Grahame's LJ

06:08 pm - Hohum.

Feeling really happy about my garden. I'll take some snaps in the next few days and put them up. The bok choy is doing wonderfully, I've got tomato plants a-plenty, rocket, and the sugar snap peas are shooting up. I don't think anything much has died despite the heat. Even my dwarf lemon tree is growing at a remarkable pace.

I've almost completed my first fill of the Bokashi bin. It's a bit over a month since I started it. The bin has produced a couple of litres of 'bokashi juice' - just excess liquid mixed with products from the fermentation. I've been using it to fertilise the plants (diluted) and it seems to be working OK. Next step will be to bury the fermented waste and leave it a few weeks to convert fully over to compost.

Saw the critter above down at Hyde Park yesterday. There were a couple of them swimming about the southern side of the eastern lake. I think they were eating little fish, but I'm not sure. Interesting critters to watch :-)

If anyone wants seedlings, I've got tomato plants that need a home. conradin and flyingblogspot are taking some, and alexmoon is taking some bok choy and rocket, but there may be more left :-)

09:28 pm - Lake Monger

Nankeen Night Heron (Set on flickr)

(Creepiest bird ever, don't you reckon!)

Yesterday morning featured a trip to Lake Monger. For those of you that aren't Perthites, it's a wetland in inner city Perth. Looking at my photographs, we saw at least twenty-seven species of bird. A very exciting morning! Wonderful light for photography, and met a few nice people too. Photography and birdwatching are approved occupations for us young folk.

Bought clipless pedals for the bicycle - which require you to clip in with special shoes. I'm really liking them, far better than my previous 'clip' pedals where you slide your shoe into a strap. I'm yet to stack it by failing to unclip my shoes when stopping, but I'm sure I will. Nearly participated in at least one hilarious dual-stacking already.

Thanks to everyone that came to my housewarming yesterday. The picnic in the park was lovely and it was great seeing everyone :-)

I've just been going through photographs and wikipedia/wikimedia, uploading photographs for birds lacking in them. If only we lived in a crazy Cory Doctorow world, I'd be rich!

11:05 pm - Pretty good weekend

Went off yesterday morning for some 6.30am birdwatching in Maylands. I hadn't realised how nice an area it is to go walking in. We saw quite a few birds, including two White-faced Heron. Saw the cutest thing I've seen in a long time; a juvenile Little Pied Cormorant. If you have a look at the photo, you'll see what I mean :)

Didn't do that much today, just domestic stuff, a bit of work on a project. I did wander out in the late afternoon with camera and tripod to take a video of the Great Egret that's been in Hyde Park lately. You can see the video here; it's not great but my next will be better. It managed to catch quite a few fairly large fish!

greyreviews asked me to lj-cut all my photographs from posts. I don't really want to, as I like showing off shots I'm pleased with, but it strikes me I might be annoying everyone. What better solution to life's problems than direct democracy, so I'm posting this poll. If the 'yeas' have it, I'll start lj-cutting all the photos.

Poll #1512704 Should I cut photographs?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26

Should I cut photographs?

09:48 pm - Protocol Buffers over D-Bus

I’ve been writing quite a lot of code using D-Bus. For those that don’t know, this is a system/desktop messaging bus which lets programs exchange serialised messages and receive notification of events. It does the job, but I’ve found using it from C++ quite frustrating.

Gtkmm provides a great wrapper around Gtk+, and so much as you manage to stay within it you get really nice things; type safety, easy memory management, easy subclassing, and a whole heap less boilerplate. Unfortunately there aren’t any nice C++ D-Bus bindings that are under the LGPL or a more permissive license, so I’ve been using the dbus-glib bindings.

What I ended up with was a lot of code that did this;

void
noun_verb(MyObject *self, const char *message, GPtrArray *keys, char **rv, GError *error)
{
    /* proxy out to a stashed pointer from a C++ object */
    self->cpp_object(message, keys, rv);
}

This involves writing quite a bit of boilerplate. You end up changing code in about four places whenever you change a message definition. Additionally, dbus-glib is fairly hideous to use. Danni has written some excellent documentation. You can see that marshalling complex structures into and out of dbus-glib is tricky; it’s also bug-prone and makes it frustrating to change existing definitions.

I’d say it’d be (in many cases) easier to marshall yourself by hand into D-Bus wire format than to use dbus-glib. It’s just that nasty to use. Encoding a repeated structure is incredibly, incredibly gory; allocating GPtArrays and filling them with GValueArray instances.. yick.

So, I’ve got a bunch of lovely, type-safe C++ code, and then this horrible stuff which is both buggy and tedious to maintain. It hit me the other day that I needn’t stick to using D-Bus to encode my messages. I’m now using Google’s Protocol Buffers. I simply define my D-Bus methods to take and return a single UTF-8 character string. I define protocol buffers and then marshall them into unicode strings:

char *
encode_base64_protobuf(const google::protobuf::MessageLite &pb)
{
    std::string s;
    pb.SerializeToString(&s);
    char *b64 = g_base64_encode((const guchar *)s.c_str(), s.size());
    return b64;
}

… and similarly decode them into protocol buffer message instances from the unicode strings at the other end. The C++ API for protocol buffers is remarkably nice; we can access repeated fields via STL-like containers. Everything is type safe and wonderful. Best of all, if I change a message I simply recompile and everything works magically end-to-end. If I add a new optional field to a message, I can recompile and everything will work without changing a line of code.

While this approach is a little inefficient, I think it’s worth it. When programming it’s important that the amount of boilerplate, and in particular the difficulty of making changes, be as low as possible. I’ve gone from a situation where changing method prototypes or passing complex datastructures about was difficult and time consuming to easy and pleasant. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to do all of this within D-Bus and allied libraries, but for now, this works :-)

10:37 pm - Let's play operation!

Well, it's time to go get knocked out and hacked up again. I've got a nasal polyp operation scheduled for the 2nd of February. It's been four and a half years since I first had them removed; nobody knows how they form, but they do know that if they're hacked out there's a 30% chance they won't come back! Who can beat those odds? :-)

In fairness, it's not a stationary probability distribution; each time I have them removed the probability of recurrence is reduced. It's somewhat amazing that nobody knows why they happen, the accepted treatment is to hack the things out... and I find myself looking forward to it.

Surgeon seems like a nice bloke. I presume I'll have to go see an anaesthetist, and I've got a CT scan scheduled for Monday. The thing that always amazes me about the medical system is how it lurches from inactivity to activity; you wait a month or two for an appointment, and then bang, everything is happening :-)

On Prednisolone for a week, then for a week before the surgery. Slightly freaked myself out reading the side-effect list, but that list is fairly scary for most medication.

07:05 am - Old Year's Resolutions

With apologies to flyingblogspot, this does seem a neat idea; so here is my list of retroactive resolutions for 2009.

Start a project to be happier

De-clutter; give away lots of stuff

Move out of Nedlands and into an exciting new area

Continue with my photography hobby

Start getting into birdwatching as a related hobby

Make a bunch of great new friends, get out of the house more

Spend much less time watching TV; partially achieved by no longer owning one

Be greener (recycle more, waste less water and electricity, …)

Upgrade bike with panniers and a rack to make it much more useful for bulk haulage

Get outdoors, do gardening

Reconsider a number of strange preconceptions

Read more, and on more varied topics

Attempt to lie to people less, even when that is difficult or lying is the socially normal thing to do

Loose weight, slowly over a longish period

Start attending weekly half-assed running group

Start eating smaller, better quality (nicer) meals

Perhaps stop making so many things impossible, when they really aren’t

… and now I’m off birdwatching / a-photographing. Have a good day people :)

06:19 pm - Garden photographs!

As promised, here are balcony garden photographs (click to see the set on flickr):



I'm feeling quite happy with how it's going :) Next thing is to make a trip to Bunnings and get some more soil, and then plant some of my vegetables. I'm excited about the Bok Choy, I've read reports it grows very well in container gardens, so I think I'll plant that next :-)

The Bokashi bin is up and running, yay!

Current Mood: happy

04:49 pm - Messing about

Above is bunnycronkite. Playing about with the video recording on my SLR; that was taken using my 35mm prime lens in fairly decent light, with a very small aperture. The bunny manages to stay in focus a lot of the time. Terrible camera work, etc, etc, though :-)

Camera can do HD recording, and has a microphone. I've muted out the audio, as nobody wants to hear me struggle to breathe Vader-style.

Hope everyone has a great new year!

11:17 pm - Gardening!

Thanks to some christmas presents, I'm now set up to grow some food on my balcony. At the moment I've got a few succulents (from cuttings), some shrubs, and a planter pot full of herbs. I planted some dwarf sunflowers on Christmas day, and they've already sprouted. I'm going to grow bok choy, sugar snap peas and tomatos as soon as I get down to Bunnings for more supplies :-)

I'm excited about growing my own food. A wonderful Christmas gift was a Bokashi indoor compostor (thanks H!). I will easily be able to feed my plants using scraps and leftovers, and will gift leftover compost to friends with gardens.

Anyway, yay for gardening!

09:40 pm - Merry Christmas!

This year I've decided to make a charitable donation rather than give christmas cards. I've donated to Oxfam's water appeal, so as to allow them to provide a poor family with a Hippo Water Roller. It seems a great invention, reducing the burden on women and children transporting water over long distances.

To all of my friends — thanks. I wish you all a happy christmas!

11:00 pm - New camera body!

About eighteen months ago I decided to get into photography. I read a few reviews, and picked out a Nikon D60 as my first camera body. I didn’t want to get anything too expensive until I decided how serious a hobby photography was.

Anyway, photography has been a great hobby, and I’ve gradually acquired more equipment. Recently the D60 has been feeling quite limited, so today I bought a better camera body - a Nikon D300s. Tried it out a bit today, I’m quite stoked!

Grebe pair building a nest

The above photo was taken with the new camera. Not a great shot, but I’m pleased just because I managed to capture two Australiasian Grebe in the act of building a floating nest. These are quite small birds (about 25cm long), and they were reasonably far away. Nice to see that someone’s shirt was dredged from the lake and recycled by them. One of the grebes has a few small chicks, very very cute.

There are lots of these blue dragonflies around the lakes in Hyde Park. They’re pretty cool! Anyone know what the proper name for them is? I haven’t got any books on Australian insects.

Anyway, yay new camera!

04:37 pm - Senior First Aid

The last couple of days I've been doing the Senior First Aid course down at St John Ambulance in Osborne Park. It was fun! I've been meaning to do a first aid course for a long time. Work has become very proactive on health and safety, so I asked to go on the course.

It definitely wasn't hard, and it was fun. Spent quite a bit of time manhandling people around and practising CPR - the rest is a combination of powerpoints and anecdotes. The test at the end is pretty trivially easy, although I doubt I'd have got it right before the course. If you were considering doing such a course and putting it off endlessly for fear it'd be Really Hard (as I had), such fears are IMHO unfounded.

Current Mood: cheerful

02:51 pm - Armada: a django interface to GTFS feeds

Announcing Armada, a system for accessing and playing about with Google Transit Feed Specification datasets.

At the moment Armada will:

• import a google transit feed to a Django (actually, geodjango) database; see “load.py”
• generate maps from that (see “map.py”)
• show you stop timetables and other very basic information, via the webserver (see “python manage.py runserver”)

I’m really keen for anyone interested to collaborate with me on this project. I’ve been very reticent in the past to work with others on spare-time projects, probably just out of pointless fear of criticism. So please, go grab the code (it’s in a Mercurial repository on google code), and if you want push access to the project let me know.

There’s pretty well no docs, so if you get stuck let me know :)

A little sketch of what I plan to add next:

• a system to create JSON ‘documents’ from the database. As an example, a JSON file with all necessary source data to generate a stop timetable off-line. This document will then be shoved into a CouchDB instance for quick lookup. Then people can write little apps which grab the JSON and generate the timetable. A reference app will be provided for each document class, written in Javascript.
• add map generation to the route view in the web interface. The map code is done, just a matter of glueing code together.
• add route timetables to the route view in the web interface
• add searching to the web interface
• query ‘stops near me’, given a point on the earth. This should be easy using Geodjango / PostGIS.
• possibly routing. Google do a good job of this already though.
• mashups! let’s overlay this data with openstreetmap. Let’s look at whether public transport is better or worse depending on socio-economic data in an area. Where are the best served areas, where are the worst? How many buses, trains, etc are on the road at a given time in the day. Plot, chart, … ! :)

There are a lot of datasets available, including data for Perth and Geraldton. I’ve only tested the PTA data with Armada, so there may be unexpected issues loading other feeds. Should be fine though. None of the fare / charging stuff is implemented, because I just didn’t care about it :)

01:04 am - Beautiful maps!

I’ve been unusually productive this evening, and here’s the result:

That’s a cropped bit from the full image (warning: 3MB, 10244 x 14710). What you’re looking at is all the public transport routes in Perth, plotted using a mercator projection. I’ve taken every path a public transport service can take, and found the sections in common between these paths. These non-coincident sections are then plotted with line-thickness and colour determined by log-scaled frequency of services down the segment.

In this image you can see that St George’s terrace and the other major roads in the CBD are red and thick, as services go down them often.

The image generated includes all services running over the last week. As a random stat, the busiest segment in the whole public transport system sees 11,745 services pass down it per week. Over a 24 hour day, that’s 1.17 services/minute.

Anyway, yay data and graphs and things. I’m going to bed! [ Edit: you might remember me posting something like this a while back. Cameron helpfully pointed out my previous results were incorrect as they failed to add up frequencies along coincident lines. I've spent quite a bit of time fixing that :) ]

... for a bit of fun, here's the entire Geraldton public transport network:

12:09 am - Another good weekened :-)

Last night I went to Pride with friends. It was great fun! A really good atmosphere, ran into lots of awesome people, and got Perthed hugely. A witch said “Hi!” and turned out to be paperishcup. Took a lot of photos, got coated in glitter that flyingblogspot and Nat grabbed from the street, had an awesome cherry cocktail. Good night :-)

Great weekend otherwise, too. Baked some vegan gluten-free gingerbread men, which turned out to be quite nice. I used this recipe and swapped Orgran gluten-free flour for wheat flour. Seemed to work OK.

Went on an expedition to Perth Zoo this morning. Saw lots of neat things, got really excited taking photographs in the bird enclosure. Saw a blue kingfisher! Stroked a python - that was really cool, first time I can remember touching a snake. All in all, a really great weekend.

12:02 am - Ask the internet!

This rather awesome egg was discovered while taking photographs of birds. Unfortunately the photograph doesn’t give much of a sense of scale. It was (at a guess) about 3cm long, smaller than a chicken egg. Anyone out there know birds and care to suggest what it might be?

08:12 pm - Face up to Climate Change

Yesterday at my birthday picnic, I took the opportunity to bug people to participate in Faceup to Climate Change. It's a neat project, a photographic petition. You have a photograph taken of yourself holding your petition, then upload the photo to the website. The Greens send your photograph on to Rudd and your MP.

Thanks to flyingblogspot providing bright marker pens and paper, I managed to take shots of a few people at the picnic for the petition. I've emailed those photographs to their subjects: if you didn't get the email, poke me and I'll resend :-)

Anyway, thought I'd plug this petition as it seems worthwhile.

06:53 pm - Birthday!

Yesterday was my twenty-eight birthday. Thanks to everyone that sent me good wishes, in person or electronically. I had a great day - cycling, a bit of self-indulgent shopping, Italian food at a cafe for lunch and Tapas for dinner. Awesome gifts too - some awesome photography books from my Mum and a flyingblogspot original painting. Neat!

I've taken this week off from work, and I'm finding it really healthy. Haven't even looked at work email. The escape from work definitely feels good.

Now, back to reading!

08:37 pm - HDR

I was randomly reminded that I’d been playing with HDR some months back. Feeling fidgety this afternoon, so I headed out with the camera and the tripod and attempted to take some outdoor shots. This is tricky as you want to pick subjects that won’t move much between exposures. In my case, while you fiddle with the camera changing shutter settings, as unfortunately my camera doesn’t do exposure bracketing.

If you look at the above image of the bench, you can see some ‘broken’ bits of sky around the trees. The tree branches have waved about a bit between exposures creating the effect. Fortunately there wasn’t much wind when I took these shots. :-)

I took quite a few sets of images. The two results I like the most both feature Peppermint Trees. I think the bark provides an interesting texture and it’s normally difficult to see the detail of it. Also, they are covered in spider webs which are normally difficult to see!

Anyway, if you want to see my HDR stuff, have a look at my HDR Set on Flickr.

10:31 pm - Geocaching hijinks

Great day! flyingblogspot and I went geocaching. For anyone that hasn’t heard of it, you use a GPS to find ‘caches’, which are usually a little box containing a log, and possibly treasures people have left for the next person. We managed to visit three around Nedlands and Dalkeith. Good fun, and nice being outside in the sunshine and heat. It all seems very ‘Neverwhere’ to me - a previously unknown aspect to many places. Saw many interesting waterbirds, and amusingly didn’t have anything near a useful lens to photograph them. Next time!

I took this shot up at the Dalkeith war memorial. It’s part of the indirect fire sight on a 25 Pounder Mark II artillery gun which was used at El Alamein. I took the photograph because I thought the texture of the surface was interesting. It now strikes me as fairly ghoulish. The carefully marked charts are designed – and have been used – to direct exploding shells upon human beings. Horrible.