richard-slater.co.uk

5 Commands I Use Every Day

For my regular day job I am a Systems Administrator, my team and I manage a network with 7 servers and approximately 600 workstations, 200 laptops and 2500 users. All clients are Windows XP SP2 or SP3 and all servers are Windows 2003 SP2 or Windows 2003 R2 SP2.

I am sure I am not alone in knowing least 5 commands that I use day in and day out to manage workstations or servers on the network. I thought I would take the time to share some of these with you now.

Posted in Misc., Sys. Admin. | No Comments »

Audiosurf

One of the many RSS feeds I subscribe to is Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Over the weekend Alec Meer posted an article about a game called AudioSurf.

Essentially you feed in an audio track in one of several popular formats, AudioSurf then analyzes the music and generates a racetrack. On this racetrack ride several coloured blocks. These blocks can be collected in a grid, in much the same way as Connect 4. Once you have collected three or more of these blocks of the same colour in a connecting pattern you will score points based upon the number of blocks and the colour.

There are variations on the theme giving your character special abilities such as pushing the blocks to the side to create more complex patterns, or “mono” mode in which you only have one colour to collect and one to avoid.

Because the track is generated from music the number of tracks available is only limited to your music collection, equally two people can compete on the same track by feeding in the same music.

If you get a chance and have $10 sitting in your PayPal account, it is available on Steam. My current favourite track is Fire Fall Down by Hillsong United.

Posted in Games | No Comments »

Driving Lesson #12

Breaking my streak of 11 blog posts on the day of my driving lesson… I had a driving lesson yesterday. Strangely enough I feel that my driving is getting worse, I don’t think it actually is getting any worse I am just getting more confident and trying to do more things at once, at which point Kev steps in (literally) with the foot break.

Interesting experience today as we were driving round in the pouring rain, it was quite disturbing at first as the windscreen wipers were distracting, however once I got over that I was more or less ignoring them. The main issue I had was large blobs of rain obscuring entire cars, again once I got use to checking a bit more carefully I got over that too.

Kev went through reverse parking today which was actually easier than I expected, perhaps because I had been doing amazingly boring task of “paper work” before my lesson today so my brain was ready to learn something. The essence of the manoeuvre is as follows, please remember that this may be TOTALLY INCORRECT and much of it will only apply to the particular model of car I am driving:

1. Start about a meter beyond the car you are going to park opposite (i.e. with the front of the car facing).
2. Do the checks from your blind spot round to the rear window.
3. Reverse until the car disappears behind the head-rest of the car (this bit may not work unless you are in Kev’s car!).
4. Check your blind spot.
5. Do one whole turn to the left (i.e. towards the kerb).
6. Once the wheel arch starts to obscure the kerb, turn the wheel two whole turns to the right.
7. Once the car is parallel with the road straighten up.

At this point you should be there. I was stopping between each step to figure out what I was doing next, although it could be done without stopping I suppose.

Posted in Diary, Driving | No Comments »

Google Chrome

I am sure almost everyone in the whole world will have seen this as I got told by two friends, my RSS feeds and my wife almost simultaneously, which was a disturbing experience in itself. Google has released their own browser, Google made a rather amusing and informative cartoon too. There is pleanty of coverage from all of the usual suspects such as Lifehacker, Lifehacker (Again), Official Google Blog and The Register.

I am making the commitment to use Google Chrome for the Google Web Applications that I use, from what I have skim read about the product it is probably more suited than my add-on rich Firefox install (I do a fair amount of website coding, and even more debugging other peoples code – for which Firebug is a must).

I will try it for a week or two, see what it is like… it certainly seems faster than Firefox for browsing the web!

Posted in Things You Find | 1 Comment »

Driving Lesson #11

Had quite a break between lessons this time, found it much harder to get into the frame of mind after an 8 day break, came back quickly enough. Kev has been trying to get me talking through what I am doing to improve my concentration and awareness of the situation, I am still struggling to get junctions and roundabout quite right, I still tend to come up to the junction to fast not giving myself enough time to get into position, change gear down and look.

It is helpful talking may way through the things I find harder, because I often answer my own questions, or at least know where I am going wrong when I say it. We spent some time turning round in the road (three point turns, although they can be done in more than three) looking at hazards and improveing the frequency that I check mirrors.

Posted in Diary, Driving | No Comments »

Credit where credit is due Mythic!

Apparently this was released sometime last week however I had missed it completely, Mythic and its Electronic Arts overlords have decided that they will not be crediting former staff members in Warhammer Online. I really don’t understand it, Ryan Shwayder put it across better than I can.

Everyone who contributes to a project puts something in, even if their product is not explicitly included in the final complete product they are part of the process. Not including someone’s name in the credits of anything be it a game, a film or a TV show is a giant slap in the face. As a programmer I would be gutted to think that I had been excluded from the credits having put years of work into and then moved on to better things a few months before launch.

Open source manages it just fine, huge sweeping lists of credits for relativly minor utilities. Why can a game? Its not like anyone is forced to watch it or read it. Put it as a file in the install directory, or a page on a website.

Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Getting into the Groove

Catherine and I put on a barbecue this weekend, in theory it was a housewarming party, however we have been here for 16 months – so not really a housewarming. One of the things that we didn’t have to put any effort into was the music, and that was down to something called Grooveshark Lite.

Groveshark is a Florida start up company who’s business model is basically to allow users to upload their music collection to Groveshark’s servers, registered users can download the music (at a price), of the said price a cut goes to the artist, a cut to the person who uploaded the music and presumably the rest goes to Groveshark.

The lite service allows you to stream music for free from the Groveshark library without even registering, in addition there is an auto play feature that is similar to Pandora which picks music based upon your tastes, which you identify by rating each track as a happy face or a sad face.

The best thing about using Grooveshark for the music is once a couple of people had been shown how to use it all of our guests got to choose the music, someone would come along and queue up a couple of tracks someone else would come along and rate some of the tracks, when the track listing ran out Groveshark guessed pretty well.

As far as I can tell it is a legal service, as they are sharing out the profits from downloads to artists, ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch seem to suggest that it is legal too. The fact it is in Florida and has not been shutdown by the RIAA is also a good sign.

In summary, if you have a party give Groveshark and your guests the job of picking the music, you won’t be disappointed.

Posted in Diary, Things You Find | No Comments »

Watching Films

I spent some selfish time on Tuesday watching Donnie Darko. I wasn’t giving the film my full attention so I had to watch it again, in between I spent some time on the website and reading the FAQ both of which are well worth going through, however they are full of spoilers, so best to watch the film first.

Anyway, watching the film re-kindled my love of watching films with a complex plot, films like WALL-E, The Dark Knight and Iron Man are great to watch, however you hardly leave the cinema wondering what just happened… in a good way. It is a fine balance between creating a film that totally confuses, and makes you think.

The one thing that has stuck out from talking to people about it is that it doesn’t make much sense if you look at it in linear time, what we watch in the film is the final iteration. I won’t say much more as I am sure there are people who haven’t seen it before.

The final upshot of watching spending selfish time is I went on the hunt for other things to watch in the evenings, these are three of the best CGI Animated Shorts I have seen over the past few days, sorry about the YouTube quality, it is the best I could find:

• Kiwi by Dony Permedi
• Funkphonic by Rakesh Tank
• MORE by Mark Osborne

Enjoy and post your favourites in the comments as and when you come across them.

Edit

Seen this one before but couldn’t find it untill now, not sure it beats the above it is a great story however.

Posted in Diary, Things You Find | No Comments »

Driving Lesson #10

20 hours of driving lessons completed now, and Kev and I took the time to go through the Driver’s Record that the Driving Standards Agency provides people who book a theory test for the first time. The Driver’s Record is broken down into twenty driving skills and four other skills related to car ownership. You can read more about the Driver’s Record on direct.gov.

Each of the 20 driving skills are rated between 1 and 5, where 1 is Introduced and 5 is independent without prompts from the driving instructor. In total I have one of the skills at level 5, three at level 4, twelve at level 3 none at level 2, two at level 1 and there are two that I have not looked at yet (emergency stops and parking). I am pleased with the progress I have made although I expect I will need another 40 hours of lessons before I will be close to being able to take my practical test.

Onto the actual content of the lesson, we spent some more time reversing round corners which along with turning round in the road, I find quite difficult. We also covered some more roundabouts and junctions both of which I am improving on, but still find difficult.

Kev also taught me a technique for moving off faster, essentially it is moving from the step by step approach to moving off to being about to prepare to move off quickly. Here is the process I have been using up until now, taken from the safely stopped position (i.e. handbrake on and in neutral):

1. push the clutch down
2. change into first gear
3. give the engine a bit of gas
4. bring the clutch up to biting point
5. put more gas on to get the revs back up
6. check the internal mirror, right door mirror and right blind spot, only move on to the next step if it is safe.
7. take the hand brake off
8. keep feet in the same place until moving
9. come off the clutch and add more gas until up to speed

The technique Kev taught me today was to combine 3, 4 and 5 with a single movement to bring the clutch up to biting point and the gas down to provide sufficient power from the engine. It was good fun, I don’t think I have got it yet but I am improving.

Unfortunately I haven’t got a lesson until next Wednesday, I know how learners feel now if they have to wait a week between each lesson.

Posted in Diary, Driving | 1 Comment »

Twitter by SMS is no more

In Europe at least, Twitter was unable to come to an agreement with mobile phone operators to continue to send incoming Tweets to mobile phones via SMS, at least one person thinks that SMS is a deceptively profitable service for the network operators. Surely services that use SMS are going to generate more revenue as people pass funny Tweets onto non-Twitter users.

After all, all of those jokes that zip round like wildfire whenever something happens in the news aren’t just the creative juices of the masses expressed in a short message, they are written by the networks to encourage people to send more messages (by passing the jokes on).

All is not lost however, I have been using jTwitter for a long time and it does a great job of keeping me up to date on the move. The Twitter API seems good enough to allow anyone too interface with the service without extensive programming knowledge – I suspect we will see more services that allow access to Twitter from a mobile phone.

Posted in Blog, Misc. | No Comments »