Just one that amused me – PSquared’s music scheduling software, Autotrack, has an option to do a web lookup on a track’s details.

Above is what I got when I wanted to check the date of The Cult’s classic “She Sells Sanctuary”.

If you are a regular commuter via mainline train stations in the UK you’ve probably picked up your morning cappuccino or a sneaky pint on the way home and felt the premium prices in the coffee shop or one of the interesting titled “real pubs on stations” make a hole in your wallet.

What would you say if I told you of a not that well publicised way to get a 20% discount on your purchases?

What you need is to get a BiTE card – it’s free – and unlike my vain attempt at finding a illustrative picture above – girl is not included. However also not included is any supermarket loyalty card style tracking of your movements. This is no swipe card – just a piece of card you flash and the nice person behind the till puts through your discount. All they seem to want to know is a few questions of how often you travel and through what stations when you sign up.

Given the pounds I’ve spent at stations over the years I just wish I’d paid more attention to the unassuming little flags stuck on some of the tills sooner.

Still trying to answer that one but two minutes in the Apple store in Manchester playing with one and I,m hooked by the Apple magic.

I,m writing this post on a iPad in said store and been throughly mesmorised. Even typing on the o screen keyboard is not as bad as I first though (Hopefully there is not too many typos in this to prove the point) althoug not sure if Id managed a long typing session. But that is not the point of the device.

But lets return to the point of do I want one? Well as I look up around the table at the front of this store there are a dozen iPads on disply, with crowds all having fun. But when I look at the price card I can safely say that my credit card will be staying safely in my wallet and saving me the “starting at £429″ price on the card in front of me.

So if you have a batch file saved on the drive with your finely crafted backup script, it may fail if your drive D:\ is now drive E:\

Enter to the rescue just the variable you need:

%~d0

Which gives you the path to the file in which the script is being run from,

so something like

robocopy \\my-server\files %~d0\backupfolder /mir

saved as ‘backup.bat’ in the root of your usb drive will work everytime.

Even for my mainly XP based work, Robocopy is a great advance over using the xcopy command with /d flag – which only copied newer files and could easily fall over with files in use.

The basic syntax I use is as follows

ROBOCOPY “Source Folder” “Destination Folder” /MIR /R:5 /W:5 /FFT

The flags I’m using:

/MIR – mirror the source to directory – will delete files in the destination that are no longer in the source (the main benefit over xcopy)

/R:5 – retry 5 times on error, the default is 1 million, which effectively halts your command unless you are very patient!

/W:5 -wait 5 seconds on error – default if 30 seconds, I find a shorter time better

/FFT – uses Fat File Times – only compares file time to accuracy of 2seconds as used on FAT file system, needed if you’re copying to an external drive formatted as such. Also found works more accurately if copying from / to a Samba/Linux server with this flag.

I use 3′s mobile internet service – which works well for me (although I’ve never ventured much out side a city conurbation with it.)

Maybe their offering is aimed at the mass market of Hotmail users – but if you are a traditional e-mail client user it’s worth noting they don’t (appear) to have their own SMTP (outgoing email) server.

Furthermore they appear to block all traffic on Port 25 – thus when I tried to connect to a particular SMTP server, which uses authenticated SMTP I couldn’t. This confused me – as the last time I’d used this “laptop and email client not on regular network” combo was via the free wi-fi in McDonalds (yes I know but in my defence I was meeting someone*) it had worked.

The solution was to connect via a secure connection which uses a different port. Also made me think not necessarily a bad thing using secure connections.

* I’m generally not a big fan of fast food, but in this case the drive through next to the Motorway exit made for a convenient no sat-nav required congregation point.

I’m mentioning this as a rather annoying bug in WordPress that has lost me a number of drafts of posts which I was working on.

The issue – which has had me banging my head against the proverbial wall half the evening – you come to save or publish a post you are editing and you get an error:

Your attempt to edit this post: foobar has failed. Please try again.


I have seen this quite a bit – and foolish I thought I’d have my ‘auto-saves’ to save me, but this proved not to be the case.

The well documented fix is to edit the wp-admin/post-new.php file and commenting out this line of code

//wp_enqueue_script('autosave');


This turns of auto-save – so remember to save them drafts.

I want to automate generation of MP3 files on a linux box- so I need to install LAME so I can do this via a command line.

So this is what I did

1 – First grab from the DAG repository the rpm for your distro:

http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/lame/

2 – Switch to the directory you’ve saved the file

3 – Install the rpm – replacing the package name with the relevant file

rpm -ivh lame-3.96.1-2.2.el4.rf.x86_64.rpm

Tis done.

I’m currently using Microsoft Security Essentials on some machines on one site, with quite favourable results so far.

From the GUI there is no way to exclude network paths from real time scanning. On these machines I want to exclude certain network files which hold my playout system audio and databases.

The answer lies on this Microsoft page

You can do this via the registry, by editing this registry key :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\Exclusions\Paths

Right click > New DWord value

Set the value to be 0
Set the name to be the share you are trying to exclude.

\\server\share : 0

Also here you’ll find the file type exclusions. I set up exclusions as per my playout system vendors recommendations.

The Microsoft page states you may have to change the permissions on the key by taking the ownership of the key from advanced tab and give write permissions to yourself.

This appears true – I exported the relevant keys to a reg file to import into other workstations, but had to first use regedit to edit the permissions to give me write access.

My idea being where I have encountered something where I couldn’t find the complete answer by googling (other search engines are available) I’ll post it up here for the benefit of others.