Today I road my bike down to Brighton from London (*), blissfully unaware of the 27,000 other cyclists riding down on an alternative route with the annual British Heart Foundation cycle ride. It only became apparent that I may be in trouble when I arrived at a seafront full of bikes and the news that no trains were accepting bikes as passengers! Luckily I managed to get on one of the BHF’s buses back to Clapham, they even brought my bike along in a huge lorry too!
I’ve plotted my route on Bikely, it’s a nice ride taking you over Biggin Hill and then on through Ashdown Forest, home of Winnie the Pooh. There’s some really quaint stops along the way, particualy the villages of Westerham and Hartfield.
The profile of the route show’s it’s fairly hilly. I’m not sure how this compares with the usual London to Brighton route the other guys had done but the last 15 miles or so were pretty tough. Next time I think I’ll have to grab a better breakfast before hand!
(*) I know, not strictly a “Programming & Tech” related post, but the GPS tracking helps. All the same, maybe I should find a better name for this blog.
I’ve finally cottoned on to the Growl app on OSX, a nice little notification system that allows applications to ‘unintrusively tell you when things happen’. Looking into it a little I realised I could couple Growl with a few atom feeds and enable myself to be notified to events such as a new email coming into Gmail or our project’s build failing on Hudson. Introducing growl-atom :
Whether this is a good idea or not is questionable. Entourage - which I use at work - fires a little notification with every new email I receive. This can get more than a little annoying when the Friday afternoon ‘name my hamster’ type discussions kick off. Never the less after a few fun hours coding I have a nice little system that will tell me when (hopefully) important stuff happens.
The code is up on Github if anybody wants to install it. It’s a simple Ruby gem (thanks to visionmedia for the ruby-growl gem), combined with a config file and Apple’s answer to the cron job which is something called a LaunchAgent. Check it out!
Visit the growl-atom page on Github
I had a couple of tickets needing doing for the XML Directory Listing project I have on Googlecode. Thanks again to all those that submitted the tickets, the new 0.2 release resolves these I hope:
- Change to in / out file handlers on Ant task, should work more like the native tasks
- Removed DTD from XML output
- Added ability to configure character set on XML declaration, defaulting to UTF-8
- Possible fix to bug in XML output on Ubuntu Hardy
I was wondering recently whether this solution is a little over engineered and how if I had to do it again I’d go for something like a simple ruby script - after all it’s not that common a task. However I’ve used this software again at work recently to generate some documentation from inline comments in XSLT and the Ant integration is really quite useful. Hope others find a use for it too.
Visit the XML Directory Listing application page on Googlecode