Ubuntu 9.04 released

Just received and email by way of the Tayside LUG saying that the new version of Ubuntu, 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope), has just been officially released. The Ubuntu site is very slow so I’m guessing that it is true. Thankfully I upgraded to the release candidate earlier this week so I don’t have to deal with slow package downloads.

Just a heads up to the Ubuntu users out there.

MP3FS

MP3FS is a read-only FUSE filesystem which transcodes audio formats (currently FLAC) to MP3 on the fly when opened and read. This was written to enable me to use my FLAC collection with software and/or hardware which only understands MP3. e.g. gmediaserver to a netgear MP101 mp3 player.

It is also a novel alternative to traditional mp3 encoder applications. Just use your favorite file browser to select the files you want encoded and copy them somewhere!

Epic win!

Robot updated again

I have the code written for the motor shield that I am using. It is completely untested as the shield is still in America someplace. LadyAda did some fantastic work with the shield and the library for it. Makes it so simple to control motors.

Version 3 of the code here.

Robot Progress

I have the motors moving on my robot chassis. Granted, it is me giving the motors power directly and not using any form of computer control but at least i know the motors work. My earlier hypothesis about the motor control circuitry was false. The switching part of the original circuit doesn’t make any sense to me (though my electronics-fu is poor) so I decided to probe the motors themselves. Switching direction is as simple as switching polarity. This makes my homebrew controller more difficult to create so I have decided to use the motor controller shield for the arduino. Yeah, its not as hacky as I would have liked but it is better than me accidently frying something.

Pdflatex and bibtex

Just had a small problem getting a citation to work in my dissertation. I am using pdflatex to render my dissertation into pdf format and bibtex to handle the references.

The trick is to not use the file extension of the tex file. If your file was called file.tex (yay imagination) you would do

pdflatex file
bibtex file
pdflatex file
pdflatex file

Running pdflatex multiple times is necessary to make sure everything is included in the final document.

Source (Not using Lyx so I have no idea about the top part)

Now with security

I have finally gotten off my ass and put SSL security on this site. The certificate is self signed which means that any competent web browser will throw a fit but you should be able to add an exception if you care that much about security and privacy. I’m too cheap to shell out for a proper certificate from someone like Verisign.

University Wearable Computing Project – Assistance requested

As part of my university course I have to do a research project on something of my choosing. Wearable computing is something that interests me and so I have chosen to perform some research into the current state of wearable computing as well as produce a prototype software application for a web based wearable computing system.

As such, I am requesting some assistance with this project. First off, I would like to hear what your thoughts are on wearable computing, the pros, cons etc. I also request any good sources of information related to wearable computing, ideally books or journal articles, stuff that can be referenced in a dissertation. Now I’m not asking you to do the research for me, just to throw any good sources my way, if you have them.

For the prototype application, I’m looking to recruit some testers. Testers must have access to some form of webserver running PHP and possibly MySQL. This is not required as yet, just a heads up to those who may be interested.

If you want to be credited as helping me with this project, say so, all others will rename anonymous. Also, the results of the research will be published in some form and I will give out the link here.

Command Line Fu

Finally Digg comes up with something useful. Command-Line-Fu is a site that has a ton of useful Unix (and occasionally Windows) commands.

For the adventurous (make sure you have a backup, please):

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click*

Random images as a background in HTML

A nice wee gem that Alex Peake informed me was possible. The problem: you want a randomly chosen image as a background but don’t want duplication in your css.

In your css file:

background-image: url('images/background.php');

Create the file referenced above with this code:

<?php
    $numofimages = count(glob("*.jpg"));
    $imagenum = rand(1, $numofimages);

    header("Content-Type: image/jpeg\n");
    header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");

    $fp=fopen("headerimage". $imagenum .".jpg" , "r");
    fpassthru($fp);
?>

and voila, random images as a background with the bonus of being able to throw in a new image without having to do any more coding.

This code assumes that your images are called headerimageX.jpg where X is a number.

Robot updated

Just a quick post to say that my robot code has been updated to communicate with my arduino. Learned some more about Python as well, mostly relating to how badly I suck at it. Can’t get object orientation to work with modules but objects are not necessary for this. Straight procedural code is all that is required, for the moment.

Download robot code

Download arduino code

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