Photos from our holiday in Brussels now online:
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Birthday and Shakespeare
It was my birthday yesterday. Jennifer and I enjoyed a performance of Henry IV Part II at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford, courtesy of the RSC. The play lies in a series of historical plays written by William Shakespeare, starting with Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 & 2), Henry V, Henry VI (Parts 1, 2 & 3) and Richard III. They track almost a century of fascinating English history more or less accurately and provide a great evening’s entertainment when performed as well as the RSC do!
Now we’re enjoying Michael Palin’s New Europe and planning our next holiday backpacking across Eastern Europe.
Retreating to the abbey…
I’ve just got back from our leadership retreat at Launde Abbey, a country get-away owned by the Diocese of Leicester and run as a retreat centre. It’s near a small village called East Norton, just off the A47 between Leicester and Peterborough.
The frosty views were incredible. More photos on Facebook but a couple to give you the picture:
Christmas at the Union
Yesterday we (OpenHeaven) ran “Christmas at the Union”, our Christmas event for 2007 at Loughborough Students Union. It was a great evening, carols, Santa, stories, sweets, silly songs and a deeper message about the meaning behind Christmas. Afterwards we (the “crew” team) pigged out on a Chinese takeaway, which was somewhat larger then we had anticipated:
The rest of my photos will appear on Facebook, but here’s a taster:
Update:
All photos now on Facebook:
MS Log Parser
Today I’ve been working on logging and auditing for our web app. We’ve already got it logging major events (searches, views, updates) but today I’ve added in auditing of any changes that a user makes.
This leads to one thing – huge log files. But help is at hand in the form of Microsoft’s LogParser tool. It is a command line applicatioon which provides a very powerful SQL like query syntax. You map an input source through the query onto an output source, which include charts created with Microsoft Office Web Components and even your own template files (useful for HTML reports).
As an example…
Say my log file contains data in the following format:
Date,Time,Operation,Object
I can easily create a report of the distribution of hits during the day:
> logparser.exe “select to_string(time,’hh’) AS Hour, Count(*) AS Hits FROM mylog.csv GROUP BY Hour” -iTsFormat:”hh:mm”
Which gives me:
Hour Hits
—- —–
00 1
08 2782
09 8098
10 10710
11 13233
12 11048
13 10257
14 12467
15 11411
16 8304
17 2864
18 1216
19 610
20 52
21 10
22 1
I can then drive a nice bar chart like so:
> logparser.exe “select to_string(time,’hh’) AS Hour, Count(*) AS Hits INTO chart.jpg FROM mylog.csv GROUP BY Hour” -iTsFormat:”hh:mm” -chartType:Bar3D -chartTitle:”Hits by Hour”
So very cool and very powerful. I’m now wading through the tool’s author’s book.
New Blog
Good morning! From now on I will be using the free blog as wordpress.com and piping it through to Facebook for all to see…I’ll be importing my previous blog posts shortly.
