May 28th 2011. A day I’ll never forget; the day Jo and I got married. It’s always difficult finding the time to write new posts, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at the very least make sure I wrote something about, cliché as it may be, the happiest day of my life. We’d originally planned the wedding for 10th October 2010: of course that date was nothing to do with the fact that 10-10-10 is easy to remember; not was it in any way related to the fact that 101010 in binary represents 42 in decimal — “the answer to life, the universe, and everything”! That date wasn’t to be, due in no small part to a severe lack of funds and planning. Fast forward to May 28th 2011 and having spent a not-exorbitant sum of money on eBay enjoyed a perfectly planned and executed wedding day in Edinburgh. The weather was even good to us – it only rained when we were inside! A massive thanks to Jo’s bridesmaids, Jess and Mip for supporting and helping her; my best man Sally for her support and help; my dad for doing a wonderful job of the photography and of course my beautiful wife Jo for doing me the greatest honour of marrying me!
In order to facilitate testing of websites in different browsers, Microsoft have released what they call their ‘Application Compatibility Virtual PC Images‘. These time-limited V12n solutions are great for quickly bringing up a VM for a particular version of Internet Explorer but they are built for Microsoft’s Virtual PC (VPC) software.
I work predominantly with Linux and use Virtual Box as my V12n application of choice. Later versions of Virtual Box support VPC’s VHD disk image format. This means it’s possible to run these VPC images under VirtualBox, but it involves downloading and extracting files from the win32 executables; downloading drivers for the ethernet adapter and other time consuming steps that I’d rather not repeat every time my IE VM expires. I’m a programmer, therefore I’m lazy and don’t like doing things more than once; I’d rather script something to do it for me. In keeping with this virtue, I’ve written msie2vbox to automate this stuff for me. It’s on Github with a GPLv3 license. There’s some outstanding todo items but it does the job for me, and I thought it might be of use to others.
I’ve updated my fork of the yql-tables repository to include a data table to wrap the Spotify meta-data API. I’ve issued a pull-request to the yql-tables maintainers so hopefully soon it should be included in the YQL environment. However, I notice the last pull request from another user was made in November last year and still hasn’t been answered; not sure if this suggests the project has stalled in some way.
Until it’s included in the environment and therefore available via the console and the web service end-point, you can use the table via this site.
-- Artist Search
USE 'http://maxmanders.co.uk/lab/spotify/spotify.search.artist.xml';
SELECT * FROM spotify.search.artist where artist = 'The New Pornographers';
-- Album Search
USE 'http://maxmanders.co.uk/lab/spotify/spotify.search.album.xml';
SELECT * FROM spotify.search.album where album = 'Together';
-- Track Search
USE 'http://maxmanders.co.uk/lab/spotify/spotify.search.track.xml';
SELECT * FROM spotify.search.track where track = 'Crash Years';
Another year begins and so too does a time of introspection and self-analysis. It’s traditional to make lists of resolutions, and while I plan on resolving to change a number of bad habits and adopting new and better ones, smoking has proved year-on-year to be the one resolution that doesn’t stick. This year that stops.
I’ve smoked for about ten years, averaging 20 cigarettes per-day. Now it’s time for me to take control of my life and stop smoking once and for all. There will always be stressful situations, anxious moments that would previously have necessitated the lighting of a cigarette. Past attempts to quit generally failed due to lack of resolve, always finding an excuse to have ‘just one more cigarette’. On the recommendation of numerous ex-smokers I downloaded “Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking” on my Kindle.
I noticed a number of repeated phrases and ideas throughout the book: perhaps this repetition was meant to be perceived on a subconscious level, but I was very much aware of what felt like insidious suggestion being snuck in under the radar. Having said that, the main themes and ideas in the book didn’t focus on the more traditional ‘will-power required’ approach, nor did the book rely on health or monetary scare tactics. Instead it felt like having a long discussion with an ex-smoker who simply validated and confirmed various feelings and thoughts that were already playing on my mind. Having someone who has been in a similar situation acknowledge these things is perhaps the nudge that I needed, to confirm what I already knew to be true and stop smoking for the right reasons.
It’s early days but I’m confident I’ve had my last cigarette. There is no guarantee that this book will work for everyone, but I’d suggest that if you want to stop smoking you’ve got nothing to lose. If it doesn’t work you’re in no worse a position than you are in now!
Revision control systems serve their purpose well for managing codebases, but they can also be used to good effect for configuration management. I’ll discuss how I’ve used Subversion to manage the configuration of my home directory. The same goal could probably be achieved just as easily with Git. While I use Git and Github for personal projects, I have employed this solution at work where we use Subversion.
