The ramblings of a bored man. Also, my personal repository of useful snippets that I think I might need again in the future and which others also may find useful.

A LONG time ago, my wife and I wrote a blog while we went travelling after university. You can find those writings at Chris and Katie's Travels

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Iterable JSON in Python

Python works relly nicely with JSON objects so long as all of your keys are nicely labeled and you dont have object or arrays with no key labels!

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Add some geek to your music

The music player cmus is wonderfully geeky with its command line interface. It starts up in a flash and is my new favourite way to play music on my laptop.

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Native NTFS writes on Mac OS X

By default, OS X does not support native writing to NFTS formatted file systems. It is possible to configure though. This is especially useful if you are sharing media and files with others using externally USB drives that are NTFS formatted. This is a short little guide on how to configure it.

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Changing IP Octets with Bash

I have program at work which needs to create a UDP multicast address from a server's IP address. This process basically just entails replacing the first IP octet with “239”. In order to be able to do this I wrote the following. There is probably a much neater and more efficient way of doing this and I would love to hear it:

MCAST_IP=$(echo ${SERVER_IP} | cut -d. -f2-4)
MCAST_IP=$(echo "239."${META_MCAST_IP})
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Showing Bash script execution time in seconds

Sometimes you want to know how long your bash script takes to run in seconds and you want to show that at the end of the script. The following is what I currently use to display this. There may well be a much nicer and shorter way of doing this and I'd love to hear it but this works perfectly!

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An old man with a bike

My dad is retiring tomorrow and to celebrate his retirement he has decided that he is going to go on one almighty bike ride! It's taking him to all corners of the UK and is going to take several weeks. So that he can keep a diary of his ride, and so people can keep up with how he is getting on, he has set-up a blog: www.anoldmanandhisbike.com.

If you want to keep up with his ride then feel free to head over there and subscribe to his updates!

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Clustering for SAS 101

At work the other day I used the following descriptions for describing the 4 types of clustering that we use in a SAS environment. I think that they are really useful short descriptions of each type so noting here for future use.