S T E P H E N H U C K E R . C O M

The doctor is dead, long live the Doctor

Just finished watching the Doctor Who Christmas special which alas is the end for one of my favorite doctors, David Tennat

I have now been watching Doctor Who since the late seventies!

New Years 2009

Went to a party at my friends house in South Melbourne.

Site is now up

hmm. … backups … you should always check backups before depending on them.

I backed up my site from my previous hosting company assuming it had copied all the folders where my wordpress installation was … all the misc stuff like images, etc
guess what, it didn’t !
thank goodness for my SQL backup which retained all my posts and comments, but alas, no images, no wordperss themes.

So next time, I will do what I did when I worked in IT, check the backups work before you need them

Update Jan 1, 2010

All is well, the “home directory” of my web site was archived in a single tar file … saved!

and I now have a backup of my website off line !

GT 2009 ZASKAR EXPERT

I purchased a new bike on Saturday, went a little over budget so I walked into the city (8km), picked it up and was riding home and I got a bloody nail through the tyre, so another 4 km walking

So far, I like it. It is very responsive, easy to accelerate.
My goal with the bike is to lose 20kg over the Australian summer and build a good physical base.

My new bike, except it has a white seat

Continue reading GT 2009 ZASKAR EXPERT

Fully Loaded

My bike fully loaded ready to go to Blanket bay last week, so pretty
Upon my return, it included extra protein, in the form of bugs, lots of bugs

Above Apollo Bay

15.11.2009 11-10-56 Great Ocean Road – Blanket Bay Fishing Trip, originally uploaded by Stephen Hucker.

Got back safety from my trip to Blanket Bay last weekend, But alas, as I was hooning down the alley behind my apartment I must have run over some glass, $50 !

Blanket Bay

This Saturday I went on my first big ride, a 500km round trip from Melbourne to Blanket Bay (near Apollo Bay).

Some pictures are up on my Flickr account ==> http://www.flickr.com/photos/hucker/sets/72157622332954407/

PDF to text in python

PDFMiner is a suite of programs in python that help extracting and analyzing text data of PDF documents. Unlike other PDF-related tools, it allows to obtain the exact location of texts in a page, as well as other extra information such as font information or ruled lines. It includes a PDF converter that can transform PDF files into other text formats (such as HTML). It has an extensible PDF parser that can be used for other purposes instead of text analysis.

I downloaded a PDF from work which has my call stats in tabular form. It worked great.

[25] 21:56:47–> pdf2txt.py -t html test.pdf > test.htm
/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pdfminer-20091004-py2.6.egg/pdfminer/pdfparser.py:8: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead import md5, struct

My project is to:
1. Email my weekly stats from work.
2. Construct a python program to read the data into a temporary textfile
3. Extract the data into a SQLite file
4. Produce statistics graphs on my average call times.

The Bike has arrived

A happy me after taking ownership of my new bike ... but nervous as hell because it has been 7 years since I last used a motorbike

Ready to go. You can find more pictures at flickr

10.10.2009 13-56-45 Suzki Vstrom First Day.jpg 10.10.2009 13-56-30 Suzki Vstrom First Day.jpg

The only accessories I have purchased so far are:

1. Boots

2. New Jacket

3. Crash Guard for bike which you can see in the photos

4. New Gloves

The owner of the shop was saying it was a A0 model, i.e not A9 (2009) but A0 (2010) … but I have no way to confirm this. My model was manufactured in August 2009. I went to the shop recently and all the 2010 models are in now, they are all September 2009.