DadHacker

Which Bookmarking Tool To Use

2012-02-05T10:16:00.002Z

I'm between bookmarking tools at the moment. I've been happy with StumbleUpon for a while, but I've just given up on their new UI. It requires you to remember too much mystery meat to get anything done. I had used Delicious before that. I can't really remember why I stopped using it. I think I liked the old StumbleUpon more. I'm considering using Google's +1 facility, but again that seems a little obscure.

Here are my requirements:

Save bookmarks
Work quickly from Chrome or Firefox
Work okay from the Android browser on a phone
Support tags
Able to be viewed as a web page rather than tied to a browser (rules out Firefox Sync)
Easy way to get my data out again

Suggestions?

"Family Math" - Great Book Of Maths Games

2012-01-29T21:31:00.005Z

I've just finished reading Family Math. This is a book of games and puzzles focused on giving kids interesting challenges while stimulating mathematical thinking. A couple of favourites have been about an algorithm for palindrome numbers (try 89) and "Ten Card Arrangement" where cards are dealt and shuffled in a repeatable way and you have to stack the deck to come out correctly.

Highly recommended.

2012-01-29T11:18:00.010Z

We've just done the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch 2012. Here's what we found:

Bird	Max Number
Blackbird	2
Magpie	2
Carrion crow	1
Woodpigeon	3
Coal tit	1
Blue tit	3
Nuthatch	2
Jackdaw	1
Song thrush	1
Robin	1
Chaffinch	1
Great tit	2
Wren	1

Security Scan

2012-01-28T20:45:00.013Z

This is just a quick list of things I'm going to do periodically to test the security of the systems I'm running:

GRC's Sheilds Up utility on all external network interfaces for machines that I can run Chrome on
On the server I have no GUI and Shields Up doesn't run in Lynx. Instead I used nmap

First time through with Shields Up I found that my home router had the SNMP port 161 open. This is a BT Home Hub version 3.0. It would appear that it is not possible to turn this off. I'll have to raise a help request with BT to turn it off.

On the server I had a surprise that ports 554 and 7070 were open. Looking in /etc/services it said that 554 was Real Time Streaming Protocol, and 7070 wasn't listed. To find out what was listening on the ports I ran:

sudo lsof -i :554
sudo lsof -i :7070

Both of those returned nothing. Next I tried:

sudo netstat -a |grep LISTEN |grep -v unix

That didn't find anything bound to those ports at all. I asked the helpful people at Rimu Hosting if they knew what was going on.

Update 29 Jan 2012: The Rimu Hosting people came back and said that when they ran nmap against the IP address they didn't see anything on ports 554 or 7070. Strange. I need to get someone else to run the nmap scan from a different location to see what they see.

Minecraft Mod Manager Website Wish

2011-11-12T20:30:00.003Z

I seem to have become the Minecraft system support person for lots of son #1's friends. The trouble is that they all want mods installed and while not that difficult, you need to be able to unpack JAR files in order to do that. This is well beyond the technical grasp of most Minecraft parents it seems. What I really want is a web site where you can just click a few buttons and it will install the mods. I'm going to see if I can contact the person who writes MineSwitcher to use that as a starting point.

I'm A Bitcoin Trader

2011-10-17T18:53:00.004+01:00

This morning my money transfer cleared into my Mt Gox account. It had taken two working days from the point I instructed the bank. I'm looking to buy 10 BTC, but I've got the maths wrong in the previous post. I'm going to make a first go at getting as many BTC as possible for my 3 GBP and transfer over some more funds.

The price this evening for BTC on Mt Gox is 1.71 per BTC. I'm going to put in an order for 1 BTC at 1.70 and another at 1.30 and see what happens. My 1.70 offer was immediately taken up. The 1.30 sat there.

Next I decided to get my new BTC out of Mt Gox. After my transaction fee I had 0.994 BTC left. I put in my Bitcoin address and submitted the request to Mt Gox. The option that I wasn't aware of was the "green address" This option seems to mean that the receiver can trust the transaction with zero confirmations. As I'm not that time sensitive I decided not to take the option. I fired off the request at 19:10 UK time. By 19:11 I had an unconfirmed transaction in my Bitcoin client. Next I went to the internet banking site, put 16GBP in the Mt Gox account, and then fired off an email to Wuala requesting 100GB of storage for 10BTC. By 19:28 I had my first confirmation of the Bitcoin transfer.

Float Food Trip Disappointing

2011-10-16T09:24:00.005+01:00

Yesterday we went with Jess and her boys on a "a foodie, floating, family day out exploring the region's historic waterways". Really disappointing. It turned out to be a much delayed 20 minute canal trip from the Mark Addy to the Lowry theatre. As for the food, the kids got a carton of Vimto and a Chorley cake. Apparently it was celebrating the launch of some book. That passed me by.

Still, we had a nice time wandering around Media City and annoying the pettifogging BBC security personnel: "That is an official BBC prop".

Buying Some Bitcoins

2011-10-12T21:46:00.004+01:00

I wanted to buy some backup space on Wuala using their bitcoin offer. As I'd only every dabbled with bitcoin previously I only owned 0.005BTC. How many bitcoins do I need?

Wuala are selling 1GB of storage for a year for 0.1BTC. Looking on Mt. Gox, I can today (12 Oct 2011) buy 1BTC for about 2.60 GBP. That would be a staggering 26 pence per GB per year. I figure I'll push the boat out and try to get 100GB. I've sent a bank transfer of 3GBP to Mt. Gox. As soon as it clears I'll have a go at buying storage with bitcoins.

Power Up Or Run Down?

2011-10-10T19:38:00.003+01:00

The Security Now Podcast has just informed me that lithium-ion batteries should be kept charged but nickel-metal hydride ones need to be fully discharged in order maintain battery life.

For my gadgets that means:

Work laptop - Keep Charged
Nokia E71 - Keep Charged
HTC Desire - Keep Charged
Mifi (Huawei E585) - Keep Charged
Asus Aee Transformer tablet - Keep Charged

Setting Up A Minecraft Server

2011-10-07T20:33:00.008+01:00

#1 and #2 sons are both addicted to Minecraft. In our "Dad and son techie evening" this week #1 son said that he wanted to set up a Minecraft server. It was actually very easy.

Follow the instructions from the Minecraft Wiki to get the Java files on to the server
I had to reduce the memory footprint as I'm installing it on the Rimuhosting VPS server that is quite restricted on RAM. I went for starting with 500 megs and maximum of 800 megs
Set up a white list file with the users we want to allow
Kick off the server: java -Xms500M -Xmx800M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

For now I just kept the server running in a screen session on the server. I do have a shopping list of things to tidy up:

Set it up properly to start at boot time following the Debian init.d approach
Set up logrotate to manage the log file
I really must set up iptables or equivalent to give me a suitable firewall

Wuala, Sunk Cost And Backup Economics

2011-10-05T22:21:00.002+01:00

Time spent backing up is rewarded in heaven. Hence I was disappointed at the Wuala announcement that they had stopped their P2P backup storage trading. I had managed to get 40GB of backup space available by sharing disk space on various PCs. I need roughly 60GB available for backup at the moment. The Wuala folks say that I can keep the 40GB free for a year which is a pretty large incentive to stay with them. They also sell space using bitcoin. I could buy another 20GB for a year for 2 BTC which at current rates is about 7 GBP. Treating my 40GB to date as a sunk cost I think it makes sense to stay with Wuala for the next twelve months. Reminder to self: start looking for a new backup provider in September 2012.

The Math Book

2011-10-04T22:44:00.003+01:00

I've just finished reading The Math Book. Nice book for dipping into with a page per topic on mathematics throughout history. My favourite was audioactive sequences.

Debian Server To Send Email Automatically

2011-10-01T14:32:00.005+01:00

I run a debian server with Rimu Hosting (highly recommended). Every week I've been going on to do a bit of house keeping. I realised that I could automate those tasks and get the server to send me an email to tell me what it had done. I decided the first problem to solve was to get the server to send me an email from the command line. After a little googling I tried this:

echo "This is a test" | mail dave@goopot.co.uk -s "Just testing from the server"

That didn't quite work as expected. The problem was that I run my email from Google Apps on my domain. I wanted @goopot.co.uk addresses to be picked up by Google's email servers. However, the debain server knew that it was goopot.co.uk so decided to handle the email itself. It very efficiently delivered the email to the linux user account on the server, and not my Google mail box.

I needed a way to tell the server that email to goopot.co.uk should be handed off to Google and not processed locally. A bit more googling led me to the Debian Wiki page about Gmail and Exim4. I followed those instructions to the letter and tried again:

echo "This is a test" | mail -v dave@goopot.co.uk -s "Just testing from the server"

Nothing seemed to happen at all. No email arrived either locally on the server or to Google. Hmmm.

Back to the drawing board. I next tried to send an email to my wife's account to see if I could figure out what was working.

echo "This is a test" | mail -v wife@myfamily.com -s "Just testing from the server"

That worked like a dream. So the Exim config is working fine, but the mail program doesn't know to go to the SMTP server rather than delivering locally.

Digging into the docs I figured out that I needed to make sure that the "local_domains" parameter was set correctly. I edited /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim4-config_listmacrosdefs and changed the local_domains parameter to be empty. I re-ran:

sudo update-exim4.conf

...and tried again. It worked. Yeah!

Getting Ready For John Hegley

2011-09-28T19:22:00.002+01:00

Went to the Manchester Museum today with the boys. We were taking a look at the Living Worlds exhibit in preparation for them going to see John Hegley next week. I wish I could go along.

Manchester Jelly

2011-09-23T19:22:00.004+01:00

Today I spent the day working from Manchester Jelly. It was quite an interesting day. I definitely felt the outsider working for "the man". I wasn't quite sure how much we were suppose to be chatting about things. The conversation came and went. Sometimes there were conversations about WordPress, VAT returns, charge out rates. Sometimes there were Trappist like silences. I think that if there becomes a core of people who turn up reasonably regularly then some common shared background will emerge and conversation is likely to flow more smoothly. Oh, and I did manage to have a reasonably productive day!

Make Vibrobot

2011-09-21T22:27:00.003+01:00

#2 son and I have just finshing making the Make Magazine Vibrobot. We used a metal shoe polish tin as we couldn't find a metal sweets tin. The shoe polish tin was circular so the cable ties wouldn't hold the motor in place. #2 son solved the problem "use duct tape". I have taught him well!

foursquare

2011-09-20T20:50:00.003+01:00

I've been playing with foursquare recently. It is quite good fun, but I have no friends. If you are on foursquare and you know me, you can add me as a friend.

Tooth Fairy Arrives

2011-09-19T08:21:00.003+01:00

Son #2's first two teeth both fell out on the same day yesterday. The tooth fairy came over night. Given #1 son's common reading of Wikipedia as the Source of Truth I hope he stays off the topic.

Minecraft Mod Manager

2011-09-18T09:54:00.003+01:00

Son #1 has got hugely into Minecraft recently. As a result son #2 is now interested in it also, but that's a different story. I've been roped in as the tech support to install all the "mods". Installing mods involves unpacking and repacking the contents of the minecraft.jar file and moving resources about in your minecraft folder. This is too tricky for a nine-year-old to do reliably at the moment. I've started writing a python script to automate the process. I had a quick goolge to see if I could find someone solving this problem already but didn't find anything.

Send and Receive SMS with Python

2011-04-30T08:41:00.026+01:00

I was thinking about writing a text-based game similar to the classic Fighting Fantasy books, but using SMS as the delivery mechanism. To do that I would need a way to send and receive SMS text messages to and from a server. As a challenge to see how that would work I wanted to write a prototype that would look like this:

CPU>>User: "Hello! What is your name?"

User>>CPU: "Fred"

CPU>>User: "Nice to meet you Fred"

The program itself is obviously easy. The problem is how to do the input and output over SMS. On to Google to see if I could find anything. Second link down on my first search I found the Active State code recipe 'Send and receive SMS messages using TextMagic'. It had a nice looking python package available. Reading the TextMagic website it seems that the only way to get started is to buy 200 SMS credits for £20. Hmm a little pricey as a barrier to entry.

I remember using Clickatell for this sort of thing ages ago. I took a look back at their site. The reality-check came in pretty quickly as Clickatell was going to cost minimum of €100 to set up and then €25 per month to run. So, back to TextMagic. And then I found out how to sign up for a free trial account!

With the free trial set up the next job was to set up the python environment. I use virtualenv to keep my python installation clean. To get started therefore created a new virtualenv.

$ virtualenv sms

$ source sms/bin/activate

I then installed the PyTextMagicSMS package.

$ sms/bin/easy_install PyTextMagicSMS

The first job was to try the sample sending program:

import textmagic.client
client = textmagic.client.TextMagicClient('your_username', 'your_api_password')
result = client.send("Hello, World!", "1234567890")

...which worked a treat. Obviously change the method parameters to match your settings.

So onwards to reading the Text Magic documentation to find out how to receive a reply. There are two ways of receiving a reply. Either you can poll your in-box to see what messages you have received, or you can set a callback URL to be notified of the response. The callback URL is clearly the way to go for anything of any complexity, but just to get started we will poll the in-box.

import textmagic.client
client = textmagic.client.TextMagicClient('name', 'pw')

received_messages = client.receive(0)
messages_info = received_messages['messages']
print('%d messages in in-box' % len(messages_info))
if len(messages_info) > 0:
first_message = messages_info[0]
print("Message from: %s" % first_message['from'])
print(first_message['text'])
client.delete_reply(first_message['message_id'])

Okay, so we're getting close to a solution. I'll have one program that sends the hello part of the conversation, a second program that checks the in-box for replies and then sends the final message. Here's the sending one...

import sys
import textmagic.client


client = textmagic.client.TextMagicClient('username', 'password')
no = sys.argv[1]

result = client.send("Hello! What is your name?", no)

...and here's the receiving one...

import textmagic.client
client = textmagic.client.TextMagicClient('username', 'password')

received_messages = client.receive(0)
messages_info = received_messages['messages']
print('%d messages in in-box' % len(messages_info))
if len(messages_info) > 0:
first_message = messages_info[0]
from_no = first_message['from']
name = first_message['text']
print("Message from: %s" % from_no)
print(name)

client.send("Nice to meet you %s!" % name, from_no)
print("I have sent a reply")
client.delete_reply(first_message['message_id'])

All this needs is a main loop round it to keep polling for input and we're done.

Pennington Flash to Wigan Pier Bike Ride

2011-04-22T21:04:00.005+01:00

Had a great bike ride with the whole family today. We went from Pennington Flash to Wigan Pier. We stopped at the Dover Lock Inn on both the way out and the way back. It even had a bouncy castle in the grounds.

The only down side was that the museum at the Wigan Pier end of the ride had closed down. That did rather mean that we got to the end of the ride and there was no where to get a nice ice cream.

Still, according to the Gmaps Pedometer we made a rather impressive 13.3 miles.

Unthanks Sound Check

2011-03-30T20:53:00.002+01:00

We had an exciting trip today. Becca who teaches DS1 viola at the RNCM also plays in the band The Unthanks. They are playing at the Manchester Cathedral tonight. We went along to see the sound check. All very exciting. The boys of course thought that Becca was the star not knowing who the Unthank sisters are. Earlier on we made Mother's Day cards. I'm really not very good at teaching drawing. You Tube helped out with a video on how to draw a flower. I don't understand how when the guy on the video draws it looks really good, but when I do exactly the same thing it somehow looks crummy.

Turning Off Google Ads

2011-03-29T20:54:00.001+01:00

I'm going to take my Google Ads off this blog site. It has been an interesting experience. In three years I've had 3,000 page impressions resulting in 34 click throughs and earning me £6 pounds. When it comes down to it this is not going to pay the mortgage and I'd rather have the higher esteem of any readers by not having adverts on the site.

Check List Manefesto

2010-11-07T10:23:00.000Z

I've just finished reading the 'Check List Manifesto'. Good book about how to use check lists correctly to manage the risk in complex systems. Some ideas:

There are two types of check list: Do-Confrim and read-do. Use them in the correct place
Check lists need to happen at the correct pause points
You mush test check-lists before rolling them out
They need to be fast enough to be actually used. Focus on dangerous stuff that gets missed rather than being overly comprehensive
Check lists are about team-building as much as directly performing QA

Favourite Kids' Polar Explorers Book

2010-11-02T22:39:00.000Z

I had trouble finding this on Amazon the other day. For the record, my current favourite book on polar explorers aimed at children is 'Polar Adventures' by Paul Dowswell.

Moving to BT Infinity Broadband

2010-10-24T21:05:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow I'm moving from my Demon ADSL network connection to BT Infinity Broadband. I wanted to do a quick test to see how much better this made my network link. I did a few tests:

(1) Simple Ping to the BBC




ping -n 20 news.bbc.co.uk

Ping statistics for 212.58.244.59:
Packets: Sent = 20, Received = 20, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

    Minimum = 39ms, Maximum = 40ms, Average = 39ms

(2) Trace Route to the BBC


Tracing route to newswww.bbc.net.uk [212.58.244.59]

over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 60 ms 99 ms 99 ms 192.168.1.254

 2    39 ms    40 ms    39 ms  anchor-access-4-s2018.router.demon.net [194.217.
23.69]

 3    40 ms    39 ms    39 ms  anchor-inside-3-g5-0-2.router.demon.net [194.159
.161.90]

4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 42 ms 39 ms 39 ms bbc-vip104.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.59]
Trace complete.

(3) Getting a 15meg file from my Rimu Hosting hosted server

scp -v -P 9999 dave@myhost.com:goo.tar . 2>&1 | tee time.txt
...

Transferred: sent 5408, received 15695080 bytes, in 28.0 seconds
Bytes per second: sent 193.1, received 560422.6

(4) Sending a 15meg file from to Rimu Hosting hosted server

scp -v -P 9999 goo2.tar dave@myhost.com:. . 2>&1 | tee time.txt

Transferred: sent 15694528, received 6008 bytes, in 201.9 seconds

Bytes per second: sent 77736.8, received 29.8

That's the tests done with ADSL. Let's see how BT fibre lives up to its billing tomorrow.

VirtualBox Time and Date

2010-10-19T07:51:00.000+01:00

Learning point of the day: I use VirtualBox to run Debian for playing with Python development. I noticed that the time and date were always a long way in the past, presumably as the virtual clock didn't keep running when the virtual machine was turned off. The solution was really easy:

apt-get install ntp

Powerline Ethernet

2010-10-16T21:58:00.000+01:00

I've just got myself a pair of Solwise Powerline Network home plugs ( PL-85PE-TWIN_MK2 85mbps). Despite the 1930's house wiring they seem to be working great so far.

Pee-Day and Penguins

2010-10-13T22:24:00.000+01:00

Today boy #3 has been in 'special big-boy pants' for the first time. He did quite well for a first day with only the odd accident. Over to the wife for coping with day #2.

In unrelated news, I've been trying to get boys 1 and 2 interested in working out the economics of Club Penguin. We've got a stopwatch, and we've been timing how long it takes to earn a certain number of coins on different games. It is a work in progress so far. I emailed CP customer support to ask if they would let me have some stats for the overall games, but they said that was a trade secret. Fair enough, if a little boring, I suppose.

Manga High Maths Games

2010-10-11T21:59:00.000+01:00

The Math 4 Love blog has just pointed me at a fantastic looking site for educational maths games called Manga High. Just setting up our 'school'.

Hiking from Llanberis

2010-10-10T23:03:00.000+01:00

Just had an excellent day's hike from Llanberis over to Ogwen Cottage. I've uploaded the GPX trace on to Ever Trail.

We stayed the night in Llanberis at the very reasonable Dol Peris bunk house. In the evening the Llanberis curry house was too full for use to get in, so we ended up at the Welsh Curry House of the Year 2007. And very nice it was too.

Towersey 2010

2010-10-04T23:20:00.000+01:00

I'm late posting about our trip to the the 2010 Towersey Village Festival. Here's the things for the memory banks:

The children's story teller Tony Wilson was great
Met Pete Coe who said that he was trying to get a CD out for Christmas with all the kids songs that he did in the 2009 Towersey kids-club. Must keep an eye out for that for presents
I've been inspired to try to play the guitar in open C tuning of C-G-C-G-C-D

Running Python 2.7 on Debian

2010-10-04T23:02:00.002+01:00

Here are some quick notes about how I got Python 2.7 running on Debian. The pointers come from the Python NW Google Group and the Debian documentation.

(1) Set up the apt/sources.list file as follows:

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib

(2) Run aptitude and do an upgrade to refresh the package lists
(3) I had 45 packages to update so I installed them all
(4) That left me with python 2.6 installed
(5) Searched in aptitude for python 2.7. Marked it for installation
(6) Aptitude seemed to nicely manage all the dependencies.

With the above complete 'python --version' reports 2.6 and 'python2.7 --version' reports 2.7.

I'll keep the virtual box snapshot of the previous version about for a while just in case.

Multiplication Game they will Play

2010-10-01T19:34:00.000+01:00

At last, a mathematics multiplication learning game that the boys will actually play. Damult Dice from the Maths for Love blog.

Fixing the 'Sent Mail' Boxes

2010-09-15T21:49:00.001+01:00

The wife now sends mail from Thunderbird, the iphone natively, from the iphone safari browser google application and the full google website. When she does this the 'sent' mail ends up scattered all over. Here's how I fixed it so that all the sent mail went to the same place:

First of all I went onto the gmail website, found all the sent-like folder and amalgamated them all into one. I had

[imap]/Sent
[INBOX]/Sent
[INBOX]/Sent Items
[INBOX]/sent-mail

Sent a test mail from each location to find out where it went

The full google website went to the correct google sent folder, unsurprisingly!
Thunderbird went to the google sent folder and to [imap]/Sent. I changed this to [Google Mail]/Sent Mail, which fixed the problem of the duplicate
The iphone native app put sent in just the google folder
The iphone google app also put the email in the google folder

Check that all the clients look at the correct place to find the sent mail

The google full and iphone apps saw the sent mail correctly
The iphone native app was getting confusing with the old sent-like labels. I deleted the labels in gmail and then it all made much more sense
Thunderbird didn't really have a good solution. The 'Sent Mail' was under the [Google Mail] folder in the tree which was a little confusing

Camping in Wales

2010-08-21T11:56:00.000+01:00

Last weekend we had a great time camping at the Llyn Gwynant campsite. It had nice fields roped off from cars, we could hire canoes to go on the lake, and best of all they allow open fires. The wife and kids had a great time doing experimental cooking.

On the second day we had a very nice, and kid friendly walk up to Llyn Idwal. Finally on the way back we stopped off at Penrhyn Castle.

Iphone and HTML5 Canvas

2010-08-09T19:44:00.003+01:00

My father-in-law wants a program to mess about with the Mandelbrot set. Ideally this should work in a browser from the iphone. I'm thinking this would be a good little project to try out using the HTML5 canvas element. Any one know how well HTML5 canvas is supported on the iphone Safari browser?

#1 Son at the Opera House

2010-08-08T17:30:00.003+01:00

Waiting nervously for #1 son to appear in a show at the Manchester Opera House. He's doing a medley of songs from the Lion King after a week of drama school.

Electoral Disappointment

2010-05-05T10:44:00.001+01:00

I've just got off the phone to Manchester Council. It turns out that members of the public can't be present to witness either the count of votes or the declaration of results. I'm disappointed and rather flabbergasted. Doesn't that seem odd? I would have liked to take my son in to see democracy in action. Turns out democracy doesn't let me.

Quick Interesting Sums

2010-05-04T21:26:00.002+01:00

Here's some interesting sums that result in symmetric answers. Useful for daily maths practise as soon as the boys get good enough to complete them.

Inspirational Maths TED Talk

2010-05-03T22:41:00.001+01:00

I highly recommend anyone interesting in teaching mathematics to watch this fantastic TED talk by Dan Meyer.

UK Election Party Quiz

2010-05-03T22:35:00.003+01:00

I've just done a very interesting online quiz to figure out which party most closely matches your views in the forthcoming UK general election. In reality I'm a single issue voter about freedom in home education...i.e. I'm voting not-Labour.

EconTalk about Education

2010-04-29T21:07:00.003+01:00

Just listened to a great EconTalk podcast about the ways that testing and choice have undermined the US education system. Very interesting stuff. It seems to me concerning how the UK's 'Every Child Matters' mirrors the US 'No Child Left Behind' without really questioning the evidence.

MS Word Non-Breaking Hyphen

2010-04-21T09:53:00.003+01:00

He's a quick MS Word short cut to remember: If you want to insert a non-breaking hyphen you type CTRL+SHIFT+HYPHEN.

Kid Friendly Drop Scones

2010-04-07T10:28:00.001+01:00

Here's a link to a really simple drop scone receipe to make with the kids:

http://www.realcakes.co.uk/AgaDS.htm

Second Email Post Test - With Photo

2010-04-03T21:59:00.002+01:00

By way of a second test of the Blogger email feature I'm sending this one in with a photo attached. This is the boys with small animals at the highly recommended Reddish Vale Farm.

Testing Phone Blogging

2010-04-03T21:55:00.002+01:00

I've just set up the post-by-email feature on Blogger, so this is my first attempt at a post. I'm trying to free myself of tie-in to Twitter, Buzz etc.

Soldering at MadLab in Manchester

2010-03-21T20:32:00.002Z

Several of us went to the two soldering workshops run by Mitch Altman at MadLab in Manchester last week. We had an excellent time. Someone from the HACMan group has just posted a link to photos from the soldering sessions.

The Rope and Anchor in Woolston Quick Review

2010-01-31T21:06:00.002Z

We went to The Rope and Anchor in Woolston for Sunday lunch today. We were our three kids (2, 4 and 7) and the Grandparents. The food was traditional faire but done well. The staff were friendly and the service very efficient. The prices were also most reasonable. Great for a family pub lunch with the grandparents. Look elsewhere if you are after a sophisticated gastro-pub.

Animation Competition

2010-01-30T23:11:00.002Z

Manchester University CS department is running a schools animation competition. Despite the wording in the rules, it is open to home educated children in the UK. I've been taking a look at the acceptable animation tools before trying them out on DS #1.

Allowed tools

Tool	Website	Notes
Alice	Alice is available as a free download from www.alice.org	Designed to be a tool for students to be introduced to Object Oriented computer programming.
Scratch	Scratch is available as a free download from scratch.mit.edu	Intended to teach basic computer programming concepts.
Adobe Flash	Flash is available for download as a free 1 month trial from Adobe	Everyone knows what flash is.
Serif	http://www.serif.com	Serif DrawPlus is a drawing and animation program from Serif Ltd.
Greenfoot	Greenfoot is available as a free download from www.greenfoot.org	Greenfoot is Java-based programming environment for novice programmers

Scratch

I looked at Scratch on the grounds that nobody got dumber by picking MIT. Before I could get any examples working I had to get the Java plugin installed for Chrome. That was a big download, so I moved on to Alice.

Alice

Alice looks really promising. In particular it has a version just for younger children called Story Telling Alice. I downloaded, unzipped and ran the tutorials. In a few minutes I was merrily scaring the pants off a small boy with a field full of spiders. What looks really interesting about Alice is that while the interface uses a lot of text, you can click and drag the words, hence no typos.

I'm going to stick with Alice for a while and see how far I can get.

Moving Email to Google IMAP

2010-01-22T22:16:00.002Z

I'm moving our family email service from Spamcop to Google Apps for Domains. The main driver is that I want to have multiple email addresses on the domain, one for each family member, and that is just not an economically viable option with the Spamcop pricing model. My wife uses Thunderbird with IMAP to sync her mail. I wanted to swap the mail server underneath Thunderbird without my wife noticing. My plan was:

(1) Migrate the Spamcop IMAP folders to Google

(2) Test out the Google IMAP settings on my own version of Thunderbird

(3) Move my wife's Thunderbird settings and re-sync the client

I'll keep the Spamcop account around for a while before cancelling as a fallback position.

(1) Migrate the Spamcop IMAP folders to Google

I started following the Google reference guide to IMAP transfers. I soon discovered that my Google Apps for Domains standard edition didn't allow me to do the transfer. Luckily Google was offering me a free 30 day trial of the premier edition so I signed up to that and then kicked off the transfer. The Spamcop settings I used were:

Server Name: imap.spamcop.net

Port: 143

IMAP Path Prefix: <left empty>

Allowed connections = 1

With these settings in place I set the transfer off running, and went off to install the Thunderbird client on my PC. The next day everything had migrated fine.

(2) Test on my Thunderbird

Setting up my account on Thunderbird was very straightforward using the Google settings for IMAP.

The tests of reading the folders worked fine. I added in the Google SMTP settings and then sending mail worked fine as well.

(3) Move my wife's Thunderbird settings and re-sync the client

Having convinced myself that I had everything working I updated the settings on my wife's Thunderbird client. Initially the folders list didn't populate, but restarting Thunderbird fixed that. I don't think my wife will be able to tell the difference. I'm going to leave Spamcop running for a few months before cancelling the account.

Art of Star Wars Review: Disappointing

2010-01-20T21:45:00.003Z

The boys and I looked in on the Art of Star Wars exhibition in Manchester and unfortunately I was really underwhelmed. It was clearly set up to sell rather safe Star Wars Art (I thought it dull, kids thought it ace!) to people with £600 to spare per picture. It is a small gallery with about 15 acrylic on canvass prints. There was nothing by way of a narrative and the uber-cool member of staff gave us a look of "make sure they don't touch anything" then went back to his MacBook.

I wouldn't make a special effort to go along.

Backup Regime

2009-11-25T22:30:00.003Z

I've updated how my backup regime works and I wanted to write it all down to make sure that it is clear in my head. The overview is to make sure that I have two copies of all media as quickly as possible and then move a third backup into the cloud. I use about 1 gig of new disk space each month, mostly from pictures and videos. The steps to get this backed up are:

Put the source media, SD cards, into read only mode
Copy the media into a new folder under a single 'media' folder on my desktop with the name of the folder being the date when I'm doing the backup
Immediately copy the new folder onto an external USB hard drive
Remove the hard drive from the desk top
Kick off a backup. I'm using Jungle Disk for my cloud backups
Put the SD card into read-write mode and delete all content to free up space
That's it

I'm going to use the OVI files space I have for syncing docs between computers for the time being.

Giving up on Google Wave

2009-11-13T21:01:00.003Z

I've been playing with Google Wave for just over a week now and I think I've seen enough. I just can't find anything practical for it to do. I feels very much like a technology searching for a problem to solve. It reminds me very much of Joel Spolsky's post on Architect Astronauts.

Robert Scoble, who I don't actually follow, has a nice post pointing out that Wiki's would be a better solution to many Google Wave's supposed use cases.

Feel free to tell me I'm wrong. I'll try to keep an open mind.

Speeding up Webpage with YSlow

2009-11-03T22:11:00.004Z

I help my sister-in-law by looking after the hosting of the web site for their company 'Out and About'. After they recently updated their content I decided to have a play with Yahoo's YSlow Firefox extension to make sure I'd got everything running as smoothly as I could. There were several server related issues that I fixed quite easily. I had most problems sorting out the expires headers on the static content. I run the lighttpd webserver to host the site. In order to get the expires header I had to enable mod_expire and make sure it was the first module listed. The in the web page virtual host entry I added: expire.url = ("" => "access 1 months") ...this is to put a long expires header for the whole site contents as it is all static. With this in place YSlow scores me an "A". The initial page load takes about 4s and subsequent navigations take about 75ms while the Google Analytics component loads.

Midnight Commander for Editing on E71

2009-10-23T19:53:00.003+01:00

I use putty on the E71 to ssh into various server to do sys admin type things and also to do a little python programming remotely. I'd not found a nice unix editor to work over putty from the limited keyboard on the phone. Recently I started playing around with Midnight Commander (mc). It turns out that the internal editor to Midnight Commander, mcedit, is actually reasonably easy to use on the E71.

Geocaching on the Nokia E71

2009-10-20T21:45:00.000+01:00

I was just typing up my thoughts about how to use the Symbian Python interpreter on the Nokia E71 to write a quick and dirty Geocaching application using the phone's GPS when a Google search found 'Geocaching Live'. I'm going to give that a go first.

Review of Land of Play

2009-10-20T00:04:00.003+01:00

Our younger two kids and I, aged four and nearly two, had a very nice Monday morning at the Land of Play in Manchester's Trafford Park. The place is very new, as of October 2009, and all the equipment is practically pristine. The unique selling point of Land of Play is the electric go-karts. Both kids loved them. The four-year-old was off on his own one and I could sit on the tail fin of the two-year-old's correcting the steering as subtly as possible. There was the standard climbing activity area, of medium size compared with the others of our acquaintance. The climbing was fine for the two and four-year-old, but would have been too easy for our seven-year-old.

The entrance fee was very reasonable. It was about £4.50 each after a 10% discount coupon that the Google Maps entry for the company offered me. The kart rides cost another £1 each, but you got a reasonable length go for the money. It has a cafe serving reasonably priced, if basic grub.

The main disappointment for me was that the environment didn't manage to shake off the feeling of industrial park. Sure it was clean, but there was only a passing attempt made at child-friendly decoration. That said I think we liked it enough to make another visit.

Children's Bingo Template

2009-10-14T11:24:00.004+01:00

There are loads of bingo templates/generators, but these are my favourite bingo cards for 4-5 year olds.

Fire Balloons

2009-10-02T19:22:00.005+01:00

Inspired by Roald Dahl's 'Danny Champion of the World', we've decided that our current project is to make a fire balloon. In the book, Danny and his father make a balloon out of tissue paper, wire and a cotton wool ball soaked in meths. Our first attempt copied this pattern. We used fuse wire to hold the wool and made a cylindrical envelope out of tissue paper. Unfortunately on an attempted launch we had a spectacular, if predictable failure with the tissue paper going up in flames.

There has been many discussions about the causes of the failure. The key problem seems to have been that the fuse wire was rigid enough to support a dry ball of cotton wool but the weight of the meths caused the wire to bend. Design efforts are now focusing on the fuel-holding mechanism. One theory is that we can use wooden cocktail sticks. The objection is that the wood will burn through before the meths has run out. We think we're going to try an experiment to find out. That should be fun!

DNS Trouble

2009-09-27T20:22:00.004+01:00

I was alerted by the nice people at SiteUptime that my website had stopped working at about 7:30am this morning. I had planned to go jogging with my dad and had friends coming over for lunch. I just had time to get on to putty to see if I could see what was going on. Lighttpd wouldn't start -- complaining that it couldn't resolve the domain name. A few ping attempts later it was clear that nothing would resolve. I didn't have time to figure out what had happened, but the support at RimuHosting is really superb. I sent them a support ticket and within 30 minutes their techie had updated my /etc/resolve.conf with their newest DNS cache servers and everything was working again. I can't recommend RimuHosting highly enough! They have a nice script to fix the resolv.conf in case you were wondering :-)

First Geocache Published

2009-09-21T20:03:00.000+01:00

In a very proud family moment we've just published our first ever Geocache. You can find it on the Geocaching web site with the ID GX1YXPO. The first two people have already found it. The first one got to it at 0745 the morning after the listing went live. A Monday too!

How to Copy URL from Symbian Web Browser

2009-09-21T12:35:00.003+01:00

I've finally figured out how to cut'n'paste from the standard Symbian Web Browser on my E71 phone. On the E61, my previous phone, I installed the Opera browser which gave me easy access to copy the current URL. I've not bothered to install Opera on the new phone. The Symbian browser lets you look at the current page URL using the Tools >> Page Info setting but has no way of copying. The solution I found was to bookmark the page that I wanted the URL of and then edit the bookmark. From the edit bookmark page a simple CTRL-A and CTRL-C did the trick.

Maths Lament and Dice Games

2009-09-09T22:28:00.003+01:00

One of the home ed lists I'm on pointed me at this wonderful maths essay: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf It is the sort of thing that makes you (ok, makes *me*) yearn to be a mathematitican. A passage half-way through got me thinking: "SIMPLICIO: Then what should we do with young children in math class? SALVIATI: Play games! Teach them Chess and Go, Hex and Backgammon, Sprouts and Nim, whatever. Make up a game. Do puzzles. Expose them to situations where deductive reasoning is necessary. Don’t worry about notation and technique, help them to become active and creative mathematical thinkers." That struck a chord. Our eldest is now seven and although very good at mental addition and subtraction, we're struggling to get him interested in multiplications or any writing. (I know I shouldn't worry, but that's easier said than done.) Then I had an idea. He loves cricket, could I make up a game that would need multiplication and involved cricket. What I came up with was to throw three six-sided die and multiply the resulting numbers to get each batsman's score. E.g {2, 4, 3} results in a score of 24. You then of course need to add up the scores to get the team result. This game in hand #1 son wrote down all of the names of the English and Australian cricket teams (I helped with spelling) and did lots of multiplication. Past experience says this game will stick for a week or two then we'll be on to the next thing. Has anyone got any pointers to other games that need multiplication as part of the game play? Any suggestions for other simple dice-based sports simulations?

E71 New Phone and Ovi

2009-08-26T20:08:00.002+01:00

I have a new nokia E71 for my birthday from my ever-loving wife and it is great. Will post more later about things I'm going to put on it. For now I'm signing up for 'Ovi' from nokia, http://www.ovi.com. I wanted something to sync up file from my PC and phone. I've signed up to a phone account and got some desktop software installed on the PC. I'll try it out over the next couple of days and report back here on how I get on.

apt gpg Key Problem

2009-06-24T23:19:00.002+01:00

I run a few Debian machines and I use aptitude on all of them to keep the packages up to date. Recently on one machine only I've been getting gpg key errors. In fact it is the server that I have with Rimu Hosting (great guys) that suddenly started presenting the error:

W: GPG error: http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 9AA38DCD55BE302B W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs: 9AA38DCD55BE302B

To list the keys that I know about I run 'apt-key list':

/etc/apt/trusted.gpg -------------------- pub 1024D/2D230C5F 2006-01-03 [expired: 2007-02-07] uid Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006) pub 1024D/6070D3A1 2006-11-20 [expires: 2009-07-01] uid Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) pub 1024D/ADB11277 2006-09-17 uid Etch Stable Release Key pub 1024D/BBE55AB3 2007-03-31 [expires: 2010-03-30] uid Debian-Volatile Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) sub 2048g/36CA98F3 2007-03-31 [expires: 2010-03-30]

Like the program says, I'm missing a key. I tried the keyserver to import the key: sudo gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key 55BE302B ...and then export that key into apt's key list: sudo gpg -a --export 55BE302B | sudo apt-key add - That done, I run aptitude and I can now happily install my security updates.

Notes from Linux Magazine - May 2009

2009-05-05T22:18:00.002+01:00

Graphics design book using FLOSS tools available from http://en.flossmanuals.net
Hyperic HQ looks an interesting tool for enterprise monitoring.
'Beginning Portable Shell Scripting' from Apress looks like a good book.
WebHTB is a tool to manage network bandwidth allocation, although it does seem to need kernel modules compiled in first.
agedu is a handy tool for finding old files in a file system
Here's a list of fuzzing tools:<
- mangleme
- browser fuzzer 2
- fzem
- fsfuzzer
- FileP
- ProxyFuzz
- Peach Fuzzing Platform
- GPF
- SPIKE
- QueFuzz
Fsniper processes new and updated files for you
Chandler is interesting again. Might be the way to put the calendar, email and contact lists for the family together. Might need to run a Chandler Hub.
Security web sites to take a look at
- InvisibleThings
- Matasano
- The Fake Name Generator
- The Milw0rm exploit database
Take a look at the digital subscription options at http://www.linux-magazine.com/DigiSub
Linux Magazine is published from Manchester. Add that to the list of reasons for civic pride.

How did the man at the Termini Station in Rome con us by typing in a number into the ticket machine?

2009-05-04T22:24:00.002+01:00

The wife and I recently went to Rome for our tenth wedding anniversary. As is typical of our travels without children, we didn't really leave enough time to get from the hotel to the airport to get back home. We were doing battle with the automated ticket machine at the Termini station when a man approached us and offered to help. Now the con-artist alarm bell should have been going off at this point, but we were really late and so we ignored it. He pressed the buttons and got the ticket that we wanted for the correct price. Only one thing was odd: as part of the booking process he typed some number into the automatic ticket machine. Neither the wife nor I were quick enough to see what the number was for. It was about 6-10 digits and he had memorized it. We can't see how we've been conned here but it must have happened. My wife thinks it was a loyalty card scheme. I'm not convinced. Anyone with any ideas please leave a comment?

'Upgrade' Killed my ADSL

2009-04-26T20:11:00.001+01:00

My ISP upgraded my ADSL to version 2+ and now my router won't connect. I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps of rebooting and unplugging the ADSL wire to no avail. Next I got on the phone to my ISP, Demon. Demon ran line checks during which I was disconnected. Humph! Calling back I had to wait in the queue again. Try to be calm. Take deep breaths. Demon persuaded me to buy three new micro-filters which had no effect. Finally they told me that they would have to pass the call to a BT engineer. To top it all they asked me to pre-approve that I would pay £170 if BT found that the fault originated in my house. Naturally enough I declined their kind offer. Only thing now is to wait until Monday to see if they can fix it. Until then we're back to 1993 and dial-up internet.

E61 Mercurial Solution

2009-04-24T21:18:00.006+01:00

Mercurial to version control files on my E61 phone. That would be sweet. I could edit text in PED then push and pull changes from my server using SSH. Only problem is that, as of writing, there is no mercurial client for the Symbian S60v3 operating system. Mercurial is a combination of Python and C code. In my dreams of spare-time nirvana I could attempt a port to S60, but realistically that isn't going to happen. I need a plan B.

Engineering Compromise

So, I'm not going to be able to have a command-line like experience of mercurial on my E61. What about the next best thing? My next idea was to use putty to: (1) ssh into a directory on my linux server (2) Update the mercurial repos there (3) Grab all the files from the linux server to the phone (4) Make edits on the phone (5) Upload the modified files back to the linux server (6) From putty on the linux server commit the changes into mercurial I've got this working. The tricky bit was to decide what to use to move the files about. I've ended up with MobyExplorer doing FTP to my local linux box. Inside the firewall I felt the FTP was safe enough. I'm a little nervous at opening up an FTP server on my public facing boxes. I had to set up secure FTP.

Secure FTP Set Up

I installed the Very Secure FTP Server (vsftpd) using aptitude. I made the following changes to the config in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf (1) local_enable=YES (2) write_enable=YES (3) anonymous_enable=NO (4) chroot_local_user=YES ...then restart the server with sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Why does cygwin pick up 'f' as my home drive?

2009-04-24T21:12:00.001+01:00

I installed cygwin on my new work laptop. For some reason when ever I ran cygwin it said:

mkdir: cannot create directory `/cygdrive/f': No such file or directory
Copying skeleton files.
These files are for the user to personalise
their cygwin experience.

These will never be overwritten.

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

bash: cd: /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory
Your group name is currently "mkgroup_l_d". This indicates that not
all domain users and groups are listed in the /etc/passwd and
/etc/group files.
See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for example, run
mkpasswd -l -d > /etc/passwd
mkgroup  -l -d > /etc/group

This message is only displayed once (unless you recreate /etc/group)
and can be safely ignored.
cp: cannot create regular file `/cygdrive/f/group.mkgroup_l_d': No such file or
directory

So, I must have got something set up incorrectly. Looking at the environment variables I see:

$ set
...lots of stuff
HOME=/cygdrive/f
...more stuff

So where is HOME set? The work laptop is running Vista and I'm farily new to it. Looked in Control Panel >> System >> Advanced System Settings >> Environment Variables, but there was no reference to HOME. Next stop was Google, obviously. It told me to edit /etc/passwd. Sure enough there was a setting against my username for /cygdrive/f. I changed it to /cygdrive/c/dave and it all worked great.

Video Editting Software

2009-03-28T15:01:00.001Z

We were going to visit the National Media Museum, but due to son #2 getting a stomach bug on Saturday night that wasn't to be. Instead we made a video diary of the weekend. My camera records quicktime (.mov) files. I had about twenty of these to splice together by the end of the weekend. I didn't have a video editing program to use. A little wikipedia led me to avidemux. This seemed lightweight and just right for what I needed. To get a rough cut done to show the wife I just appended the files together. This worked fine, but after about three minutes the sound was a long way out of sync with the video. A quick scan of the avidemux wiki suggested I do Audio->Build VBR Time Map. I tried that but it didn't seem to do anything. Clicking somewhat at random, I don't know much about video, I tired Tools->Rebuild I & B Frames. That didn't help. I'm parking this one for now. See if inspiration strikes while doing the tidying up.

Debian NSLU2 Stopped Working

2009-03-15T21:59:00.008Z

My slug, NSLU2, stopped working. The power went off and it didn't come back on after booting. It just sat there with the ready light on yellow and the ethernet on green, but not showing anything on the disk 1 light. I couldn't ssh to it or ping it. Google led me to the NSLU2-linux-debian-readme page. This led me to suspect something wrong during booting. I turned off the slug and attached the USB drive to my debian PC. In the procees the entire USB hub stopped working. If I took the USB hard drive out the USB hub started working again. So I rebooted into windows, put the USB drive in and got an instant blue screen of death. Not good. Last attempt I plugged the LaCie USB drive into my laptop. The laptop didn't die, but windows said "Please insert disk" when I tried to browse to it. I'm thinking it is dead. Looks like I need to be buying a new USB hard drive and re-installing debian on the slug. If anyone has a better idea please leave a comment!

Using my Slug as a Mercurial Repos

2008-10-01T21:14:00.000+01:00

I've bought a slug inspired by the now defunct Linux Reality podcast. It had been hanging around for a while but now I've found something worthwhile to use it for. I've been using Mercurial for distributed version control and the slug makes a great central repos. I've got Debian etch running on the slug and mercurial was a simple apt-get away (actually I use aptitude to manage the packages). With mercurial installed and a little setting up of ssh keys I'm good to go. I simply have a single mercurial user on the slug and make sure for any files that I edit I first pull from the mercurial user and when done push back. I can now edit the same files from work, various computers at home and at the inlaws and keep the whole thing under control. Now, if only I could get a symbian S60 version of mercurial going...

Age of Empires

2008-05-14T08:40:00.003+01:00

My oldest son loves Age of Empires II, so I decided to see what fun we could have hacking with the game.

Before kids I spent too much time playing Age of Empires II. Since kids I've been a recovering adict, keeping well away from temptation as I feared that one hit would lead me down a slippery slope to the AOE monster eating my free/sleeping time. Recently however my oldest son has started playing AoE2 himself, influenced by his mother I should explain. He started out on the scenario levels becoming a great fan of Gengis Khan, Joan of Arc and friends. It was his idea to start hacking with AoE2. We went on a visit to Warwick castle and the next day he suggested that it would be great if we could play a Warwick castle game on AoE2. A little playing with the scenario builder and we had a passable map of Warwick castle with the forces of Ricard Earl of Warwick lined up against the Duke of Hastings and Edward 4th. My son was in charge of deciding the sizes and composition of the various forces and, being only five, he made quite sure they were heavily biased in the human player's favour. We got this set up and ran the game. At first we couldn't get the two sides to fight each other. Then we found the dipolomacy settings and with the help of drawing up the grid of who was with who, got the correct forces to engage.

My son seemed quite happy with the set up we had. He'd get his huge band of troops, march up on the hapless enemy and win decisively. I was disappointed with the way that the computer controlled forces did little to defend themselves. They just stood about and waited for the enevitable anihilation. A little digging and I found that AoE2 has a scriptable AI language and there are lots of people writing AoE2 scripts at www.aiscripters.com. So now I have my next hacking mission: learn the AoE2 scripting language and start coding some things in it. Meanwhile, my son has this idea for a "build the Great Wall of China" scenario.

Working with the Grain

2008-04-29T22:52:00.003+01:00

Re-reading my previous posts it occurs to me that I was assuming that spending time with my family was taking time away from doing cool hacker stuff. I've missed a trick there. What I should have been looking for was the win-win. If the things you do with your kids are cool hacks at the same time then the hours are not zero sum. So, shifting focus, my search changes from looking for ways to hack in the spare moments around the kids to looking for ways to hack with the kids.

What would constitute a hack with the kids? Well it has to be something to do with problem solving, being creative, and getting immersed in a topic. The difficulty is finding the topic. Its got to be something where both me and my kids are interested. It seems patronizing to get the kids to repeat experiments out of kits without some wider motivation.

So that's what I'm going to try to do. If you have an idea for a topic then post a comment.

Chess Griffin Becomes a DadHacker

2008-04-04T13:00:00.001+01:00

Chess Griffin, presenter of the fabulous Linux Reality Podcast, has announced that he's stopping podcasting after 100 shows to have more spare time to spend with his family. This is the classic DadHacker dilemma -- doing something technically cool just takes up so much time. I can't even keep posting to a blog up to much speed never mind a podcast. If I can think of a answer that allows both family and techie things to happen simultaneously I'm sure I'll make my fortune somehow.

Update on DadHacking

2008-03-14T07:59:00.000Z

So I've been busy on the "Dad" side of DadHacker recently. Baby v.3.0 arrived before Christmas. Seeing as writing blog posts fitted under the "Hacker" remit, things have been somewhat quiet here recently. No time for hacking, but at least some time for thinking. What I've been thinking about is a return to Smalltalk. Smalltalk was my object-oriented roots more than fifteen years ago. Recently I've discovered the Seaside web-framework and it is really intriguing. Being smalltalk development, it is tied to a full-sized machine rather than my phone. There is hope as seaside has a web-based development UI. I wonder how that would run on my nokia symbian opera web-browser.

Using SSH from the Nokia E61

2007-10-28T08:38:00.001Z

Using putty as an SSH client from my Nokia E61 gives me a way to unblock development road-blocks that the phone by itself can solve.

So far I've been trying to do development on my Nokia E61 phone hand-set. Having got caught up by the pain of trying to view the PDF of the API documentation on the phone I've decided to relax the rules of my challenge somewhat. As I've got a Debian virtual host from Rimu Hosting. I'm going to extend the definition of "using the phone as a development environment", to include connecting to a Linux box from the phone.

I had SSH set up already on the server so I grabbed the Symbian port of putty from http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/

The install was very smooth over-the-air. To my shame I don't have the public-key authentication turned on, but then my server doesn't hold anything valuable. The putty implementation is very good. The most important thing to learn is that to send a TAB character you need to press CTRL-i, that way you can do the tab-completion in bash and save yourself a lot of typing. Other odd characters I grab from the "Chr" menu button so that I can get the angle-brackets and pipe-character.

The other key that causes problems is the escape-key. This is a particular problem when editing with vi. The only way I've found to do this is to use the putty menu to send a special character. This slows me down a bit but is not the end of the world.

With the putty client set-up I have given myself a way out of dead-ends on the phone alone. Now I'm going to see if I can get the Nokia python API docs in a phone-readable form.

A Talking Phone, with a Little Help

2007-09-26T22:39:00.001+01:00

Thanks to cyke64 who read my previous post about my troubles with getting the Nokia python API doc in a phone-readable form. Cyke6f pointed me at the doc as a text file at http://cyke64.googlepages.com/PythonForS60_1_4_0_doc.txt

I still had some fun and games downloading this. My normally reliable Opera browser had a fit when clicking the link. It went into install-a-program mode and then just hung. I had hoped that I could find the downloaded file somewhere on the system, but several minutes searching yielded nothing. Swapping to the Nokia browser worked fine, but it lacks any feature to save a copy locally so I have to reload every time.

With the doc available, the solution to my challenge was within easy reach. The quick speech-synthesis program goes like this:

import audio
audio.say("hello world")

Now I've got that far the question is what next. The real interesting thing I'm aiming for is to combine data from the web with voice-synthesis to give me audio notifications while driving - traffic news being the obvious first application. So, next step: write a python app to download a web-page.

Trying to Convert the Symbian Python API from PDF to Text

2007-09-23T10:03:00.001+01:00

I'm still determined to boot-strap my python development environment on my Nokia E61 phone. By boot-strap I mean use only the phone itself to set-up the environment and not resort to an intermediate PC. Somewhat surprisingly the thing that is currently blocking my path is that the API doc for the Nokia python environment is in PDF format and I can't read it on my phone. I've tried to find a PDF reader for the phone with no luck. Now I'm trying to convert the PDF to something I can read.

My first stop was the adobe web page where I found their on-line tools page . This gave me two promising looking options. Either I could give them a URL to the PDF and they would convert it into text for me, or I could email in the PDF file and they would mail me back the text.

The paste-a-URL option highlights a problem that I commonly have when browsing on my phone: there is no option to view the source of a page. The Adobe form needed a URL. The URL was hidden in sourceforge's download system. My preferred browser on the E61 is Opera. Opera lets you cut and paste the URL of the page that you are currently on, but there is no way to get the address of other links on the page. The phone's built-in browser doesn't even let you cut and paste the current URL,

I was beaten by the URL option so on to the email. I had successfully downloaded the PDF so emailing it off should be straightforward. I would have to use the built-in email client as the Google mobile mail client that I prefer doesn't let you add attachments. I'd done that before so my settings were still available. I fired off the email to pdf2txt@adobe.com as directed. I closed the Nokia mail client and jumped back to the Google mail app. With baited breath I pressed refresh. The reply was already there...but it was just an email bounce with "unknown user". Hmph! I mailed Adobe for help but I'm not holding my breath.

Time for a new approach. Here's my thinking: the PDF must have been created from some source code

PDF Reader on the Nokia E61 Phone

2007-09-22T16:46:00.001+01:00

I'm right now struck in a rather extreme example of the DadHacker-needs-to-be-mobile theory. I'm on my commute into work and there has been a crash and the traffic has just stopped. Given I have now some free hacking time and a 3G network link I'll put the theory into practise.

In my quest to make my phone say "Hello World!" using python and no other computing power than that available on my Nokia E61 I've got to the point where I need a PDF reader in order to read the standard Symbian python docs. By default the E61 doesn't have a PDF reader. Checking out the All About Symbian forums I quickly find two options: one from Nokia and another called PDF+ from mBrain Software.

Trying the Nokia one first. I downloaded the sis file from the Nokia Asia site but the installation failed. Don't know why, but it is enough to make me try PDF+.

Trying the PDF+ reader from mbrains, but on clicking the sis link the browser displays the binary on the screen. I guess that the mime type is wrong on their server.

Trying the adobe site directly. Took some searching and headed off to "Reader LE". That link sends me off to a "partner site". This site gives me an option to buy but no preview. Sigh.

OK. Time for a re-think. Next time I'll try to get a text version of the API docs from somewhere. For now the traffic is moving and I'm off to work.

Getting the Python Nokia API Doc on my Phone

2007-09-20T22:21:00.001+01:00

So I'm getting my hand-held development environment together, albeit slowly. I've got my python interpreter, easyedit lets me edit the files next thing I need is some doc available on my phone.

The first place I went to look was Google, of course. "s60 python api doc" first of all gives me a couple of links to the LightBlue bluetooth API project which is not what I'm looking for. The next link is to Nokia forum so that looks promising but turns out to be an old PDF file. Fifth link down I find a link to the Nokia open-source wiki at http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/PyS60_documentation.

Disapointingly the latest doc available is in PDF format which I can't read on my phone. Still, I've downloaded the PDF and I'll look for a reader.

Ron Stevens on Mobile Python

2007-09-17T22:14:00.001+01:00

Ron Stevens in his latest Python411 podcast talked about the future of python as a programming language to develop apps for mobile phones - see http://www.awaretek.com/python/ .

I'm interested in this avenue, but I think Ron missed an important first step. Rather than speech recognition I'd like to get my phone to do speech synthesis. Image the app: you're driving home on your daily commute when you phone tells you that it has been monitoring the traffic reports on the web and suggests that you take an alternative route. I have a feeling I've seen an API or library for the nokia/symbian python that lets you generate a voice. I think I'll take a shot at a spoken "Hello World" app.

Bootstrap Python Dev Environment on Symbian Phone

2007-09-12T23:00:00.001+01:00

I wanted to get a dev env for python on my nokia e61. What I had in mind was an editor that I could use to type up python code on the phone which I could then run using the nokia python interpreter. Installing the python sis file from nokia was easy. The hard part was finding something to edit files in e:\Python. In the end I came across "easyedit" on the nokia forums. The sis file is at:

http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?p=307143

It installed quite nicely. My little script of:

import appuifw

f = appuifw.Form([])
appuifw.title = 'dave'
title = appuifw.app.title
appuifw.note(u'ERE IAM JH\n' + title, 'info')

...works a treat.

DadHacker Needs to be Mobile

2007-05-12T09:09:00.001+01:00

Now that #1 son is nearly five my home laptop is prety much taken up full time with his computer games and #2 son who is just two, but when asked answers for "three", has started taking over the aging home desktop to copy #1. That leaves me with little room to code at home and I didn't want to mess about on my work laptop. My attempted solution to the problem was to travel as light as possible. Free time being scarce for the DadHacker I wanted to have a way of coding as easily as possible to fill in any time-gap. In the hope of doing this I've got myself a Nokia E61 phone. It has a QWERTY keyboard, gameboy-thumbs style, runs the symbian os and also has a python interpreter that runs right on the phone. Thinking that just coding on the phone might not be enough I also got myself a linux virtual private server running debian thaty I can ssh to from the phone. Next step is to figure out just how much I can get done with my thumbs alone.

Welcome to DadHacker

2007-05-10T19:56:00.001+01:00

This is a site about my attempts to keep coding in the time left over from being a GoodDad and working to pay the mortgage. Don't get me wrong, being a dad is the best thing in the world: life-enhancing fun, but it doesn't half take up a lot of time. Coding also is a lot of fun and also takes up a lot of time. The idea for this site was to track my attempts to keep my coding-foo going while being a GoodDad.