Après ma présentation d’hier à la soirée du Liege Linux Team, j’ai placé ma présentation en ligne : " Introduction aux Logiciels Libres" (ou directement : fichier PDF, 1.8Mo). Tout commentaire ou amélioration possible est le(la) bienvenu(e) ! Edit (a little bit later): since I usually write in English here, I translated my presentation in English. It’s here: " Introduction to Free Software" (PDF, 1.9Mb).
Nearly a month after the initial launch of my map of CCTV cameras in Liege, quite a number of people contributed to add cameras on this map (some people contributed heavily ; thanks to all of them). Currently, we have identified 79 cameras but it seems we are far from finishing this work since, according to some sources, there were more than 109 CCTV cameras in Liege at the end of 2006! Did this put you at rest: 40 cameras added in one go?
I’m wondering how people are using tags and how it differs from keywords usage in the scientific literature. Usually when I add tags on web services like del.icio.us or Flickr, I tend to add as many tags as possible. For example, even if a man is not the main subject of a photo, I’ll use the tag “man”. The rationale is we never know if, one day, I (or someone) would like to find a photo with a man and a tree (for example), the tree being the main subject. The problem is that I think I’m “diluting” the power of main tags. Another example … about a website helping find post-doc jobs, I’ll use the following tags: “jobs postdoc research science grants PhD job”. The problem is that “grants” is not really related (there are no list of available grants but only some jobs require grants and you never know what you’ll look for later). ...
A lot of publicity is made around CCTV cameras in London (e.g. recently). But surveillance cameras are also invading other cities like Liege. You can be pro or against. The least thing is awareness: citizen should know where they are and how data is used. But nor the Liege city, nor the Liege police websites display a map of cameras. So I decided to create such a map here (in French). Of course, I cannot do everything by myself. If you know the location of some camera, just let me know and I will add them on the map. ...
Nearly 2 months ago, I got a GPS tracker. I discovered its antenna is sufficiently sensitive to work in my pocket so I took it on my Saturday morning bike ride. Back home, I was able to retrieve data from the tracker in various formats. What can I do with this data? Find the total distance I rode, of course! I am lazy ;-) so I decided to use the Kompass track file since it’s only a CSV text file (I should have used the GPX file format but parsing XML is still more difficult for me than a plain text file). With a rather simple Python script, I was able to store all the latitudes and longitudes in a collection of objects. But, hey, how do I compute the distance from longitudes and latitudes? ...
OpenStreetMap is a “project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.” I thought it was worth participating and more documented than the UPCT project. So I got a Locosys NaviGPS GT-11 and used it for the first time on the way to FOSDEM (and back). I did a small mistake by taking an interval between points of 30s: on a highway, at 120km/h, 30s means 1km and the road direction can change a lot. When I’ll have more time, the next step will be to do some edition and mark roads, highways, interesting landmarks, etc. Stay tuned … ...
My python script pyP2B was command-line only. Tonight, I played for the first time with Tk, re-wrote pyP2B as a class and thus added a GUI. Its webpage is updated ; the archive containing both command-line and GUI versions is here: pyP2B.tar.gz (3kb).
OK, I am giving up the Jadoo project. It could have been a very interesting project. But if I don’t give up now, it will stay in my mind and prevent me from starting new projects or continuing more important projects. But it’s a temporary giving up: who knows how much time I’ll have in 2 or 3 months. For those interested in Jadoo, here is the short story: everything started with a post on Alexandre Dulaunoy’s blog, then I tried a first version and finally I wrote a small update. Files are still here: jadwrite.py and jadpub.py. ...
Here are some news about the Jadoo blog engine … I updated the CSS file (2ko) and corrected some mistakes; now, all HTML/CSS tags are correctly used. I updated the main script in order to link to Technocrati for all tags I also updated the footer (= the side bar in the published page); it now includes the Technocrati search box I added the blogroll. It’s not showing links in random order like many other blog engines. But do we need that feature? Some tasks still need to be done: ...
Hi This is my first post with the Jadoo blog engine. As I stated before, I was planning to write my own blog software with these goals: Simplicity No PHP nor any script for the client All the processing done un Python, offline No DB (maybe some other goals but I don’t remember them, right now) I’ll try to apply the “release soon, release often” principle (where does it came from?): before writing an entry, launch jadwrite.py ; to create html files, launch jadpub.py ; then upload html files with your FTP client (scripts are highly customized for my blog, for the moment ; and everything doesn’t respect all the standards). I’ll also to retrieve all my previous posts (but the URL will be changed ; the RSS URL also changed). But for the moment, I have other important work to do … There is no system for comments for the moment (I don’t know if there will be one in the future) but you can send me comments and requests to jepoirrier@gmail.com. ...