I was appalled at the state of them, frankly. The rust was thick, and not in a good way. My boat is my home, as well as my boat, and the sign of that much rust really wasn’t a very comforting thought.

I attacked the rust. The only thing for it at first was a crowbar. The next implement was a paint scraper, followed by an old pair of scissors, a wire brush and finally sandpaper. I hereby make a public vow to my bilges. I will never let you get wet like this again.

The bilges are the bits round the side and the back. Directly underneat the engine is the sump. We won’t talk about that. But I pumped out at least 5 litres of what I can only describe of as a mixture of diesel, engine oil, water and … biomass.

Here are some pictures in my bilges’ journey from soaking and rusty to de-rusted and painted.

Amongst the reasons for the failure was the fact that my boat was equipped was a fairly antique engine. A fine piece of British engineering, a Lister LR2 made in 1969, but an old engine. He managed to scrape the coke off the piston heads, replace the piston rings, give the cylinders a scrub, adjust the injectors and put it back together, and the engine sprung back into life. But it’s never quite been the same as it was back in 1969.

I got an excited email from him a few months ago, saying that he had found a better engine at a superb price and how did I feel about swapping engines. It’s a lot of disruption swapping out an engine (it’s more complicated than it sounds, and it sounds quite complicated) and I ummed and aaahd for a bit. Before I’d stopped umming, I got another mail saying that he had bought it.

The new engine is a Lister SR2. It has greater horsepower, and the unit itself is in far far better nick.

So last weekend, he arrived with a load of equipment in tow. Every item had at least two uses. The plan is twofold.

1. Remove the old engine
2. Install the new engine

Here are photos from the removal. Let the record show that I did actually help, but I also took photos. Scroll to the bottom for a video I personally find very amusing.

I spent a while trying to find the answer to this. Finding it was difficult not least because the relevant search terms weren’t very specific. Also when you’re new to an API that redefines words left right and centre, you’re not entirely sure what the API designers called various bits and pieces. So…

If you want to pass GET arguments (aka get parameters, a querystring) in the facebook canvas URL, and have them passed through to your app, you must do it as the app_data GET argument. It is then passed through in JSON encoded in Base64 URL in the POST data. This is documented here.

So the main url is:

http://www.facebook.com/MYAPP/app_MYAPPID?app_data=my-app-data

And the decoded JSON is:

{ ... , 'app_data': 'my-app-data',  ... }

Only the app-data query string argument works. If you want multiple parameters you’ll have to encode or delimit them yourself.

As this is encoded, you’ll need to decode it to get the JSON. If you want to do this in Python, this handy snippet works.

I took a couple of audio recordings but this one just seemed perfectly to sum up the day.

I’m not such a miserable old git as all that. In a way I’m annoyed that I’m annoyed because I’m otherwise in high spirits.

A video to show just how loud this is! I left the bit in at the end because they’re finding turning round a bit tricky in the stream and drifting downstream a lot! First time I saw it I thought they were in trouble (the boat drifted backward downstream about 30 metres)!

And one more thing… the Environment Agency has put the entire Thames was on Red warnings today. The official advice is:

We advise users of all boats not to navigate because the strong flows make it difficult and dangerous.

I hope everyone’s safe. They probably shouldn’t be out, however lucrative the passengers and experienced the skipper. These are not the right conditions for a crash or for a drunken student to go overboard.

~

I sent them a email, polite enough I hope.

Dear Salter’s Steamers,

Your phone number is closed, although you’re running trips. I have tried to find a mobile number for the company, but can’t.

The level of noise is unacceptable. I heard it as I was walking from Meadow Lane, and can hear it from my own home, around 350 metres away. There is absolutely no excuse for this level of noise.

Like your clients, I celebrate May Day (the 1st of May) and am all the more chipper for it from having had some sleep. Last year I was kept up for a large part of the night. I’m not a habitual letter-writer, but May Day comes once a year and I’d like to enjoy it. If I played loud music outside your home all night I’m sure you’d at least come and have a word.

I’ve contacted the Environment Agency, who were very helpful, but said this is a matter for the council. The council line is emergencies only (and I doubt that they could do anything at this point) so I’m going to wait until the morning before making a complaint about the noise.

I’m writing this at 1940 on Monday evening, hoping that someone may be monitoring the account and will turn down the music.

This is an open letter, as I know I’m not the only person affected by the nuisance. It’s online at http://blog.afandian.com/2012/04/open-letter-to-salters-steamers/

(You should also have a word with your skippers. They’re navigating in very dangerous conditions, and not very well!)

Yours hopefully,

Joe Wass

Remember being a child and having to run your finger under the line to read? No, I don’t either. But apparently it’s a thing.

I love playing around with text. Here’s an idea I had in a similar vein. You’ll almost certainly need to use your mouse to read this.

If you’re not perplexed, wait a couple of seconds for the calculations to run.

(This requires JavaScript and may result in slightly heavier CPU usage. Won’t work on a touchscreen)

If you enjoy this, take a look at worsethanterrible.co.uk

The music isn’t the only mystery, by the bye. I’m not entirely sure what the title of the programme is either. The BBC reports it to be ‘In Defence of Obscure Words‘, whereas Will Self, who I would assume to be the authority in this case, goes with ‘In Defense of Obscure Words‘. I assume that ‘defence’ follows the same rules as other words similar to it, namely that the ‘-ce’ ending is used for the noun and the ‘-se’ ending is used for the verb. But I’m not entirely sure what ‘in defence’ (or ‘in defence’ for that matter) actually means. Is it some obscure conjugation of the verb, or is the ‘in’ a preposition to ‘defence’ as a noun?

But back to the identification of the background music.

I intended to use Shazam to try to and identify the track. I was able to find a white paper on Shazam (back when I was researching my dissertation) and, at least at the time of the paper, the fingerprinting is based on amplitude patterns rather than pitch content. As there was talking all over the track, I knew that wouldn’t work.

It didn’t stop me trying, however. I needn’t have bothered, it found nothing.

Radio is an interesting medium in that it’s designed to be mono with stereo enhancements. The story of stereo in the FM format is a whole fascinating story in itself. The net result is that things tend to be mono, with excursions into stereo for effect. The broadcast itself kept to this pattern: the voices were in mono (i.e. the signal was identical on both left and right channels) and the music was stereo (slightly different signals on each track).

Of course, if you subtract a value from itself, you end up with zero. If you subtract a number from a slightly different number, you don’t get zero. This is a recognised technique for removing vocals (which tend to be panned to the centre of the track) from background tracks. I decided to try this for myself.

First I found a broadcast on iPlayer which included the trailer. I used the brilliant Soundflower to direct output to an Audacity session. The result was this recording:

Initial Trailer

I then split the tracks into the two components and inverted one half. Inverting means multiplying the value by -1, so +10 becomes -10. This is interesting to listen to. If the signals were coherent, the voices would cancel out. If you’re listening through speakers try moving your head around in the field for a strange effect.

Trailer, one channel inverted

I then added the two tracks together, letting the identical components (speech), cancel each other out. The result is almost perfect removal of vocals (except where compression artefacts muddied things a bit and made the identical signals not-entirely-identical). It’s a bit of a hatchet job on the music (of course, some parts of it are in phase) but it’s still recognisable, and certainly still has the same amplitude profile.

BBC Trailer, inverted and summed

Quite interesting! The music is still audible.

So, track identified? Problem solved? Well no, not quite. Shazam still has no idea.

Perhaps you do?

I am lucky enough to have a friend in Julian Cottee (of OxGrow) who furnished me with six chitting potatoes in six exciting varieties: Edzell Blue, British Queen, Isle of Jura, Salad Blue, Maris Bard, and Arran Victory. Today I cleared a patch, dug a trench and planted them.

I’ll spare you the usual gushing about the satisfaction of having an allotment. But it was very satisfactory to break the soil and plant my first batch. Very satisfactory indeed.

“A cat could no more write a thesis on the plight of man than a man could on the condition of being a cat”

On the Nature of Existence, Jeramiah Bullock, 1808

‎”Show me an elephant who can record in a book his thoughts. I warrant he will run out of thoughts before he runs out of paper.”

The Natural Order of the World, Rutherford Mirams, 1899

“The Kangaroo, upon seeing this treatise, kicked up quite tearing it in two. This fact notwithstanding, he was declared by the court to have made his mark upon it and in doing so, accepting its terms.”

Triumph over the Savage, Kip McKinnon, 1800

‎”Five times round the table flew the bird, each time stopping to dip his beak into the ink. He would then drag it over the surface of the blotting paper in a quite comical manner. In doing this he made parralel lines upon it. He would not stop until a rifle was fetched and the bird dispatched.”

The History of the Charachuse Family, Count Charachuse VII, 1929

“…one chapter of which, it is reported, was penned by a monkey, being kept for amusement by the Earl of Bath…”

Western Almanack, 1766

“And so, by deception, the member for Rutland introduced the entire bill, complete with it the clause authored by his snake. By the ‘ayes’ of the house, the clerk was duly obliged to sign into law and copy out, onto vellum, the act in its entirity. It was remarked that the inscription of the ‘snake clause’ followed the pattern of the snake’s marks even if we could not say whether or not the meaning had been conveyed”

A History of Tyrrany in the Houses at Westminster, 1856

‎”Around that time T. S. Elliot was said to keep a crow in his bathroom, to be his muse, and to tap out the metre to which the poet twisted his words”

Poetry?, Christabelle Cussins, 1966

The bird marketh upon paper with his mouth, with ink: by the very point of his nose writeth he. Works of writing of high accomplishment proceedeth from him and princes and men may read it alike as though it had been the work of a scholar.

Unknown document fragment, 1669

I think that proves conclusively that animals can write, and have written documents.

No, it’s Mano Panforreteiro playing his Gaita bagpipes in Oxford. With help from some pipes of another kind.