midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

Since I work in software development with Python, it seems only natural that my blog software should run on Python. That way, when it breaks, I have half a chance of being able to fix it.

Wordpress, the toolkit for this blog, is a great piece of work, and there’s nothing wrong with it, other than it runs on PHP. I’m trying to rid my server of all PHP apps, so I’m moving my blog over to one run with the Frog toolkit.

All new posts can be found at this location: midtoad.org/blog/, which resolves to http://midtoad.homelinux.org:9080/frog/user/midtoad/

All posts on this old blog will remain here for some time, pending an attempt to extract all the posts from the database and convert them over to the Frog data format.

Here’s some advice I recently wrote for a friend looking for a camera. I’m looking too, since my Canon A70 crapped out again for the third time. Ever wonder why Canon came out with the nearly identical A75 soon after the release of the A70? It’s because the A70 had a defective CCD which they tried to cover up. Anyway, in the hope that these thoughts might be useful for someone else, here they are:
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I found it surprising that a good number of python programmer’s blogs aren’t written using python - isn’t that like GM employees driving Toyota cars?
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Recently, I switched from Linux to Mac OS X with the purchase of a Mac Mini, and I’ve been busy getting some of my favourite Linux apps running on Mac OS X (for those that don’t know, Mac OS X is effectively a pretty face on top of a customized version of Linux; techies please excuse this simplification). One of the apps I wanted to get running is Skencil, a vector-based graphics program that can create and edit .svg images.
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Mt. Seven Ramp
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Last Friday, July 29th, while I was flying my hang glider cross-country along the range south of Golden, BC, another pilot was critically injured and died a couple of days later. His name was Charles Warren, and he was flying a paraglider. I’m sorry to see him go, and though we weren’t close, I’ll miss him. He took over from me as HPAC webmaster, and had made many improvements to the site.
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If you’re reading this, obviously I’m back in business. The server was down for only 4 hours, during which time I did a complete Linux install, copied data files back from backup, re-created all databases, and debugged problems. Sorry for any inconvenience.
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I returned from a business trip to find an unexpected process running on my webserver:
sh -c ./sik 202.71.104.245
What that means is the following: someone found a way through my firewall and onto my webserver, and made a direct connection between my computer and his (most likely it is a young male involved). The next step (which might already have been taken) would be to install (if possible) a root kit.

What is that? A root kit allows the hacker to take over the machine while hiding his tracks so that it becomes difficult to detect his presence. Tools that I would normally use to detect a problem are replaced with compromised versions of same that do not report the nefarious activity. As a result, I might be duped into thinking all is well when it is not.

If my PC has been root-kitted, then nothing may go wrong for some time. Then, when the hacker wants to mount an attack on some large corporation, suddenly my server will be enlisted in the fight, and the first I will know about it is when my internet service provider cancels my account (and possibly commences legal action against me).

One easy way to resolve all of this: simply wipe the hard drive of the server and start again. That’s what I’ll do; so if you read this, don’t be surprised if you can’t get through for the next day or few. When I’m back in business, I’ll have implemented a few extra controls that had slipped my attention previously.

Lesson learned.

Afternoon rays on Port Phillip Bay at Frankston, Victoria, Australia, during a ride around the bay.
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I see that there are several requests for CompeGPS to export its waypoints to a format that other programs can use, but this feature has not been added. As a temporary solution, I’ve written a small utility to convert .WPT files to .gpx files.

I’m unable to determine what all of the fields in the CompeGPS waypoint record are for, but understand enough of them to be able to generate a valid .gpx file. You can then open that file with, for instance, G7ToWin.

To run my utility, grab this zip file containing the utility (CompeGPS2gpx.exe) and a sample .WPT file (CalgaryAreaAirspace.WPT). Unzip the file into a folder, open a command prompt in that folder, and type:

CompeGPS2gpx.exe CalgaryAreaAirspace.WPT

Naturally, replace the name of the sample file with your own waypoints file.

I tested the utility with Windows XP, Python 2.4.1. I was able to read the generated .gpx file with G7ToWin (and even found a bug in it that the author has already fixed in his latest version A.00.199f).

If you need to convert CompeGPS waypoints to some other obscure format, get a copy of GPSBabel, as it understands more than 40 formats, and can convert the generated .gpx file to just about any format you desire.

The utility in written in Python, and the source code is provided. If you make changes or improvements, please let me know, and provide a copy of your work.

On Saturday April 30th, friends and family gathered at the Cochrane Ranche for a celebration of the life of Chris Muller. Over 500 people jammed the hall to hear family and flying friends speak about what Chris meant to them. Several videos were shown, some made by Chris himself. Rob Kells from Wills Wing gave the closing remarks.

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Got a GPS? Want to see your tracklogs on a map? Don’t have money for a dedicated mapping program? You’re in luck - there’s GPS Visualizer. Simply record your trip, upload to your PC using an app like G7ToWin, and then upload to the GPS Visualiser site. Within a minute or so you’ll have a picture of your trip overlaid on a nice map background or on a satellite photo.
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I received a new iPod Mini for a birthday present. Thx bro’! Good little player, except for one thing - half my 100 GB music collection is in .ogg file format, and Apple iTunes doesn’t do .ogg files. But, I found a way around this problem.
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The frustrating thing about running your own home network is that when trouble strikes, there’s no IT guy to call up and fix things for you. (Well, I guess you can always call Nerds on Wheels, but they’re $75 an hour). So you just have to get stubborn and not sit down till you fix what’s wrong. Sometimes, though, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for why things went wrong in the first place, which makes solving the problem all the more challenging.
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PHP is okay for whipping up something quick, but once I start getting into more complicated stuff, I start to feel lost. I’d rather work in Python. So I’ve begun the job of moving my BikeRoots site over to Python. There were a few things involved…
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The Bike Roots database is now in test. It only took the better part of an afternoon to modify the PHP code from the Flight Poetry website so that it could be used with my Bike Roots database. That’s the benefit of having used a MySQL database for both sections. I would have preferred to use Python instead of PHP, but it’s always easier to modify code than to write new code. Once I get up and running, though, I’ll have more time to make the switch at that time.

So far, I am only presenting a collection of routes, with no way (yet) for the user to submit new route information. I’m also not ready to present graphical images of the routes; that should come in the next few days. In the meanwhile you can check out the database here.

Visitors to this site may have noticed a curious phrase in the Quotes section (top-right of the page). The quote is by Nicanor Parra, and it says “Let’s not fool ourselves: the automobile is a wheelchair (No nos echemos tierra a los ojos: El automóvil es una silla de ruedas”.)

Nicanor Parra is one of Chile’s better known poets, in his 90s as of September 5, 2004. He’s survived socialism and military dictatorships, and so is well-equipped to comment on life in that country (or all countries).

The phrase in the quote comes from his book “Obra Gruesa”, released in the 50s. Interestingly, he recycled a number of his better-known phrases in a poem entitled Frases, in 2001. It appears here and is quoted below:

No nos echemos tierra a los ojos
El automóvil es una silla de ruedas
El león está hecho de corderos
Los poetas no tienen biografía
La muerte es un hábito colectivo
Los niños nacen para ser felices
La realidad tiende a desaparecer
Fornicar es un acto diabólico
Dios es un buen amigo de los pobres.

You can find more poems from the Obra Gruesa (and other works) at the Universidad de Chile’s Cultura website.

You might think that Nicanor was speaking strictly about the automobile as wheelchair, and conclude that he is dead right in his opinion. Millions and millions of able-bodied individuals are converted by the automobile from being active citizens to being slothful, overweight invalids who are apparently incapable of walking, running or cycling even a couple of blocks.

But it appears that Parra may have had a wider purpose in mind, with the automobile being only one symbol of a world of consumerism that turns us all into slavish addicts of the latest and greatest, thus crippling our ability to think for ourselves and determine what things are really necessary in life. More power to him!

First time I’ve written a post that has four categories!

I ran across a cool software project called Leonardoserver , hosted on Sourceforge. It’s a project licensed under the GPL that allows paragliding federations to easily offer on-line contests. You can find one example of such a contest at paraglidingforum.com.
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I’m in the process of kicking off a project called Calgary BikeRoots. It’s a website for and by Calgary-area cyclists and other non-motorised commuters such as walkers, runners and skaters.
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Surely no one can claim that getting mail working on a Linux box is easy. I’ve spent a number of very late nights on it - and finally got it working tonight thanks to some information on the Mandrake site.
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My apologies - too many late nights working on a new server set-up have addled my brain. I went to work today and didn’t notice that my server was off-line until someone asked me about later. Back up now, though (obviously), 12 hours later.

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If you haven’t heard of del.icio.us yet, take a look!

Del.icio.us has an interesting concept, one that I didn’t understand at first even though I was using its service. Each day I open up a browser and point it at del.icio.us/tag/python. I get a page with what looks like an RSS news feed: a listing of a number of links about the Python programming language, some of them with descriptions, but others not. I didn’t understand where these links were coming from, or who can post, and how, on the service. Then I read a post on woyp, and decided to take a closer look.
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This morning I couldn’t get any response from any external website using my browser from any of my home network PCs - except from Gmail through a wireless connection on my PDA. Very strange.

Then I tried to renew the IP address on my DMZ’ed webserver, and it failed. Soon after, my WinXP box complained that it had an IP conflict with another machine on the network. Clearly, something was amiss with my router, since it serves up IP addresses. I decided to re-boot it. Moments later, I was back in business!

In all the years running SMEserver, I never had this issue. Now I’ve had it in less than a week with the Linksys router. Not a good start!

… 12 hours later … I discovered that my webserver had shut itself off sometime this morning, so my website was off-line all day. Since my webserver is connected to an industrial-strength UPS, I’m at a loss to explain how this could have happened. Hmm, unless somehow someone got into my system, got a console up, and typed “shutdown fhn now” !

It took several hours to get my WordPress blog running on my new webserver, but only a couple of minutes to get the Flight Poetry site back in action. That’s because both of those sections make use of a mySQL database. Solving the problems of setting up one of them gave me the keys to quickly setting up the second.

Enjoy the website!

If you can read this, that’s good, because it means I finally have my new webserver set-up and running.

Yesterday I began the process of replacing my SMEserver Linux distribution with Mandrake 10.1. I’ve moved to this distro to enjoy consistency with my desktop PCs, and to have more flexibility on software installations on my webserver itself.

First step was to back everything up to another PC. I had a bit of a scare when I couldn’t find the datafiles for this blog, but eventually I located them in another spot. Then came a litany of small problems, each of which I had to solve: I couldn’t get the webserver to be seen from inside the home network. I couldn’t get the webserver to understand any URLs, only IP addresses. I couldn’t get the webserver to read my USB flash key, or my external IDE drive. I couldn’t get root privileges straightened out on the webserver. I couldn’t get mySQL running; I couldn’t get a user account for this blog database created.

Now that I’m able to post, it’s time to go to bed. The rest of the set-up will have to wait until tomorrow.

I’m making some changes to the topology of my home network. It all resulted from try to test out a new Python app. I ran into some hurdles because of my SME Server’s linux distro, which doesn’t including support for the Tkinter GUI, yet doesn’t allow me to build and compile a new version of Python. I’m getting frustrated with the template system that prevents me from using normal .rpm files from other distros. I began to wonder if I could do better.

I’ve rescusitated an older Linksys wired router with built-in firewall. After a few false starts, I managed to get one computer on my network talking to the internet through the firewall. Good! Then I reconfigured my SME Server so that it was no longer providing gateway functionality for my network, but was functioning only as a server. From the firewall’s perspective, it’s in a DMZ, separate from the rest of the network. Proof that it all works is me typing up this note!

Now to test out a version of Mandrake Linux 10.2 for possible replacement of SME Server. Since I’m already familiar with it on my desktop, I have a better chance of being able to manage it on my server.

I’ve updated my page on the OLC, the On Line Contest for hang glider and paraglider pilots. You can find useful information there, a PDF version of a PowerPoint presentation that walks you through the entire process of submitting a flight to OLC, and the latest copy of the MaxPunkte software.

This year, as of May 1st, you’ll be able to use your OLC entries as verification for your CIVL badge requirements, so it’s useful to get acquainted with the submitting process.

From a recent study on Application Platform Strategies by the Burton Group :

The P-Languages: PHP, Perl, and Python for Enterprise Scripting:

“PHP, Perl, and Python (the P-Languages) are scripting languages suitable for web development, system administration, and integration. In the proper context, they can be five times more productive than general-purpose languages such as C++, Java, and C#. In this Application Platform Strategies overview, Burton Group Analyst Richard Monson-Haefel discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the P-Languages in enterprise application development.”

Did you know that the Google search engine is available in many different languages? Over 100 were available, at last count. Google has a sense of humour, too. Some of the languages available include the following:

• Bork, bork, bork!
• Elmer Fudd
• Hacker
• Klingon
• Pig Latin

Take a look on their language page.

Two good articles on coding practices that should be good reading for anyone working as a developer:

• How to write maintainable code, by Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent)
• The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric S. Raymond

here’s a proposal for a template for coding practices. The two attached modules (written in Python, but applicable to other languages as well) demonstrate the following principles:
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Recently when I started up my PC, fsck checked my /home folder and found a number of errors, including bad blocks. When it was done, I had over 2000 files in my /home/lost+found folder. How to tell if any of them are worth keeping, or are merely duplicates of something else? Can I safely delete them?

Rather than go through all 2000 by hand, I wrote a little script in python to examine the first line of each file, then tell me what it had found. Naturally, as I went along, I made improvements to the file. In the end it was able to check whether any of the files were mail files, html, png, xml, c++ or other files. The ones that I could identify were moved into another folder for safe-keeping.

Here’s the script (.py file saved as .txt) that I used:
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The image below summarizes the new CIVL badge levels, which will become effective as of May 1st, 2005. Any questions?
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In parts 1-3 of this series, I described the overhaul of the CIVL Badge system. The definitive text and full details of the system are of course contained in the Sporting Code, Section 7D, which will become effective May 1st of this year. In this article, I want to describe some of the other changes that you will see in the new release of S7D. The full text will be available shortly on the CIVL website, after review by John Aldridge.

The badges and records subcommittee, under the leadership of CIVL V-P Scott Torkelsen from Denmark, undertook the review of the badge system, but also reviewed all of S7D itself, with a view to streamlining and simplifying GPS usage. In this task, a number of people were involved: Oyvind Ellefsen from Norway, �gúst Guðmundsson from Iceland, Martin Henry from Canada, and myself. (Hmm, all Nordic countries, what a coincidence!). Martin was awarded two FAI world records late last year in the rigid wing category, and as a result of his records chase he has gained intimate knowledge of some of the contradictions and confusions still remaining in S7D, as regards GPS usage. Here are the major changes developed by this subcommittee, and approved by the Plenary.

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In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we looked at the problems with the current badge levels, and what pilots around the world are telling us (through their flying) would make a fairer set of levels for these badges.

Thanks to OLC, we now have a much better undertanding of how far pilots fly day-to-day. How should we relate that to badge requirements? Well, we start with the principle that the badges should rise in difficulty from easy to moderate to challenging to difficult. That’s not what we have today, at least for hang gliders (easy - moderate - ridiculous - damn near impossible). The idea is, if we can agree in a general way on how hard the badges should be, and how accessible they should be, it will be easier to agree on specific values for the distances and other requirements.

The badge and records committee put forward to the CIVL Bureau, and then to the Plenary, the following set of principles to guide the development of the new badge levels:

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In part one of this series, we looked at how the existing CIVL badge system is broken. In this article, we look at what pilots say about fair badge levels. We do that by studying how far pilots actually fly, not how far some wishful thinkers would like them to fly. And for this information, we turn to the OLC (On Line Contest).

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At the CIVL meeting at Panajachel, Guatemala, delegates voted to revise the CIVL Badge system effective May 1st of this year. Why did they do this?

We’re been flying hang gliders for over 30 years, and paragliders for 20 (in round numbers). We have had a badge system in place for many years. There are (some estimates say) about 300,000 hang glider and paraglider pilots in the world today.

And the number of FAI gold badges issued?
Rigid wings: 0
Flex wings: 4
Paragliders: 24
Sailplanes: 6500 (including 3 diamonds on top of the gold badge).

Clearly, there’s something wrong with our program.

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Here’s the view the CIVL delegates got as they left Panajachel on Sunday afternoon: