Chris Curtis Web Site

If you look near the bottom of the panel on the right, you will see “Wholewheat Radio” and a description of what is currently playing on the station. This is produced by a nice little script that reads the basic data from a shoutcast server and parses it.

At the moment, I have this hard-coded into the site, but I will turn it into a wordpress plug-in when I have time.

Wholewheat Radio is “home-grown” music, stories and chat from a small town in Alaska – great, eclectic mix of stuff from a range of people – very much like “Chris in the morning” from “Northern Exposure” (that dates me!).

It does not seem too difficult for many people to create the mp3 file which contains the thoughts, music and sound experiments they want to send out to the world as a podcast, but looking around, creating the RSS feed and pointing people to it seems a stumbling block, even for people who can edit web pages.

Ryan King has created a php script called “dircaster” which you put in a directory on a web server with the mp3 file or files you want to podcast and point people to “dircaster.php” as the feed. The script creates the RSS feed instantly by reading the tags in the mp3.

This script works really well, but is almost too simple. I have packaged dircaster with an index page. As well as creating a nice link to dircaster which people can put into their podcasting software, it lists the mp3 files in the directory so people who want to download or listen to them can do so without having a podcast client. To use the package, you unzip it into a directory on a web server which runs php4 (most of them). You put some mp3s in the same directory and you point a browser at it. You will almost certainly want to edit dircaster.php and index.php to have sensible values for your site, and to add a bit of interest and personality to the index page.

I have spotted that dircaster.php can have a problem or two obtaining the correct url for itself and for files on some servers. I have not quite pinned down the issue yet, so watch the discussion at Ryan King’s site.

I have built a new php script that displays links to and information about all the media files (of almost any kind) in a single directory. It is based on “getid3” but I have written the framework to use the library the way I want.

You can see the script in action here.

After a year of discomfort and occasional severe pain, and a great deal of treatment, all efforts to save the tooth have failed and “lower left 6″ has gone – I had it extracted today.

I am fairly comfortable now, 9 hours later, though the procedure itself was fairly brutal. The tooth had split in half a few weeks ago, and was brittle, so it kept breaking as it was removed. No sport for a week or two while it all settles, then the removal of the constant, low-level infection should mean I bounce back twice as strong!

Today’s orienteering was in the estate and park surrounding what was obviously a stately home and is now a hotel.

This course had lots of interest. Even to get to the start you had to clamber over fallen walls and drop down the other side. Within ten metres of the start there was the challenge of squirming through a hole in an iron fence, then across two rivers and a slog across open ground to a small stringy copse. The open ground was wonderful from an ecological viewpoint, but ghastly to run on. It was covered in ant hills, each about 40cm across and 15cm high, with deer paths weaving between all of them. The hills were scattered at random, but sometimes there were four or five to the square metre. Add into the mix some very tussocky grass and swathes of dead bracken and what was shown orange on the map was actually pretty hard work. By the time I had reached the first control my ankles were sore from several misplacements of both feet. I ended up adapting by running while looking down intently, just glancing up to check where I was headed – at one point I collided with a small bush!

Things went better when I got across the huge and newly mended deer fence and into the woods. There was a lot of very sticky mud, but some great route choices to make and some interesting, technical controls. Controls 3 – 5 were good, looking simple, but with a choice between an easy to follow rough open under some power lines (which were not shown on the map) or a path and some green with a fence as a handrail, then a straight run through open woodland looking for a thicket next to a pond and a need to read the control description carefully.

I also quite enjoyed the bridge between 6 and 7. It looked like a tree-trunk sawn in half lengthways, with the flat surface upwards and covered with chicken wire to help stop slipping. Of course, by the time I got there it was covered in mud, so pretty slippery anyway – nothing to do but hold your arms out for balance and walk briskly across.

Somewhere near 7 I planted my foot very awkwardly and my left ankle was sore – I was also feeling extremely out of condition – even worse than usual! I stopped pushing and decided simply to aim to complete. I ended up 38th, with a similar mins/km as recent events, though given the open terrain it should have been much faster. This evening the ankle is protesting mildly. I do not think I have done any serious damage, but it is not enjoyable to walk on at the moment. I was fairly good with navigation today. I made a bit of a mess of control 6, which was invisible until you were right on it, tucked in a slight depression in dead bracken and I took my time finding which of about three possible thickets was the “northernmost” for control 9, otherwise I felt very confident and knowing where I was. Controls appeared where I expected them to.

I will have to have a couple of weeks out due to some serious dentistry next week, which means I am not allowed vigorous exercise. A chance for a rest and a new beginning. I aim to be back for the last SOG in this series on 28 Jan.

As it was clear tonight and I knew that the comet was near the Pleiades, I thought I should try to see it. Using very small binoculars (10 x 25) it was very easy to see as a green-grey fuzzy blob near the blueish Pleiades. I could see no sign of a tail. Once I knew where it was, I could just glimpse it with the naked eye.

A good thing to see, but not worth a lengthy view for a rather non-descript object. The awe is in what you know about comets, not what this one looks like.