Particularly clever are The Mathematics Love Song which attempts to explain love using group theory (which I vaguely remember from my degree)

Amazing Maths trick that proves 1=2 is one I have seen many times before
(in case you wondered, the proof fails because it is invalid to divide by 0 [strictly speaking you get an undefined result], so the proof must have an initial restriciton of a != b at the beginning to be valid (and therefore does not prove 1=2))

James Blunt also sings his Triangle song for Sesame Street, which is rather odd to listen to.

Mathematical Pie is rather interesting too (yes, it is a mathematical cover of American Pie)

Of course you shouldn’t miss the Abbott and Costello maths which is phoenomenal

I can input waypoints and use it to direct me where to go and it can be set to tell you where you are in BNG (British National Grid, i.e. Ordnance Survey map coordinates) so working with a map becomes almost trivial. One thing I found I needed was a way of creating a GPX file to upload to the GPS which is formed from these BNG coordinates. Some of the walking books I have give BNG waypoints but you can’t just upload that data into the GPS (unless someone knows better? I never got it to work).

So I set out writing a script to do this – BNG_to_gpx_route allows you to enter a list of BNG waypoints and it either outputs the GPX file (to file or stdout) or even writes direct to your GPS if you have gpsbabel installed!

I may well write a few more scripts to help me with my gps as I come across the need (though if you have a need maybe I will too, so let me know if you have a thought for a useful util for your gps).

Another good way to plan a route is with Marengo GPS Route Planner, which allows you to draw a path with a google-maps interface, and then simply download a GPX file which can again be uploaded to your GPS with gpsbabel

My GPS also records where you have walked which is known as a track. This can be used for finding your way back if the walk was difficult, or giving to someone else to follow your walk. One other use is for geotagging your photos, which means you run a script against your photos to add to the “meta-data” which describes details of your photos, and with the track file from your gps it adds the coordinates to the file, so when you upload them to flickr or zoomr they know where the photo was taken!

Like many others, I wondered if I would have to write this myself but it turns out there is a really good script called gpsPhoto (thanks to bluemonki for pointing it out) which already does this!

It is pretty simple, you just need to give it the path to a gps file, or directory of files, and a list of photos or a directory of photos, along with a time offset (in case your gps time and camera are different (i.e. a few minutes out, or even an hour out for daylight savings time etc)) and it will add the gps coordinates to your photos. Apparently it even works on Canon raw files, so hopefully I could just tag photos as I get them from the camera and then any time I create a new jpg from them they should automatically have the gps data in them!

Trip recored in EveryTrail, view full trip

Following Walk #22 from Hampshire and The New Forest Walks (Pathfinder Guides) we had a nice time, though the recent wet weather meant the walk involved lots of avoiding puddles (some near lake proportions!). While I mention the book, I should say that it is a rather nice walking book as it not only has waypoint data that can be entered into a gps (though not really complete enough to just follow the gps), it also has excerpts of Ordnance Survey maps which are much better than the sketches some books use. The route description is also clear and easy to follow.

At the end of the walk we saw a herd of close to 30 deer, though the photos I attempted to take were really rubbish as they were quite a distance away and it was an overcast day so not much light to take photos in (not to mention lots of trees in the way)

Then on the 2nd Jan we decided to head out for another walk in the New Forest, this time near Ashurst (walk #6 from the same book if you are curious, but we deviated a little)

Trip recored in EveryTrail, view full trip

This walk would probably have been just as muddy, however as we had a cold night the ground was mostly frozen and covered with lots of frost in the morning so was pretty firm. No deer this time, but a few new forest ponies and some wonderful patterns in the ice

It is a seven book series of sci-fi, and I was completely addicted to it. I am not sure what I am going to do now that I have finished all seven (large) books, but it should leave me more time so long as I don’t have withdrawl symptoms from it…

If you enjoy science fiction books, I strongly recommend reading this series!

What Stormtroopers do on Their Day Off | WildAmmo.com

Fantastic photos – makes me wish I had some stormtrooper action figures to try the same with

If you want to take part, have a look at the Facebook page for where you can buy a digital download of the track “Killing In The Name Of”

Now, part of me thinks this is great, lets get a real band to christmas number one (I don’t think I can remember what the last *real* band to do so was once you ignore all the Xfactor winners, tellytubbies and bob-the-builders). Another part of me thinks that perhaps this is just a publicity stunt for Rage Against the Machine. It is a real shame the band did not decide to give all money they got this week to charity!

Another part of me wonders if this is a bit of a social experiment, to see if the internet is more popular and influential than Simon Cowell and XFactor…

*Edit 17th Dec*

Interview on Radio 5:

Apparently Rage Against of the Machine are giving “the windfall” of proceeds from Killing in the name of to shelter

dpatch is a clever addition to the Debian packaging process which allows all your changes to be stored as patch files in the debian/ subfolder in the source package rather than having to modify the upstream source. There are good reasons to do this – You can easily see what you have changed in the source, and therefore can remove the changes easily if the need arises. It also allows upgrading the upstream source more easily as you do not have to patch the code yourself (and only have to do anything if the upstream code has changed too much for patch to figure out where the changes need to go)

http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/index.php?view=use_dpatch is an excellent introduction for dpatch, and certainly got me going.

The basics of dpatch are pretty simple. After installing dpatch on your system, you can start using it in your source package straight away.

I prefer to start with the debian/rules file and add dpatch support first, as dpatch can complain in some of its commands if you have not done this step first. The easiest way to do this is simply to add the following line near the top of debian/rules

include /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make

This pulls in several dpatch definitions for make, allowing it to be called easily. Next you have to change the build-stamp and clean definitions in your debian/rules. The basic idea is to tell dpatch to patch files before the build happens, and to remove the patches during the clean. This way you can work with the original package, and dpatch will add your patches automatically during package build.

build-stamp: patch-stamp
...
clean: unpatch

Now dpatch will apply any patches found in debian/patches (though it does need an index of patches to apply). Of course there are other ways to configure dpatch, see man dpatch for details.

Now you want to change your code. The dpatch-edit-patch command will copy your packages source tree to a temporary directory and put you in a new shell. You simply edit the code to make the change you want, then logout of that shell and dpatch will work out what you have changed and save those changes to a patch file.

For a new patch you probably want to use the –add2list flag as it adds your patch to the index of patches to apply. The following is an example of creating a new patch

dpatch-edit-patch --add2list 01_my_patch_name

If you want to go back and make changes to your patch you can just run

dpatch-edit-patch 01_my_patch_name

That is the basics of dpatch. You can apply all patches with dpatch apply-all and remove them all again with dpatch deapply-all and of course dpatch will do this for you when you run dpkg-buildpackage, debian/rules or debuild to build your package.

I recommend using dpatch whenever you need to change the upstream source in a package – being able to easily see what you changed to make that package work is really helpful (and don’t forget to tell upstream your changes where appropriate!)

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

It looks really cool, and the realtime-editing would be very well suited to trying to draw up any form of document or source code at the same time when you will have too much activity for trying to use a code repository.

It is a shame Gobby does not have hooks builtin to allow loading code from a VCS or DVCS (that would be cool), but you can launch it headless on a server with an auto-save directory and then all connect in and start loading documents. There are times when I have wanted something like this, particularly when you are starting out a new piece of code and have several people wanting to get started right away. Once the pace dies down, it probably makes a lot of sense to move the file to your source code control system, but for that initial burst this looks like a fantastic tool

Getting data from the gps was trivial with gpsbabel (thought you might find it easier to use the gebabbel gui frontend and getting a track uploaded to a Google Map was easy via gpsvisualizer. I have not yet managed to upload a route with waypoints to the gps device yet though.

I am also unsure which software will be easiest to plot a route in. Marengo looks like a possible choice, as a web route planner, or possibly I can do it with Google Earth, or QLandKarte (though I would need to find or generate a calibrated map for this) which can read and write the gps device directly (again using gpsbabel)

Has anyone got recommendations for gps track editing software as well as route planning software?

Bluemonki has some geotagging voodoo that I need to look at so I can start recording where my photos were taken which should be interesting

If the message below is not verifiable, it is probably mangled by your browser – a plain-text version is at http://strangeparty.com/new_key.txt

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256,SHA1                                

I have migrated my gpg keys to a stronger key
My old key was:                              

  pub   1024D/B307BAEF 2004-04-22
  Key fingerprint = 116A 5F01 1E5F 1ADE 78C6  EDB3 B9B6 E622 B307 BAEF

and my new key is

  pub   4096R/74B1FA37 2009-11-05
  Key fingerprint = 7401 96D3 E037 2F8F 5965  A358 4046 71FD 74B1 FA37

You can get my key with the following command on linux

  wget -q -O- http://strangeparty.com/anton.gpg | gpg --import -

or by downloading http://strangeparty.com/anton.gpg and importing manually

You can also fetch it from the keyserver with

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 74B1FA37

If you have my old key, you can verify that I have signed my new one with
my old one with

  gpg --check-sigs 74B1FA37

If you are paranoid and want to check you have downloaded the right key,
you can check the fingerprint of the key against the one above with

  gpg --fingerprint 74B1FA37

If you are completely satisfied, you may want to sign my new key

  gpg --sign-key 74B1FA37

If you do sign me key, please either email me that signature (email the
output of the following command to anton@piatek.co.uk)

  gpg --armor --export 74B1FA37

(Or the following if you have a mail client on your box)

  gpg --armor --export 74B1FA37 | mail -s 'OpenPGP Signatures' anton@piatek.co.uk

Or you can just get gpg/pgp to upload it direct to a keyserver

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-key 74B1FA37
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
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=cmth
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

If possible, use the Torrent download: http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent (it should be faster and saves money for all the mirrors)

If you are on Wave, you can find me as “anton.piatek” on Wave

If you are not on Wave and want to have a play, I will give an invite to the first person that comments on this post asking for one (only one, so if there is already a comment asking then you are too late). Please fill in the email field in the comment box (which stays private) as I will send the invite there

A colleague suggested that a dishwasher works fine, so I put it on the top shelf of the dishwasher with the plug wrapped in clingfilm and hit go on an “eco” wash which is slightly cooler.

I pulled it out before the trying was complete as I worried that the drying was warmer and might damage the plastic keyboard. It turns out that the dishwasher gave the keyboard a good soak, but still needed a good wipe with a cloth to actually get the dirt of the keys, so the dishwasher was not enough on it’s own.

As for drying – 2 days of drying left me with a keyboard that did not work. Dismantling and spreading out the layers of the membrane over an air vent for half a day did work, with the keyboard now working properly, and clean!

The keyboard rest did get a bit discoloured, so if you are cleaning your keyboard I suggest cleaning the keys by hand with a damp cloth (maybe with some washing up soap), and then popping off most of the keys to get in underneath them to get the dirt out from there.

The dishwasher didn’t really do much except add a long time to the drying stage

I decided that powerline networking might be a better solution. I looked at linksys’ range and decided on the PLK300 kit which is a 200mbpss kit with a 1-port adapter, and a 4-port adapter. I suspect that 200mbit means 100mbit/s in real terms as powerlines have only one pair of wires, so it is simples (as opposed to ethernet’s two pair that gives full duplex).

Getting the encryption was simple enough – press the right incantation of buttons, but I actually have no way of testing the encryption works. As for real-world speeds, I only get about 4-5Mb/s (32-40mbit/s) which is not as fast as I was hoping, but the wiring in my house is probably quite old and it is going from the downstairs power ring to the upstairs ring. I think it is probably fast enough, and as wireless is slower (and less reliable) the only other alternative is carving up the floor and walls to run cable – and I am too lazy…

Of course, as the devices are just ethernet bridges, it works seamlessly with linux and my existing network, and has almost no configuration. The power rating of these devices totals about 50W, but they seem to use less than that according to my Current Cost meter.

For reference the previous test got 9Mb/s download and 0.49Mb/s upload. The old speed wasn’t too bad, but still wasn’t as good as Be provided.

Obviously this new one is slower – the question is why? this test was about the same time of day, and as luck would have it the same day of the week. Is July a quieter internet usage month that September? Or has my service just become over-subscribed?

I will certainly be thinking carefully when it comes to the end of my contract… as paying for 10mbit and getting 2.4 is hardly value for money…

The walk was a 8km walk, and the book suggested 2.5 hours but we spent 2 hours walking (which left time for a very nice lunch in a grassy clearing in the woods)

There are a lot of cycle trails in this part of the new forest, so we are planning on cycling there when we figure out a good way of getting bikes there (bike racks are not that cheap)

We went and bought helmets (as mine no longer fitted – yes, that long ago) but then I decided my bike really needed a service. So I borrowed a pile of tools from my dad and started dismantling nearly every part of my bike to give it a full service. I regreased all the bearings, which probably needed it as they grease had completely dried up.

Yesterday I finally finished by putting back together the rear wheel (it turned out I had assembled the rear axle the wrong way round and it didn’t fit properly). We popped out for a short 30 minute ride around eastleigh park, which was great fun. It turns out I only have 2/3 of my gears as the front changer needs more adjusting (not sure how I didn’t notice that before setting out).

The only problem was that at the end of it, I had quite a sore backside from my rock-solid seat. We were planning on taking the bikes to the New Forest today, but it was just too sore (not to mention that a bike rack for the car is rather expensive, and the cheap rear-mounted ones require a numberplate and indicator light board on the back, which is a real pain).

Hopefully will find a way to fit them in the boot on another weekend and actually try out some of the many cycle trails around the New Forest

I recently moved house, and tried to change address with them via their automated phone system. In fact I tried again for each red letter I received warning me that I didn’t have a TV license (two I think).

Anyway, the guy turned up saying “we have the technology”, obviously referring to the idea that they can “detect what tv you are watching from outside your house”. I never got how that works, especially with a LCD tv. Given that they have to be invited onto your property to see what is on your tv, and are trespassing if they don’t, then I am not sure how they can actually fine you if you say you don’t receive TV.

Of course the real joke is that I do have a license, and it is paid via Direct Debit. The problem is that they do not have the technology to change the address on that license as I have tried several times. The guy said he would do it when he got back to his hotel (the gprs connection on his handheld device apparently wouldn’t let him do it then and there), but I honestly expect to get another threatening letter.

How much money would they save if their automated phone change-of-address system actually worked? Surely it must be cheaper than sending a guy out all over the country, only to have him get shown a load of valid licenses that have the wrong address still…

Ubuntu Global Jam – Birmingham (UK) – Source Guru
So, if you’re interested in helping make Ubuntu a better distro, and live in (or can travel to) the Birmingham Area in the UK, then you’re welcome to come along.

The Jam is on the 2nd-4th October, and we’ll be around on all three days….  Last year we had a great time, with refreshments (including beer) provided. Juggling penguins, and one person sleeping underneath the conference room table overnight. Hopefully we’ll also have the live Video Streams up and running again for anyone who can’t make it (or other Ubuntu Jams) to join in with!

However another question also occured – how much interest would there be in the south of England in order to try and organise one closer to home. We don’t really even need an official Ubuntu developer, as there is plenty of instructions and irc can provide access to developers real-time if we need them.

The only thing we need is a venue (I could possibly get use of the IBM site again) and enough people that want to contribute something to Ubuntu. The contribution could be packaging new programs, fixing bugs, raising bugs, improving documents, or translating documents (translation into British English anyone?)