Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

On Saturday and Sunday I attended the Sheffield Open Street Map party. All this is pretty new to me but I was certainly interested in the concept of creating a free and openly editable map of the world. The party was kindly hosted and organised by the IET and ShefLUG in cooperation with the OSM guys who brought along some GPS gear for those of us who don't have our own.

We got a crash course on how to use the handheld GPS devices and then went out to do some mapping. I partnered up with Dan on Saturday and we wandered around the back streets quite close to the Mappin building which was our base. We took it in turns making notes and using the GPS and I think we managed to map just about every street in the patch we covered as well as quite a few footpaths.

Above is a copy of the OSM map of Sheffield as it stands right now after some of our weekends work has been added. It still hasn't rebuilt the tiles with the extra bits I have just added but I am sure it will get on there soon. I really enjoyed doing the mapping and hope to do more in the future. There are so many good reasons to help out with this project if you can.

Marble is planning on adding support for OSM, it is also a great way to do something pretty geeky and get out of the office for a while I love the freedom it gives you to add data, correct mistakes and use the data for whatever you like. Personally I am thinking of adding dive sites as I go to them and using Marble to display all the sites I have been to. I could also use it to map out runs and check on my performance as I train.

Some of you may remember a post I made about Kalzium quite some time ago. In KDE 4 trunk it now has a 3D molecule viewer which is already looking pretty fantastic. I have been playing with it quit a bit, and the library where all the 3D molecular visualisation is destined to be kept so that other applications can use it.

I have been using ghemical to draw my 3D molecules and am rendering them in Jmol using the POVRay rendering stuff. This is a reasonable solution but I have to say I have found myself wishing for something a little more integrated and intuitive. Above you can see how Kalzium rendered my 4-methylbenzenethiol molecule which encapsulates the gold nanoparticles I spend so much time writing about right now in my thesis.

There is code in subversion that already does some basic molecular editing, geometry optimisation and rendering to screen. Thanks to OpenBabel it can load and save pretty much any chemical data file format too. As you may know this is the last time I am ever likely to be a student and I have put in an application to work on this over the summer with Google Summer of Code (TM). So with me luck

I have been wanting to get involved in upstream KDE development for quite some time now and this seemed like an amazing way to start. The timing is pretty great too (although right now I am insanely busy finishing up my thesis and so the application period was hard to fit in) as I will complete my thesis before the summer starts and can delay getting full time work until after the summer. Don't worry - I have no plans to leave Gentoo and once I have more free time I will be spending more time on Gentoo again too!

Yesterday and today I went along to an Open Street Map event organised in Sheffield. When I get time I will talk about that more in another post. As I got back yesterday afternoon I got talking to Carsten about it on IRC and he introduced me to Torsten Rahn who developed Marble.

I have already been testing out some of the stuff in KDE trunk but had not yet had chance to try out Marble. It is still at an early stage of development but is already very nice to use. I have added Marble 0.3 to portage as it can be built using just Qt 4. It is a great 3D globe that doesn't use OpenGL and so actually works very well on my laptop that doesn't have 3D accelerated drivers.

As Anant Narayanan had already done a lot of work coordinating the update of Gentoo developer locations I asked him about getting a list in KML format which Marble supports. Above is a screen shot showing most of Europe and the developers located there. You can search for your favourite developer and even measure the distance between them.

It is only keyworded ~amd64 so far. If you are on another architecture you can always test it and ask your friendly architecture team to keyword it if it works well for you. Torsten has lots of stuff on his todo list for Marble. He will also be giving a talk on it at aKademy this year. One of the things I am particularly interested in is Open Street Map support. I am also looking forward to tile downloading in the next release.

I am pleased to announce that my talk submission on 'Gentoo & KDE' has been accepted. I am really looking forward to attending this year's aKademy which is being held in Glasgow. I am camping nearby and will certainly make it along to everything on the weekend.

I hope we will have other Gentoo users in attendance, I have learnt in the last few days that we have quite a few KDE developers who use Gentoo and even hang out in #gentoo-kde on Freenode. That channel seems to have more people in there everyday. I have always enjoyed meeting developers and users in real life after hours spent chatting online but have not had chance to make it to many conferences in the last year.

As part of my research in the last week or so I have been checking stuff out in KDE 4 and trying them out. I have to say the okular is already looking awesome. It would have been so good to have had this available throughout my PhD work but I think it will be well worth the wait. Kalzium is also looking fantastic with its 3D molecular editor. I am hoping to help make it even more awesome this summer too. Hopefully more on that later...

Some other stuff I haven't managed to get working just yet but it is in very heavy development. I only wish I had more time to help out now but finishing my thesis is currently top of my priority list There are new versions of digiKam and K3b in portage that are looking great but personally I can't wait for KDE4!

A week or two ago Stuart (work colleague) and I entered the Dronfield 10K and no Sunday I ran it. For the first 4 km it was going pretty well and I was keeping to a fairly good pace of about 5 minutes to 5.5 minutes a km. Then came a really big hill that took a lot out of me, after that came some gradual hills that seemed to go on forever and by the 5 km mark I was ready to give up and had a massive stitch that I just couldn't shift.

I hadn't seen Stuart since the first kilometre, he was off in front somewhere. I seriously thought about pulling out as I hit 6 km and went past the start line and on to the second lap. Somehow I managed to keep going an convinced myself that I could do it. All the way round I was thinking I really need to train harder and more consistently if I am going to complete the Sheffield Half Marathon this year.

I was pleased I made it round but disappointed in my time which was a little over an hour. Too much time in front of a computer drinking coffee and not enough in the gym or hitting the pavement! I also need to stop letting so much junk food creep back into my diet, which is really easy to do when I am so stressed with completing my thesis...

Anyway I am glad I finished it, but I really want to get leaner and fitter before the half marathon. Stuart got a really good time I think and he was really pleased with himself. My muscles are still aching today but I am sure I will be back out running by Wedesday and am already looking for another race to push me on.

For now it is back to the thesis...

On Saturday Louise and I set off from home at about 6:45 and picked my friend Alex up at just after 7:00. We were headed for the London International Dive Show 2007, Louise and I attended LIDS 2006 last year as well as the last two that are held in Birmingham. The shows are a great chance to see the latest dive gear, meet people from the dive industry and get discounted dive gear.

We were supposed to be meeting Mark down there but he was a little delayed. I think we got there for just after 10:30 and he didn't arrive until gone midday. The show seemed a fair bit smaller this year and I particularly noticed the lack of a Suunto or an Apeks stand. There was still lots to see though and as usual we didn't quite get as much time as we would have liked.

I managed to get another book signed. This was The Art of Diving and Alex Mustard signed it for me. Check out his site, there are some amazing photos on there - the book is filled with beautiful shots. It was nice having a quick chat with him

We also chatted to a very nice lady on the Tony Backhurst stand about liveaboard holidays in the Northern Red Sea. I know I have only just got back from there but I really want to dive the Thistlegorm! They have own liveaboard of the year three times I think. We even saw Tony Backhurst himself but he was busy chatting away to someone. Their boats look great, it was disappointing that the boats doing the Northern Red Sea itineraries do not offer free Nitrox but other than that everything looked great. Hopefully January/February next year we will make it out there.

I got myself some new 12L oxygen clean scuba cylinders and a Fourth Element Thermocline T-shirt to take the edge off that chilly UK diving I also ordered a pocket dive log stamp from Dive Logs. I was trying to control my spending this year so I think I managed to stop myself from buying anything else. We just filled in competition entries and I helped my friends to pick out some masks, snorkels and fins.

We had a really good day and set off back at around 17:30 after discussing the day over Pizza Hut. We were going to get something a little more upmarket but we really didn't know the area and they were the first group of shops we found. Got back after 21:00 very tired but with a good haul of new toys. Lots of brochures to look over too.

I have been so busy recently I missed the introduction of a new ADSL product that connects you at up to 8 Mb/s downstream and up to 448 kb/s upstream depending upon noise levels. Before this I have been on a standard 1 Mb/s connection with a 256 kb/s upstream so it is quite an upgrade.

It is actually a little cheaper too, but this upgrade does come at a price. My transfer used to be unlimited, they had just introduced a cap of 100 GB, and the new service I am on is capped at 20 GB a month... It seems in the last ten months I haven't used more than 11 GB so I should be OK with the new limit.

It does mean I will have to keep an eye on it, especially when using torrents and stuff. It seems that this is the way the UK broadband scene is moving now. I can upgrade to a package with 50 GB of transfer but that is another £10 a month. I still have 1 TB of transfer a month on my server too which I never get anywhere near at present - I will have to start trying harder!

Currently it is synced at 5792 kbps downstream and 448 kbps upstream. The highest sustained rates I have achieved are 248 KB/s downstream and 44 KB/s upstream. This is with Zen Internet who I have been using for over three years now I think on their Zen 8000 Active service. Not bad in my opinion although I would love one of those funky new ADSL2 connections.

I recently purchased a ZyXEL 660HW-T1 wireless ADSL router that came with a free USB wireless adapter too. The router supports ADSL2 but best of all it supports SNMP properly, unlike my old DrayTek Vigor 2600 that they never fixed. That can be my backup router now. With Categories: General | 0 Comments