They're following me!

As you know, I've been 'tweeting' the Status of the LHC from the 'Page1 comments' field. Decided to knock up a quick script to plot the number of followers over time, and lo:

Twittering OCR

'things that go bump in the tunnel'

As I've beem following the LHC restart I've written a parser for the vistar status feed to send it to twitter. The basic method is:

Grab URL (see image) then do some imagemagick hackery to cut out the corner. Resize larger (helps with the OCR) and save as tiff. Run the image through OCR software, compare the output to the last run, if different then upload to twitter.

ie

curl -o $IMG $SRC
convert $IMG +repage -crop 509x205+1+533 -resize 1000x -threshold 39000 $IMG
convert -monochrome $IMG $TIFF
mv $OUT.txt $OUT.old # make a backup of old
tesseract $TIFF $OUT

# Strip out ready for Twitter
DATE=`date +%d-%m-%Y`
sed -i "s/Comments $DATE /#LHC Status /" $OUT.txt

diff -q $OUT.txt $OUT.old
if [ $? -eq 1 ] ; then
# Post to Twitter.
curl --basic --user lhcstatus:password --data status="`cat $OUT.txt`" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
fi

and lo: http://twitter.com/lhcstatus

Studies on a hashtag

I'm at the EGEE09 conference this week, and they're also plugging use of tagging in social networking such as the #egee hashtag in twitter and the 'egee09' tag in flickr. As a small experiment I created an IRC channel on freenode (#EGEE09) and announced it with a hashtag on twitter. Within 3 minutes there were an additional 3 users, only one of whom was in my normal twitter cloud, ie the other 2 came in purely from the hashtag (and one of those was under a minute later)

so, twitter is certainly becoming a respectable way of broadcasting announcements to an interested group of people who are subscribing to a hashtag.

oh and as an aside, the IRC channel paid off -- I discovered that GridPP had some nice laptop bags via it and secured one for myself during coffee.

Anyway, back to more important work -- listening to how the EU proposes to carve up the funding for call7

twitter

OK, so it's been a few weeks since I started using twitter. The best uses have been suitably demonstrated by those fine folks at b3ta but I thought I'd rant my findings so far.

In it's original use as some sort of "hello, I'm on the train" - it totally fails to impress me. Why bother? I'm following a few friends, and no offence to them, but the parts of their personal lives they choose to share are um, not gripping. If I want to know what X is doing, I'd rather a) phone em up or have some other realtime converation or 2) look for a longer than 140 characters blog posting.

However where I *do* find it useful is for a day to day scratchpad of stuff I've done to gather together for my weekly report. I'm sure the public at large don't give a monkeys what I'm up to, and my use of bug #1234 no doubt screws up hashtags something rotten, but hey, for me it works.

The alternative is some sort of cgi elog thing, but the advantage of twitter is the open API that other people have already spent time working with. Twitterfox 'just works' for me.

Ho Hum, there we go, somewhat over my 140 charaters, but if you're really sad you can follow me on http://twitter.com/elwell2000, or look over on the right of the page.