HP is the guilty party here, but they’re not the only ones.

Okay, rant over, normal service can resume.

I have since discovered that the Sumatra PDF reader will allow PDF’s it has open to be written to – I’ve been using it for a few days and it seems a nice solution to this little problem.

My torrents are downloaded by my desktop machine, which shares bandwidth with the rest of the devices on my network – my phone and my laptop, generally. I prefer the torrents not to use any bandwidth while I’m home, to free it all for whatever else I want it for.

Deluge offers scheduling, which is fine for weekdays – on almost any weekday the torrents can happily download during working hours and sleepy time. However, our weekends can vary wildly between home all weekend and barely home at all – it seems wasteful to schedule no downloading for the non-sleepy hours of the weekend on the off chance we’ll be home.

The Toggle plugin offers a better solution for my use-case – it stops all Deluge bandwidth usage when toggled. It integrates into the Deluge GUI and web clients.

However, I have found the web client to be quite slow and clunky on my phone, which is the primary device I want to use to toggle Deluge’s bandwidth usage – generally when I wake in the morning and go to bed at night. This is quite possibly my phone at fault, but it does make toggling Deluge’s bandwidth usage annoying, since I often need to use my laptop or the desktop machine.

Accordingly, I have written what I would imagine is the world’s simplest Deluge client: deluge-toggle. The client either reports what the current toggling status is, or toggles the bandwidth usage. That’s all it does, but that’s exactly what I needed.

I have also written an incredibly simple Flask webapp to interact with the deluge-toggle client, to save me having to use a console from my phone. I run this webapp on my desktop machine, and can now easily toggle Deluge’s bandwidth usage from anywhere that I can connect to my home network.

All of this is very simple, but it does say complimentary things about Flask and Deluge (particularly its plugin system) that this was as simple as it turned out to be.

• I am married to an amazing and loving woman, who is truly beautiful both on the inside and the outside, who is also my best friend. I fully realise that such a relationship is sadly very rare, and I’m deeply grateful that I’ve found love like this.
• I am paid to do what I would do for fun anyhow – and paid well enough that I have no serious financial concerns. I realise how rare this is too, and am very grateful.
• I am very actively involved in serving my community and those in need through my Lions club, which brings me great joy.
• I have many good friends, from many walks of life, some of whom I’ve physically met and others I haven’t, but all of whom are terrific people I’m proud to call my friends.
• For the past 30 years my parents and brother (well, in his case, 28 years) have been more supportive, loving and fantastic than one could imagine, and I am truly, deeply grateful for the amazing family I am blessed to belong to.
• I have a deep faith in the Lord, which brings me inner peace and stability.

Looking at the above, I can honestly state that I am blissfully content. Life has challenges, of course, and ups and downs, but on the overwhelming whole everything is going great.

“Blissfully content” sounds like a pretty good state to be in at any age – I’m truly grateful to be able to say that at 30, that’s where I stand.

Peter borrows R50 from John and R50 from James
 He spends R97 and gets R3 change
 He pays James and John R1 each and keeps R1
 He now owes them R49 each
 49 + 49 = R98 + R 1 in his pocket = R99
 Where is the missing R1?

Here is the explanation I provided, in case anyone else may find in helpful:

The sum at the end (R49 + R49 + R1) is a red herring. How Peter spends the money he borrowed and what change he holds from that is a completely separate issue to how he pays it back and what he still owes on his loan.

Look at this way:
Peter borrows R50 from John, R50 from James.
He gives John R1, gives James R1.

He still owes John R49, James R49.
So in total he still owes R98 of the R100 he borrowed.

He used R97 of that hundred, and R3 in change.

After paying R2 of his debt, he still has R1. He has to get R97 from elsewhere (he spent it already). R97 + R1 in his pocket is the R98 he owes John and James.

It’s the phrasing of the question that is out of whack.

R49 owed to James + R49 owed to John + R1 in his pocket is meaningless maths – that’s adding what he owes + what he owes + what he has. There is no physical R49 anywhere – it’s introduced in the story as a figure but it doesn’t physically exist. It represents what he owes, not a sum of actual money, so it can’t be added to the R1 that does exist.

What he owes cannot be mixed in an equation with the details of where the money went, they’re different issues.

The correct maths is either:

R49 owed + R49 owed + R1 paid back + R1 paid back = R100 (dealing purely with his debt, ignoring what exactly he did with the original R100)

OR

R97 spent + R1 kept + R1 returned + R1 returned (dealing purely with what he did with the money, ignoring the irrelevant matter of where it came from).

The reason it comes across as a missing rand is in the way it is phrased, but you can’t add R49 owed + R49 owed + R1 physically in your possession, since they are apples and oranges.

I hope this is helpful to someone.

Other than the fact that is now 2 years, not one, every last word of that is still as true as it was then. Thank you for a fantastic 2 years love.

Within 15 mins I had a reply from a chap called Gary, saying he had cancelled the Thursday booking and credited me on the site with the money so I could make a fresh booking.

I went to the site to make a new booking, and saw I had R322 in credit, not the R480 I should have had. I added 6 tickets for Friday to my shopping cart anyhow, thinking to pay the extra (the wrong booking was all my fault anyhow). I didn’t pay yet though, and fired off another email to ask why the credit was less than R480, but adding that I would understand if the refund wasn’t total.

Before it can even have got there, Gary gave me a call, saying he saw he put in too little credit, and not to worry, he’d process my new booking within 5 mins – no need to pay anything extra. True to his word I got an sms 5 mins later with the details of a booking for the right day, for the right number of tickets – he must have picked it up from my as-yet-unpaid-for shopping cart.

His service was astonishing – if only all SA businesses could have service like that.

The experience was incredible, and certainly something we won’t be able to match for a few decades. My parents took us along partially to celebrate their recent 30th anniversary but more particularly simple because they really wanted to.

The likelihood of either of them reading this here is remote, but still, this seems a good place to simply say thank you.

As it is, I got around this with some judicious process killing. I’ll decide when I reboot my PC, thanks all the same.

The division I am supporting does have technicians, but they are neither hugely technically competent nor blessed with much time to get stuff done, so a “one-touch” installation or update procedure is desired.

There are several ways this could be done, perhaps by distributing an MSI installer which is then installed on each PC. Here is another technique which works for me. It leverages SVN, both because that’s where my code lives and because both sides of this game have access to our SVN server.

1. Ensure the exe and additional files are under SVN control.
2. Tag the version of the exe which should be distributed. This will be svn://path/to/current/tag
3. Create an SVN location with a name something like “current_location“. A good location would perhaps be in the SVN folder of the project, but it really only matters that it is somewhere in your SVN tree.
4. Check the “current_location” directory out to a local working copy.
5. Create an svn:external property on this working copy, like so:
   app svn://path/to/current/tag
   Check the “current_location” directory back in.
6. On each PC the app is to run on, checkout the “current_location” directory. The app will be in a directory called “app” in the checkout location.

The “current_location” directory is now effectively a pointer to the version of the app in current use.

When the app needs updating, create a new tag and edit the svn:external property of your local copy of the “current_location” directory to reflect the new tag and check in. Instruct the technicians to SVN update on their side. This could be done by right-clicking in Windows Explorer via TortoiseSVN for eg.

For a more one-touch solution, I also provide a Windows batch file to automate the checking out of the app on the technicians’ side. This can be quite easily done using the SVN command line implementation made freely available by collabnet (it is of course even easier to do on Unix).

There are some further Windows tricks you can use to make the batch file more comprehensive and useful, but this is enough for now. I’ll write about enhancing the batch file in a (hopefully short-term) future post.