Monthly Archives: January 2010

TTC Trip Planner

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The TTC Trip Planner seems to be live, after some digging by the Spacing folks.

It works with a bunch of small browsers I’ve thrown at it – w3m, mobile Safari, Blackberry – so I know I can use it from a handheld. Yay!

Only minor annoyance is that for subway journeys, it only shows the direction of travel in the summary (“YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA TOWARDS DOWNSVIEW” – and yes, in all-caps) and you have to click through to the details to find out which station you need to get off at.

It does seem to get deeply confused at Kennedy Station; I live just south of Kennedy, and it expects me to take the 43 Kennedy north to the junction to Eglinton, then walk south. Everyone here uses Transway Crescent …

Update: how could I have missed the prettier and much less capslockier MyTTC?

Update 2: The official TTC site appears to have moved here http://www3.ttc.ca/Trip_planner/index.jsp?useplanner=true. Let’s see if it still works with mobile devices.

embedded Old Man Luedecke

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Old Man Luedecke plays The Rear Guard in Toronto a couple of nights ago:

So if that didn’t work, here’s the YouTube video:

I took this with my little PowerShot SD790 balanced on a sugar bowl. Cropped and recoded in Avidemux2, it’s not bad. To get the embedded video above, I used ffmpeg2theora (thanks, Daring Fireball!).

Whatever you do, don’t – on your first try of recording live video – try using a setting you’ve never investigated. For the second set, I used CHDK‘s default video. It looks like an attack of mosaic tiles. Oh well.

implicit markup: easy to read, hard to parse

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I don’t usually ponder about other people’s blog postings, but Jeff Atwood’s Responsible Open Source Code Parenting reminded me of some of the old wars that the used to be when I was a markup head.

Jeff writes about his frustration that John Gruber’s Markdown text-to-html filter:

  1. hasn’t been updated for some time
  2. doesn’t quite do exactly what Jeff’s users at Stack Overflow want
  3. appears to have any changes in its behaviour from v1.0.1 strenuously vetoed by Gruber himself.

Markdown is nice in that you can write screeds of text, and it does almost exactly what you’d expect. The markup doesn’t get in the way, usually. The difficulty arises when implicit markup (indented lines for quoted text, bulleted lists, highlights) has to give way to explicit (cross-references, code samples). Explicit markup is ugly, but sometimes, you’ve got to do it. Complex intent requires complex modes of communication, and sometimes plain text just hasn’t the bandwidth.

[As an aside, there was a hilarious lengthy recurring episode on John Mark Ockerbloom's late bookpeople mailing list where a user (mercilessly skewered here)  insisted that they could write a general Gutenberg plain-text converter that would re-create typeset quality in an e-book reader with no explicit markup, and that XML was completely unnecessary and ill-conceived. The un-markup language, called zen markup language (said user had an aversion to the shift key) lives on only in a single website: the home of z.m.l. As for XML, its executive assistant had no comment on the matter.]

Looking at Markdown, it looks like Gruber’s moved on from it. He made a 1.0.1 which did what he wanted. The code’s there to change if anyone needs it. I understand his frustration at people wanting to make changes and still call it Markdown; I’d be annoyed if I had text which I thought was in one format suddenly not be accepted, or do something unexpected. Seriously, that’s almost as bad as ‘deprecated‘.

[At least Gruber didn't go on a deletion rampage, like (admittedly smaller-time) erstwhile CHDK stalwart Barney Fife did when he was slighted in a forum. Looks like almost everything he contributed to CHDK has been removed, including some very useful control scripts and explanations.]

Personally, when I need to make text to web conversions, I still use txt2html and a bunch of shell and Perl glue to feed to tidy. It’s on its third maintainer, doesn’t do much, but does it simply. And I’m pretty simple that way.

oh dear …

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At the meeting Van Zyl agreed to turn off the tower with immediate effect to assess whether the health problems described by some of the residents subsided. What Craigavon residents were unaware of is that the tower had already been switched off in early October – six weeks before the November meeting where residents confirmed the continued ailments they experienced.

via Massive revelation in iBurst tower battle.

image rollover in wordpress, no plugins required

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I’m seeing quite a bit of traffic to this post. I suppose I should explain that this was a quick hack to see if I could get image rollover to work on a friend’s wordpress.com hosted blog (and no, I couldn’t). This little example doesn’t do preloading, either, and I really don’t have any intention to develop this further. Sorry …

<img title="this" onmouseover="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/that.png';" onmouseout="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png';" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png" alt="" width="192" height="116" />

This does not work on wordpress.com hosted blogs; it gets stripped out.

Update: You probably want to install the plugin Ultimate TinyMCE, which does the job rather well.

Recoverfab – for all your memory card recovery needs

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A friend has baby pictures on an SD card, which said baby later found and used as an inappropriate teething aid. Yeah, yeah, I know …

He asked me to try to get the pictures back. I couldn’t read the card. It even fried one of my card readers. I tried RescuePRO, PhotoRec and PhotoRescue: no dice. Downtown Camera returned it as unreadable (and declined to charge me anything).

So I asked metafilter, and someone suggested Recoverfab in Germany. I sent the card off last week, and waited …

Got an e-mail at 06:30 this morning that they’d received the card, with a latest completion date of a week. Before 09:00, received a second e-mail with a link to picture samples and payment options. Have paid (not cheap – €89, but they got results) and am awaiting the FTP link.

Many thanks to Leopold Hiersche for his excellent results.

perhaps a slightly easier way to make SD cards bootable for CHDK under OS X

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Now that CHDK has a working beta in the source tree for my Canon PowerShot SD790is, I actually have to prepare SD cards for it. The Bootable SD card – OS X instructions seem a bit contrived, so I took a look at the linux instructions, and modified them accordingly. These instructions should work for FAT16-formatted SD cards of 2GB capacity and under. It will not work for SDHC cards, which are generally formatted to FAT32.

This is all command-line only for here on in. It seems to work. Please note that you will be modifying raw file systems with root permissions here; there is no safety net. If you b0rk your main hard drive, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Firstly, you’re going to have to find out where the SD card in mounted. Do this with:
df
I got:

Filesystem    512-blocks      Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   487463200 318749896 168201304    66%    /
devfs                222       222         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts             0         0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home          0         0         0   100%    /home
/dev/disk2s1     3969280      3328   3965952     1%    /Volumes/CANON_DC

There are three important concepts to note when looking at the mounted card:

  1. The mount point (or volume) – in this case /Volumes/CANON_DC. This is the location that you see in Finder when moving files around.
  2. The filesystem – here /dev/disk2s1. This is the partition on the disk, arranged according to a certain formatting scheme like MS-DOS FAT16.
  3. The disk device – which for me is /dev/disk2. This is the disk device itself, and it may contain several filesystems.

Your locations for these three could well be different, so please substitute your values.

You’ll need to unmount the device, as writing to a raw filesystem while the OS thinks it has control often results in hilariously unexpected results. I used the OS X-specific command

diskutil unmount /Volumes/CANON_DC

You should get a message like Volume CANON_DC on disk2s1 unmounted. Now you need to write the boot instruction:

echo -n BOOTDISK | sudo dd bs=1 count=8 seek=64 of=/dev/disk2s1

This will prompt you for your password.

If you need to, you can remount the filesystems on the card with

diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk2

(Note that we used the disk name here, not the filesystem. If there were several partitions on the disk, this command would mount all of them that it could. It’s also kinda handy for remounting USB devices that you’ve accidentally ejected from Finder.)

Update: Knowing a difficulty getting the firmware update method of getting CHDK to work on a Mac? Running a Leopard or newer machine? Then you need to learn all about Apple’s quarantine attribute and how to remove it with xattr: FAQ/Mac – Still having trouble?.