Signal Grey

We're Back

If you haven’t already seen us, we are back safe from our adventure in Laos. Anita’s site still hasn’t covered the last piece of the journey but we hope to get that up there before too long. When I get my a into g we will also put more of the photos up on this site.

Will let you know when I’ve sorted it!

Thailand - Laos Adventure Begins

We are going to Thailand and Laos for 4 weeks!

We will update Anita’s Site as often as we can given access to the internet while we are away so you can follow our progress from there if you are interested.

See you on the other side.

A Planet Aggregator for dakota.net.nz

I have just set up the Rails Planet at www.dakota.net.nz to aggregate the two logs currently hosted there (this one right here included). Rails Planet is used at www.planetrubyonrails.org and does not appear to be in active development. As such I found there were a couple of querks to getting it set up.

Amoungst other things I suspect are mostly specific to my set up one big problem I faced was getting access to the admin interface. Since there was no default login with the install and there did not appear to be an initial setup phase I had no way of creating a user in order to then access the admin interface.

The solution I found was to comment out line 4 of app/controllers/admin/base_controller.rb:

class Admin::BaseController < ApplicationController

  layout "admin"
# before_filter :login_required

end

This essentially disabled authentication for the admin interface so I could access it without a login. Once I had set up a user account I then uncommented the line again and restarted the server to ensure the authentication was back in place.

Hopefully this helps anyone who is having similar problems.

Electronic Mathematics

I have been considering a project that would involve defining a mathematical procedure preferably in a format like XML. The definition would need to include the definition of variables/inputs, logic/sequence and mathmatical equations.

The calculation would then be executed by a programme based on user inputs. The resulting calculation would then be saved (again preferably in an XML format) for further editing if required and/or printed/exported (calculation report) to a number of formats (i.e. latex, pdf, html etc).

I have been trying to locate any pre-existing components that may be able to fulfill the about requirements. MathML, LaTeX, OpenXM/OpenMath all seem to fulfill parts of the requirements.

I would like to avoid having more than one definition of the equations in the xml definition i.e. one for the actual calculation and one for visual representation. To avoid this I either need a library that can convert Latex/MathML into executable code or one that can execute the code directly from the Latex/MathML input.

Would appreciate any input here. In the mean time I will continue my search.

Busy Times

So long time no write. It’s been busy times for Anita and I. Both work and play. The boat has had a bit more use (that big snapper is still eluding us though) and we have made a couple of trips to the snow at Mt Ruapehu which is having an excellent season. We are planning another trip this weekend and I have taken some days off to fill in with snow boarding aswell. Might have some photos to share next week.

The following week will be busy at work with a short duration shutdown. So I’d best make the most of the time off whilst it lasts.

We’ve been busy considering our options for the coming few years. Basically we can head overseas to take up assignments there or stay on here for another ~3 years and tackle some other goals. Seems the preference is for the later at this stage though there’s no pressure to make a decision until the end of the year.

Fishing

Anita has written an article on latest fishing expedition. Based on the success of that trip we are planning a dawn fishing expedition tomorrow! Long weekends rock!

Urimod : Modify URIs in HTML

Urimod is a small perl script to modify URIs in HTML. More specifically it is a tool to change URIs/URLs from mixed type (i.e. relative or absolute) to another (relative to document root). Urimod can change URIs in a whole directory tree of html files or in a single file. It is most useful for ensuring a consistent URI format across a website. Urmod can change URIs in anchor, image or link html elements.

Check out the urimod page for more info.

Internet Time Travel

In one of my earlier posts I refered to the web.archive.org (“Way Back Machine”) archive of my old site. I found this quite an interesting experience looking at my old sites and seeing how they had changed over time and it got me thinking about how other, higher-profile, web sites have changed over time.

The Fluff at the Capitaine Bougainville

Some friends of ours formed a band some time ago. The band is currently known as “The Fluff”. They had their first gig last night at the Capitaine Bougainville Theatre at Forum North, Whangarei.

Their gig was part of the Whangarei District Council staff concert so the whole thing was pretty informal. It was a pretty big audience though (est. 70-100 people) so they were all pretty apprehensive but their act went down really well.

Photos

Here are some photos from their act - unfortunately we neglected to take our camera so I only had my cellphone to take pictures.

The night finished up with these guys (yes, guys..). Lucky for them it will be hard to identify them from this photo:

So you're starting a weblog...

Yeah. Original huh?

It was inevitable really - I could only resist this trend for so long. I have had a bunch of stuff I have been wanting to publish for a long time but have had nowhere to do it.

The name signal grey comes from a site I created back in 2001 before weblog’s even existed. You can view the web.archive.org archive of the site. Of course, this, along with everything else I produced at the time, is full of bad stuff - pop ups! - I didn’t even know that standards existed at that point. At this time I believe the closest thing to blogging software was NewsPro (now known as Coranto) which I used for similar purposes on my sites.

I don’t see myself updating this daily and it is not intended as a journal of my daily life. I already have a bunch of stuff that I have accumulated and would like to share via this site. I will be adding this info as time allows.