the accidental arborist

I can feed myself

2011-06-15T22:22:00.000+01:00

I can feed myself

spelling

2010-12-30T07:50:00.001Z

Is that really how you spell expectancy?

spelling

2010-12-30T07:39:00.001Z

Is that really how you spell expectancy?

This is a test post from the command line with txt file

2010-12-29T17:48:00.001Z

line 1
line 2
line 3
you get the picture?
yes we see.

This is a test post from the command line

2010-12-29T17:47:00.001Z

ho hum.

Experiments with Google Docs

2010-11-15T20:25:00.000Z

Mucking about with Google Docs. Should really be doing other things.

Kendal Mint Cake and Cankers and Fencing Staples

2010-09-05T10:05:00.000+01:00

Some runners do fiendish back to back races all the time but it's not something I have much experience of. Until this weekend. Grisedale Horseshoe yesterday, and today the Derwentwater Trail Race.

Lonscale Fell

From Derwentwater Trail Race

These races are devised so that there is a challenge and a race. They're both the same course and distance, the difference being that the challenge is, theoretically, for the slower runners and walkers, and it doesn't have prizes. It starts an hour before the race.

It's a traditional race with a lot of my Elvet Striders clubmates, but this year they'd all opted for the challenge instead of the race. There were a bundle of Striders running in the Challenge and I jogged towards the Start area a few minutes before 1pm in the hope of grabbing a chat and a few photos. Unfortunately, the organisers had decided to start the challenge a few more minutes before 1pm than I had anticipated and all I saw were the receding backs of the runners as they headed up and away.

So away I wandered lonely as a cloud for a while returning nearer to 2pm for the trail race. Anticipating that they might start this one early too I made sure I was lounging in the starting area in good time. Sure enough with the little hand not yet on 2 we were sent on our way.

I was curious how it'd feel doing this after the Grisedale Horseshoe the day before. Interesting. Very much like the second running phase of a duathlon just when you've hopped of the bike. Not unpleasant. Actually, yes, really quite unpleasant now I come to think about it. But I'd paid my (substantial) entry fee and made my choice.

It's really a rather nice course and fiendish in a mischievous sort of way. I like the way it snakes up one side of the valley, hops over, then carries on up the other side. The terrain was much squashier than I expected but I was wearing some lovely new Salomon trail running shoes that I'd bought from that nice Mr Fisher earlier in the morning.

From Derwentwater Trail Race

Towards the end of the race I was beginning to loosen up a bit and started making a few gains on the fast descent to the finish. I had to explain to the lass in front that if she hung around gassing to her

mates she'd lose her place in the funnel and I'd get her time and she'd get mine. No tea, juice or sandwiches for the finishers (you'd have to do a fell race at a quarter of the price if you want that) but a cup of water and a bit of Kendal mint cake. No sign of any Striders but a browse of the results showed good fast runs by everyone who did the Challenge.

No decent race is complete without a proposal and this one was no exception. Not long after I'd finished I heard a bit of a commotion and turned to see a rather unusual engagement in progress (she said yes). So all the best to the happy couple.

Just Engaged

From Derwentwater Trail Race

So what about the cankers? I didn't know but soon guessed that the Fitz Park had some interesting and unusual trees. This defiant old oak was hosting the biggest canker I've ever seen as well as a rather unenthusiastic hoof fungus (Fomes fomentarius).

From Derwentwater Trail Race

And finally, do they or don't they? Split the wood that is. Some hammer in the staples vertically, some at an angle. The BTCV recommend putting staples in at an angle as it reduces the the risk of the posts splitting. At Durham Wildlife Trust we've just whacked them in. I've looked at a lot of fence staples (I need to get out more) and it seems to me it doesn't make much difference either way.

Angled Staples - Split Posts

From Derwentwater Trail Race

The Grisedale Horseshoe Fell Race

2010-09-04T15:01:00.002+01:00

It was a gorgeous morning in Glenridding as I queued at the 'quiet' Car Park ticket machine and decided how many hours I wanted to buy. Better safe than sorry. Five hours should cover it. It's only 10 miles after all. Back to the car to find Will and Casper had arrived and it was time for the handover.

Roberta & Casper

Casper, meet Roberta, Roberta meet Casper. Will was hoping to have a good crack at this race and Casper was unlikely to attack the more technical sections of Swirral Edge with quite the same agility or enthusiasm as Will would. With leads and poop bags handed over, we were all, in our different ways, ready to go.

An amiable gathering around the village hall during which, at some point, I think the race was started, and away we headed into the fells. I've done this race before so was under no illusions about what awaited me. But it's amazing how a year can soften one's memory. As we hauled ourselves up Mires Beck it all started coming back to me. Ah yes, I remember now. This race is really really hard. I was swapping places occasionally with NFR's David Coxon who had started the race mp3-cladded, but now seemed to have other things on his mind.

David Coxon

The weather was very different to last year with clear visibility in all directions, which meant navigation was no fun. Up Catstye Cam and along Swirral Edge, clear and sharp as a knife. I preferred it when it was cast in mist and you couldn't see the climbs ahead. Hot on the heels of David and up onto Helvellyn Ridge, then ... where the hell did he go? It was, admittedly, very busy. There were people out walking and eating sandwiches and drinking coffee and all sorts of nonsense. A very different scene to last year. I appeared to be all alone and I hot-footed it southwards in the hope I might find someone to chase. I bumped into a rather cheery runner walking back the way we'd come, and with a nonchalant wave and a satisfied smile he said "can you tell them that No. 96 has retired?", and suddenly he was gone.

Swirral Edge and Catstye Cam

By the time I hit the Grisedale Tarn checkpoint I was convinced that David Coxon had fallen of a cliff and was lying in a pool of blood somewhere and passed on my concerns to the marshalls. After the checkpoint another runner waited for me and asked me if I had the faintest idea which way to go as he hadn't a clue. I pointed up, rather pointedly, to St Sunday Crag, and he got the message. He was waiting for me again at the top, and this time I pointed down, towards the ford, and I messed around for a bit trying to find the famous bit of scree that some say leads to a portal that magically takes you down a fast way to the valley floor. No joy, so I just aimed for the gap in the trees and hoped for the best. Not a bad descent but, as I feared, when we hit the track it was detour time (taking the overall distance to over 12 miles), back up the valley to another checkpoint on a bridge before the run in to the final assault.

I was now finding the whole thing pretty grim. Last year it was just a long gruelling but ultimately satisfying test of endurance. This year, something was different. I was really miserable. Perhaps it was the heat, or more likely, I was tackling an event that I was not really fit enough to do justice. I shall treat the race with more respect next year. Across the bridge and a bit of paddle in the beck, and a long drink. I was taking huge handfuls of water to drink and I'm not usually one to get thirsty during races. The waddling had to stop and I stumbled on to the final climb. This went on, as I thought it might, for absolutely ever. At the top the marshalls, who must have been there for hours, offered me a sweet. After some chat it transpired that it wasn't a jelly baby but actually a wine gum, so I declined. Jelly Babies had all gone. Damn the fast runners!

Now just the final descent and a lacklustre shuffle to the line and I was absolutely done. A glance at the results board showed David Coxon had been in for some time, clearly the results of some devellish site-to-site transport from the top of Helvellyn to Dollywagon Pike. I asked Roberta how she and Casper had bonded and she said "Absolutely fine, he walked beautifully on his lead as long as we went exactly where Casper wanted to go." Will finished in 8th position overall and a fair bit faster than the year before. With the detour and extra checkpoint my time worked out pretty much the same as last year, but this year with a bit more sunburn and a lot more humility. Just a short drive now to a comfy hotel bar and bed and a few beers to get in the mood for the Derwentwater Trail Race the following day.

Looking west to Helvellyn

Grisedale Horseshoe Fell Race at EveryTrail
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Dougie Nisbet -- Running -- races -- Stockton-on-Tees -- River Rat Race - 2010 -- Sun 29 Aug 2010 01-54-12 PM BST (Modified)

2010-09-01T22:57:00.001+01:00

Dougie Nisbet -- Running -- races -- Stockton-on-Tees -- River Rat Race - 2010 -- Sun 29 Aug 2010 01-54-12 PM BST (Modified)
Originally uploaded by djnisbet

Saturday was an interesting day.

VSO

2010-09-01T22:55:00.000+01:00

Tonight we went to an Open Evening in Newcastle for VSO. Interesting, and exciting, stuff. I suspect it's when rather than if.

Roseberry Topping Fell Race

2010-09-01T22:41:00.002+01:00

At £4.61 per mile, compared to the Great North Run at a measly £2.90 per mile, you expect to get a fair bit for your entry fee. But what’s this, no road closures? No Lucozade or water stations? No walk-through showers? No medal at the finish? Does Brendan know about this? What this tiny and absolutely barking event does have is far better prizes and much nicer views, and thankfully, none of the runners shouting Oggy Oggy Oggy as we crawled up the mountain. As if we had the breath.

From Newton under Roseberry: Roseberry Topping

It was a gorgeous evening for this year’s event with the now familiar site of both first-timers and old-timers standing around looking up towards Roseberry Topping with the usual expressions of shock and awe. Roseberry Topping was looking both beautiful and scary in equal measure. There was a lot of chatter about whether “The Chute” would be the better route choice for the descent, with most runners deciding that not breaking a leg would be a more reasonable option.
A prompt start at 715 and soon after the bottleneck of the first gate. I hopped over and was managing to stick close to my clubmates Cal and Nina and was pretty pleased about that. Soon it was hand-over-hand up the Chute and then the final stumble to the trig point with Nina and Cal a little ahead and Jan a little behind. The gaps between us soon widened on the descent with Will way ahead but just behind the ultimate winner. The local vest I was following took a wide loop on the way down that avoided the steps and allowed for a flat out run for most of the final yards. I was about 50 seconds faster than last year so it couldn’t have been a bad route choice.

From Newton under Roseberry: Roseberry Topping

Newton under Roseberry: Roseberry Topping

2010-09-01T22:17:00.000+01:00

Roseberry Topping.

The Elvet 'B' team (the Men)

2010-08-31T11:12:00.000+01:00

running mix

2010-08-31T11:11:00.001+01:00

GNR Prep

2010-08-31T11:11:00.000+01:00

On Sunday I did the River Rat Race at Stockton on Tees. What a truly extraordinary event. Far more grown-up and far less tame than I expected. And I really wasn't sure about jumping of the end of a very skinny plank. It is a very brown river, the Tees!

Not exactly sure how it ties in with training for the Great North Run. I shall find out soon enough.

Last rays of summer

2009-11-03T13:24:00.004Z

What a difference a day makes. Saturday morning, and I was up with the lark to soak up some unseasonal sunshine at the Sunderland Parkrun.

Jogging around the park before the 9AM start it's easy to forget that you're in the middle of a city. The Parkrun is a great, friendly, low-key, all-inclusive run that anyone can do, and do it as slow or as fast or as competitively as they please.

From Sunderland Parkrun

What I like about the Parkrun is that it gets me out of my bed at a decent time on a Saturday morning whereas without that prod I'd probably fritter away the day without achieving much or getting of my backside and getting some exercise. With the Parkrun in my diary I'm home soon after 10 and the rest of the day is waiting.

The forecast for Saturday is good. The forecast for Sunday is not quite so good. So flasks filled and we're off to Blanchland for lunch at the White Monk Tea Room before a walk beside the Derwent.

From Blanchland Walk

One of the nice things about living in County Durham is that it's not busy. It might look busy. You might park and look at all the cars and think the fells are going to be mobbed. But they're not. I've never understood why but I'm certainly not complaining.

We headed NW up the lane and out of Blanchland, passing a mixture of old broadleaved and deciduous trees. Some of the conifers seem to think they're broadleaves and a few had me looking twice to make sure I wasn't mistaken. One conifer, a spruce, had such a broad fissured trunk I had to stare up into the canopy to convince myself I was actually looking at a conifer.

Over to the left I saw an intriguing formation of tree guards. The tell-tale green mesh shelters were arranged in a circular fashion. But why? Or around what? An old pit-shaft perhaps? Investigation would have involved a dry-stone wall and probably a lot of trespassing so it will have to remain a mystery.

We turned at Pennypie House, crossed the beck, and walked alongside the dry-stone wall beside Birkside Fell. Between the track and the wall is a grassy verge. On the other side of the track is heather moorland. On the grassy verge there were many small fungi and I can't decide what they are. (For someone studying Arboriculture, this is a rather depressing admission. But identifying fungi causes me problems!)

From Blanchland Walk

The mushrooms have a conical shiny looking cap with no sign of a ring underneath. When I got home and checked my fungi book I realised there are so many other things I should be looking for that hadn't occurred to me; e.g texture and smell.

Looking underneath the cap the gills are quite distinctively deep-grooved.

From Blanchland Walk

If I had to guess I'd say it was a waxcap. I've just found a key at the University of Aberystwyth. It's a pity I didn't note the things it mentions (wet/dry/sticky etc) that would've helped aid identification. I'll know next time!

As we walk down the lane towards the river I notice some very confused trees. There's an ash that can't decide whether it's spring or autumn. I feel sorry for it. It seems to have put out a flush of young new growth up at the top of the crown. Ash, famous for being 'lazy', is one of the latest to come into leaf, and earliest to go to bed for the winter. So this expensive leaf production is interesting. Quite a young tree. A bit of a rebel perhaps.

From Blanchland Walk

Soon we're beside the River Derwent on a riverside walk that always surprises me (pleasantly) on how quiet it is given how handy and scenic it is. Almost safely back at Blanchland but not before some more fungi.

From Blanchland Walk

An untidy bracket fungus on Silver Birch (Betula pendula) that looks a bit like Beefsteak Fungus (Fistunlina hepatica) although it isn't as reddish as I might expect.

There's also a blackened cluster around the base of the tree (which is very old) that I assume is just an older version of the same fungi.

From Blanchland Walk

Back to Blanchland and the last few hours of summer before the November rain arrived.

Blanchland Stroll at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: GPS Trail Maps

Upgrading Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10

2009-11-01T14:39:00.000Z

ouch. I hadn't realised quite how reliant I'd become on using the Lightning add-on to Thunderbird for managing my calendar. Lightning is great as it allows cross-platform synchronisation with itself and with google calendar.

Yesterday my laptop informed me that Karmic Koala was available. Not sure what it was, but it had a fantastic name, and I was having some of it. Upgrade done, and very cool new login screens, and into Thunderbird. Checked my calendar. gone. nowt. Annoying but I assumed I just needed to re-sync with google or re-add the calendar entry. But there was no options to do that.

What's happened is that 9.10 doesn't have libstc++5 and Lightning wants it. I grabbed it from the Jaunty repo and installed it using dpkg. Tried Thunderbird again and still no luck. What you need to do is remove Lightning as an add-on, restart Thunderbird, then re-add Lightning, then restart again. For me it worked like a dream. All my calendar entries just miraculously re-appeared.

Things aren't looking quite so rosy on another of my PCs. A power glitch during the upgrade gave my computers a bit of a headache and some rebooting later showed that not all was well. No hardware errors, I don't think, just yanking the power cable halfway through the 9.04 -> 9.10 upgrade seems to have confused the computer to bits. Sometimes these things are a blessing. I've burnt a Karmic CD and used it as a rescue disc to backup the more important looking bits and had a bit of a purge. I had 20GB of thumbnails I didn't know I had in .gqview and .thumbnails. They've gone. Currently doing a nice clean install. Maybe it's the best way anyway. Most of my important stuff (mp3s and jpegs) are on separate file systems and it's just my home directory that needs backed up. Better to feel the pain of a clean install and sweep a broom through the place.

Orienteering at Wallington

2009-10-12T10:23:00.001+01:00

Saturday hadn't gone well. I got bored sitting in a long queue of traffic waiting to get to the Alwinton Border Shepherd Show so gave up, turned round, and went for a walk around Cragside instead. Driving a scenic route back to Durham we passed Wallington where I saw some signs saying “Caution – Runners” and I wondered what that was all about. When I got home I read Colin's email about an orienteering event at the Wallington National Trust site, checked the weather forecast, and that was Sunday sorted.

It's just over two years since I last did an orienteering event. That was a gentle 'Come and Try it' event at Chopwell Forest. The timing for me was interesting because when I did the Chopwell event I was just starting running a bit more seriously and at the time I rather simplistically thought of orienteering and running as a bit of an 'either/or'. I thought there were people who did orienteering, and people who did running, and that there was no cross-over. This is obviously nonsense. At Wallington there were all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds with a range of fitness and abilities.

Two years since my last event, and two differences struck me immediately. First, my eyesight. Sadly that seems to have declined noticeably. I peered curiously at the blobs and text on the map and decided just to concentrate on the obvious stuff. River, fences, walls. That's about all you need. Second, the technology. Great Fun! Gone are the incredibly low-tech punches that I used to think were so sophisticated. Now it's all things that go BEEP and apart from my initial bewilderment it's all very straightforward. This was all taken care of and explained to me when I signed in.

I decided to got for the Score 60 event. This is simplicity itself. Go to the start. Start. See how many Controls you can get round in an hour. Finish. I was intrigued that there was no pre-arranged start time. I just wandered up when I was ready, beeped the dibber in the gizmo marked START, and off I went! I started like a rocket, raced across the picnic area and through the gates, out onto the path and into the woods. Once safely out of sight I got the map out and had a look at it since I had absolutely no idea where the hell I was. Presently, and more sedately, I headed off for the controls that took my fancy.

This event turned out to be exactly what I needed one week after the Loch Ness Marathon. It has none of the conventional pressures of a road or trail race but it's still a good idea to shift it when you get the chance as it is a race against the clock. Different orienteers have different styles; some manage to map read on the run. I prefer to lean against a tree, decide where I'm going, then go as fast as I can for as long as I can before I inexplicably need to stop to look at the map again. This usually mysteriously co-incides with me needing a bit of a rest. It's a bit like interval training, or perhaps more accurately, fartlek.

Roberta decided to go for a walk that coincidentally followed the main paths that skirted much of the route. There were times that I felt like a labrador as I kept crashing out of the undergrowth and bounding along only to bump into her again as she strolled steadily around the estate. I resisted the urge to pick up a big stick in my teeth and drop it at her feet.

After finishing I spotted Colin and Elfie and we immediately started a detailed deconstruction of the course, the controls and our route choices. After the first two controls (with just another 28 to go), Elfie's eyes began to glaze over and she left us to carry on with our post-mortem and wandered off to investigate the restaurant.

This was the first time I've done an orienteering event since I started running seriously and I was really pleased at how much I felt it helped. I often think I don't do enough cross-training or include enough variety in my training. I really want to do more of this sort of thing. This was a great event as it included cross-country, fartlek, road, trail, and optional water crossing (I took the bridges, Colin forded the river 4 times. Wish I'd thought of that!). You can pretty much customize and mix and match the whole race to suit your own tastes.

The Loch Ness Marathon 2009

2009-10-07T10:30:00.004+01:00

"Jings", "Crivvens" and "Help Ma Boab" were just three epithets that
didn't cross my lips as I tumbled over the finish line just 3 and a bit
minutes the wrong side of 4 hours. There were times when I really
thought it was going to happen - that I was going to duck under the
elusive 4 hours, but not today.

The day started promisingly enough with orderly queues of runners
filling up the endless queue of coaches that parked neatly around the
start. Unfortunately, just as I was about to alight, they turned out
not to be endless after all. There was a lot of radio chatter and hairy
bikers flashing by on snazzy motorbikes, but no more buses. This was
looking interesting. Eventually, 50 minutes late, a queue of bulging
coaches departed Inverness. 50 minutes; remember that number.

About an hour later, somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, the inevitable happened. Not to me, because I've long since ignored the bladder-busting pre-hydration tosh that is often routinely promoted as essential pre-race preparation, but to the poor sod sat at the front of the top deck of my bus, things were getting desperate. He started
politely enough by asking the Germans packed on the stairs to pass a message to the driver, to pull over if possible. This got lost in translation. Then we passed a coach that had succumbed to its rebellious passengers, and our chap got a bit agitated, and decided to take more positive actions. He stood up decisively, leaned over, and pressed the bell! If he thought that was going to have the desired effect he was sadly mistaken. For the next 5 miles our bus was "Just Stopping" (in the middle of nowhere) according to the neon sign, then we passed another coach in a passing place, and it was all too much. This time he jumped up in a state of agitation and pressed the bell at least 5 times with a noticeable lack of interest from the driver. At this point I heard some ladies behind me say "Oh look, the poor man, he's obviously in real pain!". Laugh, I almost didn't.

Finally he cracked; our hero jumped up and, with his face a picture of pain and frustration, announced he was getting of the bus NOW. He climbed over the Germans on the stair and was lost from view, then the coach lurched drunkenly and suddenly into a passing place. A cheer exploded throughout the coach and at least 80% of the coach, clearly wishing to show solidarity, followed our bell dinging hero out to the facilities.

It was all very well behaved. The ladies went to one side, and the gents to the other. There was a grey area where, well, I'll spare you the details. But barely(!) 3 minutes later and we were all clambering back on the bus and congratulating our rather bewildered hero who clearly was unaware quite how much so many people had felt his pain. All that was missing was a sign saying "Contaminated Land - do not enter for 100 years" and you would never have know we were there. Then again ...

So much excitement and drama, and we hadn't even reached the Start! The coaches eventually arrived at the Start 10 minutes after the race was supposed to have begun. We just about had time to get off the coach get changed and put our bags on the baggage bus. The atmosphere was pleasantly peculiar. There we were, about 7500+ of us, in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, listening to a DJ pumping out music and firing us up, and all around were mountains and glens. Weird. But Cool.

Lately I've been running races badly so I'd decided to take a bit of time and do a lot more thinking and planning for this one. I'd considered a few options and talked to many old-timers before coming up with a Plan 'A' and a Plan 'B'. Both were for sub-4 targets but Plan 'A' largely focused on pace, and Plan 'B' on heartrate, although they both followed the principle of running a negative split. I used the calculator at marathonguide.com as a guide. However the route is very uppy and downy and about 2 minutes after the race started I abandoned both plans in favour of Plan 'C', a hitherto undeveloped plan that went along the lines of "Let's see how it goes without going ballistic too early".

For Striders thinking of doing this Marathon don't be fooled by the
course profile. True, it has an overall drop, but it has lots of nippy little hills that the profile sketchers decided weren't worth making a fuss over. I'd say it's a fair bit harder than Edinburgh (Phil?). One thing I think I did right was 'allowing myself to run faster' on the descents. A lot of runners seem to hold back on the downhills when in fact you can gain quite a bit of time just by letting yourself go without increasing your energy expenditure very much. I passed the half-way point in 2.02 and for at times I thought I would pull back the time to sub-4 then another cheeky little hill would suddenly appear. Then I hit a biggie at mile 18 and I knew it wasn't going to happen. I heard my name shouted around this point and looked round to see Phil who was hobbling cheerfully along 'not really racing'. For Phil this race could be classified as a 'quarter of a Hardmoors' (and a little less hilly), so just a little bit of warm down really. Given that this is only a week later, Phil finished in an indecently respectable 4.16. Some people have no shame. A mention too for Anna Seeley who ran a blistering sub-3.30.

I ran all the way and was doing 8-9 min/miles towards the finish. I judged it about right. I'd been worried that by running a negative split I'd feel that I could've gone faster earlier but there was little danger of that. I was pretty much done in by the finish and my mile pace kept slipping as I tried to pull it back down. It was a good race plan and I simply wasn't fit and strong enough on the day to run it. Next time! Oh, And it was bit hot. Scotland. Loch Ness. October. Off course it's going to be hot!

The Loch Ness Marathon

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The Harrier League

2009-10-01T08:36:00.000+01:00

Not long now until the Harrier League starts. Locations below:

View Harrier League in a larger map

Everytrail

2009-09-29T10:09:00.000+01:00

Wow! Just had a look at the embedded slideshow in the last post. I like it. Let's try a side by side with Picasaweb for the Grisedale Horseshoe ...

Here's the Picasaweb embedded slideshow:

and now the Everytrail:

Grisedale Horseshoe Fell Race

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Trip Sharing with Google Maps

Everytrail offers a map option. Let's see what that does:

Grisedale Horseshoe Fell Race at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: GPS Trip Sharing with Google Maps

Everytrail

2009-09-29T09:52:00.000+01:00

I have an account on everytrail and for a time was quite excited about its potential for geotagged trails. But I was finding it a bit slow and the geotagging that picasaweb offered seemed more elegant and faster. True, it lacked the, er, 'trail', but I'm not sure that it was any great loss.

Everytrail has had a facelift so it's time to have another look. I've often thought something like this would be useful for storing common routes for club runs. So much tinkering to do, so little time!

Everytrail Slideshow embedding test:

Simonside Cairns at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: Geotagging Community

I wonder how that looks ...

anki and mnemosyne

2009-09-29T09:42:00.002+01:00

Hmmm ... an interesting thing is happening.

Having decided to move to anki from mnemsyone, I'm now thinking of moving back. There are loads of comparisons of the various Spaced Repetition Scheme learning tools and many of them come out strongly in favour of anki ... but ... but ...

I prefer mnemosyne.

I've tried to rationalise it but given up. Some people prefer Microsoft, some MACs, some Linux, some GUIs, some command line, some etc. Anki is very very good and has great features, but I'm more at home with mnemosyne. This review sums it up pretty well.

My Botanical Digital Ident Toolkit

2009-09-28T11:30:00.000+01:00

Botanical Idents, trees, flowers and stuff, are going to be an important thing for me, so I've been investing a fair bit of time putting together the tools that I'll use to learn and reference the plants I encounter.

Here's the toolkit:

Sporttracks and geosetter are Microsoft Windows programs and so far I've had no or limited success getting them running under wine.

f-spot is the photo manager that I use. It allows hierarchical management of tags, which is just dandy for the binomial naming system.

The workflow goes a bit like this.

Get the photos from the camera onto the PC. This is the job of gthumb. Usually I put the camera from the card into a reader, fire up gthumb, then copy to an 'incoming' directory on the computer.

Still in gthumb, I do a first pass of the images in full-screen, deleting anything that's obviously rubbish or duplicated. gthumb currently moves files to trash rather than deleting them, which is a minor irritation, but a fix is on its way.

Once I've got a reasonable batch of images, it's time to geotag them. I've got a Garmin Forerunner 305 that I use for running and I've got in the habit of carrying it of any photo trip. Using Sporttracks I read in the tracks and export a GPX file. I could just as easily do this using gpsbabel or some of the other garmin tools available on ubuntu, but I have the reader plugged into my windows PC and it's just as easy to do it there, and Sporttracks is a nice, versatile program.

Once I've got my GPX file I copy it to my ubuntu box.

Next I need to synchronize the timestamps on my images to the GPX file. I have three digital cameras in various states of repair and time. I use the well established tip of taking a picture of your gps to get a reference point.

This gives me something like this:

Now I look at the picture in ubuntu, and find out what time the camera thinks it is.

dougie@icarus:~/botanics$ exiv2 00032.jpg
File name       : 00032.jpg
File size       : 1852891 Bytes
MIME type       : image/jpeg
Image size      : 3648 x 2736
Camera make     : Canon
Camera model    : Canon DIGITAL IXUS 95 IS
Image timestamp : 2009:09:27 15:13:42
Image number    : 100-2034
Exposure time   : 1/500 s
Aperture        : F2.8
Exposure bias   : 0
Flash           : No, compulsory
Flash bias      : 0 EV
Focal length    : 6.2 mm
Subject distance: 15
ISO speed       : 160
Exposure mode   : Easy shooting (Auto)
Metering mode   : Multi-segment
Macro mode      : Off
Image quality   : Fine
Exif resolution : 3648 x 2736
White balance   : Auto
Thumbnail       : image/jpeg, 4756 Bytes
Copyright       :
Exif comment    :

i.e, the camera is 47 seconds slow. This isn't too bad and when correlated with most GPX trails is unlikely to make much difference, unless you're moving a lot, and quickly.

To align the the image time to the real GPS time, I use exiv2 again. The syntax is:

exiv2 -a00:00:47 *

to adjust the timestamps of all the files in the current directory. negative timestamps are also accepted if the camera is running fast.

Now I know that the jpegs and GPX trail are synchronized, I use gps-correlate to get the location information from the GPX file and add it to the EXIF header of the JPEGS. You can use gpscorrelate on the command line for this but I find it easier to use the GUI version, gpscorrelate-gui. I notice that gps-correlate also allows you to add an offset but I haven't worked out whether it updates the timestamp of the image. I've a feeling it doesn't. This would mean the timestamp of the original image would remain incorrect, even though the image now has geotagged data.

You can quickly check whether an image has geotagged data by using the gpscorrelate command line form:

dougie@icarus:~/botanics$ gpscorrelate -s 00032.jpg
EXIF-GPS Photo matching program.
Daniel Foote, 2005.

00032.jpg: 2009:09:27 15:13:42, Lat 54.761978, Long -1.574869, Elevation 92.149100.

This is handy done with a wildcard on a directory to quickly determine whether any images are not geotagged. e.g.

dougie@icarus:~/botanics$ gpscorrelate -s * | grep 'No GPS Data'
IMG_3542.JPG: 2009:09:27 15:13:30, No GPS Data.

Note that I still haven't looked at any of these images on a map. But I'm confident that the location is spot-on because of the picture taken of the GPS. A simple, important step.

If I want to see where the images are, I can either upload them to flickr or picasaweb, run digikam, or, my preferred option, run geosetter on a Windows PC and browse my ubuntu drive from there.

At this point I'd probably rename the files using gthumb as it has some nice rename options. Once images are imported into f-spot renaming becomes such a hassle it's not worth the effort.

The final steps, assuming that I want to learn some idents from the images, is to export the selected images (usually at 800x600 resolution or therabouts) and then import them into anki.

digikam

2009-09-28T09:49:00.000+01:00

I had another play with digiKam last night. Having pretty much decided not to persevere with it because of problems with the installation I persevered and finally got it working. The steps are a bit ragged and I've no idea what bit finally did the trick. I had installed version 1.0.0-beta4 from the sources on the digikam website but was hitting the no thumbnails/images displayed problem that is reported by many people. I'd tried quite a few things with no success and just before giving up I thought I'd try uninstalling the source and installing version 0.10 from the Ubuntu repos. Perhaps it was the:

apt-get install digikam

that did the trick, as it pulled in and pulled in something else that was required, but suddenly digikam was running 1.0.0-beta4 and the images and thumbnails were being displayed. My apt install log show:

Selecting previously deselected package digikam.
(Reading database ... 234735 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking digikam (from .../digikam_2%3a0.10.0-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package kipi-plugins.
Unpacking kipi-plugins (from .../kipi-plugins_0.2.0-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up digikam (2:0.10.0-1ubuntu3) ...

Setting up kipi-plugins (0.2.0-1ubuntu3) ...

Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place

that something called kipi-plugins was dragged in. Perhaps that was it.

The feature that was prompting my interest in digikam was geotagging. Plus digikam gets some pretty rave reviews on the web. The other feature that is important to me is tagging itself. It has to be quick and easy.

Geotagging first. I haven't tried geotagging an image itself from within digikam as I already have a sample of geotagged photos. What I wanted was to see if it would display the location of these images on a map. It does, but not quite how I expected it. digikam offers a selection of maps including OSM. Your photo is pinpointed on a global map and you can zoom in. As far as I can tell you can only zoom in to a certain level, then if you want more detail you can click on the globe ('see more ino on the internet') and this opens up a browser window with a more zoomed in view. It's fine but you quickly end up with lots of browser windows and I really want to be able to scroll through the images, slideshow style, seeing the location of each image in detail in a small window. This is how geosetter works, and the slideshow in picasaweb. geosetter does it very nicely and currently I run it in Vista and point it over the LAN at my Ubuntu drive. I've tried a couple of times to install geosetter in wine but that has been pretty unsuccessful. That would be nifty it it worked and I will revisit that sometime.

Next I looked at how digikam handles tagging. I'm used to, and like, f-spot tagging, where you can do a lot with hot-keys and keystrokes. So, say, I have selected a batch of image thumbnails and want to tag them all as Acer pseudoplatanus, in f-spot I'd press t, then start typing Acer pseudoplatanus. If the tag is in the database, it will auto-complete as soon as unique match is made, I can press , (comma) and then enter more tags. Tagging in digikam is pretty easy with mousy wousie click wicky stuff, but I wanted to try keystrokes. As far as I could tell (I could be wrong), there is no obvious keystroke shortcut to entering tags. I think Alt-G is the starting point. Once the list of tags appears (I imported all mine and they appear in 'My Tags' - that might be relevant), I looked at the list and noticed that they have underlined characters that could be used as shortcut-keys. I'm not sure how it's been done but I guess that the first unused letter in the tag name is used as the shortcut, leading to some quite funky choices. I didn't find it very intuitive. For example, I have lots of tags beginning with A, and as soon as I type A the image is tagged with the first tag that begins with A. I'd assumed I'd be able to continue typing until I had a unique tag match.

So I'm putting digikam on the back burner for the time being. It looks very nice I have to say and has lots of yummy features but it's not really my workflow. I like prodding keys and leaving the mouse alone. f-spot, even though it often feels clunky, slow and limited functionality, suits the way my brain works, and I think I'm sticking there for the forseeable future.

Fiendish Phishing

2009-09-24T19:10:00.002+01:00

The following message appeared on a mailing list I subscribe to:

I've got 5 PCs that I'm trying to use to train disadvantaged young
people. The problem is they are riddled with viruses and a firewall
blocks me from updating them. The people in charge of maintaining the
PCs won't fix them or give me the admin password (Win XP) to let me
install a new or updated antivirus the centre is being shut down in a
few months.

If they were working, I could still do a lot with them, so I've been
looking for a good online virus scan - but they all try to download a
little .exe onto your PC first, and the settings on the PCs won't
allow that.

Suggestions? Solutions? Links?

Apart from thinking it a bit naive I thought little of it. But a later post suggests it's actually a scam, a cunning phishing attempt. The MO is for another reply to appear suggesting a great website for the original poster. The great website turns out to be feeding malware.

With google it's sometimes interesting to just chuck in a whole gob of text, as I did with the above quote. Lots of hits on lots of lists but also a blog with a neat summary of how it's done.

Upgrading memory (and battery) on Toshiba A80-132

2009-09-24T10:36:00.003+01:00

A few days ago I received the battery and memory to upgrade my Toshiba laptop. I hadn't expected any problems with the memory upgrade despite having no documentation on my laptop. Search on the web and usually some kind soul has uploaded a youtube video on how to do it. When I looked at the bottom of my laptop (right) it didn't match any of the videos I watched and there looked a couple of likely candidates for going under the screwdriver.

A few minutes later and things look promising. I was relieved to discover the configuration was as I expected (You don't think I checked before ordering the memory do you?!). One bank was filled with a 512MB thingy (DIMM, SIMM, SODIMM? I've lost track of memory terminology nowadays), and the other bank was free. I had two 1GB pieces of memory to go in so the 512MB was coming out. It was ridiculously easy as I hoped it would be. The last time I did a memory upgrade on a laptop was on an old SonyVAIO PII and I remember it being a bit of a fiddle involving tiny bits of paper thin ribbon cable that I was terrified of tearing. By comparison this was a piece of cake. Or a glass of wine.

From Laptop Upgrade

On to the battery. The old battery was hopeless. It might go 40 minutes and then die very ungracefully. I'd tried reconditioning it and a few charge/discharge cycles but it was pretty much done in. When looking for a replacement I noticed that for not much more money I could get one with twice the capacity of the old one. It seemed like a no-brainer.

As I unwrapped the battery and placed it on the laptop I had my first inkling that I had not quite thought this through. It had a big chunky solid look about it. Very big, and very chunky in fact.

I took the old battery out and let them have a look at each other.

From Laptop Upgrade

I could see where this was going. Sure enough, when I popped the new battery in to the laptop, its backside stuck out the rear of the laptop. I guess all that extra electricity has to be stored somewhere ...

From Laptop Upgrade

Common Ash flowers (Fraxinus excelsior)

2009-09-23T16:35:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow I start the HND in Arboriculture at Houghall College. Today I've been getting to grips with Anki and trying a few images to see how it works. I came across this image from the Houghall Arboretum in 2007.

It's Fraxinus excelsior (Common Ash) and it's not as we might think of ash. The large black terminal bud is a bit of a giveaway in terms of identification, but the beautiful flowers that emerge before the leaves are always a great surprise.

Programs such as Anki are based around the principles of SRS, or Spaced Repetitions Systems. The idea is to construct a set of digital flashcards using a combination of latin and common plant names and combine it with images such as the one above.

digikam

2009-09-23T07:19:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I had another go with digikam. It's a program I've dabbled with once or twice in the past but abandoned after finding it too bloated, frustrating and incomprehensible. That's not a fault of digikam - just different programs suit different people. However every now and then I'm tempted back. digikam has some nice features that attract me, especially its ability to manage geotagging images, something that really interests me.

I downloaded the source and it installed fairly painlessly. I ran it, pointed it at my images folder, then wandered off for a couple of hours. Later, images imported, I settled down to tinker.

Nothing. Blank Screen. Well, not blank, just no images. I re-installed, deleted the database, let it re-import, tried again. I even installed the KDE desktop itself thinking that perhaps it needed something from that. (xmms also stopped working under kde and that was a bad bad thing.)

So time to search for answers.

It looks like a known bug. The version I tried was 1.0.0-beta4 but it looks the same problem. Perhaps I'll return to digikam in a few months and give it another go but I don't have the time at the moment. I'll stick with f-spot for the time being. Perhaps if I'd persevered I could have got there in the end but at the moment I'm spending more time exploring and investigating tools than actually using the things in anger. And I really need to draw a line in the sand and decide what to use rather than just dabble ineffectually.

picasa apparantly has geotagging support but the linux version has the option greyed out so I'm not going to invest any time going down that road for the time being.

Workspaces in gnome not remembered

2009-09-22T21:49:00.000+01:00

When I said that that I doubted the problem had gone away, I wasn't wrong. I seldom reboot, or log out, but when I do, it's unbelievable annoying to be back to Workspace 1 ... 5. I did think of nuking and re-installing but it felt like a copout. So I did a baby copout. An irritable glance at

ps -ef | less

showed a load of xfce processes. What were they doing, where had they come from, I don't know. But I knew where they were going.

apt-get remove xfce* --purge

It might fix things. It might break a lot more. But hey ho here we go and we're still here. And my workspace names are remembered across reboots. Just shows what a moment of pique can do.

Road and Fell

2009-09-22T10:17:00.000+01:00

Two massively contrasting races at the weekend, and both fantastic.

On Saturday was the Simonside Fell Race at the Thropton Show (number of entries: 82).

On Sunday it was the Great North Run (number of entries, 50,000).

Installing anki on Ubuntu

2009-09-22T09:39:00.003+01:00

In a recent thread on the mnemosyne mailing list I said that I'd abandoned anki because it didn't support hotkeys. Apparantly anki does, and always has supported hotkeys and I was puzzled. A dabble later and I discovered that the version in the current Ubuntu repository is 0.9.9.4-1 and when I installed that I discovered it did not recognize keypresses when navigating a card deck. However, building the latest anki from source did not have that problem.

Installing from source wasn't too difficult. Just the usual dependency glitches that are easily muddled through. The anki website has a ready built DEB package for download:

root@osprey:/home/dougie# dpkg -i Desktop/anki_0.9.9.8.5-1_all.deb
Selecting previously deselected package anki.
(Reading database ... 140804 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking anki (from .../anki_0.9.9.8.5-1_all.deb) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of anki:
anki depends on python-sip4-dev; however:
Package python-sip4-dev is not installed.
anki depends on python-qt4-dev; however:
Package python-qt4-dev is not installed.
dpkg: error processing anki (--install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
anki

Remembering how handy the apt-get build-dep command was for f-spot I decided to try it again:

@osprey:/home/dougie# apt-get build-dep anki
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
anki
The following NEW packages will be installed:
unicode-data
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 6079kB of archives.
After this operation, 9535kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Get:1 http://im.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/universe unicode-data 5.1.0-1 [6079kB]
Fetched 6079kB in 8s (748kB/s)
(Reading database ... 140948 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing anki ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Selecting previously deselected package unicode-data.
(Reading database ... 140804 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking unicode-data (from .../unicode-data_5.1.0-1_all.deb) ...
Setting up unicode-data (5.1.0-1) ...

That didn't look terrible exciting or if it done much so I threw in an apt-get install -f just for good measure.


root@osprey:/home/dougie# apt-get install -f
 Reading package lists... Done
 Building dependency tree       
 Reading state information... Done
 Correcting dependencies... Done
 The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
 kakasi-dic kakasi
 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
 The following extra packages will be installed:
 python-dev python-qt4-dev python-sip4-dev python2.6-dev
 The following NEW packages will be installed:
 python-dev python-qt4-dev python-sip4-dev python2.6-dev
 0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
 1 not fully installed or removed.
 Need to get 4739kB of archives.
 After this operation, 14.8MB of additional disk space will be used.
 Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
 Get:1 http://im.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/main python2.6-dev 2.6.2-0ubuntu1 [4331kB]
 Get:2 http://im.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/main python-dev 2.6.2-0ubuntu1 [978B]
 Get:3 http://im.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/main python-sip4-dev 4.7.9-1ubuntu1 [143kB]
 Get:4 http://im.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/main python-qt4-dev 4.4.4-2ubuntu6 [264kB]
 Fetched 4739kB in 6s (720kB/s)                                                 
 Selecting previously deselected package python2.6-dev.
 (Reading database ... 141005 files and directories currently installed.)
 Unpacking python2.6-dev (from .../python2.6-dev_2.6.2-0ubuntu1_i386.deb) ...
 Selecting previously deselected package python-dev.
 Unpacking python-dev (from .../python-dev_2.6.2-0ubuntu1_all.deb) ...
 Selecting previously deselected package python-sip4-dev.
 Unpacking python-sip4-dev (from .../python-sip4-dev_4.7.9-1ubuntu1_all.deb) ...
 Selecting previously deselected package python-qt4-dev.
 Unpacking python-qt4-dev (from .../python-qt4-dev_4.4.4-2ubuntu6_all.deb) ...
 Setting up python2.6-dev (2.6.2-0ubuntu1) ...
 Setting up python-dev (2.6.2-0ubuntu1) ...
 Setting up python-sip4-dev (4.7.9-1ubuntu1) ...
 
 Setting up python-qt4-dev (4.4.4-2ubuntu6) ...
 Setting up anki (0.9.9.8.5-1) ...
 
 root@osprey:/home/dougie#

easy peasy lemon squeezy.

As I'm not far down the road with mnemosyne I may well revisit anki and see how it goes. It certainly looks promising.

Donnie Munro

2009-09-18T17:14:00.000+01:00

At the Durham Gala tonight. Woohoo!

I love this

2009-09-18T14:52:00.001+01:00

Installing xmms in ubuntu 9.04

2009-09-18T14:27:00.000+01:00

Time to install the truly wonderful xmms. I've tried amarok, audacious, and many many others, but I always come back to xmms. Lean, mean and fast. I want a music player that I can point at a 100GB mp3 file system on a usb drive and say to it, start playing now. No indexing, no lyrics, no album art, no poncing about trying to impress me, just get on with it. And it does.

But it's old and unloved. Discussions on getting it working rarely escape without some amount of withering scorn being heaped on those who choose to stick with xmms, when there are, allegedly, loads of programs that do everything that xmms does, and more. But encouragingly, just as there are those who like the eye-candy of new apps, there are plenty of people out there who want a music player that just plays music. Having said that, I bet I'll buckle and dabble with other layers, just for curiosity. There's a nice ubuntu summary page that I must have a look at sometime. (Audacious looks promising, but currently crashes if I double-click the main window).

So let's go and get xmms. I'll try and get it pre-built first from

http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/

and see how it goes ...

Alt-F2 sudo synaptic Settings / Repositories

ah ... stuff that - Loads of clicky clicky ... why don't I just do what it suggest on the website ...

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and copy and paste it in from the website at the end of the file. No point in commenting it, I'll remember what it's for.

Ok, let's do it.

apt-get update, then apt-get install xmms
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libglib1.2ldbl libgtk1.2 libgtk1.2-common
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libglib1.2ldbl libgtk1.2 libgtk1.2-common xmms
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3301kB of archives.
After this operation, 8935kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Oh yes!

WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated! xmms Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

yeah, go on then.

Looked good and seemed to install ok. Then

dougie@osprey:~$ xmms /media/passport1/mp3/ Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to load module "libcanberra-gtk-module.so": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Message: device: default

and despite the error message it starts up no problem and began playing. Apart from the teensy Main Window.

So Ctrl-D to double-size that and them, ah yes, I've been here before.

Gdk-ERROR **: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) serial 63812 error_code 8 request_code 72 minor_code 0 Gdk-ERROR **: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) serial 63813 error_code 8 request_code 72 minor_code 0

I can't remember if I ever solved this one and in the past I think this is why I always ended up installing from source. The bug is well documented with one workaround suggested being to prefix the xmms command like this

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 && xmms

I've just tried this and it works fine.

I'm tempted to try and build from source, just to see if the same thing happens. If memory serves me correctly the double-size crash didn't happen when built from source, but there were other problems instead.

First attempt at ./configure/ ends with

checking for GLIB - version >= 1.2.2... no *** The glib-config script installed by GLIB could not be found *** If GLIB was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in *** your path, or set the GLIB_CONFIG environment variable to the *** full path to glib-config. configure: error: *** GLIB >= 1.2.2 not installed - please install first ***

so I'm gonna try the build-dep thing again.

sudo apt-get build-dep xmms Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: automake1.9 libasound2-dev libglib1.2-dev libgtk1.2-dev libmikmod2-dev libogg-dev libssl-dev libvorbis-dev libxxf86vm-dev x11proto-xf86vidmode-dev 0 upgraded, 10 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 4988kB of archives. After this operation, 17.4MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

One thing I'm not sure about is having the two extra lines in /etc/sources for the prebuilt package. Will it matter? Only one way to find out ...

./configure completed fine. make ok. yep. same error.

so double-size error happens whatever installation method I use. Not the end of the world. Just need to remember the prefix, and since I usually run xmms from a wrapper script, easy enough to handle.

Installing f-spot 0.6.1.2 from source in Ubuntu 9.04

2009-09-18T11:21:00.000+01:00

Just re-installed Ubuntu 9.04 on the laptop, and time to install f-spot. f-spot is in the Jaunty repositories but I use f-spot a lot and usually install it from source to keep up with the latest features. There are usually problems with the install, and they're usually muddled through. This time, however, I'm going to .... write it down!

So, here we go:

Downloaded f-spot-0.6.1.2, and it's lurking in ~/Desktop, so

bzcat Desktop/f-spot-0.6.1.2.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -

and now I have a directory full of stuff.

Into ~/f-spot-0.6.1.2 and

./configure

rumbles away for a bit to end with

checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3 checking for intltool >= 0.35.0... ./configure: line 3977: intltool-update: command not found found configure: error: Your intltool is too old. You need intltool 0.35.0 or later. dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$

The command

apt-cache search intltool-update

gives nothing, but

apt-cache search intltool

gives

intltool - Utility scripts for internationalizing XML intltool-debian - Help i18n of RFC822 compliant config files

I've no idea what intltool is, but I guess I gotta have it.

apt-get install intltool

pulls in quite a few bits and pieces. Now try ./configure again.

checking for GLIB - version >= 2.0.0... no *** Could not run GLIB test program, checking why... *** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the *** exact error that occured. This usually means GLIB is incorrectly installed. checking for mono... /usr/bin/mono checking for gmcs... no configure: error: No C# compiler found dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$

Ah. Getting a bit of deja vu now. C compiler stuff. Last time I got this I spent ages trying to figure out what I needed. The f-spot website lists the pre-requisites, but it also reminds me that there's a neat build-dep thing that does it all.

sudo apt-get build-dep f-spot

and wow, shedloads of stuff. I'll go and brew a coffee while it's installing all that...

Well it's getting there. Now I'm getting

checking for F... configure: error: Package requirements (libgnome-2.0 >= 2.2 libgnomeui-2.0 >= 2.2 libexif >= 0.5.7 libexif <>= 2.12.2 glib-sharp-2.0 >= 2.12.2 glade-sharp-2.0 >= 2.12.2 gnome-vfs-sharp-2.0 >= 2.12.2 gtk+-2.0 >= 2.14 mono >= 2.0.0 mono-cairo >= 1.2.4) were not met: No package 'mono-cairo' found Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you installed software in a non-standard prefix. Alternatively, you may set the environment variables F_CFLAGS and F_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config. See the pkg-config man page for more details.

yeah ... mono ... mono ... stuff to do with mono. This keeps coming up.
Let's see what we can find.

dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$ apt-cache search mono-cairo libmono-cairo2.0-cil - Mono Cairo library libmono-cairo1.0-cil - Mono Cairo library

I'll try the one with higher number.

dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$ sudo apt-get install libmono-cairo2.0-cil - Mono Cairo library Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done libmono-cairo2.0-cil is already the newest version.

Let's go Mono hunting ... yuck. tons of apt-cache search matches. Time for a google. Found this. - it's for f-spot 0.5 but I'm sure it's the same issue. So let's try

dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$ sudo apt-get install mono-mcs Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: linux-headers-2.6.28-11 linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following NEW packages will be installed: mono-mcs 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 381kB of archives. After this operation, 1122kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://im.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty-updates/main mono-mcs 2.0.1-4ubuntu0.1 [381kB] Fetched 381kB in 0s (403kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package mono-mcs. (Reading database ... 141360 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking mono-mcs (from .../mono-mcs_2.0.1-4ubuntu0.1_all.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Setting up mono-mcs (2.0.1-4ubuntu0.1) ... dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$

Looking promising. No idea what these packages are, but I bet they're devilisshly important no doubt. Now to try another ./configure and see what happens ...

checking for Mono.Cairo.dll... found checking for F... configure: error: Package requirements (libgnome-2.0 >= 2.2 libgnomeui-2.0 >= 2.2 libexif >= 0.5.7 libexif <>= 2.12.2 glib-sharp-2.0 >= 2.12.2 glade-sharp-2.0 >= 2.12.2 gnome-vfs-sharp-2.0 >= 2.12.2 gtk+-2.0 >= 2.14 mono >= 2.0.0 mono-cairo >= 1.2.4) were not met: No package 'mono-cairo' found

close, but no cigar. You can't get no giro smoking in the bar in Cairo (remember buying that as 12" single after hearing it on John Peel show). Where were we ...

Aha! According to launchpad there's a bug for

build-dep f-spot doesn't install libmono-cairo1.0-cil

Looks like I needed the cairo1 package after all.

dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$ sudo apt-get install libmono-cairo1.0-cil Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: linux-headers-2.6.28-11 linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following NEW packages will be installed: libmono-cairo1.0-cil 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 51.3kB of archives. After this operation, 172kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://im.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty-updates/universe libmono-cairo1.0-cil 2.0.1-4ubuntu0.1 [51.3kB] Fetched 51.3kB in 2s (23.5kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package libmono-cairo1.0-cil. (Reading database ... 141368 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libmono-cairo1.0-cil (from .../libmono-cairo1.0-cil_2.0.1-4ubuntu0.1_all.deb) ... Setting up libmono-cairo1.0-cil (2.0.1-4ubuntu0.1) ... dougie@osprey:~/f-spot-0.6.1.2$

Looking good! ./configure completed without errors. So now

make sudo make install

no errors. nice.

Now grab my f-spot config from the desktop

dougie@osprey:~$ rsync -rav icarus:.config/f-spot/ .config/f-spot dougie@icarus's password: receiving incremental file list ./ Accounts.xml addins-setup.config . .

plugin my USB drive and link ...

dougie@osprey:~$ sudo ln -s /media/passport1/jpegs /jpegs

Result!

Now for xmms ...

alsa sound in ubuntu

2009-09-16T11:11:00.000+01:00

A frustrating niggle that has been a minor nuisance for sometime, and by a bit of careful searching I find I'm not alone. Slightly distorted sound after reboot was, I'd already discovered, fixed by typing:

/etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

If playing xmms at the time there would be satisfying thunk from the speakers as the sound righted itself. However I've picked up a couple of clues from the Ubuntu forums. One is to go into alsamixer and mute the Line-In slider. That works for me.

The other is to add:

rmmod snd_hda_intel modprobe snd_hda_intel

to /etc/rc.local.

I've done that but yet to reboot, so don't know if it'll work for me.

Dougie Nisbet is fundraising for Shelter - JustGiving

2009-09-14T15:43:00.001+01:00

Dougie Nisbet is fundraising for Shelter - JustGiving

Posted using ShareThis

Club Handicap Final

2009-09-11T10:35:00.000+01:00

It was the final of the Elvet Striders Club Handicap on Wednesday. I decided not to run it and instead wandered around with camera. Surprised how even on a sunny evening and a fast lens I was still shooting at ISO 1600 and only getting 1:100th of a second or thereabouts. Tried lots of panning shots. When they work, they're great. When they don't, they need deleted.

Great North Run - 2009

2009-09-10T12:18:00.000+01:00

Not long now! Oooh, what to wear, what to wear ....

Something purple I think ...

workspaces in gnome not remembered (and a bit of network-manager)

2009-09-09T12:40:00.002+01:00

Well there goes a few hours of my life I'll never see again. It's sunny outside and I was going to do some gardening. But, there was this problem. I made a change to my desktop, and it didn't work, and I thought, why's that then, so I tweaked something, then did something else, then had a google, then tried to remember if this had happened before, then tried to remember what I'd done if it had happened before, and if it was the same computer, and whether I'd written it down, or bookmarked it, or, more likely, thought, I'll remember how to sort that out if it happens again. Aye.

It started innocently enough with me wanting to do some desktop tidying up. To be consistent across my PCs I thought I'd revert back to gnome network-manager so that I was using the same tools on all machines. I thought, careful now, this is easy to mess up. But it seemed to be ok.

Reboot and network still there. But for a little x on the network-manager applet. nm-applet I think it's called. That's annoying. Functionally irrelevant, but aesthetically irksome. I'd had this before. And so had many others. Now it was just a question of finding out what I'd done about it.

Some time (googling) later and a few red herrings I realised that this was probably because at some time I'd manually created the config files for my static ip address. From a bit of a pick from bits at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkManager/ I modified my /etc/network/interfaces file to look like:

auto lo iface lo inet loopback

and removed all the other lines. I can't recall what happened after that but it probably involved rebooting and cursing a couple of times and things sorted themselves out.

Then a bit of a tidy up of workspace names. Log out, log back in, no change.

I've been here before. Can't remember how it was fixed. But I was sure if I had a rummage around the web I'd come across some answers. I certainly found several references to people with similar problems, but no answers. Coffee was drunk and time passed on this minor irritation that was eating up the day. It wasn't a big deal, but it was very annoying.

Eventually I sussed it. Well no, that would suggest understanding. Eventually I observed what files seemed to be doing, and not doing, anything useful.

One file that doesn't seem to do much is ~/.gconf/apps/metacity/workspace_names/%gconf.xml. Sometimes it changes, sometimes it doesn't. And it doesn't really make much difference anyway. I couldn't figure out where the workspace info was being stored, or why it revereted, usually, to the defaults on restart, so I fell back on the old brute-force:

find ~ -exec grep 'Workspace 1' {} \;

and found the cheeky chappy at ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml. I've no idea why my gnome desktop workspaces are being stored in there, but I've probably only got myself to blame. I remember, vaguely, trying difference desktops and looking for a lightweight one that wouldn't hammer my elderly hardware. xfce was one of them. But we drifted apart and I ended back on gnome, but not, it seems, without a config file or two as souvenirs.

After more trial-and-error I discovered that by running:

xfwm4-workspace-settings

from the command line I could adjust the workspace settings, and they were retained after a restart.

I guess that somewhere in my configuration I have a reference to the xfce4 workspace config file. I don't have time to try and track it down right now. I doubt that this is the end of the matter but for the moment it'll have to do. At least next time it happens, I've written it down, and will no where to start.

Why Blog?

2009-09-09T12:34:00.001+01:00

One of reasons I started this blog was the realisation of how useful it could be keeping notes of stuff I do that I might need to do again! I noticed that whenever I had technical problems and started searching the web for answers, more and more I was finding the most useful stuff in blogs where people had documented their own experience. That was a thought. The number of times I've sat down and thought, I've had this problem before. How did I fix it again? If only I'd written something down, a quick note, a bookmark, anything!

The NTS (Note to Self) side of blogging is something unexpected. To me anyway. It encourages self-disciple in writing stuff down that might one day be handy again. And allows some nifty cross-referencing. That's the idea anyway.

The Grisedale Horseshoe Fell Race

2009-09-07T20:37:00.001+01:00

I'm not a huge fan of being mediocre. For now I don't know whether I've got room for improvement or whether this is about as good as I'm going to get. I dream of being average. But what a fantastic race. Loved it. Adored it. Can't wait for next year to give it another try.

I was a little anxious before the race. A little scared. I like that.

Wireless Networking

2009-09-02T11:43:00.000+01:00

A frustrating few hours and days but finally things looking OK.

Like others who are using the ipw2200 drivers with the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection I've been having problem in Ubuntu 9.04. These problems were inconsistent but usually culminated in dropped connections on anything involving heavy network traffic. I tried different channels and tinkering with and without encryption but the unreliability persisted. Problems were usually accompanied by messages such as this in the syslog:

Sep 2 09:22:01 osprey kernel: [ 3908.688320] ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting.

I thought I'd solved the problem by uninstalling network-manager and installing wicd but that was just a temporary blip. I'd noticed a couple of posts where folk had success by using wicd over network-manager but it didn't seem to be the issue for me after all. Furthermore, I wanted to get my wireless broadband dongle working and network-manager made that easy to set up.

Eventually I noticed that on many cases the AP seemed to crash and had to be reset or rebooted. A few experiments later and I noticed that I could reproduce by hammering the network with a few big file transfers. Not even that big really. The AP is a D-Link DWL-2000AP+.

So, short answer. I ordered a Netgear WG602v4 and set that up instead. And the problems have gone away. At the moment I'm trying to hammer the connection with repeated file transfers and I can't get it to fail.

Don't cut through the branch your sitting on

2009-08-24T10:02:00.000+01:00

Well that wasn't very bright. Laptop up, wireless working, so thought, time to get rid of network manager and install wicd.


apt-get remove network-manager
apt-get remove network-manager-gnome

A bit fat hairy oops on that one as my wireless network connection flew away. I'd thought it might, but thought it probably wouldn't as I'd read or thought I'd read or at least was pretty sure that network-manager was an interface to controlling the hardware, it didn't actually handle the connection itself. Well, looks like it does.

Not to worry. Just install wicd from the installation CD. That didn't work. Various attempts at rummaging through the CD to find wicd, then in desperation, network manager were in vain. A few googles later showed that I'm not the first to be thwarted by the install CD. According to the ubuntu documentation it should be a pretty straightforward affair, but despite following the instructions I didn't find much available on the CD.

Since network-manager is just another way of configuring the system I knew it should be possible to get my wireless connection back using the command line. I just couldn't be bothered reading the manual. But it had to be done.

man iwconfig

then straight to the EXAMPLES. Except there weren't any. I was going to have to do this the hard way. I got there in the end, by temporarily disabling security (you can't use a passphrase with iwconfig) and with a lot of help from a nifty tutorial over at back|track4 which looks a really handy site.

Wireless networking on Toshiba laptop

2009-08-24T07:45:00.000+01:00

To cut several hours of hacking prodding and muttering into a short concise note is not easy. I've lost count of the websites I've looked at trying to get this working but eventually stumbled upon a couple of posts at ubuntu brainstorm which pretty much summed my experience up. The hardware is a Toshiba Equium with built-in wireless using the Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG hardware using the ipw2200 driver. Over at the Launchpad there are several reports regarding this hardware running under Ubuntu, especially Ubuntu 9.04.

What many people, me included, seem to be finding, is that NetworkManager under Ubuntu 9.04 is, er, unhelpful. I'm ditching it in favour of wicd as I find it easier and more stable.

The Club Handicap

2009-08-13T08:11:00.000+01:00

Last night I stood in as timekeeper for our club handicap. It was a mistake thinking I could take photos and press buttons on the watch at the same time. On the subject of buttons, annoying things about the Garmin Forerunner 305 include:

The words lap xx appear on the screen everytime you press the lap button, obscuring the time! So you can't read off the lap time at the time of having just done the thing.
It's not brilliant at allowing rapid repeated presses of the lap button. Two runners in around the same time? You have to be very careful in ensuring the lap has registered twice.

But it was a hoot. I did get some photos, my favourite one is above. It almost looks like it's fixed, the symmetry of the runners. This one makes me laugh. All feet of the ground!

These sorts of shots have become a lot easier since I got a 'fast' lens for my Canon SLR. This was taken using a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens in evening light and it's still nice and sharp. This is their 'cheap' lens apparantly!

The Digital Notebook

2009-08-12T07:58:00.000+01:00

Last night our photography group had a guest talk by Phil Gates. The theme of Phil's talk was the use of a compact digital camera in nature photography. Over the last few years my SLR has been getting less used and I've found myself using a compact digital more and more.

I've always used photography as a learning tool but in the last year this has become a much bigger priority. With decent reasonably priced take-anywhere compacts now available the idea of the digital notebook becomes an attractive reality. I've often considered getting a digital voice recorder for use while wandering around the field but using the audio recording facilities of most compact cameras is probably a useful compromise.

So this morning I'm thinking I'm going to have to have a bit of a think. I've got thousands of digital images on my computer, almost all in a bit of a muddle. I've gone through periodic attempts to organise them but have found that whatever method I tried was wanting in a particular area. Most photo packages are, or at least were, expensive and had some limitation.

A common issue that crops up with photo software is portability. Many programs use a separate database to store the indexing information and tags regarding the photos. I want the option of writing details directly to the image file itself so that it can be accessed on other computers. I tend not to work with RAW image files so that allows a bit more flexibility too.

I've got my tools and over the next few weeks and months I'm going to give some thought over how to streamline things. The list is as follows:

Photo Manager
This has to be f-spot running on Ubuntu. There are loads of packages out there and I've experimented with a fair few and I keep returning to f-spot. It's not perfect by a long way but it's simple, free and does what I want. I tend to do very little post-processing with digital photography (a bit of cropping and brightening is about as far as it goes) and f-spot doesn't bloat itself with offering those facilities. It is a photo manager rather than a photo editor.

Its killer-feature for me is the tagging. And the simplicity of the tagging. Allowing keyboard short-cuts, minimising reliance on the mouse, and allowing flexible deletion, creation and merging of tags. The hierarchical tagging system in f-spot lends itself very nicely to the binomial system. For instance I have a tag called Acer, under which I have tags for Acer pseudoplatanus, Acer rufinerve and Acer campestre. I can choose to look at all my images for Acer campestre, or all my Acers just by clicking or searching on the relevant tags. And I can mix this with dates and locations which is handy.

I know there are other photo packages that do this sort of thing, but f-spot is the one for me. It does it with little fuss and doesn't try to jazz things up with bells and whistles. And it doesn't force you to use the mouse for everything.

But f-spot but doesn't allow you to rename files. So before the photos go into f-spot I usually have a tinker with gthumb. This is where I get rid of the dross and rename the photos. Once they're in f-spot renaming is a bit of a faff.

Lately I've discovered geotagging but the programs in Ubuntu that I've briefly explored feel a bit clunky. I've not gone far down this route yet and need to investigate Linux offerings for geotagging images, but the windows program geosetter is very nice. By exporting my images filesystem from linux with write access to Vista, I can access the files directly using geosetter and that looks promising. geosetter allows some interesting possibilities with retrospectively geotagging old photos using google maps although it sometimes has issues with certain files. The pictures taken with my Nikon Coolpix S600 seems to give it a headache with errors similar to these. I can get around this by fiddling with the geosetter config in ways that I cannot recall.

As for the GPS info. I have a Garmin Forerunner 305 that I use for running. Now I get into the habit of starting it whenever I go anywhere with the camera. I use Sporttracks for keeping my running diary and it's also just dandy for exporting my tracks as GPX files which I can feed to geosetter.

How to make sense of the geotagged data? Well I can look at it with geosetter itself and that's quite nice. flickr allows geotagged images and offers a clickable map for visitors to see where a picture was taken. But it's a bit rubbish. More interestingly everytrail gives more of a story feel to photo meanders and allows a very easy import facility from flickr, but limits to 4-at-a-time if you're uploading direct from your PC. Then there's locr that is promoted from the geosetter program itself but I haven't taken to that much. Not that I've given it enough time to do it justice.

The area of geotagging seems to me to be a great resource for botanical survey work of any kind and I need to have a bit of a tinker and see what's out there in terms of software.

So my toolkit:

gthumb
f-spot
geotagger
sporttracks
everytrail / flickr

And finally, mnemosyne. When I get images that I want to be able to use for learning identification, mnemosyne is quite nice. Like f-spot, it's simple and allows you to hot-key a lot of stuff (something I found impossible when I tried anki).

So that's my raw materials. It will probably change but hopefully it will become streamlined. I've got a lot of photos to tag and organise so it's worth putting the effort in to find a system that works well.

What sort of bird is this?

2009-08-11T16:26:00.000+01:00

So what kind of bird is this? I have a webcam sitting inside a front-opened robin nestbox overlooking the pond. The robins were never particularly interested in it and it provided a handy sheltered area to shove a Logitech webcam. Every now and then something comes along and takes an interest. My guess is that it's a woodpigeon.

Organizing photos

2009-08-10T18:18:00.000+01:00

Things are getting messy. Or messier. I've got thousands of photos to organise. It's not a bad job. And I had a fairly streamlined process for adding new photos. But now I'm discovering geotagging, and I can see it being very, very, very useful for the sort of things I'm interested in.

My Big Plan is to use a lot of my images to help me learn my plant ids. In the past I've used Supermemo on my Palm Tungsten to help me with my Botanical and Common plant names. The trouble with this, or the limitation I should say, is that there is a tendency to do just that. I can tell you that Lysimachia nummularia is the Latin name for Creeping Jenny. But if I tripped over it walking through the wood, I'd be none the wiser. I used to know what it looked like, and I try to exhert a bit of self-discipline when I'm doing my drills in Supermemo and mentally picture the plant I'm remembering, but I'm not doing very well.

Recently I've been looking at the desktop offerings. The advantage of the PDA is that it can go places a desktop can't. But it doesn't do pictures. And it's small. And my eyesight is getting a bit rubbish and I find little gizmo things fiddly and annoying. So, desktop offerings. Lots of those, but the one I'm settling for is called mnemosyne. It's not as fancy and whizzo as, say, anki, but I prefer mnemosyne because it's not as fancy and fiddly as anki.

mnemosyne allows sounds and pictures. Great stuff. It allows you to add images and that has enormous potential for me. It's still early days and I have a large collection of images that need organising, and things need a bit of streamlining.

Here's how it's going at the moment.

Camera Card goes into card reader (Vista)
Copy pictures to an incoming folder on PC.
Import GPS track into Sportracks
Export GPS track from Sportracks into GPX file
Browse pictures and delete the rubbish
Use geosetter to embed position information into jpegs from GPX file
Copy images to Ubuntu machine over the LAN
Use gthumb in Ubuntu to browse/rename/delete files
Run f-spot and import images
Tag images accordingly

I was doing ok until I recently discovered geotagging, and now things are getting hairy. I'm going to need to give this some thought. There are quite a lot of possibilities in my mind on how to streamline things and I can't be the only person doing this sort of nonsense.

fotopic

2009-08-10T16:37:00.000+01:00

I've just been following a thread on the fotopic mailing list about outage this weekend. Someone post a link to upload stats for fotopic after their big outage at new year. I think the writing's on the wall for fotopic. Damn shame really. There are loads of gallery websites but I've not found anything that allows the customization that fotopic offers.

2009-08-10T12:03:00.000+01:00

Well f-spot compiled just fine on icarus, my main Ubuntu machine. Starts fine. The flicker on preview bug is still there. Compiling f-spot in other machine at the moment. Got a couple of minor errors:

No package 'libgnome-2.0' found
No package 'libgnomeui-2.0' found

so had a bit of an apt-cache search for all things libgnomy. Nothing promising so did what I usually do in this situation and start installing anything that looks vaguely promising with -dev on the end. Seems to have done the trick:

apt-get install libgnomeui-dev

Not got much time to play with f-spot at the moment but looking forward to seeing what's new and improved in the new version.

f-spot

2009-08-10T11:30:00.000+01:00

A new version of f-spot is out. Cover me, I'm going in.