Trevor May.ca

I was trying to remember the other day how many rides I went on last year and I couldn’t remember. So for this year I decided to create a ride log and I’ve made it as a Facebook application that anyone can use.

Its very simple at the moment, which is not a bad thing, I don’t want to clutter it up. But I do have plans for more features if people actualy start using it!?

Basically all the app allows you to do now is enter in a database each ride you go on. With fields like location, trails you rode and friends you rode with. The app is integrated with facebooks friends system and has an option to post a message to your wall when you add a ride.

You can try it out here: http://apps.facebook.com/ridelog/

Screenshot:

Future features:
- Profile tab
- Profile box showing latest rides added
- upload images
- stats page showing most popular locations, trails, top riders and so on
- location & trail names clickable
- global page to view everyones ridelogs (if public)

If you have any suggestions please let me know!

I am excited to announce two new and exciting Canadian political websites I’ve been working on all summer. Both are focused on increasing peoples engagement with politics and promoting open government.

http://politwitter.ca is a non-partisan service that strives to connect elected MP’s & MLA’s with the Canadian people via Twitter. From one easy location keep track what politicians are saying and doing and what regular Canadians have to say about current politics. politwitter does the searching for you, maintaining a list of politicians and political hash tags on Twitter.

“Twitter is a micro-blogging, social messaging service that can assist MPs in promoting themselves, talking to their constituents, promoting issues and increasing transparency in government. Twitter features brief, to-the-point messages and is accessible by computers and Mobile phones. It can be a valuable tool to get re-elected, creating that personal connection with the public.”

You can view federal & provincial tweets narrowed down by partisan affiliation, province, MPs and more. The site also has a list of MP’s not currently using twitter and allows the visitor to send communications to these MP’s, encouraging them to use twitter. Politwitter wants to see more MP’s using twitter to connect with the Canadian public, promote causes and increase transparency in government.

This service stands as the initial Canadian domestic Twitter site as well as it intends to have a broader range than alternative countries’ domestic Twitter mashups (tweetcongress.com, tweetmp.org.au). In addition to gathering together all the relevant tweets, Politwitter doubles as a complete Twitter.com replacement, since those who visit the site are able to tweet, retweet, post pics, shorten URLs & more directly from the site. The site also allows real-time updates of tweets, which is very useful during active events like elections.

The site launched right before the BC Provincial election and received a surge of traffic and interest, even being linked to on the BC NDP website. The federal Liberal.ca website is also linking to the site and politwitter has a new customizable widget which allows anyone to place political tweets on their website or blog. This is particularly useful for MP’s websites, they can add a widget showing other MP tweets from the same political party.

Politwitter archives all political tweets, so there is a permanent record that can be used for statistics, trending and a public record. There is a detailed statistics page, which breaks down many partisan and regional twitter stats. The site also tracks photos and links posted by political tweeters & MP’s.

I think Twitter is a valuable political tool and Politwitter a valuable tool to bring together everything in the Canadian political Twitter world.

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I also want to announce the brand new http://parliament2.ca, based off http://whitehouse2.org/ in the US. Parliament 2 is where anyone can set the nation’s priorities. Imagining how the parliament might work if it was run completely democratically through the internet.

Visitors can add their top priorities for Canada and endorse or oppose the priorities added by others. Users can then add arguments for or against each issue and discuss them. Hopefully many Canadians will join including elected MP’s. It would be exciting to see what the results of an open internet democracy would bring.

The site is only a week old and already over 400 Canadians have joined adding over 60 priorities and hundreds of discussions. k29dt3fcei

This is a very silly bad use of twitter and the kinda thing that people mock twitter about. But I wanted to try this media centre plugin that tweets what you’re doing on media centre. So it will tweet what tv show your watching, movie your watching or what music your listening too. Since this is rather useless info, I didn’t want to spam my real twitter account so I made a separate twitter account just for this http://twitter.com/trevangie_tv. You can follow it if you really wanna know what tv shows we’re watching, you will see the 50 kagillion wedding shows Angela watches

If your crazy like I clearly am and wanna try out this plugin, you can get it here.

When I download torrented movies I like to rename them so the folder and file names are all neat. I need all my movies in a sub folders because this is the way the “Media Browser” Media center plugin in the post below requires. The AVI file needs to be named the same as the folder as well. This can be rather tedious, so I wrote a PHP script to automate renaming downloaded movies. I then used a tool called “bamcompile” to compile the php script into an executable that can be dropped into any folder and ran.

The script will scan through all the folders in the loation the exe is places, it will rename the folder all nice, format the data in the title and delete anything after the date. It will then rename all the files inside the folder to match, along with deleting any nfo and txt files.

For example a folder named “Tropic.Thunder[2008]DvDrip-aXXo” would be renamed to “Tropic Thunder (2008)“.

Most torrents you download the movie is already in a sub-folder, but if they are not, or if you have a ton of old movies all in one folder, you can use this simple DOS batch script my friend made for me to move each file into a sub-folder. movie_folder_tool

I also see someone recently made a batch file that does the same thing available here.

This is a great plugin for Vista Media Center that i’ve been using for a couple years. I has gone through a couple developers and several names, it is now known as “Media Browser”. Each new release gets better and better, the new version has the cool 3D reflective list mode. It also dynamically fetches attractice backgrounds when viewing a movies info.

Developers Blog: http://blog.manghera.com
Download here: http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/downloads/list (MCE_Media_Browser_2_0_8_0.msi)

For some random reason I decided to totally re-make my personal site. I changed the focus from being a portfolio site to more of a personal blog site. I decided to give WordPress a whirl since I had recently written a plugin for a friend. I spent the all of yesterday trying out various plugins, fiddling with code and creating a theme.

I am very impressed with how good wordpress has become, its way better than it was 3 years ago when i last tried it. The plug-and-play plugin system is awesome and there are so many great plugins available for free. The admin control panel is also now so much nicer as of version 2.7.I was also able to import all my old blog posts using the RSS import method. I am going to try and actual update the blog now!

Some features of the new site include.

• Integration with twitter
• blog posts create a  tweet
• Facebook photos viewable from this site
• ‘Facebook Connect’ visitors are able to login to this site using there facebook login. This makes logging in to comment super easy and fast!
• Livestream feed
• Tagging and search highlights, auto-tagging
• tabbed widgets
• Threaded comments with comment notification option
• Mobile versions of this site for Windows mobile and iPhone

I am testing the plugin feature to add photos from my facebook to blog posts.

So I was thinking the last 3 days about going to the pro-coalition rally tonight in Vancouver, I has somewhat hesitant as I am not really the protest or rally type. I was kind of worried it would just be a smallish group on the side of the street and it might be somewhat uncomfortable. But after the events of today, I felt compelled. Boy was I wrong, the rally was Huge, it was at the Canada Place the Vancouver convention building, inside the huge ballrooms. The rooms were packed and had reached capacity so hundreds were left outside when the speeches started. The rally was also very well organized, with huge video screens, big “Coalition for Canada” banners, a huge Canada flag and a band playing. Lot of people wearing Canada flags and other stuff. And everyone was given “Coalition Yes/Qui” signs.

I was also surprised as to the makeup of the crowd, I kind of expected a bunch of young people, it was anything but. I was standing with a group of people over 60. There were speeches from Vancouver councillors, and people from the Liberal and NDP parties as well as recorded speeches from Layton and Dion.

The crowd was very lively and all the speakers brought up Harpers tactics of divisive politics, trying to pit groups vs each other. vs Quebec, east vs west and so on. Whenever this was brought up it was the thing that got the crowd the most vocal, I could tell that one lady near me was from Quebec, she was really upset.

It was defiantly an interesting experience and nothing what I had expected.

I decided it was time to overclock my CPU to get some extra performance. I have an Intel Q6600 which is a very overclockable CPU. But i was using the stock heatsink/fan so i had to buy a better one. After a bunch of research i found that probably the best combination for performance but not too loud was.

Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme Heatsink
Scythe S-Flex Sff21F 120MM Fan

This heatsink was a bitch ass to install and its always a pain to rip out the entire motherboard to install the backplate, but it was done. For the fan layout I decided to have the heatsink fan push air upwards towards the outtake fan at the top of the case, rather than the usual setup of pushing air out the back. I figured hot air rises so might have a bit of a difference going up. The other back fan is also an outtake fan, so I am creating a low pressure environment.

I then proceeded to overclock with the help of this good guide i found, and it worked perfectly. And after much stress testing things seem stable and heat acceptable. I did think this heatsink would lower my ambient cpu temperature more than it did. But the big difference is when I did overclock the heat didn't rise that much, where as my old heatsink it did.

So the Q6600 stock is 2.4Ghz x 4 cores. I overclocked to 3.0Ghz x 4 cores. A good 600Mhz with little rise in ambient temperature. I think i will leave it here for awhile, I could certainly go further, getting into changing the multiplier and voltages. But I am happy with this for now.

I did decided to try and lower the timings on my RAM a bit though, stock they are 5-5-5-12, so I tried 4-4-4-12 and after doing some stress tests it is still stable. The memory bandwidth went from 5.89 GB/s to 6.00 GB/s. So not a large increase but what the heck.

The strange thing is, this…

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http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=4cd25087-bc41-414f-b954-f54c9b7dc10f

I went down to check this out, firstly the general traffic on Friday was bad, but then once I got in the area it was deadlock traffic. And its a small industrial road which normally has no traffic i would imagine. There was no where to park, horrible location. I eventually park illegally and get in the line. There was so many people there! I find out the line goes way around the block where I can't see. I don't know WHY i stayed, but i did for 4 hours! The sun set, it got really cold and it was drizzling on and off. They then announce that they are closing and the line is still as long as I got there, it moved so slowly. They have a huge warehouse but are only letting 40 people in at a time, and it seems like people never come out. So they count the first 200 people in the line and start giving them tickets to come back tomorrow to jump ahead in the new queue tomorrow. But right as I’m near the end of the line the decided to let 20 more people in, the 20 comes up 4 people short of me, AHHHHH! Of course some people who already got a ticket and left the line saw this and started a big uproar. So i got my ticket, but I don't know if I will go back tomorrow. The only way i lasted was I had my smartphone to keep me entertained, most people didn’t.

I think the advertising and press this got was misleading. It makes it sound like the place is going to be full of cool movies costumes. But I never saw a single person come out with anything cool, just normal clothes. Many people came out with nothing after waiting hours. Near the end of the line you could see a small glimpse into the warehouse, all I could see was closes and some suits. Which is fine if that’s what you want, but i went to find cool movie costumes, something sci-fi or military.

The only good thing is my car wasn’t towed because me and 100s other cars were parked illegally.