Edward Andrew Robinson

It has been ages since I last posted, and for that I am sorry, but I have kept up with my twitter and identica accounts. Things have been moving really fast for me of late and as a result my blogging has slipped. So whats new in the world of earobinson?

1. I am now working for CAE, more precisely CAE PS out of Toronto, and I am loving every moment of it. They have a very open culture and encourage the use of open source tools when appropriate. I have been able to use Ubuntu to host some of the websites I have developed in Django. This has kept me very happy. I can honestly say that I think that my Ubuntu, and Open Source knowledge set me apart.
2. I have been getting more and more into photography with my new Canon EOS Rebel T1i, you can follow me on flickr.
3. I have been ramping up my fitness (and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu skills) at Toronto BJJ.

This brings me to my goals for the future, I am falling in love with Django and as a result I want to play with it more and more, now my current hosting provider 1and1 has served me very well up to now. But now that I want to start playing with Django more I need to get a hosting provider that can support Django (because I want to show off my work of course). I would hope that any new hosting provider I use could support both Django, and ruby on rails (as I may want to play with it in the future). So dear lazy web what do you recommend? And I know I could use Google app engein but I like the idea of pure Django, not some hack, I have also looked at djangohosting.org but would love some recommendations from actual users of hosting plans.

Any advise lazyweb?

Dictionary.com defines a form as:

a document with blank spaces to be filled in with particulars before it is executed: a tax form.  — source

and a forum as:

an assembly, meeting place, television program, etc., for the discussion of questions of public interest. — source

Ok well I cherry picked the definitions that best suited my purposes, but anyway, I have been using both of these words is a lot of code lately and I admit the words have lost all meaning to me. In speech this is called semantic satiation, where intense repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener. So what is this called when you code? Dose it happen to anyone else? I know that for me the words “form” and “forum” have lost all meaning and look completely spelt wrong now. I think its even worse that the words are so similar prompting me to write this post, however this happens to me even with one word if I use it to much in code.

Thoughts?

I love writing about projects that I really like. When I do I try not to write about projects that people may know about and I definitely do not write about projects that come pre installed with Ubuntu. I love open office but it comes  pre installed Ubuntu.  Trac however does not come pre installed with Ubuntu. There are many solutions out there like trac, sourceforge,  google code, launchpad, all of these solutions however are aimed at open source code you publish on the internet. Trac, however lets you host your own website, either on the web or your intranet. That provides a lot of the same features that are provide by the options for open source projects.

The other big option I have seen to trac is dr project (they actualy forked from trac). and while I do like a lot of the things that trac is doing (mailing list intergration for one). Trac has a large comunity and may plugins a few of the plugins I would really like to see in the future for trac are a karma like system similar to the one on launchpad as well as better user tracking as well as a way to see who has read what similar to vbullitins who has read a thread.

Trac really is a great solution and I use for a ton of projects I work on.

Keep up the great work guys!

Edit Typos

A while back I wrote a post about using Google docs as an expense tracker. The post received a lot of great feedback and so when I wanted to learn about Google App Engine I decided the best way was to create a Google app that connects to my Google docs to let the user easily add expenses. This would solve the problem I had with the original Google expense tracker that anyone could add an expense to my spreadsheet. The result of this is eyecost released under the gpl (I had wanted to use the agpl but I don’t think that that is an option since it connects to Google servers) you can download eyecost here. The problem I am having is that if I do a lot of spreadsheet editing the Google App Engine times out.

Anyone know how I can get around this?

I was reading reddit the other day and stumbled upon the fact that wikipedia has an API. Neat I thought, and having some free time since my exams are now over I figured I would play around a bit with it. When I browse wikipedia I often click from link to link, and have come to the conclusion that all articles are 6 degrees of separation. For example I can go from Ubuntu to Tesco to Japan to G8 to United States to George W. Bush bet you never knew Ubuntu was connected to George W. Bush. I once wrote a map of the internet program that people seemed to like to download and modify so in that spirit I wrote wikimap.py to map wikipedia. wikimap.py Requires pygraphviz (Install using sudo aptitude install python-pygraphviz). To use the program simply run the program and give it the wiki page name for example “python wikimap.py Norman_Graham” Note that Ubuntu is Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution) and you can find the full name in the address bar of your browser. For more complicated maps use wikimap.py –help for full usage info.

Here are a few examples that I created with wikimap.py


And a really large one being viewed in inkscape.

More examples including the dot files can be found at http://www.files.earobinson.org/wiki/. But there are a few features I would like to add:

1. Generating the graph using python-pygraphviz currently takes a really long time and I would like to be able to do it faster
2. Page links currently include templates, I would like to only use links in the body of the text
3. It would be nice if the software cached previously seen connections. (But then I need to detect updates to that page)

If anyone has a nice simple soultion to any of those problems leave a comment. Also if you are able to generate any neat images I would love to see them.

I’m currently working on a cross platform project. The code is C++ and I’m going to be doing most of my development on the linux side but I need all of my compile scripts to be able to work on windows. After doing some googling and talking to people cmake seems to be what I’m going to go with.

My problem is that the documentation sucks. In fact even the example on the site did not work when I tried to download it (Update: Thanks for fixing this Bill). I was able to download the file but it seemed to be an empty tar.gz file.

So with a bit more googling I was able to create my own example. I know the KDE guys switched to cmake but thats about it. Anyone have any experience with cmake? How did it work out for you? Any better recommendations? Better sites for documentation?

The other day I stumbled upon Chris Harrison’s internet map, the only problem I found with his map is that I wanted to know exactly which country each network connection was in. So using the DIMES public data repository, and 1site1moment’s country boarders I have mapped the internet for myself.

From Public

Feel free to download the source code and come up with your own internet map, I would love to see what other people can come up with.

UPDATE 01: Image is back up, If the source code link wont work for you email me and I will send you a copy. Feel free to host this anywhere you like just post a link back to this site.

UPDATE 02: Source code can now also be found here.

UPDATE 03: Would love to see what other people can do with this.

Due to an issue with wordpress I have been forced to repost this.

It has been about a week since I released Propensity into the wild for your feedback, I have gotten a fair bit of feedback and received a lot of help. You will also notice that I jumped from version 0.1.0.1772 to 0.1.2.1906 well version 0.1.1.xxxx was released as a limited demo but I have pushed forward to release version 0.1.2.190.

New to this version we have:

• The ability to add your own programs to propensity (you can import them or manually add them)
• A Propensity Icon
• Cleaned up and much prettier terminal
• And many other little features.

As always feedback is wanted and bugs can be emailed to earobinson+propensity@gmail.com.

Download Propensity Here
Download Propensity Source Here

Ubuntu forums propensity post can be found here

Screenshots below

From Propensity

From Propensity

From Propensity

It has been about a week since I released Propensity into the wild for your feedback, I have gotten a fair bit of feedback and received a lot of help. You will also notice that I jumped from version 0.1.0.1772 to 0.1.2.1906 well version 0.1.1.xxxx was released as a limited demo but I have pushed forward to release version 0.1.2.190.

New to this version we have:

• The ability to add your own programs to propensity (you can import them or manually add them)
• A Propensity Icon
• Cleaned up and much prettier terminal
• And many other little features.

As always feedback is wanted and bugs can be emailed to earobinson+propensity@gmail.com.

Download Propensity Here
Download Propensity Source Here

Ubuntu forums propensity post can be found here

Screenshots below

From Propensity

From Propensity

From Propensity

The other day I tried to blog about the vte.terminal, and I had huge problems posting the source code. My problem was that despite how much I searched, and everything I tried, I could not keep the formatting and post the source code. The formatting was wrong when I used the <code> tags (The spaces where removed and in python that’s important).

It turns out that this was the most correct with the exception that befor you make your post you must go to Users then Your Profile and make sure “Use the visual rich editor when writing”
is unselected instead of [sourcecode language=’css’]…[/sourcecode] you are going to want to have [sourcecode language="css"]…[/sourcecode]

[sourcecode language="python"]#This
#is an example
#of what your source code will look like
x = True
if x:
print ‘hello world’[/sourcecode]

The source for this post can be found here.