dark clouds

del.icio.us is closing. If you use it, you may want to head over to https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export and grab your bookmarks...

Fedora Packaging

OK, so I needed to get my touchatag reader working under fedora, and RFIDIOt needs pyscard. Much yak-shaving later I've come up with a .spec file for pyscard, and its now ready for review.

spec file - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6594808/Fedora/pyscard.spec
src rpm - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6594808/Fedora/pyscard-1.6.12-1.fc14.src.rpm

oh well, lets see who'll pick up my Review Request

ssh-copy-id

I normally have my ~/.ssh/config so that it only uses my key or gssapi to login to other sites, however this poses a problem when reinstalling a server and don't yet have my key on it

ssh -F /dev/null root@hostname

works, but this wasn't working with ssh-copy-id.

Turns out that the ssh-copy-id script is braindead and only expects one or two (with the 1st beginning with -i) arguments.

lo and behold, some single quotes did the trick:

aelwell@pcitgtelwell:~$ ssh-copy-id '-F /dev/null root@concerto'
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
root@concerto's password:
Now try logging into the machine, with "ssh '-F /dev/null root@concerto'", and check in: ....

tada!

upgrade fail

No I'm not hiring an expensive car, but I certianly won't be using carhire3000 if I do...

Dear McDondalds,.... [RANT]

Dear McDonalds. If I wanted to wait over 15 minutes (from placing order to collection) for a simple meal (burger, drink and fries) I'd have gone to a REAL restaurant. Note, advertising your franchises as 'McDonalds Resturants' does not IMHO make it a real resturant. Oh, and teach your staff that >900 seconds on your timeclock is indeed 15 mins, so when I complain, point to said display (twas one of those place order and collect screens) and complain its been over 15 mins "No it isn't" is the Wrong Response. (see LART for possible reeducation tool)

Oh, and tell one of your other stores about NTP. Setting a computer clock is not difficult. Apparently I ordered at 12:39:40 in that store, but they managed to authorize a bank transaction at 12:32:16 (6 minutes before ordered. Impressive. Telepathic payments. Still, at least I got served at 12:33:20. again, before I'd ordered...

VoIP en France

We've moved to France, with all the normal hassle over paperwork, etc. Done the signups for utilities, then had to choose a phone company.

France has the rough equivalent of a LLU line 'degroupe' [no I haven't got punctuation dorted yet] see Wikipedia. and many of the ADSL modem/router/wotsits include an ATA in them.

So - at home we went with Orange, cos like the incumbent should be fairly reliable right.... ha!. If the VOIP line dies (we don't have a 'real' POTS line) then you have to do a factory reset of the livebox2, re-add in all the login details and any other customisations, and wait.

Oh, and they don't publish the SIP info for the ATA, so I can't even use a hardware voip phone for those times when internet up but the livebox voip service is down.

I've gone with (hopefully - still waiting for the confirmation) free.fr for the flat. lets see if they're any better...

more data musings

(the advantage of traveling by public transport once in a while is you can sit and faff on laptop)


More data musings

The only guarantee about user entered data is that, given enough entries it'll be inconsistent :-(

take for example an openstreetmap xapi query to pull out '/api/0.6/*[amenity=post_box]'

which is nice dataset of ~85k enties which I'll use for some simple analysis

So, the UK has ~40k postboxes, of which according to draco the breakdown of entries from the count are sources as follows:
13.5k - osm, 26.7k - website.

so of those 13504 UK postboxes in OSM, how many are royal mail run (hint - most of them!)
does the data match?

$ grep "operator" ~/Downloads/data.osm | sort | uniq -c | grep -i royal
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Post Office: Royal Mail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='royal mail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Royal mail'/>
   5065     <tag k='operator' v='Royal Mail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='RoyalMail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Royal MAil'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Royal Mail Warwick'/>
      2     <tag k='operator' v='Royal York'/>

not bad - only a few CaSe sEnsiTive issues to sort out

What about other operators, say La Poste?

$ grep "operator" ~/Downloads/data.osm | sort | uniq -c | grep -i poste
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Bureau de poste'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='De Post  -  La Poste'/>
      7     <tag k='operator' v='la poste'/>
     21     <tag k='operator' v='la Poste'/>
     12     <tag k='operator' v='La poste'/>
    917     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste Belgique'/>
      6     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste - De Post'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste Suisse'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Le Poste'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='poste'/>
      5     <tag k='operator' v='Poste'/>

again - it's the 'long tail' problem. So, out of the ~85k entries how many unique operators?
404 (how apt for a web service)

and of those how many are singles? 222 - OVER HALF!