I finally got round to writing a quick C# console application to organise photos into folders automatically. The date the picture was taken is easy to get using the BitmapMetadata class.

Here’s the code:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;

namespace OrganisePhotosIntoDateFolders
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string folderPath = "C:\\PhotosToOrganise";
if (args.Length > 0) folderPath = args[0];
foreach (string photoPath in Directory.EnumerateFiles(folderPath, "*.jpg"))
{
string subFolderName = "Unknown";
string photoFileName = new FileInfo(photoPath).Name;
DateTime dateTaken = DateTime.MinValue;
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(photoPath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))
{
BitmapMetadata md = (BitmapMetadata)BitmapFrame.Create(fs).Metadata;
DateTime.TryParse(md.DateTaken, out dateTaken);
}
if (dateTaken > DateTime.MinValue) subFolderName = dateTaken.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");
string subFolderPath = String.Format("{0}\\{1}", folderPath, subFolderName);
if (!Directory.Exists(subFolderPath)) Directory.CreateDirectory(subFolderPath);
File.Move(photoPath, String.Format("{0}\\{1}", subFolderPath, photoFileName));
}
}
}
}

6 Music scrobbles everything they play to their last.fm page at http://www.last.fm/user/bbc6music. (Thanks to Steve for showing me this)

The currently playing song is highlighted yellow. Click on its title to go through into the song details.

If the song is available in Spotify, there is a link which will open the track directly in Spotify, and that’s it.

Uefa have branded as “ridiculous” the number of players on the payroll of the Premier League’s Big Four clubs. Liverpool, who under Rafa Benítez have stockpiled a 62-man squad, the biggest in the league and enough for more than five full teams, have come in for particular criticism.

Uefa limit clubs to 25 players each for the Champions league and their general secretary, David Taylor, speaking exclusively to Observer Sport, said: “Ridiculous. 62? You could have two full-size practice games. You can only field 11 at one time. It’s an open question as to how many you actually need. Is it 20, 25?”
Observer, 29th March 2009, http://tinyurl.com/d7epns

via Football: Said and Done | Football | The Observer.

Your Dell Order is scheduled to arrive between 08:00 and 18:00 on the 12/01/2009. Please arrange for someone to be there
throughout this time – as we cannot be more specific about the time of delivery.

As your order is already on its way we regret it’s too late to change the following details:

1. delivery date
2. delivery address
3. order details

The man at the match says it was easy; the headline writer decides it was a squeeze. And who is James Osman?

More recently, it’s become one of those must-have things for keen web-trend followers. We’re doing this event or that campaign so it needs a microsite. Unfortunately, there is a common misconception amongst some that have approached us on the subject, that because what they are going to write on the site is going to be about fewer things, we should charge fewer pounds to build the site for them. It’s a bit like saying the Racing Post should be cheaper than the Daily Mirror because it’s only about horses.

The fact is, just like printing a paper is printing a paper regardless of the words, it still needs the same effort in graphics work, CSS, flash, design and implementation. In fact, sometimes it needs more effort because it’s allowed to stray from brand guidelines or be more creative or adventurous. It may only have 10 pages on it when it goes live but with the CMS the customer adds those themselves anyway, so that makes no difference. It’s a bit of a customer-service conundrum: some marketing geezer decided to make up a word, people expect the price to be lower, and we get grumpy customers unhappy with the numbers on their quotes.

If fifth is success, then fourth is the Holy Grail. One place higher, yet a million miles away. Fourth gets you into the “Champions” League, so called because back in the funny old game days, you actually had to be champions to get in it. Now you can be outclassed by three other clubs and still get in there. As there’s no real reason to fight for third over fourth (both places go into the Champions League at the same point), Liverpool and Arsenal usually just decide amongst themselves which one of them is going to have more of a “transitional” season than the other and that’s that. As long as they beat everyone else, by having better players than everyone else paid for by Champions League money, it’s all good.

When I was growing up, second was nowhere. Now you can be fourth, and world-class players like Fernando Torres will still join you. Fifth, and you’re struggling to sign anyone.

Cue the arrival of trillionaire Arab owners at Man City, a club who only a few seasons ago were plying their trade in the third tier of English football. Now we have a club which is overnight richer than any of the top 4, and soon enough will inevitably displace one of them. While this is exciting to a point, it does mean that already what was the faintest possibility of progressing from fifth to fourth for Everton has now been wiped out, and perhaps even coming sixth will soon be virtually impossible. Three games in, two of them already lost, this sort of realisation does limit the excitement for some of us.

Understandably, City fans are thrilled to suddenly support a club with far more cash than their city rivals United. City’s fans have always been obsessed with United, although they don’t seem to have the same irrational edge to it that Evertonians have about Liverpool. Could you imagine Ian Rush managing Everton? Of course not, but there was not one complaint when Mark Hughes took over at Eastlands. We don’t care what the red side say, so the song goes, but seeing as there isn’t a song that doesn’t mention them, then it’s pretty clear we do care, and if there is any justice in the world, the only good that can come out of this is the spectacular and rapid demise of Liverpool FC.

If City are to displace one club out of four, it’s going to be either Arsenal or Liverpool. The key difference between those two clubs is stadia. I’m about to go past one of them on this train, a monster that generates 7-figure revenues with every match. The other is an artist’s impression. Liverpool, with their debt-ridden owners and grand stadium plans, simply cannot afford not to be in the Champions League, and where Standard Liege failed, Man City can succeed. Surely the first victims of City’s new wealth will be our lovable neighbours? I mean, is there a God or what?

The only fly in this ointment is DIC, the Dubai-based consortium determined to upset the majority of the city of Liverpool’s population by purchasing its least popular football club / most popular tourist attraction, and flooding it with money. These people just never give up. Not only is there a once-proud club just one mile away which is offering itself for sale like a cheap tart, but there are others, like Newcastle, who would take their money tomorrow with glee. What is it about Liverpool for heaven’s sake? Please avert your gaze.

So, we will have to see how all this pans out. The glass ceiling was reinforced when the Arabs arrived, so if we can’t crack it, then let’s at least hope to see Liverpool come crashing through from the other direction. Watch this space..!

I’ve watched most of Euro 2008 but the last two nights have really summed up the meaning of Commercial Reality. On Wednesday, Germany vs Turkey on the BBC. Gary Lineker, Alan Hansen, Alan Shearer and Martin O’Neill in a palatial studio in the heart of Vienna. Ray Stubbs and the enigmatic Euro 2000 winner Marcel Desailly pitch-side, offering precious little more punditry than the boys in the studio had already mustered. Oh, and a young whipper-snapper reporter getting soaked in the UEFA official fun area. All on good salaries, in nice hotels, at our expense.

When disaster struck and the single TV feed – that UEFA forced every country in the world to take – went down, some countries had to revert to a fan in the stadium offering commentary by mobile. We in Blighty of course could fall back on fabulous BBC radio (for they are all over there too) with two more commentators, plus Chris Waddle (it was Graham Taylor’s night off).

Last night, it was ITV’s turn. Steve Rider, Didi Hamann (why?) and Andy Townsend (why-oh-why?) in someone’s living room with some orange boards and a plasma TV on the wall. “Budget” doesn’t do it justice. But can you blame them? With no home nations involved, it’s the same old tired adverts playing at half-time (anyone understand the Cantona one?). They’re probably barely breaking even and would rather be showing Emmerdale. Not really something Gary and the team need to worry about. ITV have even realised it’s not worth showing the final as we all watch it on the Beeb anyway so they’re not bothering.

In spite of all this, I wouldn’t change the BBC one bit. After the Second World War, they set up services across Eastern Europe throughout the communist era to give people hope and a link with the West. Now after 68 years, the Romanian service is closing after a job well done so that the BBC can continue is expansion of similar activity in the Middle-East. No commercial operation could ever justify this sort of activity because while its value may be obvious, it just doesn’t fit with the commercial model. So, long may it continue and long live the BBC.

Rugby League is another story altogether. As Dwaine Chambers waits to see if he can play in the top flight of a major sport after 39 minutes of reserve-team action (who needs academies?), he and the rest of his Castleford Tigers buddies are off to Cardiff for a weekend of Millennium Magic: an extra game each, over a bonanza weekend with real league points at stake… and everyone loves it. And not just any extra game: each team plays their fiercest local rivals (and Harlequins play Catalans to make up the numbers).

I was introduced to Rugby League by Jenny’s dad, who’s always been a Leeds fan. Leeds are champions at the moment, so when I go to Headingley with Jen I can’t help feeling like the tourist fan at Old Trafford, only slightly less glamorous.

Millennium Magic wasn’t the first measure to be brought in without a flinch, which might have caused palpitations in the world of the round ball. The Super League is made up of 12 teams, most of whom have adapted daft names with no historical or cultural base whatsoever. Take the Vikings for example. York? Nah, Widnes.

12 teams, so… 22 games each. Not quite enough that. So, the top 6 play each other not twice but 3 times. Some home, some away. Throw in Millennium Magic, and a play-off system so complicated I won’t even begin to go there, and you’re getting on for 30 games. Leeds, for instance, will play Bradford 4 times, Wigan and Saints 3 times and Castleford twice. Then maybe Bradford or Saints again in the play-offs. Yeah, that’s fair I reckon. Still it’s worth bearing in mind that the best teams still win, so maybe it’s not so bad and football should lighten up and learn something.

Where football ponders, Rugby League gets on and does. Take video evidence. FIFA reckon you can’t introduce it into football because the game should be the same at all levels, so you can’t have anything in top-flight football that isn’t in Sunday League. Except fourth officials. With headsets. But you know, anything else. Not a problem for Rugby League, because you only get video evidence if your game is on the telly. Amazing but true. The good teams get video evidence and accurate decisions nearly every week. The weak teams get two extra blokes with flags behind the try line. If that isn’t integrity I don’t know what is.

Anyway, if the weather’s crap this weekend, you could do worse than add a bit of Millennium Magic to your day. It’s on Sky Sports this Bank Holiday weekend. Enjoy, and see you back here at Christmas for my next post.

The home page proclaims that 2% of carbon generated by the FA Cup has been already been offset by a mere 7,803 pledges. Woopy doo. I’d say that’s pretty depressing. At that rate it will require a further 382,347 pledges to make the FA Cup carbon neutral, before we can even start thinking about the Carling Cup and the Johnstone Paints trophy. Surely a much better idea would be just to run the FA Cup over one weekend at Wembley and let the big four play each other in a 3-game semi-final / final bonanza and get the whole pointless affair over with? Not only would it slash the competition’s energy use, it would also save the rest of us the annual (and annually-dashed) hope of “a good cup run” without in any way affecting the eventual outcome.

The site also gives examples of pledges made by environmentally-aware football followers. “Keith has pledged to for away games, take a coach (National Express) to the match instead of your car”. I must say it is a relief to know that I can expect my car to be on my driveway of a Saturday and not halfway down the M1 with Keith at the wheel on an away-day bender, so well done to Keith for that.

If football is really going to make a difference, it has to be the clubs that set the example. Take Liverpool for instance. They could simply stop selling tickets to tourists. The amount of carbon emitted through European short-haul air travel would instantly plummet. Then they’d realise they don’t need to waste all that energy on a new ground because they’d struggle to fill their current one, as local reds would much rather spend their time venting their spleen on the Radio City phone-in than venturing through the Shankly Gates.

If that’s too much to ask then perhaps Rafa could just keep his mouth shut? At least that would save enough hot air to spare Keith the indignity of the National Express.

Going from 2-0 up to 3-0 up in style:

A wondergoal winner in the 92nd minute:

Och aye!

I had an argument a couple of seasons back with someone in the row behind me about Faddy. This guy absolutely slated him at every opportunity. Keep proving ‘em wrong Jim!

Having these two ads next to each other is bad enough… but is it the same woman in both?

From Random items of interest

Mickey’s secret is Head and Shoulders, see, which of course is bollocks because my secret is also Head and Shoulders and I started to go bald at 17 and I’ve had the same girlfriend/wife for 11 years (not that the second of these dissimilarities is a bad thing I might add!).

Whoever thought of this must be living on another planet, because Mickey comes across as an absolute c*ck and I am a customer of theirs but looking at my friends I absolutely don’t know anyone remotely like this, and I don’t know of anybody that does. I’ve never known an ad completely misjudge its customer base quite like this.

Anyway, you know when you’re watching telly and you go to 101 and it’s crap so you keep pressing the up button and it goes past Emmerdale and Bones, and about half a dozen “up”s later it finds a channel that’s showing Top Gear or Question of Sport or Catherine Tate and you think “yeah, that’ll do”?

Well there are ten million people (apparantly) who do exactly that, so the channel is really really popular… but nobody knows what it’s called. In marketing speak it has “low brand awareness”.

So, they’re going to call the channel “Dave”, because unlike Mickey, everybody really does know a Dave (just the one?), and unlike the Head and Shoulders ad, this is pure marketing genius.

Look out for the Dave channel, coming soon to a goggle-box near you…

Boro won the League Cup
Went on to play in Europe
That suited you

But they’re not so great anymore
A season of mediocrity is in store
For those boys in red
So we “turned your head”
And now you’re a Blue

Pleased to be at a club this big
You couldn’t resist that little dig
At poor old Boro
Your previous employer
How rude

But what if our squad so thin
Does not a UEFA Cup game win?
What will you do?

In a couple of years
Will it all end in tears?
If your agent needs the cash
Will you be gone in a flash?
To Man U?

There’s just one thing we ask
A quite simple task
Before the inevitable occurs
And we sell you to Spurs
Will it come true?

To seal a place for your name
In the Toffee hall of fame
And go down in folklore
Just make sure you score
One or two

At Anfield

One day, when our debt-free club’s team of world-class superstars are parading the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League trophies round Liverpool (if the council will let us), we’ll look back and thank our lucky stars that those 15,000 brave souls were right in their convictions.

Or, maybe it’s the death of the club as we know it? The slippery slope? Perhaps next we’ll have a giant furry mascot (Terry the Toffee Tiger), some bloke with a drum that echoes round an empty stand, and music that plays when we score a goal.

Or maybe we’ll just be exactly the same, but in Kirkby. Beating Tottenham one day then losing to Reading. I think that’s the most likely outcome, and if that’s how it turns out then that’s all right by me.

Unfortunately I only had my camera-phone with me and it struggled to focus on the view, instead getting itself fascinated with the structure of the building resulting in some blurry shots L

Here’s Laney with the famous building in the background (and is that Jamie Carragher walking past, enjoying his international retirement?)

Here’s the view of Canary Wharf from the top:

And here’s Graham trying not to look blasé about the view he looks at every day from his desk:

Here’s some pics for the interested:

The paper and the propaganda

Keith, Bill and Moyesey know what’s best

Look, it’s just round the corner.

Open Lost Connections

Sadly not everybody is fully in touch with the real meaning of the song, and some have chosen to poke fun at Tay’s art.

Tay’s original work might not quite have quite what it takes, but you have to admit that the drum-and-bass remix has that edge. Look out for it on a dancefloor near you…

It’s Monday morning. I am due in Holborn at 9.00 which means I was up at 4.45 this morning to get the 6.05 train from Leeds. At 7.15 we got into Grantham right on time… and we’re still here at 7.45 L

Coupled with my current bout of man-flu, this does not make for the best ever Monday morning.

Also spare a thought for Mrs Wells who dropped me off at the station and has been in work herself since 6!

Ho hum.

8.45 UPDATE! The train has been cancelled and is now heading back to Leeds! This is one shitty morning so far.

Today I spent ages looking on the web for how to get the title of a PDF out of the file using C#. I couldn’t find anyone that had done it, so I opened the PDF in notepad and the title was just in there, in plain text, really easy to get at. So, here’s the code for the benefit of future googlers on the subject…

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.IO;
...
private static readonly Regex REGEX_PDFTITLE = new Regex("<< /Title \\((.*?)\\)", RegexOptions.Compiled);
private string GetPDFTitle(string pdfFilePath)
{
  using(StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(pdfFilePath))
  {
  string currentLine = null;
  while((currentLine = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
  {
  Match m = REGEX_PDFTITLE.Match(currentLine);
  if(m.Success)
  {
  return m.Groups[1].Value;
  }
  }
  return String.Empty;
  }
}

Saw this poster in the Crown Inn the other night. The curvilinear heptagon in the bottom corner reads: “Try the Crown Sunday Lottery…50p a go…drawn every Monday”. Genius.

I saw this sign in Wharfedale Hospital the other day and it made me laugh. It doesn’t say “and it’s shit and we hate it” between the two sentences, but you can see that’s what the writer meant.

The school is firmly against this and I have a lot of sympathy with the school’s position. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I learned good basic values at school which are sourced from Christianity, but at no time was Anglicanism, or even Christianity at large, force-fed to me. It’s an interesting approach, and to explain it to outsiders (i.e. the C of E), it’s a bit like when you tell a hilarious story and no-one else gets it: “you had to be there”. Yes, there is an assembly with hymns and sermon every morning; yes, we have a chapel with a pipe organ and pews; yes, Founders’ Day includes a special service held at the Anglican Cathedral every year… but it’s not a church school and it doesn’t feel like a church school when you’re there.

The school welcomes pupils and teachers from all faiths, purely on ability. I hope it stays that way.

Either way, is there anything to be read into the placement of Thierry Henry nearest the exit?

I’m very much into Facebook at the moment and I’m catching up with people I haven’t seen since school, the lakes and Uni.

I spent Saturday afternoon in Sheffield botanical gardens with fellow Bluecoat sixth-formers (from left to right) Kate Clough, Julie Culshaw and Trish Cahill, after catching up with Trish on Facebook.

Number two is Shazam: hold your phone in the air in a bar and get a text telling you what the current song is called. Absolutely amazing.

But number one by a mile is Google Maps. Satellite images of the entire world. How do you better that? Well, they’ve bettered it themselves.

When I saw this video I thought it was a wind-up, but it’s true – you can now see what somewhere looks like at street level! How would you even begin to go about making that work??

So, seeing as we’re not accompanying the folks to Vegas this year, this is the next best thing…

Wikipedia defines hate as “an emotion of intense revulsion, distaste, enmity, or antipathy for a person, thing, or phenomenon…a rational reaction to people whose interests consistently conflict with one’s own”.

It’s true that this is not something you feel every day, so the word “hate” is really over-used. So, to fully understand how this feels, all you need to do is look at this picture:

COME ON MILAN!!!

We’re currently referring to our yet-to-be-born as Junior. I would prefer to call it Cletus (the Fœtus) but this is not too popular with the bairn’s mother, as she feels it may tempt fate to hand us a Cletus Del Roy Spuckler for real.

Take a look at http://share.glenwells.com/ChristieWedding.

“[Real Madrid] link themselves to whoever they feel fit and it’s not right…I don’t think it’s a correct way to go about their business…It’s really destabilising for both the club and [Christiano Ronaldo] to have all this speculation about his future.”

David Gill, Chief Executive, Manchester United, 29th August 2004
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/3609310.stm

“It’s not just the size of Manchester United – but Wayne [Rooney] would have the chance to work with Sir Alex, who has a track record when it comes to dealing with young players and making them even better…Wayne would also be playing alongside world-class players…And his commercial value would be enhanced by becoming a Manchester United player….We would hope Wayne would want to come here and we have a powerful all-round package to offer him.”

Sorry chaps but you can’t have it both ways.

This is the first in an occasional series: a mix of 10 of the best tunes I own into 57 minutes of total iPod bliss.

This is the order I’ve mixed them in, not necessarily the order I’d rank them against each other…

1. Alison Limerick – Where Love Lives (Classic 12″)
2. Three Drives – Greece 2000 (Original 12″)
3. Energy 52 – Cafe Del Mar 98 (Original Three ‘n’ One Extended 12″)
4. India – To Be In Love
5. Pete Heller – Big Love (Dronez Mix)
6. Spiller – Groovejet (Spiller’s Extended Vocal)
7. Lucid – I Can’t Help Myself (Lucid Vocal)
8. Faithless – Insomnia
9. Moby – Go
10. Daft Punk – Digital Love

The tunes that didn’t make it will be in Volume 2.

Download the mix here. Right-click and choose “Save Target As” (MP3 / 78.8MB / 5.5mins at 2Mbps) … enjoy!

See the photos here!

Also, I have a couple of phone videos for you: the crocodile band and some street dancing moves (You’ll need to tilt your head for the second one..!)

If you can’t see the movies, then you need to install QuickTime.

So now, I’m on this new package that they don’t tell people about: £17.99 with 2 months free. Over the next 12 months it will work out even cheaper than Tiscali with no service interruption. Result!

I’ve also just found out that as a Sky TV customer, I am entitled to free Evening and Weekend land-line calls. Free I tell you! The equivalent BT plan (Option 2) is £3.95 a month. You just need to add “Sky Talk Freetime” to your package at the MySky portal. I’ve changed my BT package to Option 1 with paperless billing at £10.75 a month so I’ve just cut my phone and broadband bill from around £39 month to just under £11 for two months and around £30 thereafter: £146 saved over the next 12 months! It’s worth doing if you can find the time!

You might think that being on the 13.10 constitutes an early dart, but not so. I’m racing back to the office because something we’ve done works fine and dandy there, but on site generates the most meaningless of error messages. The usual practice of copying the error message verbatim into Google and seeing who else has had it and fixed it got me nowhere. I’m unique on planet Earth with this one. So my aim is to be in the office for half four and to try to break what we’ve done there, so that I can see how to break it and therefore (maybe) how to fix it at our customer’s site. A long shot I know!

Been reading a few articles on t’Internet, including this one about something call the Keep Flags Scouse campaign. What a load of chuffing nonsense. I haven’t got the foggiest what this is on about, proabably as I am not a Red, but perhaps because I have spent too long in Yorkshire, which is why I now use words like “chuffing”. It seems to me that these people think they are wittier than they are and really should just give it a rest.

Enough about our lovable neighbours, I came across one of those funny lists of annoying stuff on the When Skies are Grey website. Can’t really agree with number 18, as I like the glitzy bars myself, and Newz bar and Alma de Cuba are favourite haunts when in town, but number 21 (“Alex Curran’s page in the Mirror. She advised that we should wear hotpants, with thick tights and medium heels. I looked a right twat at the Tottenham game.”) made me laugh out loud much to the confusion of my fellow passengers.

[If Mike is reading this, he will have no concept of who Alex Curran is, as he inhabts a superior mental plane immune to the influences of Heat magazine and the 3am girls. So, for Mike, she is the girlfriend, soon-to-be-wife, of Steven Gerrard, whose children may or may not be fathered by same. Allegedly...]

Just pulling into Doncaster… I’ll try not to leave it so long before my next bout of nonsense.

GDW

The last thing I remember from last night was the warning of several tonnes of snow in the morning. So, with trepidation, I peeled back the curtains to take a look. Not a single flake. Pah. To be fair though, we are very sheltered here in the Wharfe valley. When I head up the hill to work later (which is in the Aire valley, you see) the weather may well be very different. That’s not unusual. I have in the past driven from thick fog at home into bright sunshine, so we’ll see what the top of the hill holds later.

One thing I didn’t do last night was watch England as it’s a pointless waste of time. I looked on Sky Sports News this morning to see how they did and guess what? They lost 1-0, and now smiling Steve is “under fire”. England, their moronic fans and the red-top hacks have absolutely no idea what friendlies are for.

Ashley Cole and Wayne Bridge are injured. So surely you find the next best English left-back and give him a go against some decent opposition. If he’s good, you’ve learnt something. If he’s bad, you’ve also learnt something (that you’re screwed unless Bridge or Cole recovers). If you play Phil Neville there, who’s played there before and done OK, but doesn’t regularly play there for his club, you’ve learnt nowt.

The reason they don’t do this is that if they lose, the fans and the media get on the manager’s back like it was the World Cup final. In truth, it’s better to lose 10-0 and know for certain that you will never play any of those 11 players again. That’s the point of friendlies, but until everyone involved understands this, England will continue to waste each valuable friendly and get nowhere.

The game is also a pointer to the state of English football. Take the goalie, Ben Foster. A national team player who at the end of the season will potentially go back to being FOURTH choice for his position at his club, behind 3 foreigners (Van der Sar, Kuszczak and Howard). Shaun Wright-Phillips also can’t get a game at his club, who own some of the best players in the world. Unless something is done, this trend will continue and the England team will end up full of reserves and maybe even Championship players like Wales and Northern Ireland. No sign of an end to the 41 years of hurt and counting.

–

Rick: Yes, hello, we’d like to enter the Champions’ League please.
Lennart: Ooh no, sorry Rick. No can do. Top 4 only see, and you came, er, 5th didn’t you?
Rick: Look into my eyes. Not around the eyes, look into the eyes.
Lennart: Tell you what Rick, Pierluigi owes me a favour. I’ll get him out of retirement for one more game and we’ll see if we can’t squeeze you in instead of that other crowd no-one’s ever heard of.
Rick: Aaaand, you’re back in the room.

–

Rick: Good afternoon. We’d like to build a stadium in Stanley Park please.
City of Liverpool planning officer: Good heavens no. One of the few precious public open spaces in the inner city areas of Everton and Anfield? I couldn’t allow it. Besides, we’ve already refused Everton the same request. To forbid them and allow you would be double-standards of scandalous proportions.
Rick: Look into my eyes…

–

Coming soon: Duping Arabs through the Power of Hypnosis, available in all good book shops for just £650m.

I found this excellent article which explains all manner of tweaks you can do to XP-ise your Windows Server installation: How to convert your Windows Server 2003…to a Workstation!.

From experience, I’d add a few extra pointers to this otherwise perfect article:

• Make sure you install Standard Edition rather than Enterprise, as Enterprise Edition takes more work to XP-ise.
• Upgrade DirectX before you follow these instructions. Download the latest version from Microsoft.
• Follow these instructions to install XP Bluetooth support on Windows Server 2003.
• Make your desktop look even better than Windows XP by installing the “secret” Royale Noir theme.
• Note that unfortunately Windows Media Player 11 is not available for Windows Server 2003

Just hoping that we don’t get as excited as these people!

For those who don’t know, Cubik is the company two colleagues and I formed in 2004, and which, since then, has consumed uncountable hours of my life and has turned me into a social outcast by filling so much brain capacity that I am unable to remember anyone’s birthdays, where they’re going on holiday, what their jobs are and who in their family has kids. This leaves me incapable of basic social interaction without considerable help from my wife. The hope is that one day it will all be worthwhile

This week sees the switchover from our original hosting platform to our new platform. Double the number of servers and each one has double the memory.

Wednesday and Thursday I’m in Manchester with Michael Scott (no, not that Michael Scott, nor indeed this Michael Scott either). We’ll be building the new servers and giving them some rigorous testing. Then it’s the big switch throw on Friday night, with a nice stretch of data copying, driving from Harrogate to Manchester, more data copying and driving home again planned for 8pm to 4am. Can’t wait..! No, really, that’s the sad thing!

So, what’s the verdict? Well, launch night was a bit disappointing. All it comes with is a composite video cable, which on a modest (these days) 37″ TV makes for a pretty dreadful picture. I had the same with the PS2 a few years ago. The Wii RGB cable which will fix the problem is a further £25. Hmm. And no stock anywhere…

I also had to wait an age to get started, as the first thing it wanted to do was update its system software. That was the longest 45 minutes of my life. You get a new console home and all it wants to do is update itself for 3/4 of an hour…

Next I tried to look at all the old games on the Wii shopping channel… server too busy.

So finally, I got to play on my only game, Wii Sports. And it really is quite something! Crap picture aside, it was very very good fun and surprisingly energetic.

Over the weekend, I took it down to the in-laws’ house and got them into it too – Jen’s dad wants one for his birthday!

So, all in all, 7/10. I need more games to boost this score – I want Zelda, Mario Galaxy and Red Steel at least. At £35 a pop, £30 for the obligatory extra controller and £25 for the must-have RGB cable, it won’t be cheap. Santa are you reading this..?

Still we’ve been making good use of our weekends. This weekend we’ve finally made the effort to go to Jen’s brother’s house just outside Bath. We went into the town itself yesterday: what a nice place. It’s just like tourists expect England to look – and that’s why it’s full of them, even in November.

Last weekend we went down to our nation’s great capital and took in the National Gallery, Imperial War Museum and The Producers in one action-packed weekend. Inbetween all that we managed to meet up with father-to-be Mr Lane, and Jen’s mate from school Rachel and her fella Gordon.

I quite often go to London for work so don’t really appreciate what a great place it is. I don’t want to live there mind, but it’s so easy to get to and there’s so much to do, we should go down there more often at weekends – maybe even just for the day shopping.

I forgot my camera though, which I was gutted about. But I did take one photo of Trafalgar Square with my phone which I was quite proud of, so here it is…

GPO Deployment relies on applications using Windows Installer (MSI) for their installation package. Of course, not all applications do, including (for reasons known only to its authors) Microsoft’s excellent Windows Desktop Search.

So how do you deploy non-MSI apps? The way I’ve got round this is to use a Group Policy Logon Script. The script checks via the registry that the user is logging onto Windows XP (as opposed to a server), then checks the registry again to see if the software is installed. If not, it runs a quiet installation of the software. There is no check in here to verify that the user has rights to install which would be one potential improvement, but at present that’s not an issue for us at work.

Here’s the script, which installs Windows Desktop Search, and Adobe’s PDF IFilter to allow WDS to index PDF documents…

Option Explicit    

Function ReadRegVal(objShell, strKey)
 Dim result
 result = ""
 On Error Resume Next
 result = objShell.RegRead(strKey)
 On Error Goto 0
 ReadRegVal = result
End Function    

Dim objShell
Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")    

If ReadRegVal(objShell, "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\CurrentVersion") = "5.1" Then    

 If ReadRegVal(objShell, "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\Version") = "02.06.5000.5378" Then
  objShell.Run "\\ZICO\INSTALLERS\WINDOWSADDONS\WDS\WindowsDesktopSearch-kb911993-V2-x86-ENU.exe /quiet", true
 End If    

 If ReadRegVal(objShell, "HKLM\Software\Adobe\PDF IFilter 6.0\6.0\AdobeCommonSupport") = "" Then
  objShell.Run "\\ZICO\INSTALLERS\WINDOWSADDONS\WDS\PDF_IFiltersetup.exe -s -f1setup.iss", true
 End If    

End If    

Set objShell = Nothing

Notice the arguments (-s -f1setup.iss) passed into the IFilter’s setup. The .iss file is an answer file for InstallShield, which is a recording of the options I chose during a standard installation that are simulated during the quiet installation. This is explained at AppDeploy.com.

Since Thursday we’ve been proving how true this is by taking in the sights of Rome, not to mention the excellent food. October in Rome really is a great time of year for those of us from the damper and cooler end of Europe. Their October is like our May: warm but not too hot with the occasional shower. We’re walking round in t-shirts while the locals wrap up warm in gilets and even fur coats!

So far we’ve seen the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain and the incredible Vatican Museum, the pinnacle of which is the famous Cistine Chapel. That was much much larger than I’d imagined, and the famous art you associate with that room is just 1% of all of the artwork on the immense walls and ceiling – almost too much to take in.

Somebody somewhere starts off the whole process by encoding the episode of the show into a relatively small DivX video file (more on DivX later). Then, that person creates another very small file, called a torrent which is like a signature that identifies the video file. He then makes that torrent publicly available over the internet. That process is called seeding.

Everyone else who wants the video first downloads the torrent in the normal way (i.e. from a website) and uses one of many available torrent client programs to read the torrent. The torrent client understands from the torrent where to find the video and begins to download it.

While you are downloading the file, your torrent client allows other downloaders to download little bits of your file as well as little bits from every other downloader of the torrent in the world. This means there is no load on any one PC or server, and no bottlenecks no matter how many people are doing it. In fact, the more people doing it, the smoother it goes. When you have finished downloading, you also become a seeder and it is good etiquette to seed the video file in its entirety for a while.

This process is incredibly quick. Lost airs in the US at 9 (East Coast time) on a Wednesday night, which is 02.00 Thursday morning for us. I usually start the download off about 30 hours later on a Friday morning before I go to work so we can watch it on Friday night or Saturday morning. By the time I start downloading there are usually well over 10,000 seeders and 20,000 more people downloading.

Now that you (hopefully) understand this, here are the answers to the 3 obvious questions:

1. Where do I get the torrent files?

From http://www.torrentspy.com/. It’s a rather seedy website which serves as a reminder of the slightly dubious nature of this activity, but very effective nontheless. Just type lost in the search box.

2. Which torrent client do I use?

I like Azureus. You need to have Java installed on your PC first, then install Azureus. You can get both from here.

3. How do I play the files?

You need the DivX player for Windows. If you want to watch the files on your TV, then ask yourself how much better your life would be if your PC was in your lounge and get it moved there! Or you could burn the files to Video CD or DVD or get a DVD player that can play DivX!

To get you started, here are the torrents for the ABC recap and first two episodes of Season 3 of Lost. Enjoy!

• Recap and Season 3 Preview
• Season 3, Episode 1
• Season 3, Episode 2

Some call it bitterness, but I have absolutely no sympathy for young Wayne’s plight which in my opinion is completely self-imposed and no more than he deserves.

I remember the last time Wayne was listening to the opinions of others over those of his manager: it was when his manager was reminding him that he’s just a kid who still has a lot to learn and that staying at Everton and taking things slowly was the best thing for his long term career.

Wayne on the other hand preferred to listen to Mr Stretford who was of the opinion that Wayne was already a superstar whose club was holding him back. A high profile move to our Mancunian neighbours soon followed, no doubt very much to the personal benefit of said Mr Stretford.

Now our Wayne is suffering the inevitable loss of form that can happen to any young player, but through his own greed and impatience he is not protected by the understanding and care of those who nurtured him through his development, but instead appears overwhelmed with the huge pressure of expectant glory-gorged United fans, fickle tabloid hacks and those moronic abusive idiots who follow England.

There is no denying Rooney’s talent, and he will be back to form sooner rather than later I am sure. I sometimes wonder if there is ever a time when he looks back and regrets his move, but in doing so I fear I may be crediting him with intelligence and insight he simply does not possess.

My views on international football are well-aired amongst my long-suffering friends and when mixed with a few drinks I will admit can turn me into a dreadful and obnoxious bore. You can also add “dangerous” to that list to cover the time when those drinks were being consumed on the streets of Germany during a recent tournament of international football.

For those less familiar with them, they can be summarised thus:

1. Club buys unknown player or worse still raises him through academy
2. Lahndoners abuse player from club’s luxurious and accommodating away end
3. Home Fans chant “Player for England”
4. England call up player
5. Lahndoners adore player
6. Other players tell player how good it is playing for other clubs
7. Player moves to Liverpool / Man United / Arsenal / Chelsea

After this, the player is either a storming success (Rooney), or perhaps worse warms the bench for a season or two while the player’s previous club’s fans are denied the pleasure of seeing that player play (Wright-Phillips, Scott Parker, Wayne Bridge, Walcott). Either way it does your head in and England is the catalyst for the whole rotten process.

I also have noticed in my time away from Liverpool that most people in England think that all scousers are shifty robbing bastards and so I feel slightly less English because of it. The geordies have the right idea with their Geordie Nation (although I’m not trying to start a civil war here, and the Geordie Nation was, I believe, a classic siege mentality invented by Sir John Hall to sell shirts to gullible Geordie punters).

Anyway the fact is I’m very blasé about England and I’ll only watch them if the telly’s on, and on Saturday my wife’s 30th was far more important and I’m now feeling smug that I didn’t waste 90 minutes of my life watching their turgid display against the mighty Macedonia.

But tonight, they’re on again against Croatia and I can imagine I’ll probably take a look (Wednesday night, Premiership withdrawal from last week, you know how it is).

The Croats are managed by former Toffee, and greedy cheat, Slav (“He has a law degree you know!” – Joe Royle, 1997). Slav is famous for:

1. Joining Everton for £4.5m in March 1997, but heroically staying at West Ham to save them from relegation (and also allegedly earning a £200k loyalty bonus in the process)
2. Being regularly booked, suspended and injured during his eventful Everton career
3. Eventually having his £27k-per-week contract terminated because of injury (taking a £1m payoff – allegedly)… then immediately signing for and playing for Hajduk Split and Croatia
4. Denying legendary Frenchman Laurent Blanc a place in the World Cup Final in his homeland by grossly overreacting to an “elbow”.

Last night I saw Slav on telly defending his countrymen, a group of whom recently (and you have to say logistically quite impressively) moved themselves into the shape of a swastika, in much the same way as people in Halifax adverts used to make the shape of an X in the good old days before Howard came along. Slav claimed his people were not racist, but if they do partake in a bit of racist chanting, well, there’s nothing Slav can do about it, and it shouldn’t in any way affect his country’s bid for Euro 2012. And who can argue with that?

So how do you choose between a team managed by the lovable Slav, and one containing people like Rooney, Gerrard and Carragher? I will probably just do what I usually do: watch it and not really give a hoot either way…

We had a fab night out in Leeds on Saturday to celebrate Jen’s 30th. Take a look at the best of the photos here.

When it works, it really works and I can see all my email and calendar items wherever I may be. But sometimes one Outlook can’t tell that an item that has been put on the phone by the other Outlook is the same item it should already know about and creates a duplicate when it syncs with the phone.

So I have created a very simple C# program to identify duplicate calendar items and delete them. To do this, I loop through every item in the calendar, and write the subject, location, start and end date into a hashtable as the key. If I come across the same combination of subject, location and times again, I delete the item instead. Easy.

Here is the code. You must have the Office Interop assemblies installed, and Microsoft Outlook Library referenced. You can install the Office Interop Assemblies separately if you are not able to modify your installation of Office.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Diagnostics;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
namespace RemoveOutlookCalendarDuplicates
{
   class MainClass
   {
      [STAThread]
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         Application olApp = new ApplicationClass();
         NameSpace outlookNS =
            olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI");
         MAPIFolder calendarFolder =
            outlookNS.GetDefaultFolder(
            OlDefaultFolders.olFolderCalendar);
         while(true)
         {
            bool somethingDeleted = false;
            Hashtable uniqueItems = new Hashtable();
            foreach(AppointmentItem oi in calendarFolder.Items)
            {
               string uniqueKey =
               String.Format("{0} {1} {2:yyyyMMddhhmmss} {3:yyyyMMddhhmmss}",
               oi.Subject, oi.Location, oi.Start, oi.End);
               if(uniqueItems.ContainsKey(uniqueKey))
               {
                  Console.WriteLine("DELETED: " + uniqueKey);
                  oi.Delete();
                  somethingDeleted = true;
               }
               else
               {
                  uniqueItems.Add(uniqueKey, String.Empty);
               }
            }
            if(!somethingDeleted) break;
         }
         Console.WriteLine("** PRESS RETURN **");
         Console.ReadLine();
      }
   }
}

With tongue firmly in cheek, the Economist has worked out that at the current rate that manufacturers are adding blades we’ll have a 14-blade monster to cope with by 2100.

I managed to watch Everton v Wigan today even though it was a 3pm Saturday game which are never shown here in the UK! Nearly every game is shown somewhere in the world, and somebody somewhere will be streaming it onto the Internet.

To watch these games you need to arm yourself with an arsenal of peer-to-peer video sharing software and find out which channels are carrying the game you want to watch.

Here’s a picture of the game on my TV to prove it really works

Went to Twickenham a couple of weekends ago for the Challenge Cup final. We had a fantastic view as you can see…

Then last night we went to Headingley and sat in their impresive new stand to watch Leeds v Warrington. A really good game that, both teams played well but Leeds got every lucky bounce and ended up winning comfortably with a couple of runaways. Here’s the view from there…

I was in London the other day for a meeting. When they offered me a coffee, they gave me this mug. Not good.

A few photos from Graham and Laura’s big day are now online. Take a look.

Anyway I digress – this brings me on to filesharing. Filesharing is a
phenomenally simple yet clever technology. Files are split into little
fragments, and everyone downloads a little bit from every other person that
has the file, the result being no significant load on any one machine and
epidemic spreading of the files. Once again this is technology to fuel our
vices: filesharing exists solely to satisfy the natural human desire for
free video and music that we really should be paying for, but just like GPS,
the technology of evil has found a sensible mainstream use since Microsoft
bought Groove Networks in 2005 and bundled an updated version of their cool
software with the forthcoming Office 2007.

Geeks like me get excited when we get to play with new software, and Microsoft Office Groove as it is now called looks like it is
going to be really useful. Instead of emailing documents around between
people, you create a workspace in Groove and put a document in it. As you
move around between the office, home, wi-fi and mobile networks, the files
you put in to the workspace are distributed between your colleagues and
similarly their files find their way to you. There’s no longer any need to
be syncing with servers and not being sure who’s got the latest versions of
documents. You’ve all got the latest versions on your laptops and if you are
making changes to a file, Groove will even tell your colleagues and get them
the latest version when you’re done. I’ve had a brief play with this since I
installed Beta 2 of Office on a spare PC and it’s smart – look out for it
soon!

It looks like a couple of seasons at Real Madrid haven’t improved things. Check out this reaction by Robinho to a Gravedigger special in training yesterday, and the subsequent swipe back in the Brazilian’s direction which pretty much guarantees the nutcase’s swift exit from the Bernabeu…

After Colombia were forced to drop out, Brazil decided they weren’t interested in World Cup 86 after all. And so Fifa, faced with three competing bids, decided in May 1983 to reject Canada and the US in favour of Mexico.

There was much outrage in the US about the decision. Henry Kissinger, the leader of the US bid, even petitioned Fifa for another chance, arguing that the 1986 tournament would revive the fading North American Soccer League (NASL). He was supported by Pele and Franz Beckenbauer – but Fifa’s president Joao Havelange was singularly unimpressed. Fifa claimed their decision was down to logistics – the US bid included venues on the east and west coast, which meant increased travelling times and weary footballers. But the real reason was that they wanted to teach US football a lesson.

In 1981, Fifa had threatened to outlaw the NASL and suspend the US Federation because the NASL had changed the offside line from halfway to 35 yards out and used a shoot-out to decide drawn matches. The NASL refused to back down – and even threatened legal action against Fifa. But what comes around goes around, and two years later Fifa got its revenge by rejecting Kissinger’s bid. With the last hope of reviving the NASL gone, it folded before the start of the 1986 World Cup.