We had a power cut last night, and my Gregarius aggregator on the basement server really didn’t appreciate it. I think it was doing something to the sqlite database that holds the feeds when the power went out, so I lost all my configs and had to trudge through hundreds of old items.
It could be worse; you could be stabbed! (as Mark Taylor always used to say).
For the upcoming midwestern trip, I’d ordered some Mapsource maps from GPS Central to help navigate across the mitten. They said they were in stock; indeed, they still do at time of writing:
I was very disappointed to get a note today saying that they were really out of stock, and they can deliver after the time I need it. GPS Central had previously been great, but they let me down by misrepresenting on their website. I cancelled the order.
Prairie Geomatics came to the rescue. They’re shipping tomorrow, for the same price (and cheaper shipping). I spoke to a real person to confirm.
While I said quite early on that I had Ubuntu Feisty running in 64-bit, it wasn’t until today I got things really how I liked it. My earlier Perl problem was due to a broken gcc setup; all is happy now, and all the modules I’ve ever used are built and running as expected.
The one thing I’ll probably never get going is Citrix Metaframe presentation client. There’s no AMD64 package for it. I’m hardly heartbroken, as I still have two machines on which it runs just fine.
Canada has recently released most of its geodata for free – Go Canada! I was particularly interested in CanVec, the large vector topographical set. I downloaded the set for Toronto and environs, and slapped it into QGIS. With nearly all the layers on, my neighbourhood looks like the above.
I didn’t find any labels, or much in the way of documentation for this huge data set. It would be a shame if good metadata weren’t available, for it adds real utility to the map data.
I do a lot of work with UTM survey locations, and quite often I want to have them stored in my GPS. I used to rely on a powerful but oh-so-clunky Windows application called Corpscon, but I really didn’t want to be limited to Windows machines, and Corpscon really only works for North America.
And then I discovered proj. While it has a pretty hideous command-line syntax, the output matches Corpscon to the sixth decimal place. Say you had a waypoint stored (for Southern Ontario, UTM Zone 17, NAD83) like this:
4843744 443025 Goderich
that is, UTM northing,easting, followed by label.
To convert this to geographic coordinates, you’d invoke invproj (which goes from UTM to geographic) like this:
invproj -E -r -f "%.6f" +proj=utm +zone=17 +datum=NAD83
and it would spit out:
4843744 443025 -81.707611 43.744546 Goderich
Columns 3 and 4 are the geographic coordinates – 43° 44′ 40.37″ N, 81° 42′ 27.40″ W in more familiar notation – which is in fact a location between Brock St and Newgate St in Goderich, Ontario.
With a Unix box, proj and gpsbabel, I’m set for all my coordinate conversions.
The USB data transfer works flawlessly from the GPSMap 60CSx to GPSBabel.
Ubuntu‘s servers are currently failing to cope with the demand for everyone trying to upgrade to 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” all at once.
My blackberry is confused. It really thinks it has -1 unread messages. This creates all sorts of philosophical questions, most of which I’m not equipped to handle.
Upgraded Ubuntu from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft last night … and it was surprisingly painless. Sure, it took all night to download, and it did require me to fiddle about using the wireless access point as an ersatz eth0 to get ndiswrapper happy, but I’m not complaining.
I’m still not running in 64 bit though, as I don’t know if there are drivers for some of my cards in AMD64. It’s not a priority, though — everything’s adequately fast as is.
I’ve finally re-resuscitated the Thinkpad T21 into a basement server. Quiet it isn’t (its fan cooler and hard drive are loud), but it just works. It used to run OpenBSD, but now it’s running Ubuntu Server. I really tried to like OpenBSD, but it was a bit too spartan for my tastes.
… a USB key with the irritating U3 software uninstalled.
Seriously, U3 is a major annoyance if you:
D: and F:, but no E:); U3‘s read-only system will appear in the gap, but your data won’t be accessible.All four of the above apply to me, so u3 uninstall.exe is my friend.
(it’s actually the USB connector from my Kingmax Super Stick …)
Intel has a new ad campaign: intel.ca/multiply. Better than divide, eh?
I’m trying to get all the bits of my Sony Cybershot P100 kit together, and I can’t find the dad-blamed USB cable. It’s a weird connector, and two reputable camera dealers have cried ixnay on the vailabilityay. So I have to find it.
I have already turned the house over looking for it. Yes, I know that the recipient could just use a card reader, but it wouldn’t be so good.
Gah! Things! They’ll get you in the end.
I just upgraded my iBook to 1.5GB, the most it’ll take. The CD·ROM Store took a bit of time to get the memory in, but when they did it was $50 less than I was originally quoted.
It took me four heart-stopping tries to get it installed. It went like this:
Each tim required power off, battery out, the keyboard to come off, a fiddly little plate to be unscrewed (which was nothing like the Apple instructions said), the SODIMM reseated, fiddly plate restored, keyboard in, battery in, power on. My old ThinkPad was a lot easier – I once installed RAM in it on a subway train …