Bands what I have seen live and that
Whilst my alcohol-addled brain allows, I thought it worthy to take stock of some of the fantastic (and not so fantastic) live music which I have been fortunate enough to see over the years. There are probably loads missing but I'll try and keep this list up-to-date as time goes on or memories come back to me...
Google on Elections
Google's whole business is built on deep analysis of data. Google's blog did an interesting review of search during the election debate last night with some pretty neat insights, but what's more interesting is what Google Suggest thinks...
Aptly(?) Nick Clegg doesn't appear to be popular enough to have his own suggestion list!
So, vote for the hot, rich, judaeo-christian freemason David Camerson; or the one eyed autistic shepherd Gordon Brown (or the guy Google hasn't heard of). The choice is yours...
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
This week, on the advice of a friend I am embarking on a journey into Quintessence's "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".
Originally published as a book, the list is also available on their website in a handy searchable table.
It's going to be a long task, but I'm looking forward to exploring some new music as well as revisiting some classics; many of the albums are outside of my normal 'comfort zone' and I'm painfully aware that Durham's bubble doesn't do much for expanding my auditory horizons these days...
I'll list all the albums and chart my progress in this post, I'll also be tweeting my thoughts along the way.
Exporting Contacts from the Durham Uni Database
Quick bit of example php code to pull people's details out of the Durham University user database (not LDAP, this is a separate database with slightly different details) - this database is just sitting on the mysql server without a password!
The applications of this database are endless, in this simple example the script grabs everyone from one college and turns it into a handy CSV file you could import into your address book, etc...
Iris Exchequer Fails to Install
Had a strange problem with a machine at work failing to do a clean install of the latest version (v6.01.223) of Iris Exchequer (Pervasive edition) running on Windows XP... Windows reported the installer as not responding in its final stages and it crashed out.
Running the installer to upgrade other machines to the latest worked fine, but I couldn't get it to clean install. Couldn't find any support for this on the internet but after some investigation it turns out those 'final stages' are making changes to the registry -- the solution it turns out is to manually override the permissions of the Exchequer registry key in HKLM and give all users full access. (Run regsvr, browse to HKEY_LocalMachine->Software->Exchequer, right click->Permissions).
The Durham Hub is Back...
Returning to college residence might mean the end of bittorrent, but at least we can have ultra-fast internal file sharing again...