Tag: geolocation

Firefox, Bacteria-snot, and job-hunting geologist

'Human Statue' striking a constipated looking pose on a toiletI have to say that suffering through periods of chronic blogstipation is seriously annoying.

There have been a number of things I’ve been wanting to post about, but I’ve been way too loaded down to have time to sit down and compose them. Therefore, lest anyone think I’ve abandoned bigroom.org, I’ll throw a few of them out here in shortened form.

First, a public service announcement: HTML 5 is not just about turning the internet into Television. I keep seeing articles about “HTML5” and they all seem to focus obsessively on the <video> tag. The same is largely true of articles about the recent Firefox 3.5 browser release, since arguably the biggest feature of the new version is HTML5 support. Although there are quite a few other new features, the main one I wanted to briefly remind everyone of is that there’s also an <audio> tag. I think audio is important, because it’s a lot simpler for people to generate audio for the web than to produce a video. Also, the “Vorbis” audio codec is a definite step up in quality from the de-facto “mp3” codec. The latest Opera, Google Chrome, and Firefox browsers all support the <audio> tag with “Ogg Vorbis” files. Apple’s Safari browser doesn’t by default, but that’s easily fixed. If you install the free QuickTime® component from Xiph, it teaches QuickTime about Ogg files, allowing you to watch and listen to the same HTML5 audio and video that everyone else (aside from Microsoft, as usual) can. It apparently also allows you to create Ogg files through QuickTime, so you can make your own content available for everyone else to watch and hear if you want to.

If you’ve seen some of my earlier map-and-pictures posts, you can probably guess that I’m also interested in the new geolocation feature. As far as I can tell, it’s currently natively implemented in the new Firefox, but will be showing up in Safari, Opera, and Chrome (at least) in the relatively near future. My only real complaint is that right now Firefox can only get the location through Google via your current IP address, and that isn’t at all accurate (when it works correctly, the precision is limited to “somewhere around this city” – when it doesn’t, where it thinks you are depends entirely on whose network your internet connection comes from.) It’s still baffling to me why they didn’t include a simple “manual entry” option for geolocation. Anyway, I’ve not had time to dig into this either, so enough said about that. For now.

And now a question of science and microbiology enthusiasts who may read this – I may soon, finally, be able to buy a microscope. Any recommendations on where to get one? The only “special” features that I really want (and can afford) would be a sufficiently bright light source and ability to swap in a darkfield condenser from time to time.

Penultimately, bacteria snot Xanthan Gum is hereby declared my Favorite Food Additive of the Month. It turned out to do exactly what I hoped it would do in the lemon-ginger ice cream I made a couple of weeks ago. I must play with this delightful edible substance more.

Finally, is anybody in California actually hiring geologists? As if marrying me wasn’t proof enough of insanity, my wife really wants to move back there. We can’t stay here forever in Southeast Texas on just my meager academic staff salary, as nice as the job itself is, and although for months she’s been firing off applications all over the country (and even a few beyond the borders) she’d really prefer to take her geophysics experience and PhD in Geology from UC Davis back to California. Although I’m personally a bit less enthusiastic about the idea, the possibility of getting into UC Davis’ Fermentation Science or Food Science graduate programs definitely has some appeal. Plus, I’d be able to listen to This Week In Science live while it’s being broadcast.

Linux on the EeePC 901 a fortnight later…

'Penguin Powered!' stickersLife’s been a couple of weeks of hectic mess, but we’re still here. I’ve also now had “Bit” for about a fortnight. I still love it.

I did run into an odd problem, though. People occasionally report that they have trouble getting their Linux boxen to connect to encrypted networks. Even when “regular” encrypted networks work, sometimes people say they have trouble connecting to the hardcore “Enterprise”-grade networks running certain varieties of the WPA2 encyrption, as is in use for example on campus where I work.

I, however, had no trouble with these. I’ve got WICD installed, and I can just pick the network I want out of the list that pops up, enter the relevant password/”key” information for whatever encrypted network I want, and hit “connect”. No problems at all. It’s the plain, unencrypted “public” networks I had trouble with.

Apparently, the wireless network card in the EeePC 901 is based on the relatively new Ralink RT2860 chipset. Ralink provides native Linux drivers, which so far work impressively well. The one problem they have turns out to be that the drivers don’t respond to the old-school “iwconfig” program that everything expects to use to tell a wireless card to connect to a public wireless network. Since WICD expects to be able to do this, connections to unencrypted networks were failing silently. Hopefully this single irritating quirk in the drivers will be corrected – or perhaps a workaround implemented in WICD.

Meanwhile, there’s a workaround – you can use another tool that comes in the same package as iwconfig called “iwpriv” to set the network information. I whipped up a quick script that I can feed the name of the network and channel I want to connect to and it sets the card appropriately. THEN when I push the “connect” button in WICD, it works.

I was glad for the wireless networking performance today when some jerk set off the fire alarm in the building where I work (for about the 4th or 5th time in the last 6 months or so) and we all had to shuffle outside and sit around at a “safe” distance from the building while we waited for someone to decide there wasn’t really a fire and let us back in. I was able to stay on the wireless network from a fair distance outside the walls, and was thus spared the tragic fate of losing my connection to the InterTubes and having to interact with the real world…

If you have a use for it, the pathetically simple little script I use is:
#!/bin/sh
#call with: raconnect.sh (ssid) (channel)
iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=NONE
iwpriv ra0 set AuthType=WEPAUTO
iwpriv ra0 set SSID=$1
iwpriv ra0 set Channel=$2

The way I use it is I pop up WICD and find the network I want to connect to. Let’s say it’s called “PublicNet” on channel 1. I tell the computer to run “raconnect.sh PublicNet 1”. Then I can push the connect button in WICD and it seems to work fine. (It may be that you can leave out the Channel line, I haven’t tried that yet.)

That’s really the only problem I’ve run into so far. Otherwise, everything just plain works that I’ve tested at this point. I even loaded, geotagged, cleaned up, and posted the most recent few photos I put on Panoramio entirely on this little machine. I was right, incidentally – fixing the “GigantoFonts” problem solved the problem of Google Earth popping up too big. The Linux version runs just fine now on my EeePC 901.

I should probably post something that isn’t me blathering about my cool new toytool, though. Anybody want to know anything?

Coming Soon to a Bigroom.org blog post near you!

I got a little money for Christmas, but I’m feeling quite guilty as I didn’t really have the time and money to reciprocate in advance. I also haven’t been able to figure out what to spend it on until now. Now, I have a solution for both problems.

Xanthomonas campestris growing in a petri dish and exuding slimeI intend to spend it all on fermentation-related food ingredients and do some experimentation with sweet-tasting foods. Initially, in addition to flavors (spices and whatnot), I need to track down bulk quantities of:

  • Erythritol, which is a virtually non-caloric sugar alcohol which unlike sorbitol and so forth is not normally prone to cause gastric distress, and unlike Xylitol is not hazardous for beloved household pets. Better still, it actually is very tasty unlike that nasty hippy “Stevia” crap (which isn’t produced by fermentation anyway, as far as I know).
  • Food-grade Glycerol (“Glycerine”), which I hypothesize is close enough to the structure of Erythritol to mix well with it and help the erythritol dissolve (and hopefully prevent crystallization, much the same way the “corn syrup” does with sucrose).
  • Xanthan Gum. MMmmmmm…edible bacteria-snot. (Okay, for all that this sounds disgusting, it’s really somewhat similar to pectin, which like xanthan gum is a polysaccharide. Pectin is just fruit-snot rather than bacteria snot. Dietarily, both count as “soluble fiber”.)

There are probably other ingredients I can come up with as well. For those of you out there who are owed gifts: Chewy candies, hard candies, baked goods, and/or beverages, what’s your preference for my initial experimentation? Assuming anyone’s interested, I will probably blog my results…

Meanwhile, I’ve also been thinking about geolocation, geotagging of audio and video media, and Asterisk again. I want to take the lessons learned from my playing with the “Where Was I?” prototype and turn it into a real geolocation system, integrating with Asterisk and Laconica (which turned out to be easier to set up than I’d feared – I’ve now got my own Laconica server at http://omniblab.dogphilosophy.net/laconica, though I need to sit down and activate the IM integration (Twitter may have abandoned IM, but it reportedly works fine in Laconica).

It also turns out that you can use Asterisk with cellphones(!), at least if they have bluetooth. That’s handy to know…

Argh – too much to do, not enough time!…

Phone-in Geolocation: almost working…

It’s a hasty and rather brittle thing, but I seem to have the asterisk side of the equation functioning at a minimal level, including recording audio to go with the latitude and longitude that I dial in when I call. Aside from the beautification and cleanup to make it more intuitive, all I need to do is test the “convert the recording to mp3” call and whip up a quick frontend to display the data. Then all of you loyal fans (and/or secret conspirators) can follow along on my long but hasty journey complete with audio. Aren’t you lucky? (Don’t answer that…) If my schedule works out well enough, I may even be able to do a travelogue update from New Belgium Brewing Company along the way.

The basic process is that I whip out my trusty cellphone, call home, and dial the appropriate extension. I then key in my latitude and longitude, and then record up to a five minute bit of audio to go with it. The script then sticks the latitude, longitude, and timestamp (local to the server) at the end of a comma-separated text file and will then invoke a background process of LAME to convert the file to mp3 for online listening. I’m probably only going to have time for a really simple web interface for the moment since I’ve got to hit the road by lunchtime tomorrow after some work in the morning, but once I’m back from this trip I’ll hopefully have a chance to spiff it up.

UPDATE 20081223:If you’re bored, and you watch http://omniblab.dogphilosophy.net/where you MIGHT see an update or to show up during the day, assuming everything works. Unfortunately I won’t actually know if it worked until tonight when I stop for the evening and get online to check it out…

ANOTHER UPDATE 20081223 (late): Now that I’ve stopped for the evening, I’ve fixed the stupid last-minute typo that was keeping the page from working. The audio isn’t automatically being converted to mp3, so until I get time to figure that out the audio parts of the updates won’t show up until I have time to log in and start the conversion by hand. Hopefully be able to fix that (and spiff up the display page) in a day or two.

Any questions, comments, or suggestions (or requests)?