Making Aptana work on Debian

Debian lets you "aptitude install rails" very nicely, without faffing with all that gems confusion. The Aptana IDE installs quite happily in /usr/local or ~/bin using their installer - but the rails skeleton it generates whinges about gems not being installed.

To make it go, these links need to be put in the generated ./vendor directory of your project:

actionmailer -> /usr/share/rails/actionmailer
actionpack -> /usr/share/rails/actionpack
actionwebservice -> /usr/share/rails/actionwebservice
activerecord -> /usr/share/rails/activerecord
activesupport -> /usr/share/rails/activesupport
rails -> /usr/share/rails
railties -> /usr/share/rails/railties

Amusing to me

Messy progress

At the cost of various scratches to both myself and the fabric of my room, the destruction of a small number of tools, and the liberal coating and removal of my epidermis with pungent machine oils, I feel able to say tada;
The handlebars creak alarmingly when propelled uphill, the rear wheel is a shade too large and has a terrifying tendency to intersect the brake calipers, the front wheel has a bearing which barely bears, and one of the chainrings is ever-so-slightly non planar but, all in all, it goes. Which for £58 isn't bad.

I shall, perchance, invest in new wheel at the cost of some £30 and it shall go like the clappers.

Inchorent efficiency

After scouring Bristol, nowhere seems to sell second hand road bikes or, rather, this is precisely the wrong time of year to go looking for them.

I have dabbled with the idea of buying new, but it seems a bit unnecessary. Thusly, I was delighted to obtain, for £25, about 1/3 of a bicycle;


Woo. Now all I need to do is ungum the headset, replace the bottom bracket, straighten the chain rings, replace the axle on my wheel so it fits, fit a load of miscellaneous parts, and hope it works.

At that point I will establish it is too small for me, sell it for £50, and give in and go for the newshinyness.

Ho ho ho.
This is important.
I think.
Possibly.

Tea?

Easily the best thing I have ever seen on the internet: ISO 3103. Very rarely have I had to restrain the urge to telephone friends and relatives to inform them of the latest information to which I have become party.

In other news, The Scheme for Full Employment is an amusing novella masquerading as a novel. £7.99? Pirates. If the margins occupied less than 40% of the page surface, the type was 9pt rather than 12, and the lines weren't 1.5 spaced then I suspect the page count would drop from 250 to nearer 100. Tsk. Still a good read, anyway.

So, I said I needed a new a new freewheel. Well I got one. Oooh, shiny:



And everything shifted nicely, and hills crumbled etc. etc. Until last thursday, when I developed a requirement for a new helmet:



I'm fine (give or take cuts, bruises, grazes and pride.) As for the rust-beast, after a brief once-over, it appeared that the front wheel was the wrong side of pretzel shaped, and the stays were somewhat bent, and would need straightening:



Cost; about £60. Fine, I thought. Then, after a slightly closer look, it seemed that the chain stay was actually buckled and would need replacing. Cost now £90. But, hey, I could get the whole lot repainted for an extra £10 and get the dropouts sorted at the same time. That'd be ok.

Then, after my genius self had stripped down the frame to take to the bike shop, I noticed the socking great dent in the down tube:



Cost to repair: £more than I paid for the bike. Gah.

Now I need to find the person who knocked me off, and discuss "insurance." Bah.

Posh new gear

Well, pulley.
Tension, to be precise. Chain still skips, so looks like that'll need to be replaced. And the freewheel block. Only done about 1200 miles - I blame the hills. Silly hills.

ITU-RT-H-SMTP-Rec. What?

To quote an old, old line, the best thing about standards is that there are so many of them. High definition TV is no exception. The simple (?) acronym HD-SDI is actually a catch-all for a confusing brace of standards. Here, for my convenience, several are itemised (along with some that aren't HD in the firmly old-school, 1940s sense.) First, SMPTE:

SMPTE 170M

NTSC (Analog composite)

SMPTE 240M / 260M

1125i

SMPTE 274M

1080i & 1080p

SMPTE 296M

720p

SMPTE 259M

SD-SDI (ie. the serial interface itself)

SMPTE 292M

HD-SDI (likewise)

SMPTE 372M

Dual-link HD-SDI

SMPTE 272M

SDI Embedded audio

SMPTE 299M

HD Embedded audio

And then ITU (previously EBU, previously various others...):

ITU-R BT Rec 601

SD PAL digital coding

ITU-R BT Rec 709

Erm...

So, that's neither exhaustive nor correct. I'll update it one day. Perhaps.