We were outside Morrisons on Meadowhead in Sheffield (here on google maps) in a queue of traffic going down the hill. Behind me was a young woman in a black Audi TT. Down the inside (the bus lane) appears a well-heeled respectable looking bloke in a large silver Mercedes who proceeds to try and get in front of me. Now, I’d been queueing for some time and quite frankly, wasn’t really disposed towards letting someone who’d just come the inside of quarter of a mile or more of almost stationary traffic push in, so I held my place on the road. Mr Merc then proceeded to try and shove in behind me in front of the lass in the Audi. She obviously felt the same as I did, but Mr Merc clearly felt she was a pushover compared with me, so kept pushing, despite the girl making it quite plain she wasn’t going to give way. Eventually, the poor lass ended up half way over the white line in the face of oncoming traffic with Mercman millimetres off my back bumper.

Seeing what was happening, and fancying a bit of fun, I waited until the coast was clear and I waved the Audi girl in front of me to get her out of the awkward situation she found herself in. As she drove around, I could see she was on the phone. My assumption was that she was phoning the other half to recount the incident. As she drew alongside me, she wound down the window and shouted that she’d been ringing the police.

Within a minute, the police car came up the hill looking at the line of traffic… I took great delight in pointing out our protaganist behind me. Myself and Audi-girl pulled in down the road as requested by the police and they took details. The lass in the Audi was in a terrible state – very badly shaken by the whole experience and she’d got her two young daughters in the car – both younger than Dan – both of whom she said had been frightened silly.

If Mr Merc and his (I assume) wife and other friend in the back of the car had been in a hurry, it was a bit unfortunate for them, because the policeman must have given them a right old grilling, because it was fully another 25 minutes before they got under way again; I’d been in the brew shop on Abbey Lane and done my buying as he drove in front of the shop.

Hopefully it taught him and his passengers a lesson and next time, he wont be so much of a road hog and outright bully. The roads are everyones to share. Just ‘cos you’ve got loads of money and a big car doesn’t mean to say you have any more right over any bit of road than anyone else. Kudos to Audi-girl for phoning the police and making sure the bully got what he deserved.

If you see a gent in his 50’s, curly greying hair, big Silver Merc, DV08, give him a wave from me.

Click for photo

This is the view from the study window looking across towards Wales Bar with the sun making the snow look positively idyllic! Last night, the road from the office was less photogenic. Having said that, the drive home last night was probably quicker than usual, helped by the lack of traffic onthe roads and the fact I left it until 17:45 to leave the office for just that reason.

The period at home gives me a chance to get some debugging done on this shop floor booking application I’ve been working on for a while (not exclusively I hasten to add) so I can move on to some other equally long-standing applciations that are half-written that the users now want finished and out of the way. We’re starting to see now some very positive reactions to the work we’re doing from the users which is not only arefreshing change but means that we also feel more valued in the business. Long may it continue.

Wanting to make this a bit special, I decided to make it with Coopers dark malt extract, no sugar for a more full-bodied brew. It was a voyage of discovery for me because I’ve never made a no-sugar brew before. Everything went according to plan. The OG was about 1045. I would have liked something a little higher, but beggars can’t be choosers!

It fermented out to around 1015FG which I was a little concerned about but a quick email to Clive at Brupaks confirmed that this was about the expected FG, so I kegged it up with 100g of regular sugar and left it in the house for a few days to condition.

I’ve been having a problem with my keg not releasing excess pressure despite changing all the rubbers on the valve (it’s a 4″ neck barrel with two valves), so I wasn’t entirely surprised when the bottom of the keg went from concave to convex and stood at a crazy angle! Consequently, two days before Christmas, I was down at Brewmart in Sheffield, my local brewing emporium, buying a new barrel!

The Christmas target for drinking was unattainable, so I settled on this being a New Year brew when we were having a few friends around for the evening.

A pre-party taster suggested that this was a little more full-bodied than I was aiming for. It was more like a UK Mild than the alt-bier I was aiming for, but having said that, it wasn’t a failure by any stretch of the imagination. I like Mild!

I’ll make the kit again, but go for a half sugar half malt balance next time to try and take some of the body out of it.

If you’ve only done regular kits from tins, I can heartily recommend the Brupaks kits “with Teabag technology”. I doubt I’ll ever get to starting with full dry ingredients, so these offer a suitable alternative for me, and there’s a decent range to go through. Now I’ve got a bit more confidence with malt extract, I will be happier experimenting with brews in future.

This photo is the brew being transferred from fermentation vessel (FV) to keg. The other thing worthy of note is that it overtopped the FV causing a bit of a mess on the breakfast bar (hastily cleaned up before the boss noticed).

I’ve also got a barrel I can use for conditioning now, so even the barrel episode had a positive outcome!

“Why?” I hear you ask.

Well, I’m finding myself increasingly using services like Twitter whilst on the move (not literally) and as I’m also doing a fair amount of travelling, having a device that consolidates all my networking and music in one place will be a boon. Also, whilst the BB Pearl has been a great handset, especially the 8110 with the GPS, the camera and video capabilities are pretty dire. I don’t use the camera on my mobile much, but it is useful to have if I’m not going out with the Canon.

So, all change.

A pretty poor excuse for a blog posting though don’t you think?

Over Christmas I’ll probably try to re-skin bits of the site and might integrate my Twitter feed which is more active :)

TTFN

A quick check showed a gnats over 1.4million records in the log file (one record every six seconds since July) so something needed to be done! My collector script doesn’t add the per-record cost to the data, so I have to run a quick query first to update the ’slice_cost’:

update energy_user set slice_cost = watts * 0.0016667 / 100 * 0.175

(yes, I know I should cancel some of the zeroes out)

I wanted a table summarised by hour showing total watts and cost per hour. My base table is this:

mysql> describe energy_use;
+-------------+----------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+
| Field       | Type     | Null | Key | Default             | Extra |
+-------------+----------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+
| recordtime  | datetime | NO   | PRI | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |       |
| temperature | float    | YES  |     | NULL                |       |
| watts       | int(11)  | YES  |     | NULL                |       |
| slice_cost  | double   | YES  |     | NULL                |       |
+-------------+----------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

I’m not really interested in temperature, so I wanted this for a summary table…

mysql> describe total_energy;
+-------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field       | Type    | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| rdate       | date    | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| rhour       | int(11) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| total_watts | int(11) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| total_cost  | double  | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+-------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now let me point out here, I’m not an SQL expert by any stretch of the imagination, so forgive me if this is obvious to some people. An aggregate query on the energy_use table would give me the summarised data I wanted, and wrapping that up with an insert query would summarise and build the total_energy table in one fell swoop:

insert into total_energy (rdate, rhour, total_watts, total_cost)
 select  date(recordtime) as rdate, hour(recordtime) as rhour,
  sum(watts) as total_watts, sum(slice_cost) as total_cost
  from energy_use
  group by date(recordtime),hour(recordtime);

…which appears to do the job quite nicely.

All I have to do now is decide how much data I want toremove from the detail table. Realistically, I don’t need anything before October now I have a summary table, so

delete from energy_use where date(recordtime) < '2009-10-01'

…which removed 989000 records (or thereabouts).

Next job is to write some graphs to display the cost profiles…

I’ve spent a few minutes knocking together a quick two-part arrangement of a Christmas Carol for Dan and myself to play for the Santa  Publicity Day in Retford (there’ll be more, but I have to start somewhere!).

Rosegarden will happily create a multi-line score, but it’s not Dan-friendly. Fortunately, Rosegarden will export Lilypond files. Lilypond is a GNU command-line application for music typesetting and will spit its output out in PDF or postscript format.

So, a few key presses later and this is the result:

O Little Town

Rosegarden should be able to preview and print direct using Lilypond, but for some reason, it isn’t. Not the end of the world because I just exported the file in Lilypond format and processed it on the command line:

david@server:~/Documents/Music> lilypond –pdf Little-Town-1.ly  Little-Town-2.ly

(I had two files to process – one for each part and could combine them on the same command line).

So, concept to hard copy music and not a commercial pay-for bit of software in the loop anywhere.

I was cruising the blogosphere earlier in the week looking for inspiration.  I’ve got some two part Christmas carol arrangements to do for Daniel and myself and I was faced with having to switch the Windows box on for the first time in a couple of months (yes, it’s been that long) and use Sibelius when I found the answer.

What I needed was a soft synthesizer and to pipe the midi output from Rosegarden in to that. It was all so blindingly obvious. I’d been barking up completely the wrong tree trying to get jack working properly.

Into Yast, install QSynth, follow a few simple instructions here and we were nearly off and cooking. the little green light on the QSynth tab was flashing to show that things were happening. The volume was turned up, but something was still missing…

Ah. Soundfonts.

Back to Yast, install the soundfont, a few program restarts and Rosegarden was alive, alive I tell you.

Yet another reason not to turn the Windows machine on at home. Can I think of any more?

If  there was a Linux or Mac port of Rail simulator now…

They’ve been dried by hanging them in the kitchen then these have had a blast in the airing cupboard. Consequently, these rattle and there’s absolutely no moisture in them so they should keep for months.

(Please don’t click it)

http://online.hmrc.gov.uk.nyyyyase.com/SecurityWebApp/httpsmode/statement.php?{other id stuff redacted}

nyyyyase.com turns out to be a cluster of machines

dmlinux2:/home/david # host nyyyyase.com
nyyyyase.com has address 222.113.210.163
nyyyyase.com has address 61.73.96.212
nyyyyase.com has address 67.164.7.67
nyyyyase.com has address 79.175.103.228
nyyyyase.com has address 83.4.187.5
nyyyyase.com has address 89.134.5.8
nyyyyase.com has address 93.172.209.217
nyyyyase.com has address 110.13.183.155
nyyyyase.com has address 114.180.190.76
nyyyyase.com has address 121.174.9.100
nyyyyase.com has address 121.183.6.137
nyyyyase.com has address 190.139.220.38
nyyyyase.com has address 195.56.205.192
nyyyyase.com has address 210.116.200.91
nyyyyase.com has address 221.165.170.71

…and when you try to browse to the IP address, you’re redirected to microsoft.com, presumably in an attempt to cover tracks. The few that I’ve traced all seem to be Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary)

Browse a little deeper though and you get a site not dissimilar to the HMRC web site in layout and colour.

Be warned!