ZRMT

andylockran & friends

Clingo Universal Car Phone Holder

September 14th, 2011 by andylockran No comments »

I know I recently blogged about joining Mobile Fun, and of course there are some perks to the job, like being able to get all the latest feedback on the good and bad gadgets out there.

One phone accessory that I’ve been putting off purchasing has been a car holder for my phone. I go through phones like most people go through underwear, and never have I managed to find myself a phone holder that it suited for all the phones I tend to use. Since starting at Mobile Fun 6 weeks ago I’ve already been through three.

So I got pointed towards the Clingo Universal in Car Holder with free Clingo desk stand. It looks interesting to say the least, though I was uncertain just how ‘sticky’ it would be once I’d put it through it’s paces.

The advantage of this set, is that it comes with both the car-arm holder and also the desk stand – which is essentially just a little pocket-mirror sized device with the ‘Clingo’ technology on either pad. The interesting thing about this is that I would be able to use the car arm charger sensitively, whilst putting the desk stand through it’s paces.

Well, be under no illusion – the stickyness does fade. Whilst the car arm was still holding my phone very tightly, the days spent in my lint-filled pockets and on ‘dusty’ desks took its toll on my desk stand; getting into work this morning and the phone just slipped right off.

Unperturbed, I pulled out the instruction manual, to find that in order to ‘restore the clingyness’ of the Clingo, all I had to do was wash it with a little water. I therefore made off to the toilet, and using the handbasin rubbed the Clingo material under a steady stream of water. The water cleaned it up lovely – and whilst still wet, I let it to dry on my desk.

Ten or so minutes later, the water had evaporated, so I ventured to attempt attaching my phone to the device. WOW. It was as good as new, despite having been abused massively by me during the previous week. It’s definitely a company that I would buy from again, with the sole disclaimer that if you’re planning to keep your phone in a silicon cover – this device will not attach to that, but with something like the iPhone 4, with it’s silicone ‘bumper’ – this device is a definite improvement on any third party ‘car holder’ device you may currently be struggling with.

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Posted in ICT

Tags: accessories car cling desk stand hands free Mobile Fun mobile phones

Converting Documents

September 7th, 2011 by andylockran 4 comments »

I recently had the unenviable dilema of being told that my girlfriend had been given a data entry task for her internship. As part of that job, she had to copy/paste data from an OOXML document into a spreadsheet. Having taken a closer look at the XML behind the document, I realised it all followed a fairly straightforward structure:

<hr>
<H2>Date</>
<H2>Title</>
<H2>Type</>
<div>
<p><a>ORIGINAL URL</></>
<p class=person>Speaker/Author</>
<p>Content</>  *this may repeat any number of times
<p><b>Speaker/Author</b>
<p>Content</> *this may repeat any number of times
<p class="column">Reference</> *this may also repeat any number of times
</div>

<hr>

.etc

I had a play with BeautifulSoup, and was able to extract the data for a stanza of this document. The Content does repeat itself and loop through a few times, but I have yet to come up with a solution for iterating through, and defining each section between two ‘hr’ tags as an independent instance.

What I’m trying to do it output each section under the following headings into a spreadsheet:

Date | Title | Speaker | Content

If anyone could give me some guidance on how to do it using BeautifulSoup then it would be much appreciated. The main things I feel I need to understand are:

Identifying and defining ‘sections’ of a document as to iterate over them.
What DataType to use when processing the sections (should they be in a dict, or a list.. .etc)
How to output each line of content to a csv file with the appropriate fields (speaker, topic and date) set on each line of content.
How to handle the unicode strings that BeautifulSoup returns.

If anyone could give me a hand, it would be much appreciated. The task is for a charity, and as you may have guessed by the content, it is to process a report on parliamentary debates. The good news is that the data structure is very similar for the other types of reports that I would like to parse, so once I’ve got this one completed I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to make the minor modifications to get others done.

Thanks in advance! Andy

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Posted in ICT

Tags: beautifulsoup debates hansard ooxml parliament parse python xml

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

September 5th, 2011 by andylockran No comments »

It’s been a while since I last wrote, but alot has changed since I was last here.

I’ve moved from Manchester and relocated back to Birmingham; this was to help out with the Birmingham and Solihull Bees, as well as to give myself a little bit more time at the weekends. Most of last season had been spent travelling up and down the M6 and even the home games were two hours away. We’re two games into the season, and I’ve not managed to make it to a game yet.. that will change on Saturday.

As for my new employment, I’m now working at Mobile Fun and absolutely love it. Mobile Fun specialise in selling Mobile Phone Accessories and are a fast growing company. I was attracted to the position due to the ability to learn not just about the workings of a medium sized enterprise – but to give myself a challenge. I’d had five very happy years at Zednax, but I felt it was time to move on and set myself a new challenge.

As for the site itself – I’m pretty impressed with the development that is done at MF. There’s a great IT team, and my skills at TableFootball are much improved since starting. There’s loads of work to do – it’s an exciting time in a customer-facing business with the challenges of the current economic climate, and there’s so much going on.

I’m enjoying the new challenge, and hopefully I’ll have some more interesting stuff to share over the coming months.

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Posted in ICT

Tags: Mobile Fun Mobile Phone Accessories

Choosing a CMS

June 16th, 2011 by andylockran No comments »

For the last few years everytime I’ve decided to look at implementing a CMS I’ve got stuck. It’s not because there isn’t a good CMS out there – but that I’ve yet to find one that scratches all my itches.

I’m about to setup a new website, which will require multiple end-users to update the site, each with a varying level of experience. Ideally I’d like to pick a ‘popular’ CMS, so that if they get into difficulty there’s probably someone else that has also got into difficulty with the same problem. I’d also like to be able to take advantage of extra content-creating plugins that the end users may find useful.

However, I also want the ability to add a few ‘custom touches’ – such as easy to modify CSS, widget-able features (such as a couple of twitter streams that’ll appear only on certain pages).

I also want to run multiple sites which both share the same theme, and user database – but have different content.

If anyone can make a suggestion as to what I should look into, I’d be more than happy with some feedback.

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Posted in ICT

Network Problem

May 12th, 2011 by andylockran 2 comments »

I’ve been having a really strange networking issue at the office for the past few months. The reason I’m posting here, rather than in IRC or a Forum, is that it’s quite an interesting problem, and I’d quite like to post the solution. I’ve contacted my Internet Provider, and unfortunately they don’t seem to be able to comprehend the problem, let alone work out a way of diagnosing it.

We have 8/9 devices sharing our internet connection in the office, across wireless and wired, which pass through our Debian Router, then through a cable modem to the Internet. In order to make sure the problem was not with the router. The same symptoms occurred with a direct connection to the cable modem.

The issues is as follows:

Our internet connection doesn’t appear to drop. According to our ISP our modem has been connetced fine for the last 15 days, and they ‘can see no problem with our line.’ When downloading a large file (<100MB) or streaming Youtube videos, the connection just stops. The video stops downloading or, in the case of the files, the connection just stops. This is also evident when running large downloads through apt (such as do-release-upgrade) – during the file download sometimes it just stops downloading – yet on a cancel and restart it continues to download just fine.

I’d like to work out how I can get some documentary evidence of this connection hanging – what is the proper technical term for it – and hopefully find a way to reproduce the problem in a consistent manner. I have OSX, Linux, and Windows machines all exhibiting the same behaviour – so I’m pretty sure it’s not a clientside bug.

If you can help me out, please let me know in the comments below.

Cheers! and Thanks in Advance.

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Posted in ICT

Tags: cable modem internet network networking router

FPTP versus AV

March 19th, 2011 by andylockran No comments »

I logged onto facebook earlier and a poll popped up on the right hand side – which sport could you not live without?

Football
Rugby
Cricket

I selected Rugby – and the following were the results:

Football – 73%
Rugby – 18%
Cricket – 9%

Of course, it was limited to the three sports, Rugby includes the League/Union split, and there are probably many other options. I’d hypothesis though, that Cricket is the second favourite sport of Rugby Fans and Football fans. Therefore moving the poll to an AV setup, rather than the FPTP that it is currently – would provide an interesting insight – and probably move cricket above Rugby – but not affect Football?

There’s only one way to find out – and that is to run the poll and get the stats for both answers. I won’t delude myself and pretend I can get enough readers of this blog to vote in order to generate a fair sample – so instead can anyone devise a method of collecting this information that would get us a fair sample?

Andy

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Posted in ICT

Tag Sri Lanka

February 23rd, 2011 by andylockran No comments »

It’s one of those posts that I’ve been hesitant to write for quite some time; mainly due to the fear of not having enough knowledge at the time of writing leading to an inability to do justice to the subject.

One of the guys who keeps my twitter feed turning over is Daren Forsyth (@DarenBBC), who is currently the Marketing and Communications Director for the Organisation Tag International Development(@tagdevelopment). Their aim is to ‘design a better world,’ by using specialist people in specialist areas – by coordinating and funding that work.

Over the last few months, Daren has been tweeting about one such project based in Sri Lanka (@TAGSriLanka). The aim of the project is to get used Android phones into the hands of Sri Lankans. TAG are looking for donations of Android Phones, Solar Chargers, and also monetary donations, in order to develop the cellular network in the region.

Earlier today I can across a post on the TAG ID blog. Read it here. It discussed how through Art Therapy and Religion, communities can be rebuilt following 30 years of Civil War. It should be of no surprise to see what aid givers can learn by giving people to tools to express themselves when there is a language barrier.

It’s interesting that the lack of electricity being a number one threat to the rural community – not because it’s seen as a convenience – but due to it’s role in elephant control. When i visited the small village near Anaikatti in Kerala, they had a problem with elephants trampling houses and destroying crops at night time, and whereas villages down the mountain had electricity to power their electric fence – they didn’t.

TAG Development will no doubt have similar problems to face in Sri Lanka, but the main reason for the post is to advertise their efforts to collect Android Phones in order to get them into the hands of the people of Sri Lanka. As there are also a fair few programmer-types that read this blog, it may also be an idea to discuss possible uses for Android Handsets, and application ideas and development to suit the project. If you have any thoughts, ideas and suggestions, please either comment on the blog below, or find @DarenBBC and @TagSriLanka on Twitter.