Barcamp is an ‘un-conference’ event where all attendees are encouraged to give a presentation on something which might be of interest to their peers.
I spoke about some of the technical and non-technical things which have helped keep the support issues for Squadlist to a minimum.
The slides are available here:
Barcamp talk slides
Problem:
I’d tried using twitterfeed to hook my Teddington Lock river status Yahoo pipe into Twitter.
It didn’t seem to be seeing any updates; possibily because twitterfeed is looking at the link urls rather than the guids (The Environment Agency actually do something quite clever with the guids on their feed).
Solution:
Write your own rss to twitter bridge. The source code is available here.
Maybe abit of an overkill but doing this did allow twitter specific code to be removed from two other projects. In any case, something which talks to a large group of twitter users automatically is probably something you want to keep control of yourself.
Things I think this version does well:
Wellington City Council are doing some really good work with their online petitions.
They even do RSS feeds of the current petitions. There’s a small enhancement they could make to these feeds.
Hello.
I’ve been following the e-petitions section of the WCC site.
First, let me say that it is a really forward looking thing for the council
to be trying and it’s been really well implemented.I’d like to suggest the following enhancement to the RSS feed of current petitions, if possible.
Currently the petitions RSS feed seems to set the publication date field of all items to some time in November 2007.
If you’ve subscribed to this feed, new petitions don’t show up near the top of the feed reader’s inbox.
Would it be possible for the pubDate field to be populated with each petitions start date?ie.
http://www.wellington.govt.nz/news/current_petitions.xml
<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300</pubDate>Regards, Tony McCrae.
Outcome
This change was made by WCC’s Webcentre team within 24 hours. Thanks guys; that’s a brilliant turn around time.
So, you’ve just spent the morning pulling apart one of your most expensive possessions and when you’ve finished putting it all back togrther, it doen’t work.
I’d attempted to replace an aluminum G4 Powerbooks’ hard drive, but the new disk wasn’t visible.
When attempting to reinstall Mac OS, the installer can’t see the new disk. It turns out that the disk was working, but wouldn’t show as an install target until it was partitioned. The Disk Utility under Utilities in the menu bar can be used to partition and format the new disk.
Problem solved. Blood pressure returning to normal.
However, two things;
- Isn’t it abit strange to have a menubar on a fullscreen install program; I won’t have thought to look for one.
- Shouldn’t the install target dialog box drop a hint about the shiny new unformatted drive?
The other interesting thing is how long had this disk been in an unbootable state?
It did start making worrying comments in the syslog towards the end of last summer. Powerbooks tend to have uptimes in the months because you just shut the lid when you’re not using it; they hardly ever get booted from cold. Also considering that you probably never touch large portions of the disk from day to day, this could well have been broken for months.
The other slightly worrying thing is that on boot, Mac OS seems to run a fsck -A on the damaged disk.
This is probably why it managed to keep going for as long as it did, but surely performing unprompted write operations on a potentially damaged disk is risking making the situation even worse?
The OS also seems todo this without prompting when you try to attach the extracted disk as a USB device.
If the fcsk fails, you won’t be given the mount. Killing the fsck process did however cause the mount point to come up on one occasion, which was enough time to recover the required files.
I’ve been using one of Three’s USB wireless dongles this week.
It’s an E220 modem; the same one that most of the other phone companies are using.
Conclution; it’s a nice piece of kit which is going to be very useful.
At 15 Pounds a month it’s comparable to a wired connection but without the hassle and day off work involved in getting a phone line connected.
Pros.
- It works out of box; it doesn’t take days to get it activated on the network.
- It seems to have pretty good coverage.
- It works on a Mac and the PDF explaining how to set it up was correct.
- It has a pretty light which changes colours.
- It works on the train! You just can’t put a value on that.
Technical Cons.
- Initial connections and DNS lookups are rubbish.
It takes several seconds for DNS queries to complete. New ssh connections take about 5 seconds to come up.
- It’s NATed. You don’t seem to get a real IP number and you can’t make inbound connections.
- It dropped ssh connections like they were going out of fashion. This was becoming a real issue until I realised why it was happening; you’re behind a really agressive NAT gateway which is timing out your connections as fast as it can. You just need to set an ssh keep alive.
- There seems to be a transparent http proxy involved. You can’t access an http svn repository from this connection. Solution; use an https repository.
Three just been silly Cons.
- The Mac instructions say use the Mac driver CD included but the Three stores don’t have any of them to give out.
- The driver download link on the Three website is broken.
You have to google for E220 drivers and then follow the Three instruction sheet.
- To get to your data usage page you need to register online using you SIM number (fine) and your Three phone number. Abit of a problem there as you haven’t got a phone number because you didn’t actually buy a phone. I’m not sure what the resolution to this is yet.
Extra for experts
The modem comes with a SIM card; does anyone know what happens if you put this card into a phone?
Can you make calls; can you use the phone as a bluetooth modem?
At Twickenham Rowing Club we’ve been tinkering with an online availablity system for the past couple of years. It helps our rowers and coaches co-ordinate the cat herding task of getting 10+ people in the same place, at the same time, four times a week.
It’s a fairly rough and ready system but it’s been working well for us and we havnn’t seen anything simular in the rowing world.
This week, we released our system for use by other clubs. Part of our motive for doing this, was to try and ensure the system’s future by:
a) expanding the number and diversity of users.
b) trying to make contact with people developing simular things elsewhere in the rowing community.
The response has well and truly exceeded my expectations.
I’d thought if we were really lucky we might get 5 clubs using it within the year.
After 3 days, we’ve had over 20 clubs sign up, with a good number of those actively using it.
We’ve also had one contact from a developer working on potentally complimentally system.
This evening’s jog around Twickenham, as recorded by the linux ipaq.
Brilliant; a machine the size of a pack of cigerettes which can communicate wirelessly with a GPS and cellphone, has a 10 hour battery life, has an ssh login and runs Perl; all for 40 Pounds.
Guardian Unlimited is undertaking a major, across the board, recruitment drive.
There’s something in there for everyone and there’s probably never been a better time to be considering a technical job at the Guardian.
Furthermore, in addition to working for the paper which brings you The Fiver, you’d be working for a company with a slightly deeper vision than simply making money for the shareholders.
The home web serving empire is powered by a headless Apple Cube (you can find anything on British Ebay). It’s quite a simple beast, with no fans or moving parts save for the hard disk.
I’d always wondered how much this gadget costs to run and what sort of power savings could be made by removing the hard disk. This weekend I measured it.
Power Consumption (with hard drive spinning): 28 Watts or 0.67 KWh per day. Raising to 40 Watts when serving pages.
Cost: 12 pences per day or 43 pounds per year.
According to the National Energy Foundation, that’s reasonable for 105 kg of CO2 emissions per year which is the equivilant to burning 44 kilos of coal.
By shutting down the hard drive the power consumption drops to 22 Watts. I thought the disk would be using quite abit more than that given the noise it makes. That small reduction would save around 9 pounds a year (and presumably some coal).
Other measurements:
Television: 60 Watts
Wireless router thing-a-ma-gig: 10 Watts
How to keep a low profile on public transport by disabling the console bell. With thanks to Stuart.
To stop it in bash (and other things that use readline), try putting the following in your ~/.inputrc
set bell-style none
You may also want to try “set bell-style visible” – this will cause the terminal to “flicker” when it would normally make a beep. Note that this does not stop all applications beeping. To completely disable it, try the following in your bash profile:
echo -ne ‘\033[11;0]‘
(Which basically sets the bell duration to 0ms.)
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