PyLOLz now at Google Code
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 29th June, 2008 @ 23:06
In an effort to make my pointless and frivolous hacking seem like legitimate open source software, I'm using Google Code to maintain PyLOLz now, so any future versions can be found over here...
http://code.google.com/p/pylolz/
I've also built a pretty reliable Python OCR process for DVB subtitles this weekend which I'll make available soon.
Mashed08 and PyLOLz
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 24th June, 2008 @ 14:43
This past weekend saw the return of Hackday, this time relabelled Mashed 08, and very much a BBC affair. And to their credit, it was a much better organised and smoother operation than last year. Though I think last year was perhaps just a little more fun because of the chaos!
Team Monkey Tennis reformed, though couldn't think of much to do after all the Saturday morning talks suggested lots of the ideas we'd had. So we got to Sunday morning and decided to have a little poke at last year's project. I'll link to a hopefully more perfected version of that soon.
In the mean time, it's led me to create a Python port of Dave Dribin's LOLspeak for Ruby. It's called PyLOLz, and even has a Kamaelia component, which is a rather awesome Python framework from the BBC for building scalable, pluggable apps for a really broad range of problems. PyLOLz is the first time I've actually put some code online for other people to use, so sorry if it's not very good, but please feel free to tweak and enhance it! You can find it here...
http://freakymousemats.com/static/software/
>>> from pylolz.lolz import Tranzlator
>>> t = Tranzlator()
>>> t.translate_word('Hello')
'y halo thar'
>>> t.translate_sentence('My English skills are perfect.')
'mah english skillz r perfik.'
Currently reading...
Posted by stephen on Monday, 07th April, 2008 @ 17:06
The English A Portrait of a People, by Jeremy Paxman.
- The Daily Express reported that another Messerschmitt pilot lying on the ground some distance from his machine was approached by Mrs Betty Tylee and Miss Jean Smithson. He had an Iron Cross on his chest. His first question was: 'Are you going to shoot me now?' 'No,' said Mrs Tylee, 'we don't do that in England. Would you like a cup of tea?'
- You simply couldn't write a novel like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.
- The Bishop of Norwich was told by his predecessor, 'Welcome to Norfolk. If you want to lead someone in this part of the world, find out where they're going. And walk in front of them.'
Cake or death?
Things I know now that I didn't last year
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 18th March, 2008 @ 00:00
As it's been a while since I posted, I thought it was time for a general brain dump to serve as a reminder to myself that I've not spent the entirety of 2008 doing nothing whatsoever. What follows is a list in no particular order, of no particular merit and most likely of no real relevance or interest to anyone...
- There are very few problems in life that can't be solved with a nice cup of tea.
- Australia has 5 DVB-T multiplexes, each carrying only two or three video channels, but with each network operating one HD service. Trying to multicast them VLC results in the same massive memory leak as multicasting UK streams, but VLS is quite happy to do it without a fuss, as always.
- The hand operated valve of the radiator of an old fashioned central heating system like mine is the outlet, so a leaking radiator continues to drip when it's turn off at that end.
- Four adults can get an off peak Travelcard from Bedford to London return, including zones 1-6 travel for only £11 each. East Midlands trains 7pm service is off limits because off peak starts at 19:01.
- IronPython allowed me to build a web services middleware doodle for two companies who do things the Microsoft way. Being able to build .NET apps in a language as nice as Python makes Windows seem like a much more accessible platform. And there's even IronPython Studio.
- My car is worth much more than I thought, though might need to fix a couple of things on it first, and I'm not convinced it's a realistic price.
- On DAB, instead of calling each MPEG transport stream a multiplex as per DVB, they're called Ensembles, which is so sweet and appropriate.
- Wikipedia use PowerDNS instead of BIND and it seems like a much more flexible and scalable DNS server. The Wikipedia guys wrote a special backend to allow them to send visitors to servers in different parts of the world depending the IP address making the DNS query. Armed with this knowledge I've setup the site of my one of my clients using the same technique to send Chinese users to a local Squid accelerator proxy within the Great Firewall.
I may have learned over things too, but apparently I've forgotten them again. Kthxbye
Poorly MacBook
Posted by stephen on Monday, 25th February, 2008 @ 15:24
My MacBook's not been sleeping too well lately, constantly waking up in the middle of the night with a scream of the DVD drive (you'll know what I mean if you have one of the whinny ones like mine). Also, Bluetooth has been pretty unreliable in it for months now, and it turns out that not unrelated. Apparently the bluetooth module occasionally suffers a short on it's USB cable to the main board, hence it rudely awaking OS X from it's slumber.
Yesterday I decided I'd had enough and that it was time to operate and cut out the malignant Bluetooth, as it's not something I make much use of. So I proceeded with some trepidation...
I disconnected what I initially assumed was the Bluetooth cable, only to realise a couple of minutes later it was actually the middle speaker, so I connected it back up. In the process I'd had to pull a lot of the internal cabling around to get under the optical drive. It seems that just liberating and re-laying the cables has solved my Bluetooth problems without even having to disconnect the module. And so the MacBook was stitched up and is now working happily again and sleeping soundly through the night. Much yayness. Just need to operate on myself now so I can sleep more soundly...
