Lazy Robot

So snow has come round again, and once again trying to get anywhere is a nightmare by the sheer lunacy of the average British driver. I am constantly amazed by the things people do in an effort to get from A to B, and am never surprised when they either drive through a wall or abandon the vehicle in disgust. So here are a few handy hints for you all, based on what I've observed in the last couple of weeks: You are not a rally driver, and you are not a drift racer. Spinning the wheels and trying to drive your car like a speedboat is a fast-track into a wall. Or somebody else. First gear is your enemy. Even a little bit of gas will cause your wheels to spin, and spinning wheels means no traction. No traction means you've lost the battle already. So you want to set off up an incline? That's fine, but sticking it in first, revving its arse off and dumping the clutch will result in you sitting there like a muppet while your tyres dig a nice hole in the...

2009 was a busy year on the live music front, and I managed to beat the benchmark of one gig every month by attending 15 live music events over the course of the year. In no particular order, the bands I saw perform this year were: Magenta , no less than three times. The first at the CRS BOTY awards, and twice as headliners at the Montgomery Hall in Rotherham. One particular treat was hearing Metamorphosis played in its entirety live on stage. Mostly Autumn , playing a monumental 2.5 hour set at The Venue in Stocksbridge. Electric Six twice, the second time supporting the new album Kill in the Sheffield O2 Academy 2. Doves , supported by the awesome and somewhat bizarre Malakai . Unfortunately this one was cut short due to air conditioning screwups at the O2 Academy, which were righted later as you shall see ... The Wonder Stuff in Leeds, celebrating the 20th anniversary edition of The Eight Legged Groove Machine. Threshold at the Rothe...

On occasion, for one reason or another, iTunes seems to have a link to a file that no longer exists. Your options are then to either hunt for the file manually, one by one, or manually hunt and delete all the dead ones. There is a handy exclamation point icon that will tell you which are broken, but there is no way to filter for these. Fortunately, thanks to a bit of logical jiggery pokery, you can use Smart Playlists and a cunning quirk of iTunes to do it for you. Herein lies a step-by-step guide to finding all those annoying broken links. Step 1 Create a new Smart Playlist with a single Artist Does Not Contains rule. Put some garbage into the search field so it will return every artist. Call this playlist "All Music". Step 2 Create a normal playlist called "Working Music". Step 3 Create a Smart Playlist with 2 rules. These are: Playlist - is - All Music Playlist - is not - Working Music ...

Using a music management program like iTunes can be very useful when keeping a large collection in order. It can rename files, keep them organised in a decent directory structure and let you browse and edit the tags with ease. Perfect, as long as the songs you import are all properly tagged and have no duplicates. If anything is wrong, though, it can be a royal pain in the posterior. When creating an iTunes library out of an existing music collection, it is often the case that an existing set of MP3s has to be imported into an existing iTunes library. In this case, many terrible things can happen, including duplicates and MP3s with subtly different (and sometimes incorrect) tags. Enter Dupin , from Doug's AppleScripts . Dupin is a handy iTunes duplicate finder and remover. This is not a free tool, but if you're dealing with several thousand MP3s and don't fancy the agony of the iTunes dedupe tool, it's well worth a tenner. The key to ef...

Last night I went to see a classic prog rock band at my local Classic Rock Society venue, the Montgomery Hall in Wath-on-Dearne. I went to see Pallas there a couple of years ago, and they put on an amazing live show. They might not have the lightshow, the arena-sized crowds or the support of big labels, but they have what matters; enthusiasm, talent and showmanship. Looking around the room and seeing maybe 110 people, averaging about 45 years old, it struck me that it is a good job the CRS exists. Somebody needs to be promoting gigs for great bands like Pallas, Magenta and Threshold, even if only to a handful of faithful followers in Wath. Old rockers never die, and new rockers are coming along all the time. Cheers, CRS, for letting us see them!

I has been recently pointed out to me, after a rant on the state of a particular codebase, that I actually love terrible code. The only time I sound truly enthusiastic about my job is when describing just how badly factored, bug-ridden and generally god-awful a piece of code is, and just what I'm going to do about it. The only time I sound happy with my job is just after refactoring, reworking, rewriting and thoroughly debugging said code, and I have an air of triumph about me. So, is bad code, in fact, the only thing that makes my job even remotely bearable? Discuss.

It's often said that a backup strategy is only as good as the corresponding recovery strategy. Your backup is useless, after all, if you can't restore from it. Unfortunately I have recently had to test the backup strategies I have been using for my two most frequently used computing devices; my iPhone and my Macbook. The sad demise, and subsequent revival, of my iPhone has already been documented in a previous post. Thanks to the joy that is iTunes, my phone was automatically backed up the day before the incident, minimising the amount of lost data. The worst thing I lost was my Rally Master 3D save-game, so no big deal. I have used several mobile phone sync/backup tools before, and suffice it to say that they suck. Often flaky or having badly integrated 3rd party components, I have yet to find one that really syncs properly. Even the venerable Palm handhelds (yes, I know they're not phones, or at least, didn't used to be) became a nightmare to sync once they starte...