A Productive Weekend

I had a good weekend. Not only did I get to see the wonderful miss_amaranth, but I also got my BandTrack project started and a good bit of progress was made on it.

On the Friday, I got dressed up in my suit (the first time I've warn it since the interview which got me my current job!) and miss_amaranth put on her lovely new dress and off we went to the Christmas Ball. It was alright but as miss_amaranth commented, not worth the £20 we paid for it. The music ranged from naff to plain terrible, the "Vegas" upstairs consisted of a big sign and 2 tiny game tables and about the only fun thing was watching the karaoke. We left about midnight and decided to try the new Chinese take-away. It was very good.

I woke up quite early Saturday (about 9, I think) and got to work on a hobby project of mine, BandTrack. I'm going to go into detail with that in another post, I think. miss_amaranth slept peacefully, waking only occasionally to say "hi" and advise me she was going to sleep more. She was catching up after an extremely busy week and I had plenty to be getting on with so I was happy to let her sleep lots.

When she decided it was too late for even a student to be sleeping, we both felt like bacon so a walk to the shops to clear out the head-cobwebs and get the required bacon as well as yummy ice-cream (Ben & Jerry's for her, Vienetta for me) was in order. We talked lots, as we do when we go for our walks and I admitted that I might have found someone I'd like to get to know better in the future.

As those of you her flist will probably be aware, miss_amaranth had planned to take this weekend very easy. This resulted in quite a bit of time for "doing our own things, together" which is something me and her do a lot. It works really well for us both as our hobbies are very much solo affairs (writing and web development) most of the time so as she scribbled things and chatted with people on MSN, I got on with BandTrack.

We stayed up until very late, at least 2am, programming and writing stopping every now and then for cuddles and kisses which is my perfect way to spend a Saturday night. We did need to stop for a while to have a quite involved conversation but most of the issues were happily resolved.

Sunday was much of the same, a walk into Winchester itself to have our (becoming traditional) Sunday brunch at 'Spoons before a wander around the (unpleasantly crowded) Christmas Market before sitting on a wall talking about things and stuff. A spot of shopping later and then the bus back to the Halls before having another quiet and relaxed day together.

The travel home was particularly good, with no long waits anywhere, not even Oxford (where I normally have to wait 50 mins for the next bus). I was then up until gone 1 trying to get my project working on the actual internet, but that's a story for another post.

All in all, a good weekend was had by all.

We've advanced a tech level!

As I mentioned in my last post, I also spent a lot of this weekend working on my pet PHP project, BandTrack.

This started Wednesday evening, when I decided to get a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) set-up running on my laptop, Rover. After failing to get anywhere using WAMP Server (incidentally, why is so much of this stuff in French?) I got my hands on EasyPHP thursday evening. This proved much more successful and, after a few false starts, I finally happened across the VirtualDomain node and was able to get my websites up and running on Rover. A bit more tweaking on the train ride to Winchester during Friday evening, and everything was good to go.

If anyone is interested in setting up a WAMP server and would like my config files, feel free to ask and I will provide as well as an explanation for how/why they work.

I must have looked like a right pro, in my suit and everything, tapping away at my laptop all the way there. Book, cover and judgements based thereon springs to mind.

Saturday morning I decided I was going to get my head around this whole Model-View-Controller concept and so set about going through the tutorial detailed here. It's not perfect, particularly when it comes to getting all the code to work properly, but it only needed a bit of walking through the code to see where bits had been missed or where something had changed name mid-tutorial. As tutorials go, this was definitely in the category of "Best".

So with MVC finally set up and working nicely, I was able to retire from using the Internet and set about building BandTrack. This was my second build, having sold my first attempt just over a year ago, and I must admit I'm much happier with it so far. No more "bands.php?action=detail&name=nightwish", instead it's a much slicker "/bands/nightwish".

Progress was pretty rapid over the weekend and users can now register, login, and add and remove bands. Whilst still a long way from finished, I'm feeling really good about it already.

The only remaining nightmare was getting the site to work on my actual web host, rather than just Rover. After over an hour of tearing my hair out in frustration with getting .htaccess to work, I finally fixed the problem (incidentally, it was the QSA in the rewrite rule that was causing the problems). I then copied the file to the 000webhost forum so if I ever need it again I know where to find it!

Writer's Block: Top ten playlist

[Error: unknown template qotd]
According to Last.FM

In terms of an actual top 10 (surprisingly different):

1. Slipknot - People = Shit


2. Machinae Supremacy - Player One


3. Sabaton - Union


4. Frank Kelpacki - Hell March 2


5. Bif Naked - Twitch


6. Lonely Island - Space Olympics


7. Freemasons - Heartbreak (Make Me A Dancer)


8. Ludo - Lake Pontchatrain


9. Meco - Star Wars


10. Turisas - To Holmgard and Beyond

I'm aware there are several songs that also have a large meaning to me (namely Bif Naked - Lucky, Evanescence - Anywhere & Kimya Dawson/Adam Green - Anyone Else But You) but that list is in terms of "Desert Island Disk". Catchy, good to listen to and hit my musical tastes right on the head.

In terms of crossover from when I was younger, I'd say definitely, certainly in terms of genre. Right from the moment I got into music my taste was for dance, disco and metal. The only thing that's changed in the last 11 years (I only really got into music around 12/13) is I've developed a taste for 80's synth pop too.