Archive for Technical stuff
May 29, 2008 at 10:29 pm · Filed under Software, Technical stuff
So, here is the tube map showing progress to date, you may have to zoom out to catch the extremes, depending on the size of your screen:
**UPDATE** I’ve removed the image as it seems to be slowing the blog down and crashing folks computers, you can still view The Full Screen Map over here.
If you don’t know about google maps, it’s a particularly useful little gadget. Click on the “my maps” tab and then either plot a map manually or import a data file from SportsTracks or whatever GPS mapping system you have on the computer. There are a number of examples in the previous few posts. You can colour the map as you see fit and then copy the link to an embedded image. Very swish.
I’ve been including these embedded google maps to illustrate each section of the London Underground route but have been struggling to display all the sections together on one interactive block.
There are a stack of hacks for google maps out there as well but the two I have found particularly useful are, GPS Visualizer and Map Channels.
GPS Visualizer is an incredibly in depth utility. If you are into maps, you want to check it out. It enables you to plot multiple gpx tracks onto one image and will colour them according to an amazing array of variables such as speed or altitude. You could plot atmospheric pollutants with coloured blobs suggesting density or of course simple tracks showing how slow you actually run. I’m sure I could plot my geographical tube map using GPS Visualizer but to be honest I can’t be bothered to stay up all night trying to fathom out how to do it.
Map Channels is very easy to use. It requires you to have set up all your routes as google maps already but thats not a problem for me. You can then create maps with multiple map channels visible. If you set the colour and style of the track in google maps this will be replicated in Map Channel image. Incredibly easy and yet it includes a great number of style control options.
I’ve only just started playing with this one but I’m impressed by how well it has enabled me to display multiple, differently coloured tracks.
Popularity: 14% [?]
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Tags: google maps, GPS, gps visulaizer, London Underground, map channels, maps, tube
December 23, 2007 at 7:36 pm · Filed under Apparel, Equipment, Gadgets, Technical stuff
You should see the floor of my flat - tis littered with no end of exciting possibilities. I could of course take a snap and show you but then you’d see the truth, which involves an awful lot of boxes, wrapping and all those other things that I haven’t quite got round to putting away yet.
There are about 5 more months to go before I get thrown back into exam anxiety so in the meantime I’m needing a new project, that’s in addition to the running project and the allotment project which have ceased to be a new and have now slipped into the realms of “norm”. In times like these my fall back project always seems to be “teach yourself programming”, so here I am with a floor full of teaching manuals. The trouble with programming is the plethora of different languages out there, and then there are different variations of the same language like C, C+, C++ and C#, what is the novice supposed to make of it? As I can’t be bothered to research this too much I’ve opted to dabble with two languages at the same time: Python and VB.Net.
I’ve got python cos its free and sits nicely with computer that I just broke and accidentally forced into being a linux machine and VB.Net because that goes with my windows laptop and because Sporttracks, the best program ever (that I should have written) was developed in dotnet.
I’m sure no one is interested in all that but the other thing fighting for space on my floor is a little package that I’ve been asked to trial. Inside is a running rucsac the Salomon Raid Revo 20 and the latest Nokia N-carnation, the N82. What joy eh? I can see that I’ll have to go out and do a bit of running over the hols to try both of these gadgets out. Is it possible that the N82 could beat the N95 as running gadget par excellence?
The Raid Revo 20 is particularly welcome, I ordered the Inov8 Race Pro 18 ages ago but it seems to have been lost by the Royal Mail. I’ll try the salomon substitute tomorrow on my running commute and report back.
Popularity: 34% [?]
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Tags: allotment, commute, n82, n95, Sporttracks
March 18, 2007 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Rambling, Technical stuff
This post is surely asking for trouble but here goes. A recent plugin - Firestats - has opened my eyes to the wonders of google searches and more specifically the search terms that lead visitors to this site.
Some are quite painful:
- Iliac crest pain in back and hip
but others are darn right uncomfortable:
- Pictures of Bushy legs of Women
- Very Big Girls Bums
- Bulging Underwear
- Women’s blogs of underwear
Popularity: 19% [?]
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January 27, 2007 at 9:38 pm · Filed under Technical stuff
So my new site has launched and I have to say I am seriously impressed with wordpress. Movable type used to leave me on the verge of a nervous breakdown every time I attempted a significant update or even a minor design tweak. With wordpress I have been able to do a complete server installation, import from the old blog and a template redesign within the space of a few hours and I still have my hair!
One of the major advantages over MT has to be the superb documentation available as well as the plugins for just about everything you could want to do. In contrast, Six Apart seem to have taken it upon themselves to bury the MT documentation in recent years and anyway it is nigh on incomprehensible even when you do find it.
Do please let me know if you notice any problems or if you have any comments on the layout - thats if you can find me.
Technorati Profile
Popularity: 12% [?]
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January 26, 2007 at 7:52 am · Filed under Books, Running, Technical stuff
I am slightly concerned about two new obsessions that seem to be gaining a foothold.
Firstly you may have noticed that a whole load of ultrarunners have suddenly gatecrashed my blogroll and therefore my regular reading list. Yesterday my new book arrived, Ultramarathon Man
by Dean Karnazes, and I stayed up til 3am to finish it.
Why would this be? A long run for me is 10k.
Can’t help feeling such an admiration for this show of endurance and ridiculous stubborness. When Karnazes finished his first 50-miler he described rather too vividly the terrible spasms and projectile vomiting that ruined his lovely new Lexus. It’s trials like this that help define who you actually are and I’m sure most of us hanker to know just how much we could actually deal with.
The second development is rather more impulsive. Last night I suddenly decided that I was going defect from MovableType and head over to wordpress.org. This is clearly going to cause an immense weekend long headache if I go ahead with it. I had to restrain myself from giving it a go last night when the urge first grabbed me.
This is my explanation in advance for any prolonged outage of the blog, and any pattern baldness that I may concurrently develop.
Popularity: 21% [?]
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Tags: book, Dean Karnazes
January 9, 2007 at 7:48 am · Filed under Technical stuff
What’s happened to Technorati lately?
I use it to keep track of recent posts in all my favourite blogs but it is just not playing fair anymore. It’s telling me that a lot of my fellow bloggers haven’t been active in over 100 days when I know for a fact that they’ve been at their most prolific over the New Year.
My frustration forced me to skip on over to Bloglines, and so far so good. I don’t think I’m going to miss another post again. In fact last night it informed me that Junebug had just posted an entry entitled “Who wants pasta?”, and as I did I headed over there to check it out. There was nothing! No post, no pasta, just old entries. This morning, I get up and check it out again, lo and behold the pasta post is up. Three cheers for the psychic bloglines, big improvement over Technorati.
Popularity: 8% [?]
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November 5, 2006 at 11:13 pm · Filed under Technical stuff
At last I have found a plugin to deal with the mountains of spam winging its way to this blog. The latest update of Movable Type helped but spammers like TramadoL1234 kept getting through the spam filter. Repeatedly. Thankfully I was alerted to the cure all by That Canadian Girl. The panacea comes in the form of Akismet. I think it is specifically designed for wordpress but there are plugins developed for MT and most other blogging systems that I can think of, just check out the developer page.
**UPDATE - Jan 13th 2007**
I’ve disabled Akismet from my blog. I don’t reckon it works with MT, I’m sure its a wonder with wordpress but it just doesn’t seem to learn from its errors on my system.
After downloading the movable type version of Askimet I was initially very happy indeed - I found it completely wiped out all the spam posts that had been sneaking through my existing barrier.
Problem is, it seems to work by blocking all legitimate comments too - I was beginning to feel quite lonely in my little corner of cyberspace. The only way to avoid missing my comments was to trawl through the 200 and odd spam messages each day. Thats no different to marking all comments for review and is a tedious task.
I am now using a captcha style plugin called comment challenge. So far so good, legitimate commenters have been allowed through and no errors detected in the last 24 hours. I would have gone for the real captcha method but my attempts at installation failed. The comment challenge plugin has been designed as an easy installation module.
Popularity: 32% [?]
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September 3, 2006 at 7:35 pm · Filed under Rambling, Technical stuff
It’s great knowing that folk are actually interested in reading the random scribblings that make up your blog but I find that it comes with a worrying sense of responsibility. All of a sudden I feel like I am writing for an audience and have to consider what it is “they” want to read. All the more concerning when you know that your most regular audience comprises your mum and your dad.
Anyhow, I am pleased to announce that my dad has now started his very own blog, so I can now check up on him on a regular basis too. So far he is writing about the characters he comes across on his allotment and has already educated me on the reason why Pythagoras avoided Fava beans. Check him out at The Nearly Good Life.
Popularity: 17% [?]
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Tags: allotment
August 19, 2006 at 8:45 am · Filed under Technical stuff
I couldn’t wait any longer, I had to find out what all the hype surrounding YouTube is about. That canadian girl started me off with a link to a haunting film about a giant little girl puppet. While I was there I came across my fave advert - the Tango/Bravia spoof:
I only caught it on the telly once, so I don’t know if Sony kicked up a stink about copyright infringements, and had it shifted.
Popularity: 10% [?]
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July 31, 2006 at 1:35 pm · Filed under Technical stuff
I knew I should not have attempted this upgrade. I made the same mistake last year and it resulted in approximately 27 hours of high anxiety while I desperately scrabbled around every user forum trying to find an answer to “how the hell am I going to get my blog back?!”.
Well at least todays upgrade anxiety only lasted for 6 hours - I’m obviously getting better at this.
Before I started the installation I backed up my current MT folder and changed the details in mt-config.cgi-original and then renamed it to just mt-config.cgi. I found the old MT installation guide for version 3.2 was useful here.
Here are the problems I faced while upgrading movable type to version 3.31.
Problem 1: Error 500 on running mt.cgi
-turned out not all my .cgi files had the correct 755 permissions, so I changed these in smartFTP but I still got the error 500 message.
-next I realized that smartFTP was set to transfer everything as binary so I changed this to ASCII and uploaded everything again. Also confirmed permissions again.
-excellent - this solved the error 500 issue but gave me problem no 2.
Problem 2: On running mt,cgi and acknowledging that I was upgrading my installation, I get the error message - upgrade.tmpl cannot be found
-this was solved by uploading the extlib folder again. It seems as though not all the uploading went according to plan. My advice would be to keep repeating the upload until it works or at least check the error logs on your FTP client.
All running well now though, time will tell if the improvements are worth the stress. I’m hoping that there are some nifty ways to handle all the spam comments that I’m getting bogged down with at the moment.
UPDATE
Here’s a quick update on what I’ve found so far:
- The editing system no longer seems to support the Opera web browser. For example I can’t select categories from the drop down list. This is a big pain and has meant I have to use IE to finish the job - not ideal at all.
- The second new thing since my upgrade is the ability to use bulleted lists easily. I downloaded the FormatList plugin as it merges seamlessly with v3.31 so now I’m sure I will go list happy with the next few entries.
Popularity: 13% [?]
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