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If you post images to flickr and use iViewMedia to organise your images, you might be interested in PictureSync. It’s a little application that monitors which images you’ve got selected in iViewMedia, and then uploads those images to flickr. It’s very configurable, but can use the title, category and keyword fields to make the title and tags for the flickr image. You can also get it to resize the image for upload, which saves a step in Photoshop.

I tend to tag my images with keywords anyway, so this is a real time-saver, and keeps my workflow within iViewMedia Pro. Another cool thing it does is to save the flickr image ID to a custom field, so that you could construct a URL to show the page on which the image appears in flickr.

Apparently, it can upload to iVerse, Buzznet and Fotolog.net too, though as I don’t subscribe to those services, I can’t tell you how well it works. It also works with iPhoto, but then so do some of the other flickr uploading tools; PictureSync is the first I’ve found that supports iViewMedia.

Lately, I’ve been tinkering around with my old PC laptop, trying to get a Linux distribution reinstalled on it. This laptop—an ugly duckling brother to my sleek PowerBook—has had a bit of a checkered past. I originally got it when I was short of money and couldn’t afford an Apple laptop. It was a cheap generic machine from Digital Networks, but came with Linux (Red Hat) pre-installed instead of Windows. I used it as my main work machine for some time until my work bought me a PowerBook. In the process, I learned a heck of a lot about Unix which stood me in very good stead for using the new MacOS X Cheetah (or whatever felid it was then).

Ugly Laptop languished in a cupboard, and only came out occasionally for me to try something out. At a particular low point in its (and my life), Ugly Laptop was reformatted and had Windows XP installed on it. I had a horrible deadline, and my copy of Word had become completely unusable for collaborative editing. This emergency procedure was so that I could use Word for Windows until the crisis passed. I really couldn’t be bothered to download all the patches and updates necessary to prevent a Windows machine from becoming a spammer’s zombie, so I never connected it to the network.

Now there’s a possibility that I might do some collaborative work with someone that would require using some custom software only available on Linux (it hasn’t been ported to MacOS X yet), and I thought that I’d have another go at installing a new distribution. The Linux kernel and window managers like KDE and Gnome have come on enormously in the time that I’ve been away, so I was curious to see what the current Linux experience is like.

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Like many other avid radio listeners, I was really sad to hear that John Peel had died. Many people have—rightly—focused on the loss to the music world because he was such an eclectic and enthusiastic champion of new music. However, I’ll also really miss his Radio 4 programme, Home Truths.

Home Truths tends to divide opinion; you either love it passionately or hate it. It’s certainly hard to describe to someone who hasn’t heard it. It deals with ‘family life’ if you take the very broadest definition of both ‘family’ and ‘life’, and ranges massively in tone between very serious, tragic matters and utterly trivial and silly ones. As such it seems to mirror John Peel’s eclectic music selections; just as he didn’t see any problem in playing a death thrash metal track followed by a Delta blues track from the 1940s, he happily mixed interviews with people on very profound and serious matters with assorted mad correspondence from his listeners. It all worked somehow because he was the one threading it all together.

In a typical programme—though there really wasn’t such a thing—you might hear John interviewing a woman who had self-harmed for most of her life and was trying to explain it to her children, or a family who had only just survived being blown up by a terrorist bomb, sandwiched between correspondence on the correct Latin translation of the lyrics of “How much is that doggie in the window?”, or family euphemisms for having sex¹. Listening to Home Truths frequently meant swinging wildly between feeling very moved and howling out loud with laughter.

John Peel was also an extraordinary interviewer. In fact, his talent was that he didn’t really interview at all; he just talked to people and listened to what they had to say. There was no sense of him ‘steering’ the conversation that you often get with other interviewers. Indeed, he would often veer things slightly off-course himself, because he would chip in with his own anecdote, empathising with what they were saying. If the person was relating something dangerous or unwise that they had done, he could be gently disapproving, like an uncle who loves you but still likes to tell you what you should do.

Other people have acted as stand-ins for John Peel on the show from time to time—the most recent being David Stafford, who covered for Peel when he went to Peru. However good they are at their job, it just isn’t the same without him. His sensitivity in interviews and his dry links between the pieces made the show. Also, listeners knew that if there was one person who would enjoy the love song they had written to their garage², it was John Peel.

¹ My favourite was ‘looking at Lundy’. There was quite an explanation involved with that one…

² Yes, really. I still sing it in my head sometimes, as it was hilarious and catchy. Immortal rhymes like, “Me and my garage/It’s better than my marriage/From your concrete floor/To your up-and-over door”, and “You look smashing/In your new lead flashing” don’t grow on trees, you know.

Mr. Bsag has just got a Brompton folding bike to replace his old Philips folder for commuting, which has now officially become a write-off (in the technical sense of costing more to repair than replace). Bromptons aren’t cheap, but you get what you pay for in a very solid build quality and a tiny folded size. He managed to find an ex-demonstration model at a big discount, which was great, but it didn’t come with any instructions, and arrived folded.

We spent the best part of half an hour last night trying to figure out how to turn the neat, but tangled mass of metal and cables into a ride-able bike. Like one of those infuriating linked metal loop puzzles you get in Christmas crackers, the solution was obvious once you’d actually done it. The bike folds in three places (four if you count the folding pedal—that one really stumped us for a while), so there are lots of ways to get it wrong. He’s going to have to put a bit of practice in if he’s going to pull off the folding/unfolding trick smoothly enough not to get laughed at by the other Brompton owners at the railway station.

Of course, we should have just looked on the web in the first place, but that wouldn’t have been any fun.

I hate violence and I hate watching violent films. But for every rule there’s an exception, and if the violence is an accurate portrayal of a real situation, and the film tells an important and hidden story, then—for me—it’s justified. City of God (Cidade de Deus) is a violent film, but an important, beautiful and heartbreaking one. The film is based on the true story of a group of kids growing up in a Rio favela, from the perspective of Rocket—the only one to break out of the cycle of poverty and violence and get out of the favela. Almost all of his contemporaries end up being drawn into drug-dealing, violence and crime.

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A little while ago, I wrote about how I used Tinderbox to implement my the GTD method. At the time, this was inspired by Merlin Mann’s entry about hacking GTD, in which he described his own—rather neat—method using plain text files.

Well, now that I’m using TextMate so much for everyday work (and can keep a set of related files as a project in one window), I thought I might—just as an experiment—see how easy it would be to translate my method in to plain text files. It’s not that I don’t like my method using Tinderbox, or that I think this is necessarily the best or easiest way to do things. It’s more a case of exploring other possibilities (professional curiosity is part of my job, after all), flexing my Ruby coding muscles, and seeing how far you can push the scripting abilities of TextMate. Some of you might quite legitimately wonder if I ever get anything done on my GTD list if I’m spending so much time fiddling with the list itself, but somehow I am still regularly managing to complete things off my list.

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There must be something about Sunday nights that switches off my critical faculties and turns my brain to mush. I can find no other rational explanation for the fact that on Sunday I enjoy watching Midsomer Murders. For those unfamiliar with the British TV landscape, this show is classic Sunday night fare, featuring; lovely rural thatched cottage locations, mild tongue-in-cheekiness, great British Institutions (WI, bell ringers, Regattas etc.), and—of course—gruesome murder.

There are many reasons to find Midsomer Murders laughable¹, but the thing that gets me every week is the sound effects. At some point, the people responsible for sound effects must have reasoned thusly:

1. Midsomer is a rural area.
2. Rural areas have lots of foxes and owls.
3. Foxes and owls come out at night, and their calls are a bit spooky.
4. Therefore, every night scene should have a minimum of one fox scream or owl hoot per two seconds.

If there were as many foxes in Midsomer as there appear to be from the soundtrack, the dead bodies would never actually hit the ground—instead, they would recline gently on a carpet of screaming foxes. If there was a BAFTA for “Most Gratuitous Use of Nocturnal Animal Cries and Calls” (and there should be) then Midsomer Murders would be a dead cert for the award.

¹Not least of which is the stunning body count of an average of 3 murders per week in a tiny rural area. It’s true that Inspector Morse had much the same problem, but Oxford is a little more urbanised, and anyway he carried it off with a bit of gravitas.

The Idler has a fascinating collection of peoples’ rebuttals and confirmations of their list of the worst towns in Britain:

We’re making our decision on the number of nominations each town gets. So we’ll be surprised if it isn’t Hull – but you never know. There are a number of strong contenders across the South West, there are dozens of costa-del-granny seaside towns forcing their way up the rankings, more and more of you are furious with life in London. Cumbernauld still seems unrelentingly miserable.

…

We’re finding the semi-illiterate hate-mail particularly funny – please keep those coming in, they’re providing great material for out next book.

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As I mentioned when I was writing about my new camera, I’m finding flickr much easier to update with new photos than my own photoblog. In particular, I still haven’t found a good way to automate the updating of the thumbnails that I show at the top of the page, and I have to do it manually. Since I’m posting most of my images to flickr (and then copying some to Wings Open Wide), I decided to use flickr’s own script to display the last five images.

Unfortunately, the styled version (which looks much nicer) works vertically, not horizontally, so I couldn’t use it in the header to replace my previous thumbnails. This has meant slightly re-ordering the components of the page, and putting the search bar in the right-hand side of the header in place of the thumbnails. I think it looks OK, but I’m open to other suggestions. Polite ones…

What I’d really like is some way to auto-post my flickr images (along with a thumbnail, which is the crucial thing) to my photoblog, with the layout of my choice. Surprisingly, flickr allows you to hotlink to your images, with the very reasonable proviso that you include a link back to the flickr page. They also have an API that lets you get details of the URIs, titles, dimensions, descriptions and so on of the images in your collection in an XML, so it should be possible to build something that grabs this information and then builds a template for you. I’ll have to think about it a bit.

WordPress has been updated to 1.2.1:

I am relieved to announce that WordPress 1.2.1 is now available for download. This release addresses a few bugs and minor security issues with 1.2. We’ve also backported the new login system from 1.3 that is much friendlier and should address many of the problems people have had with logging in and cookies.

I’ve upgraded, and all seems to be well. However, there’s bound to be something I’ve forgotten, so do let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary.

A guide dog got on the train the other day with its owner. I find it fascinating watching guide dogs work; the way they instantly snap into readiness as soon as their harness is on is really touching. And—as far as you can tell from all the wagging—they really enjoy their work.

The thing that caught my attention about this particular guide dog was its size. It was a huge hearth rug of a dog, part German Shepherd and part a variety of other big and slightly wolf-like dogs. After its harness was taken off, it tried to curl up in the spaces between people’s feet—with only partial success. I was quite touched by the way it kept trying to squish itself into a smaller parcel as more passengers got on. I think guide dogs are trained to tuck themselves away when off duty outside the home.

For probably the first time, I wondered whether you need to be fitted for a guide dog. I don’t just mean that you need to find a dog you can work with happily, and who bonds with you, but also one that’s the right height for you. This dog’s owner was pretty tall, and I suppose that it’s a good idea for the dog’s back to be quite close to your hand so that you feel his movement clearly through as short a length of harness handle as possible.

As soon as the dog heard the announcement for New Street Station (or perhaps when he noticed his owner react slightly to the announcement), he jumped up, gave a cavernous yawn, shook his rug-like pelt and looked towards his owner. Once the harness was on, you saw the look of concentration in his eyes, and he and his perfectly matched human were off.

Various people have commented on the TextMate maillist about the lack of a function navigation menu in the application, like the ones that BBEdit and SubEthaEdit sport. This is a drop-down menu that allows you to jump to the definition of a method, a class, a function, or—in LaTeX—a section or subsection. Those things are pretty cool for sure, but others on the list commented that you could use the ‘Find word’ command to do something similar. You just place the cursor on the word you’re looking for (for example, ‘section’), and a separate window opens showing each line containing the word. You can then click the line to jump to the corresponding line in the main window.

I’m writing a talk in LaTeX using the beamer style at the moment, so I decided to add one or two things to this technique to make a nice little navigation pane to help me jump around my presentation while I’m writing it. My setting in the Command > Edit Menu dialogue are as follows:

Before running command: Do nothing Commands: grep -rn --regexp='frametitle|section' Standard input: Entire document Standard output: Show in separate window Pattern: ^(d+):(s*)(\frametitle{|\section**{)(.+)}$ Format string: $2$4 Line: 1

This finds every line containing the words ‘frametitle’ (the slide titles) or ‘section’. It then strips away all the LaTeX junk from those lines so just the frame or section title is shown. Since I indent my LaTeX neatly, it also captures the whitespace before the line containing the section or frame title and prints that out to the command window. So you end up with a neat, indented hierarchy of section and frame titles which forms a skeleton outline of your talk, and which you can use to jump to particular points. If you add a hotkey, keep the command window open and drag the horizontal split widget to hide the source code at the bottom you’ve got a navigation pane that you can refresh with a hot key as you add to your talk. In many ways it’s better than a drop-down menu because you can see the whole structure at a glance without moving your mouse.

This solution isn’t anything revolutionary (I just modified the existing code), and it’s tuned to my particular usage, but I hope it demonstrates just how powerful the flexibility of TextMate is.

Update 29/11/2005:Hugo Mallinson sent me a much improved version of my regexp, which copes better with different kinds of formatting, sub-sections and so on. With his permission, here it is:

command: grep -rn --regexp='section|item'
pattern: ^(d+):.*(sub)?(sub)?(section**{|(item{))(.+)}$
format: (?3  : )(?2  : )(?5 * : )$6

If you have looked at the new pictures I’ve posted on Wings Open Wide and flickr, you might have noticed that I’ve got a new camera: a Casio Exilim EX-Z40. I’ve been thinking about getting a new camera for a while, because Mr. Bsag often uses the Nikon Coolpix for recording scenes that he might paint. This means that one or other of us often doesn’t have the camera when we need it. Not wanting to make the same mistake twice, I thought that it should be me who got the new one. This isn’t quite as mean as it sounds; Mr. Bsag doesn’t need very high resolution for his purposes, and the Nikon is fine for him.

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I’ve just discovered Feedburner. It’s a service which takes your RSS or Atom feed and splices in bits of other content or functionality. So—for example—you can produce a ‘SmartFeed’, which dynamically delivers the correct format (RSS, RDF or Atom) to a the reader, or you can splice in feeds for your last few flickr images. It’s free, so I set one up out of curiosity, which you can find here. It’s got the works; flickr photos, del.icio.us links, Amazon associate ID automagically added to any links to media items, and it’s a SmartFeed. My only gripe is that it doesn’t seem possible to show the full text of an entry in the feed, but perhaps I’m missing something. What do people think? I might provide this feed for a while to see if people prefer one giant feed to a number of more specific ones.

I’ve been fiddling around a little more with integrating Ruby scripts and one-liners with Quicksilver, and I found a way to number the lines of a selection. This is handy for those times when you decide to bullet-point some text. Generating bullet numbering manually is a chore, and if you rearrange your points you need to renumber all the following points. It’s a simple and not very elegant bit of code—I’m sure someone with more than my newbie’s knowledge of Ruby could make it much more efficient. For some reason, I couldn’t seem to cram it all into a one-liner, so you’ll have to save the code below as a file somewhere on your system.

You need to call this script via Quicksilver or the command line like this: ruby /pathto/line_nos.rb | pbcopy. Then copy your text to be numbered, run the line above, then paste. Voila! Numbered lines. Note that the backslash at the end of the line starting ‘$std_out’ indicates a continuation line.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# line_nos.rb
text = `pbpaste`
lines = text.split(" n") 
def number_lines(max)
  i = 0
  while i < max
    yield i
    i += 1
  end
end
$std_out = number_lines(lines.length) {|val| num = val + 1;
   puts "#{num}. #{lines[val]}n"}