If you need to install Python packages on Windows, I suggest you use pip-win. I just used it with Python (vanilla) 3.3 for Windows and it works like a charm.
The first time you browse/select the Python executable it will download and install the environment needed (pip and virtualenv). After successful installation, you can enter your pip-command in the second field. That’s all.
As a sidetrack for a work related project, I recently looked at GeoDjango. GeoDjango is the geospatially enabled version of Django, the socalled webframework for perfectionists with deadlines.
Doing the GeoDjango tutorial for the umpth time, Python caught me again. The way the language works, it seems to flawlessly connect with the way I think when I’m programming.
I needed to do some manual upgrading, can’t remember what exactly, but that had to do with the Ubuntu registries not having the latest version or so. Nothing special.
Thinking about two projects to create now. One is an idea I already have for a long time, so maybe it will see daylight some time.
Yes, that’s right! The deal was made earlier this week, but I wanted to go public with it after talking to my boss. Which I did this afternoon. He took it very well, I guess.
For the first time in a long time, I will be leaving consultancy behind me. Unfortunately that also means no more company car, so I’ll need to buy one myself in time. My new title is Senior Developer, and I guess the senior refers to the amount of grey hair I have, or the lack of hair for that matter 😉
I will be starting my new job February 1st, since I have a 2 months notice on my current contract. Plenty of time to finish my current project(s), and to transfer the knowledge I have of previous projects to some of my colleagues.
Exiting times!
On Friday the 13th we had a power outage. Of course. It lasted an hour. After that my whole house came to life again, except….the TV-signal, my landphone and my internet. Correct, same provider. They had problems after the power got back on, and their problems lasted several hours.
I didn’t think I had any problems, everything in the house seemed to work. Except when I tried to get some files of my NAS disk for work. It died. Connected the disk to a Windows machine, my Linux server, tried repairing the disk with a controller of the same type of disk, but none of that worked. The disk was dead. It contained my photos, my music, my documents, all my downloads and some backups. Great. Because of money issues, the disk was not mirrored. And I found that my latest backup of my pictures was….from July 2011.
🙁
I bought 4 new disks.
Two 3TB disks to be installed as RAID1 (mirrored disks) in my server, to be my main storage for pictures, documents and the like. And the NAS gets two brand new 1TB disks, also to be used in RAID1. To make things more expensive, I bought NAS-grade disks, which basically can stand being “on” 24/7.
The NAS disks are now installed and I am gradually restoring my pictures onto it.
The period the missing pictures span was certainly not the best period of my life. But there were some good moments I captured. Guess I have to make up for that in the years to come. Let’s charge the Canon, and start shooting.
Since yesterday I started playing Please Stay Calm on my phone. It’s a zombie game, kind of turn based. You have a limited amount of energy (and health of course) that you can use to scavenge for stuff or to hunt/kill zombies. Other than most games, the scavenging and hunting is done GPS based, so the game will list locations (shops, streets, etc) you will know.
Of course you can connect with friends (via Facebook or the app). You need to level to progress. You need money (found by scavenging or by selling stuff you found) to buy weapons, build safehouses, etc.etc.
It’s a simple game to play, the interface is not difficult and you don’t need superfast reflexes to dodge the zombies like most other games. I like it. At the moment I’m only at level 4, but for less than a day playing that seems okay (maybe it’s not).
Have a look here: http://pleasestaycalm.com/ and find the app in the Playstore or on iTunes.
Wow. The signal from upstairs is so strong, that I go downstairs again, the phone does not switch access point and retains the connection. Maybe I should think about replace the Netgear downstairs with a Siemens 😉
Finally I solved my wi-fi problem that I was having upstairs. In the bedroom and bathroom I have a weak signal, and sometimes in the middle of a page reload or a game load, it would switch to my providers network (3G). Upstairs in the computerroom or on the roof-terrace I have no wi-fi signal whatsoever.
Until now.
I thought, why not try the old Siemens SX762 ADSL router, and just skip the ADSL part? Turns out it can be used without ADSL, and LAN-port4 can be used to uplink. With that port connected to my switch upstairs I now have wi-fi there. It’s only 54g, but good enough for the phone.
Yeah!
Experimenting with Spotify, throw (Sony), DLNA, uPnP and knowing that my Squeezebox server is something that will obsolete in a while, I found something that might just be right. Of course it does not have the nice hardware like the Squeezebox itself, but I get some stuff in return.
I found Plex. It is a mediaserver that you run on a computer in your home. It indexes your music, your movies, and your pictures. And with the Plex clients, you can browse and even play that content. DLNA browsing is not so surprising, but DLNA by itself does not help if the browser/client does not know how to handle a specific filetype. My phone does not know how to handle a movie in MKV format. It does not recognize my camera’s RAW format. Plex does. And it does it well.
The client app on my phone was not free, it was € 3.71 or something like US$ 5.
When connected to WiFi on my local LAN, I can play content (movies will be the main bottleneck) in any quality, even 20Mbps in 1080p is no problem. But you don’t always have your own WiFi at your disposal, that’s why you can connect your server to myPlex. On the server you enter the myPlex account information, and you enter the same credentials in the Android app. This is how they find each other, much like the Squeezebox has.
Now I can still see everything on my server, and from within the client I can choose the quality I want the data to be streamed to me. If you’re on a tight data-subscription, you can turn the quality down, but when that is of no concern you can turn it up as much as you like (or as much as your provider lets you).
Just tested all this, and tonight in the restaurant I could show a movie in full HD with subtitles. Over just 3G. Don’t worry, it was just a test, we had a lovely dinner with no movies 😉
Yesterday I started with the “real” Zombies, Run! app, not the 5K training. I knew I had to evade the zombies for real now, noone to protect me or so. Very early in the run, I picked up some supplies. Batteries, a sports bra, things. Not long after that, I got a zombie warning, about 100 meters away from me. Evading the zombies meant accelerating, so I did. But the distance between me and the zombies only got smaller and finally I threw away 3 items from my inventory which seemed to distract the zombies from me. WTF? This pattern continued until the end of the run, so in total: 0 zombies evaded.
Read the FAQ.
Here’s how chases work:
When a Zombie Chase is triggered, the app calculates your average pace over the previous 30 seconds
You must increase your pace by 20% from this average
You must maintain that increased pace for 1 minute in order to escape the zombies.
Right. Should have read that before I ran. Hope things get better on the next run. You can see my run here.
I never knew that there was Linux support for SQLServer, but it turns out that there is a JDBC 4.0 driver for it that can be used in GeoServer.
From the download, put sqljdbc4.jar in the tomcat/lib directory if you only want JNDI connections, or in the GEOSERVER/WEB-INF/lib directory if you want connections that can be defined in GeoServer as well.
Download the sqlserver plugin for GeoServer, and put the jar file (in my case gt-jdbc-sqlserver-9.3.jar) into the GEOSERVER/WEB-INF/lib directory.
Now restart Tomcat (or just the GeoServer webapp if you don’t want JNDI connections). Now create a new store. Be sure to open up port 1433 on your Windows firewall, or otherwise GeoServer can’t reach it.