The project I've been doing work on for a while, Wikipublisher, has finally been released.
It's really neat: it allows you to take a set of wiki pages and produce a very nice looking PDF copy of them suitable for printing. This may not sound like much, but there's a whole lot of neat stuff it enables -- collaborative single-source publishing to web and print, customised documentation to take home and read on the bus or in the bath, etc. It includes a plugin to the PmWiki wiki software which produces the XML we need, and a web service component which transforms that XML into nice PDFs, by way of Latex (which gives us the very nice looking bit).
You should all go and try it. Other people think it's neat, too.
I'm sitting in the library trying to get some writing done on my thesis. This does seem to work, if I ignore IRC.
But getting internet connectivity is a pain. A CafeNet AP is visible, but I can't connect. I can see fourteen trillion Telecom Wireless Hotspots, but they cost $10/hr. So I bite the proverbial bullet and give Theresa Gattung my pound of flesh.
Then I remember: aha! There's a hack out there -- nstx -- which will tunnel IP over DNS. And I have a box in the US with lots of spare IP addresses pointed at it. So I set it up. And after some trouble with binding it to the correct IP, solved by reading the documentation, and some prodding of BIND, I have connectivity!
And the latency isn't too horrible. 600ms pings to NZ, but that's only to be expected. 4kbytes/s is about as much bandwidth as you can get out of it -- but hey! It's better than GPRS, and much much cheaper.
Now you know why I got rid of my Mac -- this sort of thing would have meant much more wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I just spend the last 3/4 of an hour eating lunch on the overbridge at VUW.
The reason it took so long is that just as Patrick and I had finished eating, we noticed lots of police cars down below. They cut off all traffic, and someone else pointed out a guy standing outside on of the windows on the top floor of Von Zedlitz.
Roger and co of Victoria Rescue ran past, and more police arrived, along with an ambulance and fire truck. Two busses got stuck at the Salamanca Rd corner, and then eventually the guy went back inside, and walked with some official looing people to a car which drove away.
To top it off, I missed the guy getting back inside due to conversing with others on the overbridge.
Well. To sum up last week: Invercargill was some combination of cold, wet, and windy; the scenery within a couple of hundred kilometres was nice.
And the week before? Campylobacter really isn't that much fun. And a fun fact: if you go to a doctor and they do tests and confirm that it's what you've got, then they have to inform the Ministry of Health!
There are some pictures on Flickr, and more will follow.
Step 1: Learn Unix and Perl.
Step 2: Download this file.
Step 3: Unpack it, read the README.
Step 4: Cross your fingers, toes, and eyes. Follow the instructions.
Step 5: Complain that it doesn't work.
No warranty, express or implied, etc. Backup your iPhoto library first :-)
This morning I wholemilkified the cornflakesphere which I then consumified while reading the newspaperfile that was automagically papercasted onto my front lawn-site. Radical!
-- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166618&cid=13897006
Excuse me while I consumify my own small part of the cornflakesphere, and then buscast myself to MyOffice 2.0, when the Rain beta subsides.
Hrm. Woke up today and discovered my laptop wasn't getting a DHCP lease.
Got out of bed and discovered my desktop couldn't seen anything on the network.
Went down to the datagarage and discovered that everything was off.
Wandered outside again to look at the switchboard. Hrm, none of the circuitbreakers are off. Turned the (unlabelled) datagarage one off and on again. Back in the garage. Still no power.
Plugged UPS into the other circuit. Power! But then not. Confused.
Plugged UPS back into the datagarage circuit. Power! But then not. But then power! Aha! An intermittent fault!
Woggled power plug in back of UPS. Power! Still power! And still power!
Carefully backed out of garage, not touching anything.
Still power!
Maybe I do need to set up Nagios and the GSM modem. But then I'd be woken up by events like this, and I don't want that.
After switching to Ubuntu (and an Acer) from an iBook running OS X, I wanted to transfer my iPhoto library (some 6G of photos) to a Linux photo management application. The only GNOME-esque such application my initial search turned up was F-Spot, so I looked at that.
No iPhoto import, damn. I'll have to write my own.
So off to a CPAN search -- there's a Mac::iPhoto, which uses Mac::PropertyList to read in the iPhoto database. Except that it doesn't work; I get a parse error.
82 lines of Perl later, I have my own Property List parser. This has the advantage that it actually works, at least on my one test case -- my 1.8MB AlbumData.xml from iPhoto. And it takes much less time to finish than Mac::iPhoto did to throw an error.
Now to investigate F-Spot. It seems to use a very simple sqlite database to store album (they seem to call them tags) data. And it reads the EXIF dates off my photos. Well, most of them. It seems that the photos that iPhoto rotated have lost their creation-date metadata.
Plan for next hack at this: get creation-date metadata back (maybe by just reverting to the original images, potentially running them through exiftran), and shovel album data into the photos.db F-Spot database.