We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • proj: your cryptic geographic friend

    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.

  • a nerd whee!

    The USB data transfer works flawlessly from the GPSMap 60CSx to GPSBabel.

  • now feisty – and 64 bit!

    I reinstalled Ubuntu completely last night, and took the opportunity to go to AMD64 mode. I had to sacrifice the cheapo ndiswrapper wireless card, so am now running a switch off the wireless bridge. So it works now!

    It looks like Perl really doesn’t like 64-bit. CPAN‘s having difficulty building.

  • not so feisty

    Ubuntu‘s servers are currently failing to cope with the demand for everyone trying to upgrade to 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” all at once.

  • how can you have less than one unread?

    blackberry negative mail

    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.

  • captcha that would’ve been quite trendy in the 80s

    croufraj - the new sense of now

  • that was (fairly) easy

    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.

  • headless

    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 small form of happiness is

    … a USB key with the irritating U3 software uninstalled.

    Seriously, U3 is a major annoyance if you:

    • use Mac
    • use Linux
    • work on a PC with locked-down permissions
    • work on a PC with a one-letter drive gap (like having D: and F:, but no E:); U3‘s read-only system will appear in the gap, but your data won’t be accessible.
      (It’s not really U3‘s fault. The fact that Windows still has drive letters amazes me; why don’t they go for the whole 70s thing and have punch cards and gargantuan 5MB hard disk packs?)

    All four of the above apply to me, so u3 uninstall.exe is my friend.

  • Ephemera

    Ephemera – images I’ve found along the way. Some are copyright, some offensive, but for some reason, I kept ’em.

  • acned, yet inscrutable

    acned yet inscrutable

    (it’s actually the USB connector from my Kingmax Super Stick …)

  • better not the other operator

    Intel has a new ad campaign: intel.ca/multiply. Better than divide, eh?

  • a pox on nonstandard USB cables and those who would create them

    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.

  • more on WordPress dates

    I got sick of the annoying date display bug, and so dug through the default theme files looking for specific references to date formats. And there were many …

    I found that, instead of using the WordPress the_date() function, there were many calls to the_time('l, F jS, Y'), which forces a specific date format. If you replace instances of the_time('l, F jS, Y') with the_date(), your date and time format set in the Options panel will work as expected.

    How hard was that? Not very. How easy would it be to be modified in the default template?

  • no false positives

    There was some low-level kvetching on a WordPress blog that Akismet was marking too many false positive comments as spam. Concerned, I trolled through all 11 pages of spam – and didn’t find one real comment.

  • tasty bytes

    my ibook status

    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:

    1. black screen – eek!
    2. appeared to work, but no extra RAM recognized.
    3. black screen – double eek!
    4. works- yay!

    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 …

  • ctrl + alt + down

    … may cause hilarity when inflicted on an unsuspecting cow-orker’s PC.
    (ctrl + alt + up fixes it, btw. If it doesnt: you tried something you read on some random blog?!)

  • the drug of the nation, now at your station

    I’m annoyed to see that United Mobile Broadcasting Corp has installed TVs in the GO trains. It will be all ads. As if we don’t have abbotances on the train. I wonder how much of a discount we’ll get on our passes now that GO has all this new revenue?

    I’m particularly sensitive to moving images. I have to be prepared to see them (like in a cinema) else I get disoriented. Maybe I’ll barf on the train.

  • site search broken

    I don’t think that WordPress‘s search function works any more.
    Ah, it’s been fixed in 2.1.2.

  • all atwitter

    Twitter is one of the most pleasantly futile things I’ve ever seen.