Computer Programming

Prongramming the bike computer I just got is well... like programing a computer.

It has 2 A2 sheets of just english instructions, but none of it seems to explain much.

Id be happy with just a trip distance and speedo function, so am manily trying to enter my wheel size.

However on the size entry bit,

it has a 4 digit selection, where the first digit can only be 1 or 2, the rest of the digits can be 1-9.

What units of measurement can that possibly be?

what on my wheel is one or two thousands big?

I have a 700c on the front, and a 27" 1 1/4 on the back.

these are total wheel & tyre circumferences right?

My front rim is actually, 622mm.

Can anyone throw me a guess of what figure I am suppossed to be entering?

Much thanks.

2096 for the front wheel. (assuming a 23c tyre)
2161 for the back wheel

use the wheelsize for whichever your sensor will be on.

check the wheel size cross ref. on the grid you have been provided plug that number into the cat eye and hey presto you've got a working speedoometer it is just to configure the computer to allow for different sized wheels i don't think that 4 digit number relates to anything except for the computer code behind the odometer

whats the serial number of the odometer and what size wheels are you running there should be pdf's on line of the correct codes. i'll check it if you want

RTFM. It can't be that complicated

Wheel circumference in mm. None of this Imperial measurement shit! ;)

As always, Sheldon (rip) has the goods..
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/cyclecomputer-calibration.html

I need to teach myself a bit of programmering for some research I'm doing. It involves using the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to, first create a list of people who share one particular attribute, then find links (again, with the ODNB) between those people by looking for references to each name in the list on each persons biographical entry.

I think this is pretty simple stuff, and could be done by hand were I do enjoy tedious as fuck work. But I don't, so I'm going to allow myself the time it would take to do it by hand to learn how to ask computers to do it.

So. Advice?

Python with the "natural language toolkit" (I vaguely have some idea of what that means) seems to be potentially what I want. Someone else mentioned R (apparently quite useful in social science research generally).

Assuming one or the other, can anyone advise me on how to go about doing (i.e., learning) this? Particularly good DIY teaching methods, for example.

kthxbai!

I think this might not quite be the right thread (but I don't know the right programming thread).

I haven't ever read the ODNB so I don't know what the data looks like, but to understand the task, you want to:

1. scan the entries of people for a particular attribute
   
   1. is the attribute you are looking for in a regular place? Or are you searching the text itself?
      
2. build a list of those entries.
   
3. for each of those entries scan their text for a name on your list
   
4. build a graph of the relationships between the people.
   
   

I don't think you want the natural language bit (if the above is correct). That would be more for parsing the sentences and trying to capture their meaning etc. Depending on the size you may want a database of some sort, but I bet you could do all of this in memory instead.

I think for this sort of task any language with good string handling is what you would want. Perl and python both fit that bill. So does javascript for that matter. I don't think you want to mess with R (in fact a lot of people use python first to get their data set up and then use R to process it).

If you have never touched programming at all it might be a little hard for you. Going through and generating the first list is pretty straight forward. Finding the links between entries would be fairly straight forward. If you just want each entry to have a list of related entries that should be ok, but you do need to understand how to create at least objects and arrays.

I think javascript might be your best bet. There are a ton of intro tutorials and you could quick-and-dirty make something that works.

@arrowplum

Hey, thanks for the reply. No idea about right thread. I just searched programming and posted.

Re: 1.1, the data is not stored in one place/space, unfortunately. It will need to be pulled out of the entry (which reads like any biography would - random). This is why I thought the natural language toolkit may be helpful.

Re: 4, no - the data will be output into a txt file which can be used with existing statistical analysis software.

Ultimately, I'm just trying to make my life easier in terms of getting the data. However, it is a skill which could become useful in the future (I can think of one project already which I would have saved myself an afternoon if I could have worked out something that would automatically strip text of particular fields).

Ahh yeah. In that case, like you suspected, Python is probably your man. It sounds like the pain of learning it would be useful to you in general (ie this isn't just a one-off).

That natural language stuff is still only useful to you if you need to figure out things from context (I think).

If you have the time, I point you in the direction of: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book
its a good start especially if you aren't programming in another language already.

Oh also, it isn't perfect but this thread http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/242694/ at least has a lot of people on it who could help you too.

Thanks, duder. I shall delve into the world of Python! I did take a programming class in high school, but that was quite a while ago. Was thinking of bashing my way through that code academy thing and seeing where I am after that, unless people feel it's a particular waste of time.

Ah and missed your second post, thanks for that as well!

As an unintended consequence of this thread being brought to my attention, I finally figured out how to program my bike computer's wheel diameter. Finally the speedometer and distance will work!