions, and I think I just head a couple of heads hitting tables.

I was lucky that I’m running the blogs on MySQL 5.x because it supports some basic Geospatial functions. These are functions that allow you to perform calculations on places or rather sets of places, in my case that’s the latitude and longitude of two places. I had to create a new column for my places table (called lat_lng_point) which is of a special datatype called point, and then I had to populate that column with data calculated from the latitude and longitude for each place using the MySQL GeomFromTextfunction which creates a very odd looking data item.

It might look very odd but its quite powerful because you can do some very interesting things with it. If you take two “points” created using GeomFromText you can find the “distance” between them using the GLength function.

So using the following bit of code:

$findit="GeomFromText('Point(".($lat) ." ".($lng).")')"; $sql="SELECT place_name,lat,`long`,GLength(LineStringFromWKB(LineString(AsBinary(lat_lng_point), AsBinary('".$findit."')))) AS distance FROM canalplan_codes ORDER BY distance ASC LIMIT 1"; $res = mysql_query($sql);

We can take the latitude ($lat) and longitude ($lng) from the JSON feed and find the nearest CanalPlan location that matches it.

At the time of writing this post the code (with a few extra bits to make it look nice) produces:
Finding places closest to My current Latitude location at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK (51.9031645,-2.0471622)

Avon Lock (51.9962,-2.15681) is 0.14382 from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK

Now no doubt you’re scratching your head trying to work out what that distance is. Well its a distance expressed in degrees which is pretty meaningless to people like us.

So that is how things stand now, and that’s why the little Latitude Widget on the right hand bar has a little bit of text underneath it saying what the nearest Canalplan location is.

What comes next?

Well possibly implementing a “real” distance. As I said the distance given is in degrees so we can either trust that its right or we can recalculate from scratch. The calculation for this is quite simple (!) :

gcdr=acos(sin(lat1)*sin(lat2)+cos(lat1)*cos(lat2)*cos(lon1-lon2))

This gives the “Great Circle Distance” between the two points (lat1/lon1, lat2/lon2) in degrees. You then convert this to nautical miles by multiplying it by 60, and then finally multiplying that by 1852 you get the distance in metres which I can then convert into one of several “nicer” formats. So it could say:

Avon Lock is a distance of 9 miles, 7¼ flg from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK

The other, much easier, thing to do is to create a new widget that replaces the Google Latitude iframe with a mini Googlemap with your nearest CanalPlan location on it (and saying where you actually are under it).

Well I think everyone’s brains are probably hurting now, so I think I’ll go for a walk.

Class Dismissed!

Summer is over… it’s official

September 1^st and Summer is now officially over.

How do I know? Do I have some special Almanac that tells me? Is it all based on folk lore? Is it because the schools went back today?

Nope, its none of those.

I know Summer is over because when I went to our local Sainsbury’s supermarket, to pick up a few things, all the “Summer” related products such as BBQs, charcoal, lighter fluid, disposable picnic plates etc., have all vanished. Gone as if they never existed. All gone and replaced with something else.

So what “Season” is it now? Is it Autumn, Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness ? No… I’m afraid not.

It’s “Back to School” Season. What ever that is. Not everyone has children of school age and this obsession shops have with things like this just depresses me.

Still it could be worse, it could be Christmas (I think that’s in a couple of weeks).

All hands on Deck

Last weekend Nick and I headed up to the boat to do some work on it. The deck boards on the boat are made out of plywood and they get wet and once water gets in on the cut edge they start to break down, and the starboard deck which is the one that we use a lot to get on and off the boat (and also gets more water running over it) had gone a little mushy and was starting to fall apart:

The last thing we wanted was for someone to jump onto the back deck at a lock and go through the deck into the engine well so we’d decided to replace it. The decks have been replaced twice since the boat was launched in 1986 and the last time they were done was back in 2000/2001. As you might have noticed the side panels aren’t square and cutting a piece of ply that big to that sort of shape isn’t easy, and its not cheap to buy either!

So we’d discussed alternatives and decided to go with timber planks which had been pressure treated against rot. There were several reasons for this:

Hopefully they should last longer than ply
They would be cheaper as ply, or no more expensive
Its easier to cut one plank to the odd taper than a sheet of ply and it if goes wrong then you’ve only wasted one plank.
A solid cut edge will be less permeable to water than the cut edge of the ply
Easier to repair, if a plank gets damaged we can simply replace it.

So we went to Wickes and spent about £60 on timber planks and beams and screws, bolts and brackets and early on Saturday morning we took a screwdriver, our trusted Dunlop tyre iron and our hands to the old deck and ripped it up exposing the top of the starboard fuel tank and the batteries:

The first thing we did was clean the piles of grit blast off the top of the tank – it gets everywhere and my recommendation to anyone is DONT ever grit blast your boat unless you want to be finding the stuff for years.

Once we’d done that, and had a coffee, we put wooden beam down the side of the drain channel and then built a timber frame up which would provide support for the planks. We had to do this slightly differently than the way we’d planned it in our heads because we couldn’t remember just how things were arranged under the deck, but the principle was the sane:

Then it was a matter of cutting each plank to length and fixing them in place with lots of screws and lots of frame sealant to stop water creeping through it:

As the sealant needed to cure and as it was now late afternoon we called it a day, got cleaned up, had something to eat and headed off to the pub.

Sunday morning we got up early and we took some floor paint which we diluted to make it easier to apply onto the raw wood and we painted the deck:

What these last two photos show is that the two middle deck boards really need replacing next. As these two are the ones that sit over the engine, and have to be lifted to check the oil and coolant and to access the weedhatch and sterngland, we’ll probably use ply wood for these two but we might put a cross strut on the bigger board to stop it flexing as much as it does. The other side deck is slightly more complicated because its got the fuel filler hose and the control panel on it. But now we pretty much know what to do we know that its another days work for the side panel (and we have all the timber we need for that) and other one for the middle panels

Internet on the Boat

Kathy and I spent the weekend on the boat on the moorings. We couldn’t go any where because the canal is closed due to a breach on one of the embankments and so they’ve closed all the locks to stop boats moving and hopefully to keep the water levels up until they can get some pumps in to pump water round the section they have had to drain.

My G1 is still away for repair and so I’ve been using Kathy’s old LG Viewty which has some very odd quirks to it and I’m glad its not my normal phone.

There is one good thing with the Viewty in that Linux just recognises it when I plug it in and I can use its 3G modem without installing any software (unlike Windows where you have to install the unbelievably crap LG communications suite.)

When I tried it at home it had crawled because we live in a 3G dead spot, but out on the boat moorings it really flew.

: 3G speedtest on the boat.

Yes, that really is a 665Kbps download speed. I think if I try it at home I get something like 86Kbits.

So I configured my laptop to share its internet connection and we actually were both surfing the net at the same time. The only down side is that the 3G stack seems to choke if you ask it to do more than a couple of things at once.

TasKiller

I’ve had an Adroid G1 on T-Mobile for quite a bit now and I quite like it, its got a lot of good features but one huge problem with it is the damned battery life. Like its terrible.

I found I can make it last longer by turning off 3G unless I know I’m in a good 3G signal area. My part of Cheltenham is lousy and sitting on the table at home it will often lose data connectivity completely.

But the other day I stumbled upon TasKiller which is a totally free app in the Google Market Place.

So what does it it do?

Well it kills apps, pure and simple. When you “quit” an application on the G1 you’re not really quitting, its just swapping things round. Now some of these apps don’t really cause problems but others, like the built in email app, seem to hog resources.

After installation you simply start it up and it shows “idle” apps in white and active apps in yellow. Short clicking on an app kills it, if you long click on it then you can either switch to it, or you can add it to an ignore list.

The ignore list is very clever because one of the features of TasKiller is you can kill all running apps except those that are on your ignore list.

So that’s a quick overview of what it does. It doesn’t sound like a lot but it really makes that battery life last longer.

If you’ve got a G1 then get this app, seriously.

Keeping things up to date

It’s a never ending task really.

Most of the core server components update automatically, as long as I remember to kick off an update process once in a while, its everything else that you need to keep a eye on.

The server has a WPMU installation on it which has to be upgraded, as do all its plugins, and then there is the WP install and its plugins, then there’s the photo galleries which use Coppermine which has to be updated.

Pubnight doesn’t escape either as the Wiki software has to be updated as well.

Even when I upgrade the server it can trip you up because upgrades on the Apache server / php packages usually break eAccelerator which then has to be recompiled.

Still its keeping me busy

Just another Statistic

That’s what I am, when it comes to being part of a large, and growing, number of people who are out of work. 6 months without work is not nice and the market is such that its now an employers market rather than an employees, so less jobs being advertised and more people chasing them. Gone are the days of “good” salaries for IT staff, now companies can offer thousands less than they would have been doing a year ago and people wont complain, they need the job.

So after 6 months the generous subsidies that you get for being unemployed stop and if you’ve got a partner working more than 20+ hours a week then you can forget means tested benefits. You can just forget it, it matters not how much they earn, if they do a decent number of hours you do not get a penny in help.

I find it rather annoying that if my wife had just been lazy and sat round and NOT looked for work then we’d be able to claim just about everything back off the state but because she did the right thing and got a job we don’t get a single penny. I heard of someone in the job centre who stated that he needed a £40K+ salary job to “make it worth him coming off benefits”. That just stinks really.

So I had my second 3 monthly review… you have to keep looking for a job or we’ll cut off your benefits. And what benefits would those be? Oh that would be the ones you don’t pay me any more because its more than 182 days since I first signed on as unemployed.

So why should I keep signing on?

Well it pays your NI contributions for a pension. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

The only other reason to do is to keep the figures up. Remember the unemployment figures ARE NOT how many people are unemployed. They are how many people are signing on. Stop signing on because you can’t be arsed walking for 70 minutes every 14 days to scribble your name on a bit of paper just for your NI contributions, and you are officially not “unemployed” even if you don’t have a job, and dear old Gordon and the rest of the motley crew of expense fiddling MPs can say “unemployment is falling” or at least “unemployment is not rising as fast as predicted”.

Maybe I should stand as an MP, I couldn’t be worse than the present bunch could I?

Knight Rider

You’re probably thinking that Steve’s gone bonkers but please bear with me on this one.

Sci-Fi are running the new series of Knight Rider. Now we all remember the original which starred The Hoff which aired back in the early 1980s and was, along with Air Wolf one of those rather silly programs which sort of pushed the technology a bit but not to silly extremes, talking cars with computers that could do clever stunts, supersonic helicopters and so on. You get the picture.

So along comes the new series (not the 1997 spin off) and the first episode sets all the background up, or starts to and there is KITT – the talking car.

He’s come on a lot in some ways, he can do more, he’s much more intelligent and of course can tap into spy satellites and zoom in on people driving at high speed in cars and point microphones at them so they can hear what is being said. But on the down side he’s still slightly whiny and condescending and more than a touch annoying.

But KITT can do so much more than that. He can change the colour of the paint job and change the tint level of the glass. So thats sort of bordering on what we can do nowadays so that’s all right.

Wait, wait, there’s more. He can Morph.. no he doesn’t turn into a small clay person a la Aardman Animations. No he can morph into other vehicles. He can morph into a different body shape and grow large air rams and side skirts which just seem to pop out of the vehicle when no-one is looking. But better than that, he can, at speed morph into a completely different vehicle. So he changes from a muscle car into a huge big 4×4 open top truck with huge great wheels, bigger wheels than he has normally, and all at 100+mph,

Just a tad silly really, and the computer generated animation looked naff.

Having said that the stunt at the end of the first episode when a big Jeep style vehicle rammed into the side of KITT at high speed was pretty impressive.

I’m still trying to work out how the tyres were smoking when he was spinning them in a room with no oxygen in it, mind you how did they get the engine to run in the first place.

I think I need to suspend my reality checks a little more in future.

As for what followed it… Joss Whedon’s “Doll House”, that’s seriously odd