Arcoarena

I’ve been rumbled

With Easter (rapidly?) approaching I thought now would be a good time to post some code.

So here’s how you calculate the date of Easter (in python as it happens)

"To Calculate the Date of Easter"
year = input("Which year do you wish to calculate the date of Easter for: ")
a= year % 19
b = year//100
c = year % 100
d = b // 4
e = b % 4
f = (b+8)//25
g = (b-f+1)//3
h = (19*a + b -d -g + 15) % 30
i = c//4
k = c % 4
l = (32+2*e+2*i-h-k) % 7
m = (a + 11*h+22*l)//451
n = (h+l-7*m+114)//31
p = (h+l-7*m+114) % 31
print "Easter is on", (p+1),"/",n,"/",year

The method is from “Practical Astronomy With Your Cacluator” by Peter Duffett-Smith (which I recommend for anyone with an interest in Astronomy). It is based on the fact that Easter Sunday is first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March (nominally the day of the vernal equinox).

I was going to post my code to simulate an Enigma Machine, but I seem to have lost it, if  I do ever find it I’ll put it up.

From an ad on Facebook

“Which words below would you most associate with M&S?
Qaulity
Convenience
Value
Underwear
Clothes”

Highlighting, obviously, my own

It’s occured to be recently that whilst I like messing around with technology I’m not a particularly hardcore geek. Sure I run linux, but that’s it, I run it and sometimes install it (which recently isn’t exactly challenging). I don’t really play around under the bonnet, I just want a desktop that works.

The infuriating side of this is that there are quite a few cool little projects that I’ve thought of doing but never got round to. This means that I’ll never stumble upon the next internet fad and make a million purely by chance.

So, in case anyone wants to be more motivated than me here’s a list of things I’ve considered doing over the past couple of years and never got round to

• Designing a house (may still do this but it will be waaaay in to the future when I have the money, I’m currently wondering whether TurboCad is worth having a mess around with, anyone know?)
• Building a remote controlled model Ekranoplan
• Designing / Building a cheap amphibious car (admittedly mainly spurred on by that Top Gear episode)
• Setting up an OpenStreetmap project (more on this later as I’ll hopefully get round to this one)
• Designing my own lighting desk (a hardware implementation mainly with a software interface

Of course one of the obvious reasons why I haven’t done any of these is because they are ridicously big projects of which I have no real need, unlike fitting a kitchen, fixing the car, and relaxing.

Some day I’ll get round to some/all of these…..maybe

I didn’t mention this in the previous post as I had a confidence attack.

Looking at this road in Beckermet Google maps, and the post office seem to think it’s called “Lowrey Close”. I was quite careful to check the spelling when I recorded it as I got it wrong on my first try.

I’m certain it’s actually Lowry Close,  after non other than L.S. Lowry  whose sole link to the area appears to be “regularly visiting friends in Cleator Moor”, but I suspect is the closest West Cumbria has ever got to a famous artist.

Of course, I could have got the spelling wrong and whoever supplied the data to Google may indeed be correct. But at least if that is the case someone can correct it.

So, over Christmas I got a Garmin eTrex (the basic one) second hand from someone on eBay. When I visited my parents I noticed that my Beckermet looked a little non-existent on Open Street Map. So, I though that I’d do something about it. Tracing from the Yahoo images isn’t possible because at any sort of sensible zoom level everything looks like a brown blob so the GPS was the only way to do it.

Here we have Beckermet before

and now after

I do have one confession. I appear to have missed Kirkbeck Drive, oops, I’ll have to do it next time I’m back. I’m also missing some road names, largely because they don’t have signs on them anywhere. I’ll have to look to see if they’re on out of copyright maps.

Care for a look? – Take Me There

Plans for next time include taking my bike to do some of the roads leading away from the village and some of the national cycle routes obviously.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that I probably won’t get round to sending those Christmas cards I bought so….

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone. I’ve not got out and seen people as much as I should have next year so I shall endeavour to do so more next year.

I’ve got a large pile of things I need to do before Christmas so I’ll let you know I’m still not dead after.

My very efficient memory just stores up nine planets…….errr…. how about; My very efficient memory just stores up nonsense?

Everyone else seems to be. With the higher state of security about today people appear to have got a bit jittery [1], [2], [3]
The increased security it stupid because a really determined terrorist could just find a suitable ‘body cavity’ to hide anything they wanted to get onto a plane (with the possible exception of knives – ouch).

And to top it all off….this

It’s quite hot here. The temperature’s been up as high as 25 degree C and it’s meant to be around 30 inland. The weekend was quite hot too. Joanne’s back from Morrocco and was complaining it was cold but with temperatures of 40 in Fez I can hardly blame her.

Anyway, what do I decide to do on one of the hottest days this year? That’s right, go for a 3 1/2 mile run. My God, that was difficult, and slow. All I can say is that I hope it gets cooler before the next time we go.