SiC – David Sidwell

I’ve got files everywhere. This PC has 2 hard drives, plus another external one that I sometimes plug in. There’s two other PCs; the  old Linux server and the XP Laptop. Plus lots of back up CDs and DVDs.

So where is “Linux and Windows.txt” file, which has my step-by-step guide on file sharing. Or “MyTextMovie.avi” ?  Or “Podcast23.mp3″ ?  or or or

I’ve tried a number of programs that index your files/disks and let you search later. I’ve settled on three. Yeah, one would be great but no single one appears to do the lot:

Locate32 Main one for Hard Drive indexing and searching. Can also do USB drives etc.  Scheduled, via Windows Task Manager, to run every 2 hours. Smart stuff. Quick, powerful and low on resources.

Copernic Desktop Search. Mainly for my email which is stored on the PC, like Thunderbird and Outlook. I used to use this for Hard Drives, but Locate32 suites me better.

Cathy. For indexing and searching (data) DVDs and CDs. Not movies!  Again a fast, easy to use program.

Let me add a Adamsian 4th to my list of 3. One for Movie DVDs. Eric’s Movie Database. Type in a title and it scoots off to IMDB etc to drag down the details, like Genre, Year, Actors. Excellent.

Wow, I’m nearly as old as NASA.  It’s been around for half a century. I wouldn’t have picked that; I thought it started in the early 60s, not 1958. But hey, congratulations anyway.

Got me thinking back to two of their many achievements that really interest me:

Apollo 8

This was originally ‘just’ meant to be another step in the quest to land on the moon. The plan was to get the Lunar Lander (the LEM) for the first time, attach it to the rest of the craft and fly around the Earth – in low orbit – to test things out. But when it came time, the LEM wasn’t ready. So in a radical and daring move NASA decided to send the craft (minus the LEM) around the moon.

To me this was the BIG leap for mankind. For the first time we left orbit; Trans Lunar Injection (TLI)

On December 21st 1968 we left the cradle. 2 hours and  27 minutes after lift off the crew are told “You are go for TLI”.  They reply: “Roger”

And there it is. No great speech nor fanfare. No quote to go down in history and be remembered by every school child. Roger.

Apollo 8 went on to perform spectacularly well, successfully firing their engine to go into orbit around the moon, snapping the first ever Earthrise picture and – thank goodness – firing the engine again to get out of orbit and back home.

I have read the book Genesis: The Story Of Apollo 8 and highly recommend it. Plus NASA has the official mission logs (the Flight Journal) as well as a another site.

Gemini Missions

Gemini refers to two. And this was The Two Towers of missions. It was the middle one, that fits right between Breaking the New Ground (project Mercury, the first Americans in space. 1-man spaceships) and the Final Objective (project Apollo, landing on the moon. 3-man spacecraft)

As such it tends to be forgotten today, or perhaps less remembered. Some recent reading and a documentary reminded me how vital these Gemini missions were.  There were the key steps between (relatively) simple orbital flights on modified nuclear missiles and the full blown man on the moon stuff.  NASA refers to them as the Bridge to the Moon and is justifiably proud of them. Their official Gemini web site is a great place to start reading, with another related site full of information too. As for books. Mmm. Time for me to start looking for a good book on the Gemini Program.

Just a few days ago one of my nieces said she couldn’t find a certain word in the dictionary and asked me to help. I think it might have been – ironically enough – the word assistance.

And sure enough it wasn’t there as its own entry.

But, of course, it was there under assist. And so we had a bit of a chat about how some words are formed from other words. If only I had remembered about the Visuwords web site, we could have gone to their browser and visually seen (he he) how the two words were related. Not just those two but how assist is related to lots of other words.  Just like this.

Was a sunny but cool day today, so decided to take the new GPS out for a spin and get some exercise at the same time. The Organ Pipes is a natural rock formation quite close to Melbourne; the exit is literally off the Calder Freeway near Keilor.  They were formed millions of years ago when lava cooled slowly and cracked into quite regular columns. Erosion exposed them and they are now on the side of a hill on a river bend. And yes, they really do look like organ pipes.

Before I left home I knew there were at least a few interesting things to see whilst visiting this Park; the Pipes themselves plus another interesting formation called the Rosette Rock. I wanted to get their exact GPS locations (latitude and longitude) and put them into the GPS before I left. I’m still searching for a list on the web of such ‘waypoints’, but no luck so far. So went to Google Earth, zoomed in…and using some of the external data (layers) was easily able to find the Pipes and the Rock.

I used gpsbabel to convert their Google Earth co-ordinates to Garmin format, uploaded to the GPS and ta da, they both appeared in the GPS and on its Map.

Anyway I did this very pleasant walk just fine and the pre-loaded values were very accurate; for example the GPS beeped – a proximity alert – when I stopped at the Organ Pipes viewing area itself.

I also logged the walk in the GPS so it could be seen in 3D back in Google Earth; which confirmed what my legs had told me: down a steep hill, along a flat river valley and back up the steep hill.

One final comment on this National Park. When I first visited it in the early 1970s it was very barren. Just bare grassy hills and weeds. Over the following 30+ years a group of volunteers have done a sterling job clearing out the weeds and planting native trees and shrubs. The result is nothing sort of amazing as the ‘before’ photos ot the place show. Barren to living bush again.  Well done! 

Well thanks to a number of people who took the time to tell me that the Astronomy news StarStuff podcast had returned. It was only a few weeks ago that I was bemoaning its loss.  You can find out more about it at the  ABC science site.

I’ll go back and add it back in to my list of Podcasts.

It was originally a radio show, which (sadly) does not appear to be returning. You can find out more about this side of things too.

Having finally got a full GPS at last, it was time to get some maps. The unit very quickly found exactly where it was on Earth ; and I mean quickly. But the basic map that came with it, only said it was near Melbourne. Nothing like street level.  It could tell me my latitude and longitude as well as log it when I went for a walk around the block. In fact I did this, converted it to Google Earth format and was able to see how accurate it was, particularly compared to the GPS in the HTC mobile phone.

Anyway time for some maps. I do not want Turn by Turn street directions. In fact the GPS is set to be in “off road” map mode which means just get me from Point A to Point B, don’t worry about keeping me on the Roads. So it’s more for bushwalking.

Of course there are commercial maps out there and I may very well end up buying them. However I soon discovered the free, open-source type maps; the Open Street Map (OSM). Most GPS, including mine, cannot directly import the OSM data.  So here’s how I got it to work:

• You can run your own extractions and conversions. However some good people regularly extract and convert (OSM) data for given States and GPS.
• I grabbed their Victoria one (VIC.img.zip).  Unzipped it (VIC.img)
• My GPS cannot directly import these (older?) format files, so I grabbed the free version of sendmap20 and installed it
• The GPS only stores maps on a microSD card, so installed that
• Ran sendmap20.exe and dragged VIC.img onto it…then copied it to the GPS unit

Worked first time, now have nearly 6 MB map of Victoria.  It shows a fair bit of data.  I loaded up the log I did yesterday (the walk around the block) and it showed the streets where I had walked, but didn’t name them all. However, I’m very happy with it so far.  Will be interesting to take it off on a real bushwalk and see how it goes.

Take 3 on this one. My first GPS was some years ago, but it wouldn’t work with rechargeable batteries (despite the store saying it would). But they were cool about it and gave me a full refund. Particularly when they themselves couldn’t even fit the rechargeable’s inside the unit.

The second was the ‘bonus’ GPS that’s part of my new HTC mobile phone. It works okay, but eats the battery. It’s quite accurate. But the battery stuff was a killer for ne. As I said, it was a bonus in the phone and the phone is cheap, so no complaints here.

As I’m doing more bushwalking I decided to get a dedicated GPS unit. I plan to use it not for assisting me get from Wombat Creek to the top of Mount Howitt, but for the logging (recording) of this trip. I still use bushwalking books and maps, but it’s great to have the GPS log where you went. Then you can load it into Google Earth etc and see it in 3D.

Later on I’ll probably move to route planning. I also tried my first Geocaching yesterday.  Basically it’s a treasure-hunt using your GPS. You go to a web site, type in your postcode and nearby Caches are shown. These are GPS latitude and longitude co-ordinates.  And off you go to find the cache.  In fact the first one was like 1km from my house, but had the sea between me and it. However I didn’t look closely at what the GPS unit was telling me to do. I ended up on a thin, long (artificial) point of land that stretched about 1km out into the bay. But I wasn’t used to the GPS and picked the wrong point, so when I got out to the end it was telling me to go 400 metres north. Which was across to water to yet another thin, long point…

I think part of the problem was moving the GPS from horizontal up to vertical and back. Moving it up to vertical makes the GoTo/Compass function (“walk THAT way”) obviously get confused.

Anyway it’s a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx model, which I purchased new from the USA.  Even with the postage it was much cheaper than buying it here. And it took only 5 days to get here!

Tags are everywhere and they are invaluable They are little pieces of text that let you describe your stuff – music files, images, blog posts, browser bookmarks etc – with your descriptions.  Some tags live inside the files (like the title, artist ones within a mp3 file, or the exposure, white balance values within a jpg).  Others live outside, such as a description or comments of/on that photo when you move it to Picasa, iPhoto or up to the  Flickr web site.

But, as I found, you have to be a bit careful.

On this very blog I have a whole section dedicated to bush walking. I added a whole heap of articles, describing assorted walks. I did it in one hit, but (back) dated them to the date of the walk.  As the blogging software now supports Tags, I naturally added the tag of bush walks to the posts.

Except I didn’t quite do it that way. In fact, on three different posts, I actually tagged them with:

• bush walks
• Bushwalks
• bush-walks

This was an accident, but the software allowed me to do it. Actually both sets of software allowed it;  the client (editor) that I was typing the words into and the server application (Wordpress).

And so when later on I looked back at my tag lists I had three new topics/tags. Ouch.  I only wanted the one!

Of course the software did exactly as it was told to to, create the 3 tags. In fact it was me who was not using a Controlled Vocabulary.

Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designer of the vocabulary, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, where there is no restriction on the vocabulary.  

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary

In practice I don’t really want to go in – as ‘designer’ – and create a list of tags as a separate exercise. A compromise would be for the editor (client) to simply display a list of tags that I have already use and I can just click on the one(s) I want.   Currently I use Microsoft’s Live Writer. It lets me add Wordpress keywords, but they are uncontrolled; no list of exiting ones.  Hopefully in the future it will be updated to support a user-controller vocabulary.

The beauty of the Live Writer is it runs on the PC. I can also log in to the web site – via a browser – and manually add a new post. In fact that does show me a list of tags (sort of), but editing on the server isn’t as quick and easy as doing it locally on the PC.

One last thing. Google.  Want to see how smart they are and why they are worth billions?  Do a Google search for

• bush-walk

Yep, it returns hits with the phrase “bush-walk”, “bushwalk” and “Bush Walk”…

After a few years I’m looking at Docbook again. The theory is excellent, particularly for creating Technical or Help guides; you create your ‘document’ once – in a neutral language/format – and then you can publish it in many ways. For example you can generate a:

• PDF file 
• Rich text (like MS Word)
• Web Page, with CSS style sheet to pretty it up
• Help file, such as compiled HTML

The actual neutral format is XML.  And therein lies my list of things to investigate. XML is fantastic for such purposes, but isn’t the most friendly thing to edit, if you just attack the raw data. It looks like this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <book xml:id="simple_book" xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0">
   <title>Very simple book</title>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_1">
     <title>Chapter 1</title>
     <para>Hello world!</para>
     <para>I hope that your day is proceeding <emphasis>splendidly</emphasis>!</para>
   </chapter>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_2">
     <title>Chapter 2</title>
     <para>Hello again, world!</para>
   </chapter>
 </book>

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook

So my questions are:

1. Is there a good GUI editor that understands the Docbook XML format, but hides it? In other words, makes it look like MS Word or Open Office.
2. Can it spell check, including Australian English and have the ability to add your own words?
3. How easy is it to do the final publish (i.e. transform) into PDF, Web Page etc
4. Is the whole thing a compromise? Wonderful in theory, but the final Web Pages etc are pretty plain or hard to navigate.
5. Does Docbook support cross-referencing? Vital for technical documents.  You create a screen capture, add it to your document, then refer to it in the text; “see Figure <cross-reference>”

So far I’m using the open source Eclipse platform to handle the editing and – via  Ant – the ‘automatic’ conversion.  I got it to work yesterday, and a PDF was created. Today I’m taking the same ’source’ (i.e. the Docbook XML) and trying to get it to generate a Web Page, then standard Help file (compiled HTML). 

It’s not for the feint hearted, but I’m getting there. I’ve got a feeling you do all the hard work in the original set-up and configuration stage, then after that things become quite straightforward.  We’ll see.

I reckon I’d weigh 15 kilograms more if it wasn’t for Podcasts. As much as I love music, I prefer to be informed and/or educated during my daily walks and that’s what my Podcasts are for.  Now that I’ve joined a Gym,  I may listen to the less-demanding music a bit more, but for now it’s Podcasts. And here’s my list of ones I subscribe too in iTunes.  These are audio-only, so ABC means ABC Radio, usually Radio National.

Must Gets: Every Episode downloaded

• Astronomy Cast
• StarStuff
• Skeptoid
• The Movie Blog Uncut
• Digital Living (ABC)
• Dr Karl’s Great Moments in Science  (ABC)

Usually Grab Most Episodes

• Hindsight (ABC)
• Radio Eye (ABC)
• Military History Podcast

Monitor and Sometimes Downloaded

• The Ark (ABC)
• Rear Vision (ABC)
• Late Night Live (ABC)
• Media Report (ABC)
• Street Stories (ABC)
• Background Briefing (ABC)
• Brains Matter
• Melbourne University Up Close
• In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg (BBC)

Abandoned!

• Movie Time (ABC). In their enthusiasm for films, they gave away too many plot points – spoilers – for me.  Unforgivable!