The Kriptonomicon
| www.flickr.com |
Links
These are a few of my favourite links.
Flavours
There's more than one way to view this weblog; try these flavours on
for size.
The Kriptonomicon, Dont read everything you believe
John's contact details:
blog@kript.net
Subscribe
Subscribe(RSS) to a syndicated feed of my weblog,
brought to you by the wonders of RSS.
or by
Atom..
Sun, 19 Oct 2008
The Doubtful Guest
I've a picture of the stage before they started (and before I saw the sign saying photography forbidden, oh well) up on flikr - check the sidebar.
A. saw this and bought tickets for us. Its an adaption of the Edward Gorey book of the same name. As surreal and weird as the original book, this was some of the best theatre I've seen, and pretty much defies description. I think the show has ended now, but if it hasn't, head along to the Cambridge Arts Theatre and see it. You may even get a Q&A with the cast, as we did.
Posted at: [/live] permanent link
Some nifty command line stuff
So after reading in the Halloween countdown pages at the
Redecorating Middle-Earth in Early Lovecraft blog that Mary Shelley's book 'The Last Man' was available as a free audiobook, I thought I'd download it and listen to it as a series of podcasts (thanks to
podcastamatic)
but when I got to the page, the low quality mp3's were mixed in with the high quality ones. I've addressed the multiple mp3 download issue
before, but this time I thought I could come up with something that got what I wanted. One last night command line sesson, and lo;
for i in `~/perl/mp3grep.pl thelastman.html | grep -v _64k` ; do filename=`echo $i | cut -d '/' -f 6 `;curl -C - -L -o $filename $i; done
A neat script that downloads the files, and renames them to something sensible. I'm sure you could replace the initial curl of the 'thelastman.html' file with another shell script to extract the info, but that I'll leave as an exercise.The things you'll do when you realise MacOSX only has curl, not wget (indeed, I understand why now, curl being much more powerful), and you determine to proceed anyway..
Posted at: [/code] permanent link
Fri, 10 Oct 2008
Japanese Banking Crisis
We have learned from reliable sources that the Japanese banking crisis
shows no signs of improvement. If anything, it is worsening.
Following last week's announcement that Origami Bank had folded, we have
received more breaking news ... According to our sources, Sumo Bank has
gone belly up and Bonsai Bank is preparing to cut back some of its
branches.
Karaoke Bank is up for sale and is going for a song! Furthermore, shares
in Kamikaze Bank have taken a nose-dive and 500 back-office staff at
Karate Bank got the chop.
Analysts report there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank and
staff there fear they may be in for a raw deal.
Stay tuned ...
Sorry, sorry, email circular and I couldn't resist..
Posted at: [] permanent link
Sat, 04 Oct 2008
Chariots Of Fire 2008
I trained for months for this, up to three times a week, and managed in a very respectable 11:24. Similar to previous times, I found after I checked this blog, which was disappointing, but much better than the times I was getting running the test route near work (12:45 often). Our team came 87th, maintaining similar position we had last year - not bad considering over 450 teams! Of course, one of my (younger!) students ran it in 10:something..
As I ran with my new GPS, I have Tracklogs of
test run
and the
the race itself
or if you have google earth, you can use these for
test run
and
race itself
Posted at: [] permanent link
Cambs County Council and the Geospatial web!
I'm looking for new halls for my Tai Chi (and hopefully Kickboxing!) classes, due to issues with my previous one, which is turning out to be fairly tricky to find. On a whim, I phoned the council, and asked the receptionist if they had a list of halls for hire, expecting to get passed onto another department. "Oh, yes" she said, "would you like me to email you the link?". Sure enough, a few mins later, I was looking at
this. Browsing it, I realised what I wanted was it overlaid onto a map, so I could see where would be appropriate. Looking at the source, it was in nested HTML tables, and inconsistent formats, so I gave up the idea of writing a web scraper, and mailed the site admins on a handy link, asking if they had the info in a CSV that I could use in a google maps overlay.
A day later the reply came back; "Oh, we've
done it! put "Halls for Hire" in the Search For box (including the double quote marks)
and put the village/town you are thinking of moving to in the Location box
leave the Show Results on a Map box ticked
then click on the Search Cambs.net button.
Live Earth rather than Google maps, and in a tiny window, but otherwise superb - great job Cambridge County Council, and completely unexpectedly competent and on the button!
Posted at: [/martialarts] permanent link
Just upgraded my Macbook's hard disk
Remarkably painless. The most difficult part was ordering the right hard drive (not all 2.5" drives are the same size, apparently. Yes, I know.). So poor marks to Dabs, which took a week to ship my order ("usually ships in 24 hours!"), and only decided to when I complained, and full marks to
macupgrades.co.uk, which, for 30 more than I was going to pay at dabs for a smaller disk, sold me the right sized disk - and one thats 320GB!
You'll need a Phillips #0 Screwdriver and a Torx T8 Screwdriver - which was the hardest for me, I ended up using one at work, so must buy some v. small torx.
Using SuperDuper! I made a bootable clone of my current 120GB disk (which as its part of my normal backup routine, took 15 mins to update the image), swapped out the drive in its caddy, booted into disk utility from an OSX install CD, formatted the disk, and selected restore from the USB disk. Took about 3 hours, all told. Now I can start creating and using the assorted Virtual machines I need!
Now to buy a USB caddy for the old disk, and partition the huge USB dsk into Time Machine and 320GB clone for my new disk!
Posted at: [/gadgets] permanent link