graham.reeds/

The World According To Clarkson

Just finished the book which is simply a collection of his humourous articles from his Sunday Times column from January 2001 up to the end of 2003. This one was such a success he’s recently released a second anthology presumebly from the beginning to 2004 to end of 2006. A such they are fairly short articles which won’t take too long to read – however I found as such you can’t sit down and read through like you would a normal book, you take in one or two before you go to bed, another when you are waiting for your girlfriend to get ready and one while you are sat on the toilet. Which is probably where I read most of the book.

I personally think it is a good book as I don’t read the Sunday Times (therefore the articles are new to me) and thoroughly enjoy his rants on Top Gear. Therefore I give this book 4/5.

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Merry Christmas Everybody!

I have to say it (at the risk of upsetting my parents) but this was probably one of the best Christmas’s, if not the best Christmas, I have ever had. A day late to wish everyone the same but no time to post yesterday.

There is no way of listing all the presents I got – a lot were for both me and lou for our new house and are currently residing in the lounge (which is now filled to overflowing with stuff).

One of the best games I got was the big bag of tantrix tiles – I am looking forward to honing my skills at home and then challenging the best online. All my times for the first 10 were well under par and if they published the par times for 11 and 12 I think they would of been too. However the following 3 took me about 20 minutes each and were especially frustrating as I managed to get the basic loop sorted in less than a minute each time. I called it quits for the evening after completing level 15 (half way mark on discovery) and it was a good thing too – the power cut out less than an hour afterwards.

Fortunately I had bought my girlfriend the wind-up torch from Boots and my sister-in-law had bought us an AA-powered torch for our new house. So it wasn’t long before the house was lit with candles and we were snuggled up in bed together.

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Quelle surprise!

Guess what happened to me this morning? I was apologised to by a bus driver for him being late!

Admittedly he did go and ruin it by going on about how it was absolute mayhem with buses not starting and ice everywhere.

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Weirdy Beardy Redux

I asked name three famous people you haven’t seen without facial hair. I came up with:

• Des Lynam
• Burt Reynolds
• Geoff Capes

My fiance came up with:

• Santa
• Bluto
• Osama bin Laden

I had to point out to her that the first two aren’t real (sorry kids but that isn’t Santa kissing mommy – if he’s wearing a red outfit it’s probably the postman) and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen pictures of Osama bin Laden when he was at Oxford without beard, though he might of had a moustache.

The best offer was given by MiL and that was

• FiL

When we pointed out that FiL isn’t famous her response was “Well he should be”. Awww, bless.

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Weirdy Beardy

Name the first three famous people you have never seen without facial hair.  I will post my three in the near future.

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That’s (not) Entertainment!

Everyone knows the tune of “the Entertainer“, it’s a catchy little tune but you can have too much of a good thing.

The case in point: At the weekend I was painting the ceiling in the bedroom of the house me and my fiance have purchased. It needs a lot or work before we can move in. As well as the painting we were taking delivery of stuff for the house – so I was in and out the house, with the windows open to let out the paint fumes. I first heard it around 10am. My first thought was that it was an ice-cream van – but at 10am on a frosty December morning? Then I heard it intermittently all throughout the day until I went back to my fiances parents home around 4:30pm.

The next day I heard it again. This time I wasn’t at my house, but around a friends about 2 miles from our purchased home. This time the audio was a lot closer and you could tell the direction it was coming from and it was coming from towards our house!

Now you can surmise two things from this:

1. A person/people has/have a motion activated Christmas decoration that plays the Entertainer, and has/have set the volume to 11.
2. That person/people has/have no taste.

I said to my fiance “I would hate to be their neighbours” but she pointed out that since we can hear it, they are our neighbours.

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Testing Times

No posts for nearly a month and then 2 in a day!

Anyway: Work continues, albeit slowly, on my S:GTC-a-like which goes by the not-at-all-original working name of Galaxy.

The purpose of this post – apart from to assure those that follow this blog that I am still working on it – is about Unit Testing. Now everyone who programs in Java uses JUnit for unit testing, and it is a useful piece of software. Every open source IDE worth it’s salt has support for JUnit – even MS who seem to behind the curve on IDE development by a good couple of years has support for it in VS2K5 (in regards to C# that is).

You are reading this thinking that there is a “but” to all this and you’d be right. I have a class, which has all it’s parameters encapsulated so therefore you must use the setMethod() and the corresponding getMethod() to set and get the values. No problem there – that’s standard practice, but when it comes to testing you have to test two functions per test instead of one: You can’t test that getMethod() works without first calling setMethod() and vice versa without breaking encapsulation. Oh well, if one of the functions fails then both set and get functions will fail and shouldn’t be too hard to find out which failed.

Heading on I can see some more bumps in the road: Testing of interface classes, and testing of functions that naturally take a minute to compute before a result is available.

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Installing IIS6.0, PHP5.2, MySQL5.0.27 and Mantis 1.0.6

This is what I spent this morning doing and this afternoon writing up the steps. My line manager was kind enough to allow me to post the document about what is needed to be done since we had to find a couple of “gotcha’s” out the hard way. Some of this information was gleaned from here and here.

It’s currently here as pure unformatted text. Once I get the chance this evening I will tidy it up a bit.

Installing IIS6, PHP5.2.0, MySQL5.0.27 and Mantis1.0.6 to Windows 2003 Server R2 Standard Edition

Files needed:

IIS 6.0
Windows 2003 Server CD
PHP 5.2.0
PHP Browse Cap
MySQL 5.0.27
MySQL GUI Tools 5.0r6
MySQL Connector/PHP 5.0.27
Mantis 1.0.6

IIS 6.0

1. Insert the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition CD into the tray.
2. Click Start » Control Panel » Add or Remove Programs.
3. Select Add/Remove Windows Components from the left-hand sidebar.
4. Select Application Server in the Windows Component Wizard.
5. With Application Server high lit, click the details and check ASP.NET.
6. Okay everything until you are back to the wizard. Click next.
7. If you get a Files Needed message, select the drive that the CD-Rom is located in and click OK.
8. Click OK finish installation.
9. To test the install, open your browser and type http://localhost/ into the address bar. You should see a This page is under construction message.

MySQL 5.0.27

1. Extract Setup.exe from the zip file and run it. Ignore the warning messages from 2003 Server.
2. Select Typical Setup and click next until you get to the sign up step. Select Skip and complete the installation.
3. In the Configuration Wizard pick Detailed Configuration from the first option screen. Click next.
4. Pick Server Machine on the next screen. Next.
5. Select the Non-transactional for database usage. Next.
6. Pick the first option (Decision Support (DSS)/OLAP). Next.
7. Make sure both options are checked at the next screen. Next.
8. Use the standard character set. Next.
9. Allow MySQL to install as a Windows Service and launch automatically with Windows.
10. Set the root password to ‘#######’. DO NOT ENABLE ROOT ACCESS FROM REMOTE MACHINES AND CERTAINLY DO NOT CREATE AN ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT.
11. Execute Settings.

MySQL GUI Tools 5.0r6

1. Start the install by running the installer
2. Accept the terms and conditions, the install directory and complete setup.

PHP 5.2.0

1. Extract the PHP 5.2.0 zip to C:\Program Files\PHP
2. Extract php_5.2.0_mysqli_5.0.27-win32.zip to the php installation directory.
3. Copy libmysql.dll to WINDOWS\System32 directory.
4. Rename php.ini-recommended to php.ini
5. Open php.ini and uncomment cgi.force_redirect and set it to 0 (zero).
6. Copy php_browscap.ini to php\extras and set the path to it under browscap.
7. Set session.save_path to php\sessions. Create the directory if needed.
8. Set the extensions (or replace them with this list):

extension=php_mbstring.dll
extension=php_bz2.dll
extension=php_cpdf.dll
extension=php_curl.dll
extension=php_dba.dll
extension=php_dbase.dll
extension=php_dbx.dll
;extension=php_exif.dll
extension=php_fdf.dll
extension=php_filepro.dll
extension=php_gd2.dll
extension=php_gettext.dll
;extension=php_ifx.dll
extension=php_iisfunc.dll
extension=php_imap.dll
extension=php_interbase.dll
extension=php_java.dll
extension=php_ldap.dll
;extension=php_mcrypt.dll
extension=php_mhash.dll
extension=php_mime_magic.dll
extension=php_ming.dll
extension=php_mssql.dll
extension=php_msql.dll
extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll
;extension=php_oci8.dll
extension=php_openssl.dll
;extension=php_oracle.dll
extension=php_pdf.dll
extension=php_pgsql.dll
extension=php_shmop.dll
extension=php_snmp.dll
extension=php_sockets.dll
;extension=php_sybase_ct.dll
extension=php_tidy.dll
extension=php_ffi.dll
extension=php_xmlrpc.dll
extension=php_xsl.dll
;extension=php_yaz.dll
extension=php_zip.dll

9. Add the install path for PHP to the user environment path.
10. Add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PHP\IniFilePath=C:\Program Files\PHP to the registry.

Mantis 1.0.6

1. Extract the Mantis install files to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mantis.

Integration

1. Stop the MySQL server. Open my.ini and change the root database location to d:/db/mysql5.
2. Copy the original database files/directories from the old server to the MySQL data directory (d:\db\mysql5\).
3. Create a new user, mantis/mantis, in MySQL Administrator. Give it full rights to the Mantis DB. Restart MySQL.
4. Start IIS Manager. Add a new website to the server using C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mantis as the location.
5. Check all boxes for permissions, ignoring any warnings.
6. Open the website properties (right click » properties), select the Home Directory tab, click configuration, click add. For the executable browse for php5isapi.dll which is located in the php install directory and give the extension as .php. Set ‘Limit To’ to GET, POST, HEAD.
7. In mantis\config_inc.php modify the following lines:

$g_db_username = mantis
$g_db_password = mantis
$g_database_name = mantis

8. Open IIS Manager and under Web Service Extensions set the name to PHP ISAPI Extension and set the required files to php5isapi.dll.
9. Add index.php to the list of default content pages in the Documents tab.
10. Turn off the internal firewall in Windows 2003 Server.
11. Restart Windows 2003 Server.
12. Start your browser. Enter http://localhost/admin/ into the address bar. Select Upgrade Your Installation, then Upgrade Now. Perform Basic Upgrade and the String Escape Fixes afterwards.

Fin.

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