Siri not recognising relationships

I upgraded to an iPhone 4S yesterday and have been playing with one of the new features, Siri, trying to get it to understand “Text my girlfriend”. I had associated Emma with my contact record but it wasn’t finding her contact record in the address book.

I store most contact records as Title, Firstname, Surname. E.g.:

Miss Jane Smith
Mr John Doe

If you ask Siri to make an association then in your contact record it will store the name of the relationsip (sister, brother, etc) and the full name including the title.

However when it tries to lookup that relationship it will fail.

The simple fix is to remove the title from the relationship on your contact record and it should all start working again.

Climbing Snowdon for Brake

On October 1st I am going to be hiking up Snowdon with some of my colleagues from work to raise money for the road safety charity Brake. Every 30 seconds someone, somewhere in the world, is killed in a road crash. Brake campaign to improve road safety within the UK and also support those affected by road deaths.

I would really appreciate it if you could sponsor me and the team by donating to Brake via our JustGiving page: http://www.justgiving.com/FSGSnowdonWalk

I am told it may look like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELdijJpGcyc
But more likely like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHcm5kX65JM

I will be taking my camera and phone so will tweet, Facebook and photograph the sun, rain, snow or hail (delete as appropriate).

Thank you,

Dan

JustGiving: http://www.justgiving.com/FSGSnowdonWalk
Brake: http://www.brake.org.uk/
Fleet Support Group: http://www.fsguk.com/

Computer Fun

When I was at my parents house this week my Mum presented me with box loads of my old stuff. Apparently now that I own a house I can no longer use the parental storage facility.

While digging through the various books, papers and momentos I discovered a 1984 edition of the Usborne Computer Fun programming book. My parents got me this book when I was playing with my Dad’s BBC Micro (a model B) and I vividly remember typing these programs into the computer.

Jigsaw puzzle




Jigsaw puzzle

Originally uploaded by Daniel Durrans

I have picked up the camera again after months of not having had any motivation to take a single photo. I have started a Project 365 – one image every day for the next 365 days. I am hoping this will not only improve my photography skills but also provide the focus necessary to get the camera out of it’s bag.

Emma has been working on this jigsaw for the last few days. It has been sat in the middle of the living room in the Puzzle Store that she got for Christmas. Slowly working from the outside in she has constructed all of the edges and a reasonable proportion of the upper half on the puzzle.

Ginger cake

I am eating comfort food this weekend due to having a bout of man-cold that I caught from Emma earlier in the week. Comfort food for me means anything loaded with calories. You can’t get much more calorific than an cake loaded with syrup, treacle, sugar and butter.

Ingredients

  • 3/4 lb S.R. Flour
  • 1/4 lb Black treacle
  • 1/4 lb Golden syrup
  • 4oz brown sugar
  • 2 small eggs
  • 1/2 teaspoons soda bic
  • 4 oz margarine
  • 1/2 teacup milk
  • 2 teaspoons ground ginger

Method

  1. Put fat, sugar, treacle and syrup in a saucepan and heat gently until the fat melts. Leave to cool.
  2. Sift the dry ingredients in a bowl, make a well in the centre and add eggs & milk.
  3. Slowly pour in treacle mixture, stir without beating, until well blended.
  4. Turn mixture into a greased and paper lined tin.
  5. Bake in the centre of a slow oven (150′c) for 1 1/4 hours. Test by pressing.
  6. Remove from tin when cool.
  7. Store in an air tight container.

Tin should be 11″ x 9″ x 2″

bcp BULK INSERT a quote escaped csv file in SQL Server 2005

I was having trouble trying to import a quote escaped CSV file into SQL Server 2005 using BULK INSERT. It kept giving me an unexpected EOF error until I used a format file where I created a dummy start and end column to pick up the initial ” and final \r\n.

For example this format file will import six columns which are all formatted as:

“column1″,”column2″,”column3″,”column4″,”column5″,”column6″

9.0
8
1       SQLCHAR       0       1       ""          0     ExtraField          ""
2       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     1     ModelId             SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
3       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     2     QualifyModelId      SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
4       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     3     MediaAspectCode     SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
5       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     4     SmallImageFilename  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
6       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     5     MediumImageFilename SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
7       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\""        6     LargeImageFilename  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
8       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\r\n"      0     ExtraField           ""

Installing irssi using macports

To install irssi using macports issue the command:

sudo port install irssi +perl

This will ensure that you get the necessary perl scripting support. Most people using irssi are going to want this.

Note that if you use scriptassist to help you load irssi scripts then you will want some extra perl stuff:

sudo port install p5-libwww-perl

Migrating reporting server database with SQL Server 2005 Standard

If you are moving reporting services to a brand new SQL Server machine (such as setting up a UAT environment or test server) then you may backup and restore the reporting server database from your production machine. You will probably then backup and restore the encryption keys. However you will probably get the error:

“Reporting server can’t be used as part of a scale-out deployment” or something along those lines.

Fear not! Because you aren’t using enterprise you need to remove the key for the old server from the config using:

rskeymgmt -l

and then

rskeymgmt -r

SQL Server Service Broker and Backup Exec

I had a problem today where whenever a full backup of the master database was taken by Backup Exec the Service Broker would say in the SQL Server error logs:

Could not start Service Broker for database id

Google didn’t really know what was going on but I found that if you delete the master4IDR file on the offending server (probably in the default database directory) then do another few backups the problem vanishes.

master4IDR is a copy of the master database that is taken when Backup Exec backs up the database. It is used to do disaster recovery on the server.

What if Facebook could auto-tag uploaded photos?

Facebook could become the ultimate platform for training facial recognition systems. Almost every photo uploaded to the site is of someone. The first thing that you do is to tag the people in the photo, creating a link between the photo and the related person.

But what would happen if the tagging process worked in conjunction with facial recognition technology? Every time a person was tagged in an image you could help the system learn what that person looks like. Eventually the system could become “smart” enough to recognise people on its own.

Auto-tagging photos – it’s the way forward, and you heard it here first!