Grass
Posted by sam
on 2011/03/06
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Today’s Lesson
Posted by sam
on 2010/12/29
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And lo, it came to pass that the Mighty Warriors of Albion (and The Colonies) did travel to the Land Where The Convicts Dwell, and there in their Own Back Yard they did smite them with ruthlessness and aplomb (save for the Incident at Perth, which is a strange and wild place). And the Once-smug Ponting did have his arse handed to him upon a plate, and they cast him out unto the Wilderness where dwelleth the West Indies of Old, and the Unwise Phrase “We can win this five-to-nought” did ring in his ears for ever more.
– “Book of Boycott, v. 3, ch. 12″
Extracting beauty from revision control
Posted by sam
on 2010/11/28
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I realise I may be a little late to the party here, but I recently came across the awesome gource with which I made the above video. It’s generated from /etc/ on my VPS – I’m versioning that using etckeeper which gives me a git repository going back to August of this year.
How I did it
This is pretty easy to do. First I grabbed a copy of /etc/ from the VPS to /tmp/etc/ on the laptop (running Ubuntu Maverick), then
sudo apt-get install gource ffmpeg
cd /tmp/etc/
gource \
-s 1 \
-800x600 \
--date-format %Y-%m-%d\ %H:%M:%S \
--colour-images \
--disable-progress \
--camera-mode track \
--file-filter \.svn \
--output-ppm-stream - | \
ffmpeg \
-y \
-b 3000K \
-r 60 \
-f image2pipe \
-vcodec ppm \
-i - gource.avi
Most of the gource options I’ve used are fairly self-explanatory I think. I’m filtering out \.svn there because some of my config files are also versioned with subversion (my apache vhosts, for example) and the video was even denser with those left in. The ffmpeg options I cut ‘n’ pasted wholesale from somewhere, Cargo-Cult-style, because ffmpeg is voodoo.
Speaking of subversion, it’s possible to generate gource videos from SVN projects too, using either git-svn or the python script that you can find on this page.
The Wikipedia Game
Posted by sam
on 2010/10/31
2 comments
Navigating Wikipedia without a keyboard
Things you will need
- An device with a net connection (we used the Linux box under the TV)
- Some kind of music player (we used Amarok)
- Some booze (we used Red wine)
How to play
Open Wikipedia in your browser of choice, then set your music player to shuffle mode and start it. Now the object of the game is to navigate your way through Wikipedia to the page of the currently-playing artist or band without recourse to the keyboard. You must find your way to where you want to go purely by clicking on links.
For example, let’s say the target track is How Soon Is Now by The Smiths. Well, we know they’re from Manchester, so that seems a good place to aim for. We can get there via:
- The ‘Geography portal’ link
- The ‘Europe portal’ link
- The ‘European Union portal’ link
- The ‘More cities…’ link
- The ‘London’ link
- The ‘United Kingdom’ link
- The ‘Cities and conurbations’ link
- The ‘Manchester’ link
And now it’s just a couple of hops:
and that’s it. Presuming you got there before the end of the track, that’s +1 for you (and be sure to record these scores somewhere, otherwise the whole thing becomes pointless).
Then use The Smiths as the starting point to get to the next artist. Repeat until you lose interest.
Tips
Knowing any of these things about the artists or bands proved useful when we were navigating around:
- The city from which they originate
- Other artists with which they may have collaborated
- Movie soundtracks on which they may have appeared
Thanks to Kitty, Chris and Ulrike for helping to come up with this.
