Joe Button's Website

Since I moved to Bristol I haven't listened to most of my music collection, which remained packed away on a hard drive for several months. I have now addressed this state of affairs in a characteristically ludicrous and impractical manner.

My friend Wayne was kind enough to donate me his surplus Linksys NSLU2, which I've installed the fabulous OpenWrt on. The prebuilt image I tried didn't seem to play nicely with bluetooth so I built my own version out of svn. I installed mpd and connected my USB hard drive and speakers.

Recklessly disregarding this wise admonishment, I decided to knock together my own solution to controlling the music player from my bluetooth phone. There are various solutions already, but they all seemed a little on the heavy/byzantine side for me and my slug. So, I threw together a small C program to relay messages from my bluetooth phone to mpd. Actually it just relays messages sent via bluetooth to any host/port, so there might plausibly be some other use for it. Don't know what though.

This just left the app to run on my phone. The phone's a nokia 6021 and runs J2ME/MIDP2.0. I'm not much of a java programmer but I managed to create a somewhat working app (source here). To describe it as basic is understating the case, but hopefully at some point I'll get round to turning it into something more complete.

My esteemed friend and ex-colleague Dave has written a Dashboard widget that shows you pollen forecasts for your area in the UK. Get it here.

I thought my UK pollen forecast gnome applet might be useful to more people if I made it available as a Firefox extension. If I'd realised how much faffing about was going to be involved I might not have bothered, but anyway it's done now.

It has a page here at the official Mozilla addons site, but you need to be registered with the site to get it there until somebody reviews it and judges it fit for public consumption. So for the time being you can get it from my website.

Zirtek, the manufacturers of anti-allergy medicines, provide a free (as in beer) desktop app that tells you the pollen forecast for your area. It's Windows-only, but with a small amount of cunning we can work out what it's doing and make our own version. Wireshark reveals that the app is downloading data from an XML feed here. Zirtek don't seem to publicise that url but it's on the public internet so I guess there's no legal issues with using it.

I made a gnome applet, which you can install as follows:

$ svn co https://tubbs.trition.org.uk/pollencount/gnome_applet pollencount_gnome_applet
$ cd pollencount_gnome_applet
$ sudo make install

Then right click on your panel, click Add to Panel and select 'PollenCount'. Right-click the applet to set your region.

At the time of writing the web is in the midst of a strange situation with respect to XHTML rendering. Modern websites often identify themselves in their head sections as being coded in XHTML, but identify themselves in their HTTP headers as being coded in HTML. This is because Internet Explorer, the crappest but most prevalent web browser, fails to render XHTML code that correctly identifies itself with the application/xhtml+xml mimetype. To work around this authors send their pages with the wrong mimetype, which causes all browsers to fall back to rendering the code as if it were HTML. This is just one of many ways IE makes the web a more broken place than it ought to be. But I digress.

Various arguments have been advanced as to why XHTML might be preferable to HTML, or vice versa. One of those arguments concerns rendering speed. I've seen people argue this as an advantage of both XHTML-style rendering and HTML-style rendering.

Out of interest I hacked together a (fairly unscientific) speed test of Firefox 3's rendering of a page served as text/html vs the same page served as application/xhtml+xml. The page chosen was my own homepage (with a couple of minor modifications). I served it locally via a slightly modified version of nweb, an extremely simple and lightweight webserver. The render time was discerned using javascript, by taking the time in the head of the page and again in an onload handler, and subtracting one from the other. Not sure if that's the best metric but I can't think of a better one.

And the results are... I bet you're really excited now... over 40 page refreshes, the text/html version averaged a time of 385ms, while the application/xhtml+xml version averaged 367ms. Making the XHTML version ~5% faster. Not dramatic or particularly scientific, but kind of interesting.

I think my new Visual Compressor LV2 plugin is just about ready to be unleashed upon a frankly uninterested public. This one has a GUI that lets you visually set up the compression parameters (hence the name, duh). It looks like this, if you're running one of the very few lv2 hosts that support the GUI extension. As far as I know so far that's just Ingen and Elven, which is available as part of ll-plugins

You can get the source by doing:

$ svn co https://tubbs.trition.org.uk/audio/lv2/visual_compressor

You'll need lv2-c++-tools installed to build it.

A while ago the management of a company I was working for decided it needed to keep track of the time its employees were spending on various tasks and projects. The solution that was arrived at was that we would all use dotproject, a project management web app written in PHP.

Since a typical day at that company consisted of hundreds of interruptions with brief bouts of actual work permitted in between, using a web app to track time turned out to be too unwieldy to be really practical. I quickly resorted to retrospectively filling my timesheet with plausible but largely fictitious entries.

I was motivated by this experience to write tagalog, a small gnome/python app which allows you to track your time easily without interrupting your flow any more than necessary. Here's its homepage.

A while ago I watched The Seventh Seal with my French marine biologist friend Sophie, who revealed at the end that she was confused because she thought 'seal' meant a kind of marine mammal. Finding this hilarious, I created the following graphic:

I suspect about 1% of people will get the references and about 1% of those people will actually find it amusing. I nonetheless believe in my heart that this graphic is funny.

I was inspired by Lars Luthman's appositely named guide to have a go at writing a simple LV2 audio plugin. It turned out to be surprisingly easy.

My plugin is a simple volume modulator with period and depth controls. Here's what it sounds like, first with an otherwise clean guitar sound and then with an added ludicrous metal patch from my effects pedal. Warning: extremely cheesy guitar playing.

You can get the source by doing:

$ svn co https://tubbs.trition.org.uk/audio/lv2/shimmer

You'll need lv2-c++-tools installed to build it.

Today I added Spamhaus's ZEN blocklist to my webserver config. This required a two line addition to my exim4 config file and has resulted in my receiving no spam whatsoever for over two hours. That's truly amazing and I wish I'd done it ages ago.

I played another farewell gig with Anna last night at Cambridge Junction. I think that's at least my third farewell gig with The Anna Mudeka Band, and I'm sure there were a few with BabaSimba (a band I used to be in with Anna) too. Since I seem to be imminently moving to Bristol this one might actually have been my last though.

For some reason the band forgave me for completely missing the soundcheck and showing up two minutes before we were due on stage, which I'm immensely surprised and grateful about. The gig was great, and most of the audience was lured out of the seating which had been misguidedly allotted to it. With each final gig I've been progressively forgetting that I'm supposed to be in a World Music type band and playing more and more like Tom Morello.

So, now I need a new musical project to keep me occupied. Anyone up for starting a band called sth to cover songs in the style of Black Sabbath?

I got my first metric spam today:

I'll be watching to see if this is part of a trend.

I've finally got round to turning my embarrassing holding page into something approximating a website. Please let me know if you think there are any problems with it I need to fix.

Now, let's see if I can be bothered to post any actual content here...