It was so easy I thought I was kidding myself

I came home today to find my mantis server had stopped working. Something was wrong with the some aspect of the HDD. Not entirely sure yet, but I've put the drive in another machine and copied all the valuable data of it.

I was impressed just how easy it was to restore some aspects of the server. The physical machine I moved it to already had Apache on it. So it was a cut and paste of the Virtual Host and Listen line to configure and a bounce to get it going.

The next step was to reconfigure the router so that the server could be reach from the interwub. This was a 5 second job. Quick test, no database! Of course!

So I jumped on to the machine and quickly realised I couldn't access the existing MySQL install. Argh, what was I going to do? Try and reconfigure the current install of MySQL to point at the dodgy servers data? I thought I would have a look in the MySQL folder to see how the data was stored. There was a folder called data, and in that a folder with the same name as the database.

I wonder what would happen if I just cut and paste that

So I tempted fate (I have backups) and logged into MySQL, show databases and there it was. Ha! How awesome is that? OK, now for a real test. to access it via the mantis web-app. Works perfectly. Once again, awesome! Awesome like a million hot dogs.

Now, allow me to digress. I love it when applications don't bind themselves to the system that they are running on or force uses jump through some farcical ceremony just to perform a simple task. For instance, my brother has a Toshiba Gigabeat for his mp3 player. I remember him trying to get his songs onto it. You had to install their application and then work this ghastly interface just to transfer some songs. I think it was more than 24 hour period before he had everything working.

My Creative MuVo is literally a flash drive that I could drag and drop files onto. The music player app was smart enough to work out folder structures and to not trust the file system state as it last remembered it. My Nokia N95 8GB thankfully supports both methods.

Last time I checked most users know how to drag and drop a file and while it might not be immediately obvious that your application can support such advanced functionality, it is nothing that good documentation can't fix. If you have to spend lots of money writing an application, try making it one that wraps a GUI around the cut and paste process. You will save money if nothing else.

Anyway, I have just finished copying some music onto my phone. Time to go to sleep with some soft tunes ghosting through my headphones.

Dalmore - 12yo

For the past year and a half to two years I have been a part of the Australian Single Malt Whisky Club. Each month they send me a bottle of single malt whisky that I would otherwise be unable to purchase from the local alcohol merchants. It's a passion that started after a fantastic time I had exploring Scotland's whisky in 2004.

Today I was delivered a fancy bottle of Dalmore 12yo. I'll quote the site as they don't have a permalink.

Dalmore is literaly, "the big meadowland". The distillery is situated North of the the traditional highlands, drawing its water from the Alness River, near the city of Inverness.

Colour: Rich, deep, golden mahogany.

Nose: Intense and firm. Well structured with silky smooth malty tones - a hint of Oloroso sherry lingers in the background. It shows great finesse, extolling fragrances of orange, marmalade and spiced notes.

Taste: Good attack on the mouth, more elegance than muscle. The aged Oloroso butts smooth its rich, fleshy body with great harmony. Almost a concentrated citric mouth-feel captivates and tantalises the middle part of your tongue. An aftertaste of great abundance rewards the palate. A Highland malt of great distinction.

Not sure if all of that actually applies to the whisky. My nose and palate is not as honed as whoever wrote that. I find whisky descriptions a lot like a real estate advertisement. You never really know until you give it a good look yourself and to be weary of "renovator's delights". This is especially relevant to whisky.

So I have my dram and shall give it a go. This is live whisky-blogging. The interwub is a powerful beast often abused. :)

Colour, all correct. It has the fantastic colour to it. Nose, not sure. It's a little blocked and my ability to detect faint scents has never been tip-top. Sorry to disappoint you all but from what I can tell there is no marmalade.

The taste is delightful, strong yet smooth and the faint citrus on the tip of your tongue is present. I rather like this.

Onto the shelf it goes for an occasion that warrants it, like a guest. So if you ever come around for dinner. Ask for a dram of the Dalmore 12yo, to (probably) misquote Iain Banks in his book Raw Spirit.

The perfect size for a dram is one that pleases the guest and the host.

NIN - This one's on him.

I've been a fan of Nine Inch Nails since the mid 90's. Somewhere around the time Broken came out, but it was Pretty Hate Machine that was album I heard and fell in love with.

Over the past few six months Trent has becoming more and more aware/involved with his significant and loyal fan base as well as fully embracing the concept of creative commons. It's been pretty special to watch him go from four full, very good albums (Pretty Hate Machine, Downward Spiral, Fragile, With Teeth) over the period of sixteen odd years to three albums (Year Zero, Ghosts I-IV and The Slip) over the next two.

This is pretty awesome from a fan perspective. We get lots of new content and each album is increasingly free or of low cost. Radiohead were the first to trial this process for their album In Rainbows. After which Trent marketed the Saul Williams album: The inevitable rise and liberation of Niggy Tardust as free or $5 if you were so inclined. I didn't pay the $5 as Saul Williams isn't my style of music. I still downloaded it and had a listen. I liked a couple of songs allot but the rest were as I was expecting, not what I'm interested in.

Now you may think, $5 that is pretty cheap, you should fork over the cash. You still have the album don't you? My argument is that $5 is cheap, but its not a micro-payment. It still has a value and while Saul Williams has not acquired the money of me this time. The next time I will be interested again because I know that there is a chance I may like his album. He has something that usually costs a lot of money. Exposure.

The Exposure aspect is important. Trent and Nine Inch Nails have exposure so that when Ghosts I-IV came out. I first ordered the free version because I was a little short of cash. Some while after I purchased the version that was right for me. Turns out its the glossy double CD back for $75. $70 more than the cheapest version. Why? Firstly I like buying CDs. Sure it's wasteful, but you get more than the music, you get something tangible to hold and a series of images that are somehow more real than a pdf document of the same thing. There is effort in a NIN package that correlates to the effort that goes into each track. Secondly, because I roughly know where the money is going. To the artist for the work he has put into the album.

Trent made a lot of money off Ghosts and it is a decent album, not his best, not his worst either. A worthy item in in the NIN catalogue.

What is the point of this post about free music. Nine Inch Nails released an album today called "The Slip". As he says on his news post: This one is on him. You can't dislike an artist who gives as much as he gets.

Whether or not the flurry of productivity coming from Trent will have an impact on the quality of his work is one that can only be answered in hindsight. As a fan I'm completely biased and won't be ashamed of that.

For those who like Nine Inch Nails. Enjoy!


note: I call him Trent because I got tired of writing Trent Reznor very quickly.

The sweetest thing

Every now and again I have a moment of realisation where I am thankful that somebody else thought of something before I did. I had one of these just the other day. They are a little bit like this xkcd comic.

I was trying to find a bug in a binary tree and the problem would not manifest itself immediately. The code worked for a seemingly arbitrary period of time, but at a depth of N a get out clause needed to be true and it wasn't. Therefore it kept on recursing until it either could not create any more branch-nodes or it generated a stack-overflow.

I attempted to step through my code trying to find my bug, but I find it hard to debug recursive code. You’re never too sure how deep you need to go before the problem manifests. After missing the bug I pondered how I could represent the tree to find the bug. One of the things I have been teaching myself to do of late, is when I have a hard to reproduce bug, ask myself the question "How can I best model my data to visualise the bug?". It is not quite changing my work practices to stop bugs before they occur, but it really helps once they do manifest.

XML came to my rescue. I added a dump routine that iterated the tree dumping it out in well formed xml. I then used Notepad++ to display the xml with indenting and the bug was immediately visible.

So the moral of the story is: I love xml and am glad somebody else thought of it a long time ago. It’s a sweet way to visualise certain types of data and with the assistance of text indentation it is even better.


Just so you don’t think I’m blinded by xml-lust: Xml for network messaging formats is still a bad idea. Seriously, any format where you spend 50% of your bandwidth describing the data being sent is wasteful.

p.s. I am aware that this is a bit of an odd post.