Bob the Cob & other tails

Oh, long time since I last posted. Therefore there’s a lot to say, which means I probably won’t get much work done tonight. In fact, that last sentence, and this one even more so, is probably just wasting even more time I could have spent on work.

When I say work, I mean own projects.

Work, as in my paid employment, is going well. It’s for a small web design company based in Oxon Business Park, Shrewsbury. Mutiny Design, and sister company re-route.co.uk, who do SEO, based in the same office, is backed by an organisation with quite a large annual turnover. The main benefit of this for me is that I’ll nearly always get paid on time.

Sharing an office with re-route.co.uk also means I get to learn a lot about SEO, as those who know something about it can probably tell.

Anyhow, I’m enjoying work, which is probably a good thing. Even so, I still think about my old job quite a bit. Actually, I haven’t touched a horse or done anything vaulting related for about 2 months. Given I’m supposed to be competing in 2 weeks with the Clwyd team, I don’t think I’m going to do much good. Still, Di said it’s either me or her and if she did it I’d have to lunge. Either way, I get to be a little humiliated!

There’s the vaulting holiday this weekend at Clwyd anyway. I intend to go, so long as I don’t have any more little accidents on the bicycle before then…

I think it’d be awsum to have a vaulting barrel in the garden. At least it would if I had a garden. I suppose there might be someone nearby who could accommodate such an ugly mass of steel in theirs but I haven’t the inclination to go round asking.

And finally! At least I think so…

The projects I mentioned at the start are: PHPeer - a Gnutella2 implementation in PHP - and ShrewsburyDIY (another excellent opportunity to include a link!).

PHPeer is progressing well. I can handle many of the processing that are required for what I want (not much, TBH - there’s already plenty of perfectly adequate software out there). And what do I want? Right now, another glass of milk. But from PHPeer, ability to search by specific hash (not started) or keywords (mostly done), the ability to download preview files (done, but needs changing to run in a child/separate process) and the ability to send this data via an API (mostly done).

I went vaulting today with the Perry group. Got there alright, vaulting well, got home fine. Rather cold weather (for the UK), not unusual for this time of year, but none of the snow that was forecast.

Not to bore folk with too many details but this one’s of relative importance: I was wearing my red Clwyd Special Riding Centre jumper. I say it’s of relative importance because, we concluded, this may have been the reason why the Spanner horse took an apparently disliking to me, and me only, and only when I was trying run out to him in canter. Nevermind, I always did prefer blue anyway.

I’d also like to report that I did a fairly decent cartwheel. That is I landed on my feet rather than my face. That, to me, is good, nevermind the rest of it!

Finally, Andrew’s opinion of the CVI** in Saumur appears positive. Probably, then, worth the effort of going up to the post office for the form to apply for a passport.

So, anyhow, afterwards I spent an hour (’uur’ in Dutch, I’d like to point out for no particular reason) wandering the streets of Shrewsbury (’Yr Amwythig’ in Cymraeg (Welsh) - see it on the Welsh map here: http://sucs.org/~rollercow/cyosm/ - I don’t see Google Maps doing that!) with a GPS receiver taking seemingly random photographs with the camera in the other. The result is partial coverage of the centre of the town in OpenStreetMap. Hey, it’s better than it was before I went mapping.

The vaulting coaching conference at the weekend was quite successful. A good turnout. The venue was nice, too. A meal at the Cross Keys 3 nights running. Nice food but I think I spent too much money overall, what with not having an income.

Vaulting on the Monday was good. I felt I was more interested and better able to concentrate than in certain previous sessions. Still pretty tired, though.

Wednesday was a Wolves LUG (Linux User Group) meeting where a bunch of us went out the map inside the ringroad around Wolverhampton. Another fairly successful mapping event. I notice I do a lot more recording points of interest (POIs) than other people, and a lot less than others.

For some reason the geolocation of photographs was a bit off, despite the photo for syncing camera/GPS times. Therefore I’ve missed a lot of speed limits, one way systems, vehicle restrictions, etc. I think I got everything named accurately enough, though, so since others have only recorded streets I don’t feel too bad about it.

Yesterdays driving lesson went well. More roundabouts and some primary highways. I had the GPS on so managed to record where I went; a big loop with some smaller loops, by the look of it. Unfortunately I’m not able to tag anything much from memory. Even so, the map looks a little more complete with some lines on it, don’t it.

Yesterday afternoon, while in a reasonably good mood and in the mapping mindset, I decided to go out a record some streets just off Bearwood Road, by Lightwoods Park, including one where Bill’s mother lives (seriously! Non Brummies probably won’t get the significance, but anyhow).

So there’s several new bits of map. According to the OSM stats I edited 232 nodes yesterday (ugly graph: http://osm.bandnet.org/osm_stats/user_png.php?user=Higgy). I like stats.

There’s been some snow today but so far not enough to cause too much disruption. Usually I like snow but with travelling out to Shrewsbury for vaulting tomorrow I’m expecting to have some difficulty. The Hagley Road has been known to come to a standstill when there’s a bit of snow on it.

One of the sponsored ads on a search on Google:

I’m away this weekend for the vaulting conference. Could be good, or it might not be. I don’t know what to expect but I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough.

Have fun, folks!

Hey folks.

Consider this the official announcement of tracktwo.com being property of me, and being the new name for bandnet.org. I think a .com domain markets itself better, is more well known. myspace.com, facebook.com, youtube.com. You get the idea.

Just a few hours ago I set up a test version of the current codebase at test.tracktwo.com. You can sign up as both user and artist. A few features already work (tagging artists, adding friend/favourites, rating artists). Uploading files also works, but the files themselves are not listed in any way and file editing doesn’t actually work just yet.

Graphics and stuff are being updated but suggestions are welcome. I’ve tried to keep it simple, idea being YOU provide the content, but a few icons here and there to add some colour is always a good thing.

Do remember this is a test site only, i.e. if you sign up there is no guarantee your data will still be there when the site goes live proper. For this reason I wouldn’t consider it worth doing much promotion just yet. Again, when the site goes live…

I’m currently listening to an episode of Yes, Minister - titled ‘Big Brother’ - from 1983. It is both funny but also really quite scary because, despite being 25 years old, it sounds uncomfortably familiar. Not because I’ve heard this episode before, either.

So I’m a little distracted.

I was going to say work on bandnet is still happening. I’ve pretty much caught up with where the previous codebase was. It’s currently on a private SVN server but I’ll be making it public shortly, basically replacing the old codebase.

I’m getting annoyed with myself for the number of times I’ve rewritten the site. I’m determined to stick with this one.

Fake Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap founder) points out that what any collaborative mapping website, and I’d like to expand to any website that allows collaborative data collection, needs is Germans. bandnet has one, Arne, who I’d like to thank for supporting my effort, providing feedback and the like. Without his input I might’ve given up entirely a while ago.

Anyway, a few things work already. A few other things need to be written, and the whole thing made a little more user friendly (basically write some XHTML/CSS/JS), and that’ll be it. I think many of the boring/tedious bits are done, apart from some of the license handling. So what’s needed is code that pulls data from the database and displays it.

User and artist profiles now use a lot of shared code. This means I only need to write a lot of code once to get things done a little more quickly, which I like.

I’m going to get the file handling written and a few basic profile features completed then release as an alpha version. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll have a test site set up. After a week of fixes stuff I’ll do a bit data import and update the DNS record so it appears as the main site.

It’s possible there’ll be a rebranding. I’d like a .com domain but getting the bandnet one is going to be expensive. Suggestions, anyone? There’s one or two existing domains about to be deleted. These will also be more expensive than previously unregistered domains but hopefully not overly so.

Anyhow, I’m done.

It’s been a while since my last post here. I’ll try and recap.

The course about horses was useful. I learnt a few useful things, mainly ORBITS. I’ll attempt to recall from memory each point:

• Outline - if you drew a line around the horse, how would it look? Is head in the right place (on the neck is generally a good start), etc?
• Rhythm - is the pace even or do some strides take a little longer than others?
• Balance - where is the horse’s center of gravity? Horses tend to have a ratio of 60/40 on their front versus hind legs. What you want is 50/50, so hind legs should come forward more with each stride
• Impulsion - is horse putting some effort into the gait or is it half asleep? Whatever the tempo, you want the gait to be active and full of energy
• Tempo - the speed of the gait, i.e. how quickly is the horse making each stride.
• Submission - is the horse listening to you, the lunger, and paying attention?

Obviously there’s a lot more detail I could go into but not at 2:30AM. I’ll see if I can make a separate post with it in sometime. Pester me about it.

Since that there’s been another weekends vaulting. Although very close to Christmas (weekend before, leaving me travelling home on Christmas Eve (what did Adam say to his wife the day before Christmas?)). For once I wasn’t asked to coach very much despite the lack of our most excellent coach, although with several Clwyd vaulters missing and other coaches and groups that came along I think there were plenty. So I got a bit more pressure to vault instead.

Stand is getting more and more comfortable each time I do it, perhaps because I can practice it on public transport. It’s perfectly acceptable to stand up on a train, and to a lesser extent, a bus, although standing on one leg for more than a second or two tends to attract a few odd looks, I’ve discovered. OTOH scissors is not so easily practiced without a vaulting barrel.

I noticed a couple of days ago that a second oil drum has appeared in the garden. This brings having my own practice barrel a little closer to reality. The trouble is for the project to continue it now relies on my father, as he is the only one with welding skills, and not the company with oil drums to dispose of. It gives me a little more to consider: fixed handles or vaulting roller? 5 or 6 feet high? Pink or brown? Actually, purple and green, as Larry Boy (google it), may look nice. I was thinking of adding a red hand print at one end and naming the thing Wilson. Seen that somewhere before, I’m sure…

On the job (hob? yob? Depends where tha’s from dunnit) front, there’s still not a lot that particularly interests me. Trouble is, people ask and I say ‘web design/development.’ But here’s what I have experience of: PHP, MySQL, Linux, Apache, XHTML, CSS, some JavaScript, Photoshop to a basic level and a very tiny bit of ASP I did a very long time ago and forgot. That’s a fairly complete skill set in itself. There are a few jobs out there where these skills are what they’re looking for. OTOH, it’s all self taught. That is I don’t have paper produced and signed by external sources saying I can do these things.

I’ve recently found a company nearby that specialise in PHP development and training. I’m not looking for a job there as I doubt I have the level of knowledge they’d be looking for, and they don’t appear to have much on offer anyway. The training side looks interesting, though. I’m hoping when I start claiming jobseeker’s allowance I’ll be able to get funding from elsewhere for the two courses I want to do (totalling £350, still a fairly hefty sum even if I had an income, although still less than a copy of Photoshop, which I couldn’t use without forking out for a windows license or a mac as well so isn’t a lot of good to me right now).

I’ve started having driving lessons again. I had a grand total of 5 while I was working at Clwyd. 11 months later I had my first lesson in Birmingham. Going by stories my instructor has been telling me, I’ve remembered a huge amount considering the gap. The advantage is there’s a lot we can skip (’this is a seat belt, this is the steering wheel’) and lets me get on with the fun bit of driving. We recapped on controls and did left turns to begin with. Next lesson was roundabouts (which didn’t go amazingly well, which I’m going to blame on hills and whatever was distracting me that day) and a single right turn that went horribly wrong. Finally, last week we dealt with encountering traffic, more left turns, some right turns that went very well from the beginning and a single roundabout that also went very well. If I could just avoid parking on the curb (considered a serious fault and will result in a failed test) at the end of the lesson I’d have been entirely happy with it. Still, I’m feeling more confident about driving. I hope the next one is as good.

The last thing I’m going to report on now is bandnet.org.

Unfortunately I’ve decided to start it again. Fortunately it’s developing fairly quickly thanks to the better use of OOP, existing code and some idea what I’m building.

In doing it again also means a new theme. I hope you looked up Larry Boy: it’s that colour. Since only my laptop runs windows, and therefore is the only thing I can run Photoshop on, and my laptop under windows doesn’t support the full resolution, and therefore aspect ration, of my LCD monitor, I decided to play along and make the purple very purple. Purple and orange is taken by Jamendo so I went with a darkish green instead.

So far implemented is account registrations (both user and artist, using a lot of shared code so very quick to develop), logins, very basic profile page for artists (again, a lot of shared code so user profiles will be very quick to write - waiting on development of the templates files which display it all), a basic selection for which account to upload file to (artists of which you are a member or your user account - that’s right, users have privileges to upload to their profiles, although this will be limited to photos for users).

Basically, that’s it. I think for the sake of getting something done quickly I’m going not going to put much effort into the template yet, instead focusing on making the data available to the template engine. That way backend can be tested better while frontend is being worked on.

Which means I’m already nearly where I was with the previous code set without having spent anywhere near as much time on it. Only thing that had the current effort doesn’t is nearly complete upload handling, basic license stuff, image resizing/caching, a more complete template for the profile pages and a few other small, easily implemented bits. So once those bits are done again I’ll won’t feel quite so bad about it.

On top of bandnet there’s a couple of other project ideas I have; some small, some less so, one huge! I guess it’s fortunate that this huge one just adds a few bits to something I was hoping to do in bandnet anyway, making it quite justifiable.

Anyhow, the time has been going forward for a while now (someone really should do something about that!). So at twenty to four ay em, Mr Higgy finally makes the terrible error of clicking publish. Good night!

Last night, when I attempt to go to be early so as to be up at a reasonable time with the result of getting increasingly frustrated at the amount of time I was lying there not sleeping, eventually dozing off around 5:30am, I realised many things.

One of those is that making tables in Scribus is not actually that hard - create a ‘table,’ which produces a set of empty text frames, and then enter all the data into the first one. You then link frames, clicking each table cell horizontally, left to right. Then edit the text in the first frame, insert frame breaks and you’re done!

Another is the solution to at least three of the issues I’m having with bandnet. The thing I’m working on right now is file handling.

Certain files, such as photos of users, certain other images and the like, might actually be the same so don’t need to be stored twice. Identical files will always have identical hashes (using SHA1 in this case) - if they don’t, they’re not identical.

Also, copyright to any individual file will only be assigned to one entity - in the case of a photo, the photographer. If this person or group allows, other’s can use the file. Therefore several users can have the same photo on their profile and I only need to store it once.

Yes, I know facebook and other sites have had this for a while. It’s not just that I’m interested in, though.

Since rights are generally only assignable to one entity, if someone else uploads an identical file then one of them is infringing someone elses copyright. So that way it can be flagged with the copyright owner and the issue, hopefully, resolved.

There is a problem, though: none identical files might actually be the same work but with a very tiny difference. In this case there’s two possibilities: either the actual data part of the file, instead of the whole thing, will match that of an existing file or it won’t be matched and the owner will have to flag it as their work if they find it.

Basically many sites are less sophisticated so won’t have any such matching, relying on the users to flag the item as copyrighted.

Onto licensing: this is something that’ll be a fairly major part of how files are handled. bandnet will, of course, try to honour the license - either distribution is allowed or it isn’t. It’ll help users choose a suitable license for their work.

Working in this way will allow filesharing to be used and promoted for content that allows it while not forcing people to release their work into the open if they so choose.

Obviously using open licensing will be encouraged - after all, if enough people like them their music will show up on filesharing networks eventually. Including some information in the tags for the file about how to donate to the artist will at least give some compensation for free sharing.

Anyhow, I’ll go to bed before midnight and hope sleep well enough to learn about horse’s gaits tomorrow. I might be able to post on a different subject.

I’ve just committed a load of code for bandnet that does stuff with uploads. Basically uploads are now moved, inserted into DB and the user is given information to tell them what’s going on.

I need to redo some stuff again because I forgot about GetID3, which I can use to get information about files as soon as they are uploaded. I don’t think it’ll slow things down much but I ought to look into how the user is kept informed again. Process should be:
Receive uploaded files, insert into DB, inform user
Process files (resize images, GetID3 info), show user edit page

Then have a daemon run through the process_queue and convert audio files to low quality MP3, caching the result for the embedded flash player to use. For podcasting/radio streams the original files can be used.

Anyhow, OHLOH stats are reporting about 9k lines of code costing $110,000. $110k is worth an ever decreasing number of £s, it seems. Best get on with the job…

In other news, apparently my perpetual cold could just be an allergy to dust mites. Makes sense. Moving elsewhere doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I’m not enjoying Birmingham much anyway.

Edit: Ohloh stats actually reports 27,718 lines of code taking 6 person years and $356k! All because I decided to put the getID3 code into SVN. I expect to edit the code anyway to take out calculations I don’t need. Perhaps I should move it to another dir and use some SVN command to copy it? However I do that…

I just wanted to point out I noticed today that bandnet.org is the top result when searching Google for ‘bandnet.’

TBH I don’t know how it came about. Has more links to it than other sites, I guess.

The new site itself is progressing. I’ve been concentrating on the artist profiles a lot and adding features. Of course, this is where the main focus will be.

My intended focus this week is on uploads/downloads.

On the download front there’s a great project out there, I’ve forgotten the name of, that is a Gnutella client in your web browser. It should be good for allowing people to download quickly (i.e. via Gnutella) without needing special software. OTOH its unlikely to be kept open once the download completes to allow others to download the file. This is one reservation I have about BitTorrent - availability decreases over time.

The best course of action is to encourage people to use a filesharing client with at least Gnutella support, although preferably Gnutella2, and keep it open. Encouragement could come in the form of using available methods of testing (for example, http://home.no.net/tgrumpy/ct/dex.php) and reward users that keep their clients open. Somehow…