moorepants

moorepants

a websitee

Notebook Entry

Today's task list:

  • [x] Install Zotero
  • [x] Archive Simon Grant's thesis
  • [x] Discuss copyright issues with BMD and blog about it
  • [x] Setup our webserver on AWS
  • [x] Figure out the bug I'm getting at the end of page 153 on the plone book
  • [x] Work on parsing the walking data
  • [] Install our production Plone site on the new AWS server
  • [] Work on the website theme
  • [] Figure out what to do about the incorrect budget category for the computers
  • [] Review the TODO items on the Yeadon paper
  • [] Do D-Flow/Cortex tutorial (Due August 12)

Simon Grant's Manual Control Thesis

This pop science article appeared yesterday:

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/mysteries-bicycle

It is nothing new, but it had lots of comments, most all of which were the continual misunderstanding of bicycle dynamics and stability, but one comment was interesting:

I did a fair amount of related research during my PhD around 1988, and would be happy to give anyone a good idea of how humans control bicycles, if you're really interested... -- Simon Grant

I Google his name and found this:

http://www.simongrant.org/pubs/thesis/index.html

in which he has work on manual control tasks, including his SUV...Simple Unstable Vehicle (i.e. a bicycle). There is some experimental work that may be interesting. I'll have to read more when I get time.

To archive his web version I used:

wget -H -r --level=5 --no-parent -k -p http://www.simongrant.org/pubs/thesis/

Zotero

I reinstalled Zotero. My database was lost in my computer wipe though. It didn't have much in it anyways, so that isn't too big a deal. But luckily I lost my Mendely database too!! I was dreading having to write some scripts to extract all my data from Mendely for a Zotero import, so this data loos solved that problem. Bye-bye Mendeley (and Elsevier)!

Install instructions for the latest Zotero on Ubuntu 13.04:

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ wget http://download.zotero.org/standalone/4.0.9/Zotero-4.0.9_linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
$ tar -jxvf Zotero-4.0.9_linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
$ sudo cp -r Zotero_linux-x86_64/ /opt/zotero
$ vim ~/.local/share/applications/zotero.desktop

Paste this in:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Zotero
GenericName=Reference Manager
Comment=Open-source reference manager (standalone version)
Exec=/opt/zotero/zotero
Icon=/opt/zotero/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Office

And add an alias in my .bashrc:

alias zotero=/opt/zotero/zotero

I then installed the Firefox extension and it asks if I want to link to the standalone Zotero, which I said yes too.

BMD Coyright

See bmd-copyright.html.

AWS Webserver

I have a live Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64 bit server running on a micro instance. Time to install Plone so we can start adding some content to the web site.

Walking System ID

Worked out the maths for the linear least squares. Will post tomorrow.