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!

m m m metadata!

OK, in a semantic web kinda way, I've been looking at some of the clever machine tag integration that flickr are doing, and thinking about how these things *should* automatically link up.

Take for example http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/ and look at http://www.flickr.com/groups/postboxbypostcode/

There are many excellent postbox groups already but they all have, to my mind one problem - no structure enabling anyone to find anything. This group will only contain boxes which have their postcode in the title or tags, enabling easy searching.

if you can't find it, or reference it, it's useless.

I therefore propose to tag the postbox pics with 'ukpostbox:XXX_YYY where XXX is the 1st part of the postcode and YYY is the box ID

This means that 1) things like locating-postboxes could bring up a set of pics of the boxes, flickr could automatically link to posting times (uhm but that assumes the royal mail has an API ha ha ha ha ha). If people have followed the Tagging guidelines on openstreetmap, then you can even link them directly together.

Maybe sir Tims vision wasn't so bad after all :-)

WebDAV

Here at CERN we use AFS for our home directories on Linux, but the windows stuff all uses DFS with https webdav voodoo.

Discovered on Ubuntu 10.04 that if I save a nautilus bookmark with:

davs://USERNAME@dfs.cern.ch/dfs/Users/U/USERNAME dfshome

it totally fails to connect. The correct syntax is simply:

davs://dfs.cern.ch/dfs/Users/U/USERNAME dfshome

and put in *both* your username and password when prompted.
Oh, and they're stored in ~/.gtk-bookmarks incase you need to edit them :-)

transmission + munin

OK, so things like the Rocks Avalanche Installer (pdf) show how useful bittorrent can be for providing a scalable install service. How do you know the status of bittorrent installs though? transmission-remote -l is all well and good if you're on the console but what about long term graphing? Cue Munin and a quick bit of python:

#!/usr/bin/python
# Munin plugin for monitorring transmission bittorrent status
# Andrew Elwell 
# $Id: $
import sys, os

if len(sys.argv) == 2 and sys.argv[1] == "autoconf":
        print "yes"
elif len(sys.argv) == 2 and sys.argv[1] == "config":
        print 'graph_args --base 1000'
        print 'graph_title Transmission torrent status'
        print 'graph_vlabel Count'
        print 'graph_category Transmission'

        print 'Stopped.label Stopped'
        print 'Stopped.draw AREA'
        print 'Idle.label Idle'
        print 'Idle.draw STACK'
        print 'Seeding.label Seeding'
        print 'Seeding.draw STACK'
        print 'Up.label Up and Down'
        print 'Up.draw STACK'
        print 'Downloading.label Downloading'
        print 'Downloading.draw STACK'
        print 'Will.label Will Verify'
        print 'Will.draw STACK'
        print 'Verifying.label Verifying'
        print 'Verifying.draw STACK'

else:
 # OK we cheat - initialise ALL values to 0, then overwrite with 'real' ones, then spit out the whole dictionary.
 data = {'Stopped': 0, 'Seeding': 0, 'Idle': 0, 'Up': 0, 'Downloading':0, 'Will':0,'Verifying':0 }
 for state in os.popen("transmission-remote -l |sed 's/^\s\+//g' | sed 's/\s\{2,\}/~/g' | cut -d '~' -f8 | sort | uniq -c | grep -v '1 $' | grep -v '1 Status' | awk '{print $2, $1}'"):
  (s,c) = state.split()
  data[s] = c
 for k,v in data.iteritems():
  print k + '.value' ,v

EDIT: Suppose I should really find a nice template that copes with embedding code, but in the meantime thats what 'view source' is for...