Scattered

I am doing a bunch of things today, all fairly small. I think it's because I finished working on the time series framework yesterday, so I'm kind of at loose ends.

New programming project

One thing that I would like to do is to take all the messages that I sent with my SPOT device while hiking and make a small animation of them on Google Maps. This would be another use of Clojurescript. My previous project – a Clojurescript program for computing the Voronoi Diagram of a set of points input by a user – is a bit stalled at the moment, so it's good to have something else to work on. Also, I feel like adding points to a Google Map is something that Clojurescript is better suited to, rather than the fiddly numeric stuff that I was trying to make it do. I will come back to the Voronoi Diagram at some point (hopefully fairly soon), but I am putting it on the back burner for the moment.

So far, I see two major tasks:

Getting the coordinates and times of the SPOT messages

Every SPOT message is an email that contains the coordinates of where and when the message was sent. Parsing the email can be done offline, so I will probably just use Clojure for that.

Putting them on the Google Map

The API for using Google Maps appears to be easy to use and well-thought-out. There's even a way to drop the markers at different intervals – just what I want to do.

Notmuch

I am also playing with the notmuch email client. So far I quite like it. It's a heck of a lot faster than my previous mail client, mainly because it doesn't do as much. Like gmail, it is optimized towards two operations: searching and tagging. I never really used tags in gmail, because doing so involves clicking around, but it's much faster in notmuch. So far, this seems like the big advantage for notmuch.

Git annex

In an effort to use all the software written by Joey Hess (not really, but it seems like it), I am also trying out git annex.

So far, I have come up with one really compelling use case -- syncing podcasts to my mp3 player. My mp3 player has the problem that it will delete all the files on it at random times. Thus, I need to keep a backup of all the files on it on my computer. However, when I am done listening to a podcast, I like to remove the file. Hopefully, I will be able to sync the files that I remove myself (that is, remove them from the laptop), but not the files that get removed by the stupid thing crashing.

Another thing that I would like to do is put my music and video collections in git annex. I'm not sure that anything special would come from doing that, but it seems nice to have these things in version control.

blog comments powered by Disqus