Digikam crashes on startup
To be honest, this post is really designed as a reminder to me in case I ever reinstall my OS, but it will probably get a bit of Google juice and could possibly help somebody else. If you’re using Digikam (a fine piece of software for organising your photos, well worth a look) and you find that it crashes on startup with Linux Mint, then <pre class="brush: bash; title: ; notranslate" title=""> sudo apt-get install kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins
Convert pdf to text on Ubuntu
We had rather an ugly scanned pdf of a very lovely poem over on our feedback website so I thought I would try to post the text from it using Optical Character Recognition using tesseract. On Ubuntu start with: `` sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr imagemagick You’ll need to convert the pdf to an image file: `` convert -density 600 input.pdf output.tif and then output to output.txt like this: `` tesseract myscan.
Five tips for five years
I saw some wonderful tweets the other day where the author gave their former naive self some time-travelling advice from their present self about how best to get started with programming. I did intend to keep the link but sadly my filing system has failed and it’s fallen through the cracks. I’m grateful to the author, in any case, for inspiring this post, written on the fifth anniversary of my own initial foray into the world of programming.
Don’t apologise- it’s just feedback
I’m cross posting this to my team’s blog which can be found here to bring together my two worlds of programming and Linux-geekery with the Involvement and experience in UK health services which I use programming and Linux-geekery for in my job. Here it is, a story from a meal out in a pub and the lessons the NHS might learn from it. I witnessed a rather amusing event after a meal in a pub last week, but thinking about it the next day I thought perhaps there are some lessons in it.
Downloading Lucida Console on Ubuntu
Well, it’s been a horribly long time since I blogged anything. There’s another small chaos generator in the house and he and his older brother are keeping me pretty busy. Anyway, this is a quick post to solve a problem which appears to have no Google Juice at all- downloading Lucida Console for Linux. If you want Lucida fonts generally there’s some stuff here, but at least when I tried it there was no Lucida Console.
Primum non nocere- gathering feedback data in the NHS
One of the bits of the internet where I hang out is alive with debate around this comment piece in The Guardian. I would advise you to click through to read it because I can’t give a good summary of how hard-hitting it is but, in summary, it describes a couple who had exemplary service at an A + E department when they suffered a miscarriage but were then very distressed when they received a follow up text the next day asking them to rate their experience of A + E using the NHS’s Friends and Family Test (how likely are you to recommend this service to others: Extremely likely… etc.
I did it! I edited some open sourced code!
I do try to promote the benefits of open source wherever I go, and one of these many benefits is, of course, the ability of endusers or intermediate parties to modify the source code to make changes to the software. A couple of times I have been dismissed by members of the closed source contingent who mock the idea that individuals who work outside of the IT world (e.g. in healthcare, my own area) would sit down and modify or even read reams of source code.
All hail the mighty Cron- setting up cron jobs and a mail server to collect their output logs
At a certain point, everyone with a penchant for databases and Linux is going to want to make use of cron, whether it’s to back up their data, run maintenance on certain fields of a database, or something else (in my case, do a huge pull of MySQL tables and format ready to drop nicely into a Shiny application). Cron is, quite simply, a little pixie who lives on your server and executes scripts at times you determine: every day at midnight, every Wednesday morning, every 6 hours on weekdays, you name it, cron does it.
Querying Google analytics data with R
This post is in response to a question on Twitter, but it may be of interest to others. I produced a Shiny app for querying Google Analytics data for my book. The data on the live version which lives here is automatically pulled in via the API each time the application is run. That code cannot live on my GitHub because it needs the username and password for the API. So I’m reproducing it here.
Book review: PHP Cookbook by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg
This is a book review of PHP Cookbook by David Sklar, and Adam Trachtenberg. Full disclosure: I received this book free under O’Reilly’s Reader Review Program. This is a very comprehensive book indeed. I’m relatively new to PHP programming and I used this book in two different ways. Firstly, as a straightforward cover to cover read, and secondly, as a bit of practice and to make this review a bit more realistic, to help me write a little toy application that I am developing in idle moments in the hope that I can scale it up and use it in my job.