I got my NaviGPS BGT-11 in the post last week – yay!

To get it talking to Ubuntu I used this nifty perl script. And I could download all the manuals and things from the Locosys website.

Hurrah!

Had a problem last week where my editor was defaulting to using UTF-8 whereas the files i was editing were ISO-8859-1. This ISO character set allows for extra single-byte characters beyond those in standard ASCII – including 163 (0xA3), the simple UK ‘£’ sign.

This is nonsense in UTF-8, but my editor cheerfully didn’t inform me that it had made a ‘best guess’ at decoding the character and I ended up saving garbage back out when I wrote the file.

I might have noticed this when I did a diff but I didn’t because gnome-terminal was trying to use UTF-8 so I ended up comparing equally borked decoded characters and didn’t spot it.

Changing my editor’s encoding was simple enough, but changing gnome-terminal wasn’t quite so easy. I could change it for the current session, but had to re-select it each time I opened the terminal, which was far from friendly.

Thankfully this guy had figured it out.

Additionally there is a launchpad request to allow this setting to be changed more easily from within gnome-terminal itself.

This is a quick related to my employer and day-job, Ebuyer.

They started using Subversion (SVN) for version control many moons ago, quickly found that it was lacking when it came to merging support. They then used SVK, or at least they did until today.

SVK is built on SVN but has better support for merging. I’m a bit light on details, but I gather that it does this by storing a stack of the merges that have been made on a branch in a local depot to make sure that they aren’t made again. This works well, but it means that after several years of use the local depots get large and the whole thing grinds halt.

You see, SVK, SVN and even Concurrent Versions System (CVS) are based on the same paradigm and neither is a revolutionary leap on its predecessor.

Enter the next generation  of VCS: Git, Mercurial and Bazaar (bzr).

These VCS systems offer new features such as fully decentralised version control – the idea of the central repository is gone. More importantly they use a completely different underlying architecture – a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), here’s a good explanation of the DAG in relation to GIT if you’re interested.

Anyway, Ebuyer’s VCS guru evaluated all the options and decided that bzr (bazaar) was the best option. They spent an amount of time migrating the cleansing the old SVN data and migrated what was left to bzr.

Today was the big day, and it went really rather well. Everything Just Worked. The best thing for us is that it has a powerful plugin architecture so you can extend the default functionality really easily to customise it for your own setup. Add into that the various workflows supported and you’re laughing.

Once I’ve seen how it beds in I think that I will look at migrating the Floating Frog projects to it because even we’ve had various merge conflicts on our small projects which might be made better by bzr.

To follow on from my previous post about OpenStreetMap I have on the hunt for a digital camera. The idea being that I take snaps with the camera of street signs, post boxes, churches and other landmarks then marry the timestamps up with those from the tracer when I get back home so that I can label the map properly.

I didn’t want a brand new one because it’s going to take a bit of rough and tumble with me on the bike and stuff; Vicky’s is, well, just that – it’s Vicky’s, and if I break it then she’ll have my balls

So I went on an ebay hunt and got pipped at the post on a dubious purchases. I sulked on one of them as I took my eye off the ball.

Late on I decided to send a cheeky email to Hull Freecycle asking if anyone had an old one collecting dust somewhere.

And, do you know what? Two people replied. Curiously both from Driffield. I collected from one of them, who happens to work at Hull New Theatre this tea time – and he brought not one, but two. How kind is that?

So I am now the proud owner of a Trust PowerCam Optical Zoom 910Z and a Trust PowerCam Zoom LCD 730S.

A guy I know up at Ryedale LUG has got me interested in the OpenStreetMap project.

The point of the project is to create a free, editable map of the the world.

Someone I was telling about this asked last night what the point was when he can get maps through his TomTom. Well the point is that the mapping data isn’t free – you have to pay TomTom to get the mapping data. The reason you have to pay them is because they have to pay the mapping people such as the Ordnance Survey.

Now, there is a whole sub-plot here which I paraphrase and may be slightly inaccurate. However, the gist is that the UK tax payer paid for much of the UK mapping to be created in the first place (see the © Crown on the OS site?), then the Ordnance survey charge us for the data we paid for the creation of in the first place. If I’m right then that’s not on, is it? This reminds me of Fight Club where they make their soap from the fat at lyposuction clinics and then sell their soap to ladies who frequent aforementioned clinics.

So, anyway, Al put me onto a guy who was selling a NaviGPS BGT-11 which is a GPS tracer. You can use these to plot out roads etc and upload them to OpenStreetMap. This is a Good Thing ™ because Withernsea isn’t very well mapped at the moment.

In a couple of weeks I will hopefully be a happy mapper and will update on what I have been up to.

Go listen to the latest Ubuntu UK podcast and be in with a (realistic!) chance of winning one of these babies. Seriously, go do it – just listen, enter the easy quiz question to their email address and wait to see if you win. No catches, no nuffink.

S01E10 – Easy Come, Easy Go | Ubuntu UK Podcast.

P.S. I also get my name dropped

I found out two things today.

1. The XSD for this XML:

   <someElement anAttribute="aValue">someValue</someElement>

   goes a little something like this:

   <xs:element name="someElement" type="some-element-def"
                        minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" />
   ...
   <xs:complexType name="some-element-def">
   <xs:simpleContent>
   <xs:extension base="xs:integer">
   <xs:attribute name="someAttribute" type="xs:boolean"
                            use="optional" />
   </xs:extension>
   </xs:simpleContent>
   </xs:complexType>

2. To get bzr 1.5 running on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add a couple of entries to /etc/apt/sources.list and re-run synaptic.

   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bzr/ubuntu hardy main
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bzr/ubuntu hardy main

3. To compile PHP4 with MySQL support other than the archaic bundled 3.x use --with-mysql=/usr

This is a useful guide for beginners to Bash shell scripting: All about Linux: 10 Seconds Guide to Bash Shell Scripting.

Again, a bit late in the day this one, but on 29th June I went with my girlfriend to see Radiohead play live in Manchester.

They played at Lancashire County Cricket Club‘s ground. The place was really easy to get to – though we ended up paying £10 for ‘event parking’ in some car park around the corner which is a bit gutting having paid nearly £50 for a ticket in the first place.

However, we got there at about 17:30, I peed in a bush due to lack of facilities and we ate packed lunch then headed in. I haven’t seen so many people in a crowd like that before – but then I’ve never been to football matches where they get twice that number every week.

The weather was atrocious on the East side of the Pennines but once we’d gone over the top it faired up and the weather was absolutely gorgeous – we were lucky not to get sunburnt.

Anyway, we got to see MGMT and Bat for Lashes for warmup. MGMT really surprised me, good live band and Bat for Lashes had a cracking voice but seemed a little bit out of place on the day – she may have been better as the first act, but that isn’t to disparage her as an artist at all.

The main problem with the venue was visibility – I’m 6′ tall and I kept finding I couldn’t see anything so I feel for those that were smaller. However, with the exception of the usual minority, the atmosphere was the friendliest of any gig I have been to.

So, enter Radiohead: naturally they were sublime, there’s lots been written about it above plus lots of photos on Flickr and I’m sure that Youtube is awash with videos.

It took about 45 minutes to get out of the £10 car park and a further 45 to get to the motorway out of Manchester and we got home at 01:30 … but it was a really fantastic event and I would go and do it today if I could.

I’ve just looked up where we parked and it shows clearly why it took so long to get out – we had to get East to White City Way and were right at the back. Oh well!

A few months ago a requirement came up in the Land Rover Project to move from Paypal Website Payments Pro (UK) to using Protx.

Both of these systems enable you to take online payments directly from customers’ credit cards, but what’s the difference?

Well Paypal was a great early choice for us. L. R. Series already had a very strong eBay presence as so used Paypal heavily already. They were familiar with the Paypal admin systems and given that their own website was about to be launched there was merit in easing that transition by not changing everything all at once.

Additionally Paypal have one great feature: they don’t require that you have a merchant account. Paypal act as the merchant on your behalf. This was necessary for the Land Rover people because as a new startup they would have been unlikely to get merchant status from their bank.

So Paypal have a lot of positives. The downside to Paypal is that they charge for the privilege of them being your merchant; don’t support Verified by Visa nor Mastercard Securecode and so leave you much more susceptible to chargebacks; we also found that CVV/CV2 failures weren’t being rejected or flagged up clearly in the administration panel.

Enter protx.

To use protx you must have a merchant account – you need to contact your bank and jump through a few hoops so that they can satisfy themselves that you are merchant-worthy.

Once you have this then you can sign up to Protx and let them handle the payment for you.

The best features we found with Protx when compared with Paypal are, in no particular order:

1. Reduced transaction fees
2. Quicker to get money from them into your account
3. Better security – e.g. VBV and MSC are supported; the admin panel is awash with traffic lights about the security of the transaction; you can add more policies to determine which transactions are rejected immediately.
4. Great customer service

All handy experience to get just before starting with Ebuyer.