David Grant

The Worst (or Best) Rod Black Quotes from the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver

David Grant — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:11:34 +0000

Watching the short-track speed skating and figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver I was reminded of the sheer awesomeness that is Rod Black. Some love him, others want to strangle him (or maybe just hit the mute button). Throughout the Olympics I jotted down some of the most puke-worthy and groan-worthy things Rod Black said. Then I went to CTV's website and uncovered a few more gems. I'll leave the delivery up to you. Make sure to use lots of long pauses and think of Rod and his glorious mustache (which he unfortunately shaved off). Rod Black, if you see this, I hope you have a sense of humour!

Rod Black 2010 Olympics Quote	Puke-ometer
"Celebrate Ilderton. Celebrate Moirs. Celebrate Virtues. Celebrate Canada."
"Flawless. If there was a slip in their program, it was nary a slip."
"They just happen to be the best ice dancers on the planet."
"The Americans were perfect. The Canadians were perfect."
"We CAN believe!"
"Ohhhhhhhh Canada. Dream ride, golden quest. They've skated together since they've been kids. They are 4 minutes away from the ultimate goal."
"Is it enough!? Magic!!! 11,000 in here think so."
Marilyn: "It was an exquisite performance. Exquisite." Rod Black: "It melted this ice. It brought the crowd to its feet, and the house down."
"The theme has been 'believe.' Do you believe? <Virtue and Moir score announced> Yes!!!"
[Virtue and Moir] Friends, Virtue-aly forever. Born to skate together."
"We've got a couple of Americans, a couple of Koreans, and a couple of Hamelins"
"4 skaters. 5 laps. 3 medals. 2 Canadians. 1 Gold."
"The brothers Hamelin."
"You CAN believe Charles Hamelin, you CAN!"
"It is — Charles Hamelin. It is — Francois Louis Tremblay. It is — Canada. Gold and Bronze, here TO-night!"
"Pure. Canadian. Gold!"
"China, to the fore!"
"The golden boy, Charles Hamelin."
Absolute Gold here tonight!
And the brothers Hamelin are going to be on a podium together — their dream — here in Vancouver.
The Canadian men had been shut out. Couldn't crack the podium. They were saving the best — for last.

Idea for puke-ometer shamelessly stolen from the Christie Blatchford Hall of Shame

NoMachine NX is awesome

David Grant — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:57:31 +0000

Short-version:
Use NX. VNC sucks.

I love Remote Desktop for connecting to Windows machines remotely. I worked from home many times while at Kodak and if it weren't for Remote Desktop, it would have been impossible to enjoy a full-screen connection to my work desktop while at home. I didn't think there was anything for Linux besides VNC until now (I had used remote X a long time ago though, to connect to the Solaris machines at UBC). Then I discovered NoMachine NX (NoMachine is the company's name and NX is the product name). I downloaded the Free Edition for Linux and then grabbed the Windows Client (which apparently is also free?). It's ridiculously fast, as fast as Remote Desktop. Google is also working on neatx an open-source NX server implementation and there is the freenx project, a GPL-licensed implementation of the server and client components. If you are trying to connect to a Linux desktop remotely, don't even think about using any of the VNC derivatives. Use NX.

Dell External Wi-Fi Switch

David Grant — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:25:18 +0000

So the other day the WiFi stopped working on my Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop so after a little bit of troubleshooting and assumed the mini-PCI express wireless card was fried and ordered a new one from Dell's website. The new one didn't work either. Then I suddenly remembered that there was some sort of WiFi switch on the side of the laptop. I felt the switch and moved it moved it in the direction of "On" and it clicked! So it had been turned off! We move our laptop around a lot and somehow the switch had been switched to the off position accidentally.

I'm still glad I ordered the wireless card though, as it is a Wireless-N card so now if I upgrade my router to a Wireless-N router I might get faster speeds!
Dell External WI-FI switch: Mine looks something like this, but not exactly.

Windows and 64-bit

David Grant — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:31:52 +0000

Doing development, or more specifically deployment in a Windows 64-bit environment can be a frustrating experience. Let's start with a simple example from MSDN about the File System Redirector:

The %windir%\System32 directory is reserved for 64-bit applications . . . Whenever a 32-bit application attempts to access %windir%\System32, the access is redirected to a new directory, %windir%\SysWOW64

That's right, the System32 folder is used by 64-bit applications and the SysWOW64 folder is used for 32-bit applications. It's so obvious.

Concatenate/Combine PDF Files in Linux

David Grant — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:22:42 +0000

I know there are lots of ways to do this. This is not a HOW-TO, but just sharing a script I made for doing this. It's a decent example of how to write a command-line utility in Python.

Since I write my cover letters and resumes in LaTeX I always need to concatenate the two together before sending it to an employer. This is very important so that the person on the other end prints out both and it makes their life easier by not having to worry about two files. For the longest time I just had a simple script that looked like this:

#!/bin/sh
#Concatenate two PDF files and output to the third argument
echo "**** Converting PDF files to PostScript"
acroread -toPostScript -size letter -pairs $1 /tmp/$1.ps
acroread -toPostScript -size letter -pairs $2 /tmp/$2.ps
 
echo "**** Concatenating PostScript files"
a2ps -q --columns=1 -o /tmp/$1.both.ps /tmp/$1.ps /tmp/$2.ps
 
echo "**** Converting PostScript file to PDF"
ps2pdf /tmp/$1.both.ps $3
 
echo "**** File saved to:" $3
 
echo "**** Cleaning up"
rm -f /tmp/$1.ps
rm -f /tmp/$2.ps
rm -f /tmp/$1.both.ps

I am just including that code because it shows clearly what is going on. The input PDF files are converted to Postscript files using acroread, the Postscript files are concatenated using a2ps, then the output Postscript file s converted to PDF using ps2pdf.

I decided to make it in to a full-blown Python script since I don't know bash/sh very well and I wanted it to be able to handle errors and an unlimited number of input files. There was a case in the past where I had to concatenate more than two input files, which involved running this script multiple times. I know there are many other simpler ways of doing this but I wanted to get more practice writing a unix command line utility in python using subprocess and optparse (and making the file importable so it can be used by other scripts, which many people forget to do). The script is a lot more complicated now but it's so much better functionality-wise. Enjoy!

SVN path: http://svn.davidgrant.ca/repos/src/scripts/acro_cat.py?rev=1476

Relative path in repository:

/src/scripts/acro_cat.py?rev=1476

SVN revision log

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Django Golf Handicap Tracker

David Grant — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:50:30 +0000

Django Handicap Tracker Screenshot
This is the first Django application I ever built. It was started in the 0.96 days and I have since ported it to 1.0. It mostly works and now supports multiple users using the django-registration and django.contrib.auth module. I haven't done much work on it though. Eventually I will put it online for all to use.

SVN path: http://svn.davidgrant.ca/repos/src/python/django_handicap

Relative path in repository:

/src/python/django_handicap

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My Project Euler Solutions

David Grant — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:02:06 +0000

Euler
So far I've solved about 24 of the Project Euler problems. I'm not sure how long it took me, probably a few months working on them here and there. I would like to continue solving more of these when I get the chance. So far I have only implemented them in Python (and in one case, Cython) but I would love to implement them in a language like Haskell one day..or who knows maybe I'll try implementing a few of them in Go

SVN path: http://svn.davidgrant.ca/repos/src/python/euler

Relative path in repository:

/src/python/euler

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Vancouver Sun Parking Tickets Website Screen Scraper

David Grant — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:54:15 +0000

When the Vancouver Sun came out with their Vancouver parking tickets database I immediately had some burning questions, like, did the meter maids work on holidays? Do the work less in the evening than during the day? I found it difficult to answer these questions using their interface, so I decided to screen scrape all 1.6 million parking tickets in to my own MySQL database. This was a bit challenging as they made it difficult to screen scrape the data but eventually it could be done simply by first getting an AppKey, a hidden value inside the HTML source and then doing queries using that AppKey as a parameter. It took about a week to get all 1.6 million tickets downloaded. By using Django, it was easy to get them in to a database and view the results. Initially I just put all the data in to one table, then later I decided to normalize the data a bit which was interesting as I decided to do that in pure SQL which I hadn't done before. I did the scraping itself using a combination of BeautifulSoup, lxml, and mechanize.

vancouver-parking-tickets project at GitHub

MySQL SQL dump (42 MB)

Here's some data:

Number of tickets by day of the week:

Day of week	Count
Monday	238482
Tuesday	277797
Wednesday	294478
Thursday	274529
Friday	243830
Saturday	181235
Sunday	121036

Number of tickets at each address:

Address	Count
1050 Robson St.	17899
1150 Robson St.	15674
850 Hornby St.	10501
650 Broadway St. W.	10426
1050 Alberni St.	9729
1750 Broadway St. W.	9121
1050 Hornby St.	9100
650 Hornby St.	8863
1050 Mainland St	8328
1050 Homer St.	8269
1150 Hamilton St.	8094
850 Howe St.	7941
850 Broadway St. W.	7848
2250 4th Ave W.	7634
950 Hornby St.	7462
1950 4th Ave W.	7403
2650 Granville St.	7354
1650 Broadway St. W.	7062
1350 Broadway St. W.	6961
1150 Broadway St. W.	6903
1050 Hamilton St.	6889
950 Broadway St. W.	6821
150 Davie St.	6676
1150 Homer St.	6658
1150 Mainland St	6562
750 Broadway St. W.	6553
950 Homer St.	6504
1150 Davie St.	6461
1150 Alberni St.	6386
1050 Davie St.	6202

Vancouver Park Board Swimming Lessons Screen Scraper

David Grant — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:44:19 +0000

I was waiting for the January 2010 swimming times to appear on the Vancouver Park Board website but I got tired of all the clicking and scrolling required to see when the lessons were available. The other problem was that once the lessons appeared for one pool, some of the other pools still hadn't posted their lesson schedule for January 2010. The times that came out for the first pool were not ideal so I wanted to wait and see what came out for the other pool, while making sure that the first pool didn't book up. I wrote a script that would allow me to see what lessons were available at 2 different pools on Sunday and to see how many spots were left in each lesson. Here's some sample output:

david@centurion:~/svn/scripts$ ./check_swimming_lessons.py
PT 1/2 Starfish/Duck Sat Set 1 WP - Pool Open Jan 09, 2010 11:00am 10 / 10
PT 1/2 Starfish/Duck Sat Set 1 WP - Pool Open Jan 09, 2010 12:00pm 10 / 10
PT 1/2 Starfish/Duck Sun Set 1 WP - Pool Open Jan 10, 2010 12:30pm 10 / 10
PT 1 Starfish (4-12mo) Sat 1Win1 VA - Vancouver Aquatic Centre Open Jan 09, 2010 9:00am 1 / 12

As you can see, at the "WP - Pool" pool (actually Lord Byng, the pool I was waiting on) there were just recently 3 lesson times added. At the "VA - Vancouver Aquatic Centre" pool there is only 1 spot left in one time. There are two other times but there are not shown as I have enabled filtering on only lessons that have spots left and which are on Sunday.

SVN path: http://svn.davidgrant.ca/repos/src/scripts/check_swimming_lessons.py

Relative path in repository:

/src/scripts/check_swimming_lessons.py

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Django Recipes Application

David Grant — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 06:55:53 +0000

Django Recipes Screenshot
django-recipes at Google Code

My mom was writing a family cookbook using Microsoft Word and I thought this was a bad idea for several reasons. At first I thought about using LaTeX to separate the style from the content a bit, then I thought about using XML, then I settled on a database as being the most generic to store recipe data. I quickly decided on using Django to create this cookbook framework because Python is probably my strongest language and it makes creating custom websites really easy.

So far it includes:

Most important models, Recipe, Ingredient, Direction, Category, Food.
Very nice admin interface for creating recipes with inline ingredients and directions.
Front-end: only a recipe_list and recipe_detail so far, but the recipe_detail has an experimental method of displaying recipes that is based on this LaTeX style: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/cooking/ (apparently based on style in a famous German cookbook by Dr. Oetker (Gromzik, J.; Reich, C.; Sander, C. (ed.): Dr. Oetker Schulkochbuch – Das Original. Ceres, Bielefeld, 1996.)

Competitors/related projects:

KRecipes - KDE-based desktop recipes software.
Ben Collins-Sussman's effrecipes - Simple, but it works. Not under active development.
Recipes on Rails - Ruby on Rails recipes site. Not open source as far as I know. Embeds "Source: Recipes on Rails" on all photos and has google ads. Great site though. One thing it has that my site lacks is per-direction photos. This would be easy to do. I already have per-direction ingredients.

If you are aware of any other similar projects please let me know. I am especially interested in any other web-based and open-source cookbook projects.