My name is Andy Baxter. I live in the North West of England. This is my webspace for writing up personal projects. I also write an occasional blog on this site.
I work part time for a small electronics company, doing bits of research, linux sysadmin stuff, and some microcontroller programming. When I am not working, I like to go cycling, make and listen to music, cook, engage in computer geekery and electronics, read a bit, and take photos.
The site is pretty much under construction at the moment. It is powered by dokuwiki - a lightweight wiki program with neat syntax and some nice features. I hope you find something here you like.
You can contact me at this email address: andy on the server highfellow dot org. (replace 'on the server' with '@' and 'dot' with '.' to make the right address).
I have added a link to a coffeescript 'world word clock' web app, and a supercollider program I wrote a while back to generate tones in a shepard scale.
I've just written a short bash function which notifies you when a command has finished running, using libnotify and notify-send (on ubuntu, make sure the package 'libnotify-bin' is installed).
Just copy the text below into one of your bash startup files. (E.g. ~/.bashrc, or /etc/bash.bashrc)
function notify() {
# notify <command> <args> - sends a popup notification when a command finishes
cmd=$1; shift
$cmd $@
err=$?
[ $err -eq 0 ] && \
notify-send "$cmd $*" "Finished: OK" || \
notify-send "$cmd $*" "Finished: Error"
}
To use it, run the command you are invoking preceded by 'notify'. E.g. if you are building a project using make, you would type 'notify make'.
When it's finished, you get a notification.
I've now finished installing the stair lights. I'm really pleased with how they look, and they're working nicely. I've put up a page about them here
I've now soldered up the main PCB for the stair lights I'm making, and set them up on the stairs using blu-tack. The only things left to do are to put the switch on the far end, check for bad joints again, and install them properly using cable clips.
They look really homely coming down the stairs at night.
I have just been moving my site over to a new hosting provider, called webfaction.com, mainly because I wanted better python support. So far I'm really impressed with them - the service is quick and helpful, and the way they have laid out their custom written control panel is really neat and well thought out. It's only taken me a couple of hours to move everything over, partly because I now have proper ssh/sftp access to the site, which makes things a lot easier.
Now I'm just waiting for the nameservers to update, which should be done in about 20 minutes.