++ ukchill.com ++ http://ukchill.com technology, music and opinion Tue, 08 May 2012 22:21:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Cookie Law Article http://ukchill.com/news/cookie-law-article/ http://ukchill.com/news/cookie-law-article/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 22:21:23 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=364 I’ve had an article I wrote for work picked up by a few blogs recently – the UK is gradually waking up to the fact that endemic use of cookies (and similar technologies such as flash cookies) may not be such a cool idea and that the widespread use of this stuff is not great [...]]]> I’ve had an article I wrote for work picked up by a few blogs recently – the UK is gradually waking up to the fact that endemic use of cookies (and similar technologies such as flash cookies) may not be such a cool idea and that the widespread use of this stuff is not great for personal privacy.

That is, unless you are an Internet Marketeer…

Impending ‘Cookie law’ could mean £500k fine for businesses

 

]]> http://ukchill.com/news/cookie-law-article/feed/ 0 Project Management Rap http://ukchill.com/video/project-management-rap/ http://ukchill.com/video/project-management-rap/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 22:12:56 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=360 Straight from the school of ridiculousness that is my mate Chris (ace Sax dude and management trainer) comes this bizarro cheese-fest of a music video extolling the virtues of the GANTT chart… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r22Ty_wZAuw Be warned – kittens may suffer as a result of watching this video!    ]]> Straight from the school of ridiculousness that is my mate Chris (ace Sax dude and management trainer) comes this bizarro cheese-fest of a music video extolling the virtues of the GANTT chart…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r22Ty_wZAuw

Be warned – kittens may suffer as a result of watching this video!

 

 

]]> http://ukchill.com/video/project-management-rap/feed/ 0 Accurate Postcode data for the UK and Northern Ireland http://ukchill.com/technology/accurate-postcode-data-for-the-uk-and-northern-ireland/ http://ukchill.com/technology/accurate-postcode-data-for-the-uk-and-northern-ireland/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:57:05 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=342 Getting accurate postcode data for use in my programs has proved to be an interesting technical challenge, despite the availability of free services such as those from Google. I needed a UK postcode to Latitude/Longitude conversion tool that would work offline, which made the Google API’s completely useless. A freely available dataset was made available [...]]]>
Getting accurate postcode data for use in my programs has proved to be an interesting technical challenge, despite the availability of free services such as those from Google.

I needed a UK postcode to Latitude/Longitude conversion tool that would work offline, which made the Google API’s completely useless.

A freely available dataset was made available from the Ordnance Survey under the moniker of “Code-point open”, however this is missing some data (notably Northern Ireland) so can’t really be called complete, and additionally it does not provide locations in Latitude/Longitude, but instead it uses Ordnance Survey Grid references.

If you need to do this, then hopefully the tools here will be of some help.

First we need to grab the Ordnance Survey Code-point open dataset. They don’t provide a straight link, so you will need to register to actually get access to the data. Once downloaded and extracted you will have a folder full of CSV files.

Secondly we need to convert the grid references to more useable LatLong values. Chris Veness has written some Javascript to do just that – as well as writing some incredibly informative articles about how this stuff actually works (there’s some horrible maths involved!). I spent a couple of evenings converting his scripts to Python and wrote a little data extract utility which put all the data into a SQLite3 database.

Another couple of hours to write a set of wrapper functions around the database and include the validation rules from the UK government data schema and hey presto! We have a usable postcode_utils module.

This just leaves Northern Ireland…

It turns out that the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) have some GIS data available in ESRI ShapeFile format. There is a useful Python library to work with ESRI Shapefiles and it took a matter of minutes to extract the coordinates from the NISRA data, that provides postcodes in… bah! another Grid System, but this time it’s the Irish Grid!

Some more hunting online to get the right values for the grid transformations and the Geoid dimensions used for each grid system and a bit of tinkering with Chris Veness’ code and we are done! Here is a Sqlite3 database containing all the postcodes in Great Britain and Northern Ireland with accurate Latitude and Longitudes (more accurate than some Web Services I could mention) and some Python to use with it. Also, this information is all freely available and free for use commercially and non-commercial use (provided you give attribution as mentioned on the various sites linked to above).

If you find this useful, please let me know by using the comments feature. Also, if anybody has a source of data for the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man I would be very please to find them!

]]> http://ukchill.com/technology/accurate-postcode-data-for-the-uk-and-northern-ireland/feed/ 3 Generating HTML5 using XSLT http://ukchill.com/technology/generating-html5-using-xslt/ http://ukchill.com/technology/generating-html5-using-xslt/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:01:33 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=333 HTML5 LogoRecently, I have been updating some of my HTML generation tools to output valid HTML5, rather than the XHTML 1.0 standard I have been using for the last few years. The main advantage from my perspective is the ability to use the more semantic block elements, such as the nav, section and article elements. In [...]]]> HTML5 Logo

Recently, I have been updating some of my HTML generation tools to output valid HTML5, rather than the XHTML 1.0 standard I have been using for the last few years. The main advantage from my perspective is the ability to use the more semantic block elements, such as the nav, section and article elements.

In general this is a fairly straightforward task, as I am generating clean XHTML using XSLT and my template library works pretty well, but I ran into some problems whilst validating the output using the W3C Validator.

The first issue is to sort the DOCTYPE out. The XHTML doctype looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html
    PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

This is easy to generate in XSLT using the following output element.

<xsl:output encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" method="xml"
    omit-xml-declaration="yes"
    doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" />

This unfortunately forces the document to validate against the XHTML 1.0 specification which does not include all the lovely new semantic elements – which means that my new documents are suddenly invalid!

We need to generate:

<!DOCTYPE html>

which is really hard to do using XSLT. I have read a number of articles that suggest you output the element as text, however this is extremely ugly and as it turns out, incorrect.

The correct XSLT incantation is:

<xsl:output
     method="xml"
     doctype-system="about:legacy-compat"
     encoding="UTF-8"
     indent="yes" />

This forces use of a dummy DTD (about:legacy-compat), which is the W3C recommended way of not using a standard DTD URI.

Now the W3C validator will happily validate against the HTML5 specification rather than the XHTML 1.0 specification.

]]> http://ukchill.com/technology/generating-html5-using-xslt/feed/ 11 The Strange (Knighton Heath Demo) – giveaway http://ukchill.com/music/the-strange-knighton-heath-demo-giveaway/ http://ukchill.com/music/the-strange-knighton-heath-demo-giveaway/#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2011 21:32:51 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=318 White StratAlthough I don’t seem to have any early recordings of The Strange, I managed to locate these which were made by the last incarnation of the original line-up (Dave, Richard and myself with Graham White on drums) some time in the late 90′s. The demo was made at Knighton Heath Music Centre in Poole and [...]]]> White Strat

Although I don’t seem to have any early recordings of The Strange, I managed to locate these which were made by the last incarnation of the original line-up (Dave, Richard and myself with Graham White on drums) some time in the late 90′s. The demo was made at Knighton Heath Music Centre in Poole and was engineered by Dave Thomas (of Manitou fame).

This era was probably the last time that The Strange was a going concern as a live band – once Graham quit (for personal reasons unrelated to the band) we migrated to my flat, and although did lots more interesting experimentation, the music would have been harder to perform live relying as it did on drum loops, samples and sequencing as much as on drums, guitar, synth and bass.

Anyway, enough rambling, here are the tracks.

These Wings

Monkey

Small World Big Sky

]]> http://ukchill.com/music/the-strange-knighton-heath-demo-giveaway/feed/ 1 ASCII me! http://ukchill.com/news/ascii-me/ http://ukchill.com/news/ascii-me/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 23:21:57 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=297 ...................................................................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................................................................... ............................................................................................................................,,........................ ...................................................................................................................................................... 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Studio 2010 to allow debugging using both IIS7 and the development Web server http://ukchill.com/technology/setting-up-a-web-project-environment-in-visual-studio-2010-to-allow-debugging-using-both-iis7-and-the-development-web-server/ http://ukchill.com/technology/setting-up-a-web-project-environment-in-visual-studio-2010-to-allow-debugging-using-both-iis7-and-the-development-web-server/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:39:13 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=262 Create the site in IIS ManagerWe have run into an issue recently when importing a number of our legacy web projects into Visual Studio 2010. It seems that some projects don’t provide the options to allow us to run and debug them on the local version of IIS. For some reason, when a project is initially configured in VS2010 it [...]]]> We have run into an issue recently when importing a number of our legacy web projects into Visual Studio 2010. It seems that some projects don’t provide the options to allow us to run and debug them on the local version of IIS. For some reason, when a project is initially configured in VS2010 it sets a flag that determines whether the project properties page is shown inside the project window (where it will contain the necessary configuration options) or the project properties page is shown as a pop-up dialog window (where it doesn’t contain the options to allow debugging on a local IIS).

Here are the notes you will need when setting up a new project to guarantee that you have access to the required configuration page.

IIS 7 Configuration

The first step is entirely optional, as it is perfectly reasonable to run multiple Web Applications within a singe Web Site, however I prefer having separate Web Sites for different projects (or clients) as this allows me to control individual settings for each of them (for example host and port bindings) without me worrying about breaking a different project.

If you will use “localhost” to access the server, then you will only be able to have one Web Site instance running at a time, but this is rarely an issue, and you can easily run more than one site at a time by using a unique hostname or port for each.

Create the site in IIS Manager:

Create the site in IIS Manager

Where you create the Web Site mostly doesn’t matter, Visual Studio will add your project to the site as a virtual directory and the physical files can exist anywhere on your filesystem.

Add web site settings

Manage Web Site

Once the site has been created, stop any other site that is using port 80, and start the Web site from the actions panel at the right of the window.

Because you want Visual Studio to modify the IIS configuration, you will need to run Visual Studio as Administrator.

Create an empty Web Application

Create a new project in Visual Studio (File > New > Project…).

Create an empty Web Application

Select: Visual C# > Web > ASP.NET Empty Web Application.

If you leave the “Create directory for solution” checkbox selected, then all your project files will end up one directory below the solution file. Personally I don’t mind having the .sln file in the same folder as my project files so I uncheck it.

New Web Project Settings

If you click OK to create the various project files, then immediately compile and run the application you will see that by default Visual Studio has configured the development web server.

Cassini - empty web application

Reconfigure the project to use IIS

Web project properties

Now whilst this is useful for small standalone projects, we would ideally like to be able to switch development to the full version of IIS7, and to do this, we need to perform another couple of steps.

Back in Visual Studio, stop the project and in the Solution Explorer, right-click on the project and select “Properties”.

In the window that appears, select the Web option and scroll down until you can see the Servers section. Change the selection from “Use Visual Studio Development Server” to “Use Local IIS Web server”.

VS2010 - Web Server settings

Click the “Create Virtual Directory” button to complete the IIS configuration. If you see the dialog below then everything has gone as expected and you can now run (and debug) your web application in IIS. You can switch between IIS and Cassini (the development web server) simply by changing the radio button back.

Dialog - Virtual directory successfully created.

Using the same web.config for both IIS and Cassini

Because IIS7 uses a new integrated pipeline, and Cassini uses the classic pipeline, some of the settings in the web.config are not compatible. Whilst it is possible to use two web.config files (and move them in and out of the application directory when you switch webservers), it is much more convenient to use a single web.config with both webservers.

.NET will complain about the legacy settings if you are using the integrated pipeline (which we normally will want to do) unless you have the following included in the system.webServer section in the web.config:

<validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />

This line instructs the .NET not to validate any settings it finds in the web.config for the integrated pipeline – this allows you to have settings that only work in classic mode (such as httpHandlers and httpModules co-existing with the handlers and modules sections that are required by IIS7.

]]> http://ukchill.com/technology/setting-up-a-web-project-environment-in-visual-studio-2010-to-allow-debugging-using-both-iis7-and-the-development-web-server/feed/ 2 Climate Control – giveaway http://ukchill.com/music/climate-control-giveaway/ http://ukchill.com/music/climate-control-giveaway/#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:57:16 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=224 Not so many tracks today – in fact I can only find two from this era! This particular phase coincided with me getting a regular DJ set doing chillout. I had the slightly naive opinion that I could mix live performance with DJ’ing (armed with a couple of synths and samplers as well as a [...]]]> Not so many tracks today – in fact I can only find two from this era!

This particular phase coincided with me getting a regular DJ set doing chillout. I had the slightly naive opinion that I could mix live performance with DJ’ing (armed with a couple of synths and samplers as well as a laptop full of MP3s) mixing with an early version of Tracktor DJ.

In practice, the gigs were a complete nightmare – manually tempo syncing hundreds of tracks (this was before Ableton Live made it a non-issue) and matching keys to be able to swap pieces in and out of the flow meant I spend all week preparing for the set.

The fact is, the average punter couldn’t tell the difference between something played live and some crap played straight off a “Best of Chill Out” CD. The last gig I just put Wish You Were Here on and sat drinking at the bar, still got paid though because the barman was a huge Pink Floyd fan.

The Climate Bass

Troubadours and Fairytales

]]> http://ukchill.com/music/climate-control-giveaway/feed/ 1 Embrionic music – giveaway http://ukchill.com/music/embrionic-music-giveaway/ http://ukchill.com/music/embrionic-music-giveaway/#comments Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:18:42 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=209 Embryo - (c) 2007 lunar causticWhen I finally moved out of bedsitter-land and stopped sleeping on other peoples couches, I got a small flat in Poole where I began to rebuild my life after so nearly destroying myself. Following the example of a number of people I had met in my wilderness years, my flat became a kind of open-house [...]]]> Embryo - (c) 2007 lunar caustic

Embryo - (c) 2007 lunar caustic

When I finally moved out of bedsitter-land and stopped sleeping on other peoples couches, I got a small flat in Poole where I began to rebuild my life after so nearly destroying myself.

Following the example of a number of people I had met in my wilderness years, my flat became a kind of open-house and a great community of friends used to call by at all hours of the day and night. We would smoke, drink, make tea and jam for hours with whatever instruments were at hand.

It was about this time that I started building my own recording set-up and just experimenting. Dave, Vlad and Jez were regular visitors – these tracks are about all I have left of that time.

I should probably point out that most of these tracks were originally untitled as they were just jams we did. The titles were just provided so that I didn’t have to work out what “untitled 087.wav” was…


Chemical

The Psychic

The Plan

Embryo

Tobacco but no skins

Vlad’s Piece

Jez’s Piece

8k

]]> http://ukchill.com/music/embrionic-music-giveaway/feed/ 0 HTML5 Audio and pre-loading http://ukchill.com/news/html5-audio-and-pre-loading/ http://ukchill.com/news/html5-audio-and-pre-loading/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 13:00:34 +0000 Mike http://ukchill.com/?p=253 I’ve had to remove the in-page audio player temporarily, as it seems that some browsers don’t respect the autobuffer=”false” attribute on the HTML5 audio element. What this means is that everyone who visits my site has been downloading ALL the music I have been giving away, simultaneously, whether they listen to it or not – [...]]]> I’ve had to remove the in-page audio player temporarily, as it seems that some browsers don’t respect the autobuffer=”false” attribute on the HTML5 audio element.

What this means is that everyone who visits my site has been downloading ALL the music I have been giving away, simultaneously, whether they listen to it or not – consequently, my little blog is being hammered and it is getting ridiculously slow.

Until I can spend some time working up a usable HTML5 player that supports many instances on a single page, I have disabled all the audio players – the files are still available using traditional links though.

]]> http://ukchill.com/news/html5-audio-and-pre-loading/feed/ 0