Solent Youth Action has grown fast over the last couple of years – even faster than I’d hoped. And now it has meant that we are hitting a problem with one of my early decisions. 🙁
Windows XP Home isn’t always enough
November 25th, 2006Windows Command Line has got smarter
November 24th, 2006Most die-hard command-line fans tend to agree that the Windows Command Prompt isn’t great. When you consider how old it is, it isn’t all that powerful. This isn’t the end of the world, as there is always cygwin.
But now Microsoft have released their new command prompt PowerShell. I tried downloading it this evening, and so far, I really like it.
I can be a C-numptie
November 22nd, 2006This might not be earth-shatteringly new to those who have seen my code before, but I was a little surprised. 🙂
A C program that I wrote a little while ago (and has previously worked fine on Windows, Linux, Solaris and HP) failed horribly on AIX. A little digging showed that I had written:
char* thisIsSupposedToBeAString[256];
I guess that at the time I wrote it (presumably early in the morning, and caffeine-fuelled) I had a string (char thisIsSupposedToBeAString[256];) and wanted a pointer to it, so went back and stuck a * on it without thinking.
Maintaining two blogs is difficult
November 21st, 2006I started an internal blog on the work intranet a couple of weeks ago. Two weeks later, I’ve finally got round to writing a second post. I’m not sure why I’ve found it harder to keep up a second blog – I guess part of it is that it’s harder to access the intranet one from home, and I can’t post from my phone. I’m going to try and write another post soon, though.
If you have access to the IBM intranet, take a look! (Better yet, help me out by answering the question there! ;-))
wii!
November 21st, 2006I’ve pre-ordered my Nintendo Wii through Amazon.co.uk this morning. Fingers crossed, it should wing it’s way to me on launch day, 8th December. I can’t wait. 🙂
I’ve read a lot of comparisons about opinions about the ‘next-gen’ consoles, PS-3, XBox 360 and Wii, in the last week or so. But for me it was an easy choice.
I don’t play games that much nowadays. As a former PlayStation and PS-2 owner, it kinda feels like Sony given up on me. As games get more expensive (and the consoles – how much will the PS-3 be?!), more complicated, harder… it’s like they’re not for me anymore. I’m not able to invest the amount of time needed to learn some of the big new games (or the amount of money to buy them!), and so I’ve been left behind.
And this is where Nintendo feels different. They are welcoming the ‘casual gamer’. I know that a part of marketing is getting consumers to feel a kinship with a brand or product, and to produce a message that resonates with them. And – for me at least – Nintendo have done it, in a way that Microsoft and Sony haven’t.
The differences between men and women
November 20th, 2006We had a guest speaker at our Samaritans AGM tonight – Joe Ferns from General Office – who talked about suicide and depression in men. I’ve heard the statistic many times before that young men are more likely to die by suicide. I wasn’t aware that (although the overall number of suicides is slowly decreasing) the gap between number of suicides in men and women is widening – and has been for several decades. Joe gave an interesting perspective on some of the reasons behind this.
winter has arrived
November 19th, 2006I took Grace for a walk this morning, so that my wife could have a lie in. Was fun, but wow it’s cold!
Using Scheduled Tasks and batch files to do automatic backups
November 17th, 2006As I’ve started storing all of my project work and GTD notes in my Wiki program, I thought it might be a good idea to take regular backups of the text files it uses for data. And being a geek, I thought I’d automate it. 🙂
@ECHO OFF
REM this makes the batch file less noisy - dont
REM output commands to screen
REM limit scope for environment variables created here
REM to within this batch file only
SETLOCAL
REM make a note of where the current directory is
REM so we can go back there afterwards
REM (useful when running this batch file manually)
set DIR_TO_RESTORE=%CD%
REM run the 'date /t' command
REM this outputs in the format:
REM 19/11/2006
REM (probably different for people with non-UK regional
REM settings)
REM Using for to look at bits of date individually...
REM FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN ('command1') DO command
REM options -
REM tokens - identify which bits of the date output I want
REM (3 tokens - day month year),
REM delimiters - how they are separated ('/')
REM (users with non-UK regional settings might
REM need to change this - e.g. for '-')
REM command -
REM 1) date /t - show date without prompting to change it
REM 2) set - set environment variables to store each token
FOR /f "tokens=1-3 delims=/ " %%G IN ('date /t') DO (
REM set environment variables to store individual date values
REM (assumes date/month/year - users with non-UK regional
REM settings might want to switch date and month)
set dd=%%G
set mm=%%H
set yy=%%I)
REM this gives us a numeric date - in the format yyyyMMdd
REM which is useful in filenames for sorting
set TODAY=%yy%%mm%%dd%
REM go to first directory containing something to backup
REM tar it up, and move it to a backups directory
cd "C:\\Documents And Settings\\Administrator\\My Documents\\bLADE My Documents\\"
"C:\\cygwin\\bin\\tar.exe" -cvf %TODAY%_gtd.tar WM_Wiki_Pages
move %TODAY%_gtd.tar "..\\My Personal\\WMWiki Backups\\."
REM repeat as required
cd "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\My Documents\\My Personal\\"
"C:\\cygwin\\bin\\tar.exe" -cvf %TODAY%_ref.tar "My WM Wikis"
move %TODAY%_ref.tar "..\\My Personal\\WMWiki Backups\\."
REM finished! go back to where we started
cd %DIR_TO_RESTORE%
REM end scope for environment variables
ENDLOCAL