Once again, it’s conference time. This time, I find myself winging my way to Sydney for a rare winter conference — specifically, the first edition of Pycon AU. As usual, I’m not presenting, but merely attending, although I hope (with the co-operation of the papers committee) to finally fix that at next year’s LCA. (Of course, if Silvia talks about HTML5 video, I’ll probably get knocked back!)

It’s been a busy month. Few months, really. I don’t tend to talk about my actual day jobs much on my blog, but I might as well mention a project I worked on earlier in the year — a prototype system for visualising the family trees of wheat strains, which is quite nifty if you like HTML5 canvas based goodies, although it’s far from a complete system. (If you work in agricultural or biological research, have a bit of spare budget lying around, and would like to see it become a complete pedigree traversal and analysis system, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you! Yes, this will be open source; in fact, it would be already if I’d had some spare time at work to sort that out.) Massive props to Nicolas Garcia Belmonte and his Javascript InfoVis Toolkit, which made the tree handling easy. It’s fair to say that the initial code that I wrote before deciding to use JIT was… ugly.

The project I wrapped up a couple of weeks ago was also rather interesting, and will be open source as well, but sadly I can’t yet talk about it. I’ll try to remember to blog about it when I can.

On a personal level, things have also been a little hectic. As per previous years, a group of my friends and I traipsed down to Albany for the Foundation Day long weekend, which was typically filled with wine and laughter, and I spent last Saturday taking part in the 15/15 Film Festival, which gives its participants an object and a quote (this year, a newspaper and "there is beauty in randomness", respectively) to put in a film and asks them to make a <15 minute film in 15 hours. We had an interesting time on that one, partly thanks to the loss of half of our raw footage due to technical issues (OK, NTFS not handling a dirty shutdown very gracefully, if we’re going to point fingers, and I am), which resulted in a very quick redefinition of the film in the editing process. I’ve yet to see the final cut (we were so pressed for time that we had to submit it without actually viewing it start to finish), and I don’t think the competition rules will allow us to put it on Youtube until the judging is complete, but it was a great experience and it doesn’t sound like the end product was that bad.

Admittedly, it didn’t sound that great, either.

All in all, I’m looking forward to a couple of days off. The conference proper is on Saturday and Sunday, so I’ve got tomorrow completely off, along with today and Monday as travel days. At this stage, the plan is pretty much sleep, broken up with the odd social engagement: with any luck, I’ll be having dinner with Noogz tonight, which is always fun, and will be off to the SLUG meeting tomorrow night — having never attended a proper LUG meeting, I’m looking forward to it! (Yes, this means I’ve lived in the city of PLUG for over fifteen years without ever actually going to a meeting.)

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days pushing a few things up. It’s not going to completely replace my need to have some Git repositories on my own server (there are things that aren’t open source or aren’t for public consumption, like my resume — although making that open source could be entertaining), but it’s definitely handy for other things.

Obviously, my user page is going to cover the full list of things at any given time, but the projects I’ve uploaded so far include:

• CineJS — the Javascript video processing library originally introduced at LCA 2010 and in an earlier blog post. There are a couple of releases probably coming for this in the next few months: an interim release to work around what looks like a bug in Mobile Safari on the iPad, and a more featureful release which will hopefully have the first steps towards WebGL support. I’ll probably get rid of the Google Code site for CineJS in the near future, since there’s no point having two issue trackers.
• Dubnium — long time readers will remember this as my Google Summer of Code project back in 2007, and it’s been neglected far too long. It is, in essence, a cross-platform GUI debugger for PHP code. It’s gotten a bit of love in the last few months and I really just need to spend a day or two cleaning it up for a release. Unfortunately, part of that process involves getting a Windows build environment set up, and that’s rather killed my motivation so far.
• A couple of little Gopher related things: the source tree for wp-gopher, my Python-driven Gopher interface to WordPress (which you can see in action on this very blog) and a Gopher stream wrapper for PHP that I knocked up on my lunch break today just for the hell of it, which I’m currently imaginatively calling php-gopher. Let’s face it: these are obviously Important Projects.

So, yay GitHub, helping me procrastinate from doing actual development work in my spare time for two days now. (Yay may not be the right word.)

So our good friends in Tasmania have an election looming. Good for them! Democracy’s awesome.

What’s not so good for them is that free speech is also awesome, and that’s no longer available to them in the political arena courtesy of section 191 of their Electoral Act, which means that all political statements during the election campaign must be authorised. This requires a full name and address, and effectively kills anonymous discourse dead. Digital Tasmania are talking a bit more about this, if you’re interested, and there’s plenty happening to Twitter, too.

As a result, I have decided to authorise anything Tasmanians want to say on-line. I mean, I don’t really care about Tasmanian politics, so I don’t mind authorising everyone and everything.

So, if you want to say something political in Tasmania in the next few weeks but don’t want to post your full address on-line, use my magical automatic authorisation Web site and I’ll authorise whatever you have to say. Promise.

(Side note: whatever you post is trivially publicly accessible. Bear that in mind.)

There’s a simple example that applies a greyscale filter to a 30 second clip from the classic 1964 film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Check out the source code to look at how the filters are constructed and applied, or look at the more complicated stack demo to see how filters can be combined and altered.

This is pretty alpha, but it should work on current versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. I’d love to see some more complicated filters, and if you e-mail them to me, I’ll be very happy to include them in future versions.

The current version is 0.1.1 (and comes minified), and you can also clone the git tree.

I present this example from the DateTime::getTimestamp() manual page. It’ll be disappearing from the mirrors over the next few hours, because I’ve deleted it (and posted a much simpler note in its place), so here was its content, for posterity:

If you are using PHP < 5.3.0 you can use this function instead:

<?php
function DateTime_getTimestamp(&$dt) {
$dtz_original = $dt -> getTimezone();
$dtz_utc = new DateTimeZone("UTC");
$dt -> setTimezone($dtz_utc);
$year = intval($dt -> format("Y"));
$month = intval($dt -> format("n"));
$day = intval($dt -> format("j"));
$hour = intval($dt -> format("G"));
$minute = intval($dt -> format("i"));
$second = intval($dt -> format("s"));
$dt -> setTimezone($dtz_original);
return gmmktime($hour,$minute,$second,$month,$day,$year);
}
?>

It’s fair to say that’s an interesting approach. The normal way of doing it would be:

<?php $timestamp = $dt->format('U'); ?>

I don’t know what the answer is — moderation has its own problems to do with workload, as PEAR can attest — but a system that’s letting that go up as recommended practice (and stay up for a month) has to be looked at.

I now have to deal with a giant backlog of e-mail, feeds and university work, so naturally I’m procrastinating and reading Slashdot instead. This story about parking meters in Chicago made me… do something that’s somewhere between raging and laughing. We’ve had those meters in Perth for years, and for all the many, many complaints Perth residents tend to have about City of Perth parking (and particularly their grey ghosts parking inspectors), the horror of having to walk a hundred metres or so to a ticket machine isn’t generally one of them.

It did remind me of working in the city last year, though. I usually parked at the Royal Street car park — even though it was a decent walk to iiNet’s offices on the Terrace, the day rate was cheap and there was usually parking still available at the hour I was getting there. In their infinite wisdom, the City of Perth decided to install new ticket machines last year which had apparently not gone through any sort of QC at all; the credit card functionality almost never worked, coin slots didn’t have enough clearance and kept getting jammed by 20 cent pieces, and it was generally a giant screw-up. As a result, you’d fairly often end up calling the City of Perth’s parking hotline, having a whinge at the completely disinterested person at the other end who’d promise someone would look at it someday (clearly not always the same day, since the same machines were often broken for several days at a time), and being given a reference number to write down and put on your dashboard to tell the parking inspectors that you’d at least tried to pay and that they should be merciful and not fine you. (That worked most of the time.)

Depressingly, the one time I got a decent response out of the City of Perth was when I got given $30 in change from a machine in the Goderich Street car park. (I was expecting about $2, from memory.) I called the hotline after a brief moral dilemma and got told by a rather surprised City of Perth staffer (after confirming not once but twice that yes, I really did want to give the money back) to wait there and one of the City’s contracted security people would be there shortly.

They arrived in two minutes flat. Amazing what happens to parking response times when money is involved.

Fast forward to today, and I’m quickly setting up a guest account for my friends to use while we’re away on our Melbourne-Sydney road trip (since I’m apparently the designated laptop carrier for some reason). The slowness of both the GUI and Wi-Fi annoyed me, so I went and had a look around for solutions. For the benefit of anyone else having the same issues, here’s what I found:

Wireless: The 701 includes an Atheros chipset. Long-time Macbook users like myself will probably have to suppress an instinctive shudder at that. Launchpad bug 378156 is there to deal with this and, although it’s still open, hints at the best way to deal with this: installing the relevant linux-backports-modules package provides a newer version of the ath9k driver that resolves the flakiness and packet loss that the default version suffers from.

Netbook Launcher GUI: The main selling point of the Netbook Remix is its impressively slick launcher GUI, which wraps around GNOME to provide a better small-screen environment. It looks terrific and would work really well but for Launchpad bug 349314, which details a problem with the tiling support in the graphics chipset driver that makes the launcher unusably slow. The workaround for this is to enable the /apps/netbook-launcher/force_low_graphics option in GConf, but the real fix is in the pipeline, which is a new kernel version (2.6.28-15-generic) which is currently in the jaunty-proposed repository and makes everything work smoothly, just as your chosen deity or non-deity would have intended.

The Ubuntu Wiki has a useful page detailing these and other problems that affect the 701, but with those fixes above, I’m now very happy with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the 701.

At any rate, I’m off on a holiday as of tomorrow evening, and looking forward to my first real break since last July. (Conferences and uni trips are fun, but not exactly relaxing a lot of the time, and the Foundation Day long weekend I spent in Albany just wasn’t long enough.) The plan is for five of us to go to Melbourne for a few days (including taking in the battle for the priority draft picks, aka the Fremantle-Melbourne AFL game; and no, I’m not a Dockers or Demons supporter, so that’s going to hurt), drive very slowly through the snowfields in the general direction of Sydney, then catch a Bledisloe Cup game the weekend after next and return triumphant. And hopefully relaxed.

Obviously if you have open DB bugs, are breathlessly waiting for long-overdue action on the Dubnium front, or really want a new feature in wp-gopher, you may be waiting a bit longer.

I’d apologise for the above, but I’d be lying through my back teeth as I did it. I’ve been looking forward to this for months.

To prove that it works, you can view this very blog post via Gopher (possibly even IPv6 Gopher, if you have IPv6 connectivity) and marvel at the following string of UTF-8 encoded Arabic, which Wikipedia claims is the Arabic name for Perth: بيرث.

A tarball is available: wp-gopher-0.2.1.tar.gz (SHA-1 sum: b9f9f1ced88464a1ff52cef5d088f2d046d7a20d), or you can git clone http://www.adamharvey.name/git/wp-gopher for the latest trunk.

I’m not quite sure what’s malicious about a Mythweb interface, but hey, who am I to argue with the sensible people in university ITS.