AlexH

During lunch break at work, there are a bunch of people who play UT2004, and it’s a good way to blow off steam. Yesterday, with the help of our IT guy, I plugged a USB mouse into the computer of the guy who sits on the other side of my cubicle wall. He’s pretty much the best player in our office.

Today, I joined the game in spectator mode to see what I could do.

It was very interesting, because he didn’t seem to notice when I clicked the mouse while he was teleporting. He didn’t notice that, probably because he’s used to compensating for net lag.

What he couldn’t compensate for was when I’d put him facing the wall just as he was about to fire a bunch of rockets.
Eventually paranoia set in, and he was checking his computer for trojans, remote desktop hacks, etc. He was smart enough to realize that there were two people spectating the game, and it had to be one of us messing with him. At that point I couldn’t keep a straight face and he knew it was me. I had the choice of telling him how we did it, or having my monitor turned off every time I tried to play, so I let him in on the secret.

The only problem is that I now have to watch my back all the time…

From Blog Maverick:

The point of all this is that it doesnt matter how many times you fail. It doesnt matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and either should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because..

All that matters in business is that you get it right once.

Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are….

With all of the Google Map trickery going on, I took some time out on the long weekend to see if I could combine Google Maps with Election data.

The first step was to get the GIS data for the ridings. I used wget to recursively download the data from this page, which are self-extracting zip files. Linux’s unzip utility easily took care of extracting the files. Apparently they are in a file format called ShapeView.

Then I had to figure out how to deal with the GIS data. There is an open source tool called ShapeTools that can extract data.

Now the problem is how to deal with the coordinate systems. I’m still working on this. Basically what I need to do is make a reprojection of the GIS maps from whatever coordinate system that they used, to decimal latitude/longitude coordinates. It’s in BC Albers format which is a BC specific format, so I’ll need to figure out how to use proj.4 to convert them.

I did get a working version of the BC Election GIS maps. Port 81 seems to be working now, so the public can see it.

My next step is to write a Python script to parse the data and generate an XML file that GMaps can understand.

Coolness! I’m constantly forgetting what the differences are between Linux and Windows, especially with cutting and pasting. This script provides a Linux style cut and paste with the mouse.

I haven’t seen any bugs yet, but I think the big test is going to be how it works when I’m playing UT2004 at lunch.

One day I’m going to be an old man, telling my kids about how we were allowed to race our cars in a safe manner, but that stopped on May 27, 2005.

Yes, yes, YES! Another example about how your website can be infinitely more useful when you open the API:

Have a look at this example: BBC NEWS | Business | Glazer wins control of Man United

I don’t know exactly how it works, but basically the proxy inserts links to Wikipedia into BBC articles.

How is this different from Google’s Autolink which caused quite a stir in the blogosphere? The BBC is encouraging you to do this.

From O’Reilly Weblogs:

Adrian Holovaty and Wilson Miner have put togther an application that visually shows crime incidents in Chicago using Google maps.

Check it out. It’s notable for a number of reasons:

It “munges” together application logic and data from a number of sources (e.g., Google Maps, and a Chicago Police Department database).

Check it out: Chicago Crime

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp –dport 3000 -j DNAT –to 192.168.1.3:30
iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp -d 192.168.1.3 –dport 30 -j ACCEPT

I don’t know if order of operations is important with iptables, but this went after the line:

iptables -A OUTPUT -o $WNDEV -j ACCEPT

in /etc/init.d/S45firewall

Today I was chatting with Edward about wireless networking on #bcwireless, and it turns out he’s in the US Army, stationed in Iraq. Right now they use a mix of CAT5 and uncoordinated Wifi, but he’s hoping to get a mesh network going so everyone can share the bandwidth.

Elections BC says that blogs are advertising.

Can Elections BC scale? There are so many BC blogs available, and I’m sure everyone is going to have some comments on the lead up to the election, or the results afterwards. A change is required, and even Elections BC admits that. Jennifer Miller says:

“If we feel certain parts of the act can be amended to make it more effective and efficient, we will definitely make that recommendation”

Now, journalists don’t seem to have the requirement of registering to be election advertisers when they write editorials in newspapers. At least, I didn’t see any in the list of election advertisers. So, can bloggers be considered journalists? Do they want to be?