After about 2000 miles on the Dahon Vitesse D7, it was time to get a new bike. The Dahon had it’s fair share of problems. The frame split where the seat post frame tube met the cross tube – luckily within warranty, so a new frame was fitted. The wheels on the Dahon where very poor.  On average a spoke broke on the rear wheel every three to four weeks.  Eventually I had the rear wheel rebuilt with new spokes.

Of course there was all the usual stuff with chains wearing and the like… but that is normal for a bike that does 8 miles a day four day’s a week. So the Dahon is being retired to ’second bike’ for use in emergencies.

So, what about the new bike?

I am now a proud owner of a Birdy Touring bike.

This bike has 24 gears, nicely distributed from very low (hill climbing will be so much easier!) to pretty high. One of the things that I found with the Dahon was that there was not enough high end in the gears, and I was quickly at top speed, with a feeling that I could have gone further. The new bike has by contrast a massive high end in the gears. I topped 42 mph on the flat – with a tail wind!

It has full suspension using a combination of elastomer (rear) and spring/elastomer (front). And on a canal tow-path trip which varied from very uneven brick to muddy pools, it coped well.

It is fully kitted out with mudguards and Pannier racks (front and back).

And of course it folds.

I went to collect a book I had reserved at my local Wolverhampton Library, and as I had the item issued, I was offered a free tea bag.

Bemused; politely; I said no, thank you, I don’t drink tea.

P.S. Wolverhampton Libraries, why can’t I reserve a book on-line if it is NOT on loan? quite often I would prefer you to send the book to my local library if it is in the Central Library on the shelf. And I know your system could do it!

Feature requirements:

• Should only move a file if it has been edited. (we assume that the filesize will have changed by at least 1 byte!)
• Should not just sit there copying all the time.
• Should find out about all files in the specified directory.
• Should report when it updated the file and which file was updated
• First run should copy all files to the destination directory. (assumes I have updated my working copy from svn)

So after several attempts, here is a more polished version which stores the filename and the last size of the file in a ‘bash hash’. OK bash doesn’t have hashes (mores the pity) but reading around on the web I found this post with a comment from Scott Mcdermott which does the job nicely (once I had stripped offending characters from the file names).

So here is the full code of the deployment assistant:

#!/bin/bash
# script to deploy code from SOURCEDIR to DELIVERDIR 

PROJECTNAME="blog-in-blog"
SOURCEDIR=blog-in-blog/trunk
DELIVERDIR=/var/www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/blog-in-blog/
FILENAMES=blog-in-blog/trunk/*
LASTFILESIZE=0
COUNTER=1

echo "======================================================"
echo -e "delivering changes \n\tin \033[1m$SOURCEDIR\033[0m \n\tto \033[1m$DELIVERDIR\033[0m"
echo "======================================================"		

if [ -z $1 ]
then
	echo "usage$  $0 "
	exit 1
fi

hash_insert ()
{
	local name=$1 key=$2 val=$3
	eval __hash_${name}_${key}=$val
}

hash_find ()
{
	local name=$1 key=$2
	local var=__hash_${name}_${key}
	echo -n ${!var}
}

while true
do
	for FILE in $FILENAMES
	do
		FILESIZE=$(stat -c%s "$FILE")

		#tidy up file to avoid problems in variable name
		FILE=`basename $FILE`
		FILEORIG=$FILE
		FILE=`echo "$FILE" | sed 's/[\.\_-]//g'`

		LASTFILESIZE=`hash_find fileHash $FILE`
		#echo "filesize:"$FILESIZE
		#echo "lastfilesize:"$LASTFILESIZE
		if [ "$FILESIZE" != "$LASTFILESIZE" ]
		then
			echo "--- $COUNTER ---------------------------------------"
			date
			echo -e "deploying \033[1m$FILEORIG\033[0m from project $PROJECTNAME"
			echo "Size was $LASTFILESIZE bytes, now $FILESIZE bytes."
			cp $SOURCEDIR/$FILEORIG $DELIVERDIR
			hash_insert fileHash $FILE $FILESIZE
			UPDATE=1
		elif [ "$UPDATE" -ne "1" ]
		then
			UPDATE=0
		fi
	done

	if [ "$UPDATE" = 1 ]
	then
		echo "======================================================"
		let COUNTER+=1
		UPDATE=0
	fi

	sleep $1
done
#ends

Basically I wanted to be able to use my DV camera to take single frames, which could then be rolled into a finished video.

A little shell script follows, which does just what I need, using dvgrab and ffplay.

#!/bin/bash
# script to take a shot with DV camera

count=1
calldir=`pwd`
wrapdir='wraps'

function help_me
{
echo -e "HELP!"
echo -e "h - shows this help!"
echo -e "s - takes a shot"
echo -e "p - shows a preview of all the shots so far"
echo -e "w - writes the shots to a wrap file in ./$wrapdir"
echo -e "q - quits\n"
}

help_me

if [ ! -d $calldir/$wrapdir ] ; then
mkdir $calldir/$wrapdir || exit
fi

while [ "$ans" != "q" ]
do

echo -e "I'm waiting for instructions:(h|s|p|w|q)"
read -sn1 ans

if [ "$ans" = "h" ] ; then

help_me

elif [ "$ans" = "s" ] ; then

echo -e "grabbing a frame"
dvgrab --every 25 --duration 1 2>/dev/null
echo -e "grabbed $count\n\a"

count=$(($count+1))

elif [ "$ans" = "p" ] ; then

echo -e "Preview"
cat $calldir/*.dv | ffplay -
echo -e "Preview ended"

elif [ "$ans" = "w" ] ; then

echo -e "Wrapping up"
echo -e "Creating in in $calldir/$wrapdir"
echo -e "Enter filename for wrap:"

read filename

cd $calldir/$wrapdir || exit

cat $calldir/*.dv | dvgrab -stdin --format dv2 $filename 2>/dev/null

clear

# reset count after wrapping file
count=1

echo -e "Tidying up last wrap: deleting $calldir/*.dv"
rm $calldir/*.dv

echo -e "Preview wrap"
ffplay $calldir/$wrapdir/$filename*
echo -e "Preview wrap ended"

cd $calldir || exit

elif [ "$ans" = "q" ] ; then

echo -e "Quitting...\n"
exit

fi

done

A Day In The Life.

New Hornby train set – Bernard Cribbins

Last time I tried Audio on linux I found it to be a sorely disappointing affair. That was some 6 to 12 months ago.

On my old Windows box I had an E-mu 1820, but when I bought it I didn’t know that Creative didn’t like to help out by open sourcing their drivers. (How many people have bought M-Audio cards now, knowing that they can get Open Source drivers for it!) On my old Windows box I thought that card was going to stay, until week before last…

I had had some recent successes with getting jack and pulseaudio playing nicely. I had had a play with Ardour and loved it. So I bit the bullet and gave it a go.

I now have glorious multi channel playback and recording via my E-mu audiodock, so I have taken the opportunity to throw together a few recordings of my poetry. The first couple were straight recordings with a bit of reverberation added for ambience.

Virility

The Tree I Wish I’d Been

The most recent is a full on four and a half minutes of sequenced sound and samples

A Rude Awakening

If you are viewing this on the site you’ll see the above links as little embedded mp3 players, courtesy of the very smart wpaudio plugin.

Highlights might be…

• The Langdale Heights page
• The scripts section
• Some poetry
• A few photographs

And, of course, I eat my own dog food… Several sections of the site are powered by my increasingly popular wordpress plugin blog-in-blog (over 2000 downloads and counting)  that allows you to show posts on pages as part of the content. I use it for the ‘Writing’ subsections, and for the updates on the home page.

Enjoy

I am sure it is not, as some people seem to think, a source of free books to view online.

However, it is rather a nice example of what you can do if you take a bit of a risk and open up your content.

Now imagine the lookybook interface as the interface to your junior library catalogue!

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.