I don't make New Years resolutions. Not for any particular reason. I'm sure at one point in my youth I eschewed them out of some sense of duty to gen-x non-conformity and just never got into the habit of making them so now that I'm staring middle-age in the face the whole enterprise seems a bit silly.

However, each summer, as I have done since I was born, I take a trip to Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba, where I am the proud owner of a very tiny (sub 300 sq ft) cabin. I typically spend about 2 weeks there, alternating between recharging my batteries by reading and generally keeping to myself and visiting with the various family members who have their own tiny cabins or live around there.

At some point in the past couple of years I realized, this trip (and in particular, returning from it) represents my new year.

I don’t make new years resolutions, but I almost always come back from summer vacation resolved to do something differently.

— Jason Diller (@jdiller) July 30, 2013

It was never a conscious decision to make a 'post-summer-vacation-resolution' I just noticed I was doing it. Sometimes there are more than one, sometimes they're related to my personal life but most often I'm resolving to do something differently while at work.

This year, I'm hoping to do something that will cut across both my private and professional lives. I'm resolving to be more focused, and more methodical and to basically make an attempt to see if I can re-grow some of the attention span that I used to have but has atrophied over the years due to an advanced case of NADD. Unlike dear Rands, with whom I generally agree wholeheartedly, I don't really see NADD as a good thing. I'm firmly with the scientists that say multitasking really doesn't work.

Even if there's the odd super-human can pull it off, which I seriously doubt - I think those who claim the ability are delusional - I know I can't do it. Three years ago I changed jobs and the environment I came from (high-walled cubicles, library-voices culture) could not have been more different from where I went (open concept, loud, IM clients and the ubiquitous chatrooms). For me the difference it made on my ability to focus was striking. Like many of my teammates, I adapted by using headphones (often playing nothing but white noise) and ignoring the chatrooms and jabber client for periods of the day. The experience, particularly the contrast to what I was used to, tought me clearly that I go much faster when I focus on one thing until it is done.

So the plan is to focus more, but how?. Well, for one, I'm going to be more mindful of it and try to notice when I get distracted. Then I can make changes to help reduce the distraction. The first step is to return to using only a single monitor at work. More on that later.

It's been six months since I dumped my $100/month satellite tv subscription in favour of a UHF antenna connected to a PC running Linux and MythTV and I'm pleased to announce that I have absolutely no regrets about the decision at all.

When I started talking about doing it, one of my co-workers cautioned, "You're going to end up being the sysadmin for your tv, do you really want that?" Honestly, it was one of the things I feared would happen. I worried that a package upgrade would take it out, or that MythTV would occasionally take a vacation and require manual intervention, but none of that has happened.

The setup has been rock solid, required less hands-on maintenance and reboots than the dedicated PVR hardware it replaced, and has survived numerous package upgrades and even a full blown distro upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 without missing a beat. Having a computer connected to your TV has other advantages too. You can play games with MythGame, browse the web, or even play some big-screen online poker from the comfort of the couch.

If Linux could play Netflix, it would be perfect, as it's the only thing MythTV currently lacks that we use regularly to consume media

Updating statuses in Redmine via the API turned out to be harder than I expected. Taking the representation it sends you, and changing the appropriate values gets you strange behaviour:

• The server responds to the PUT request with 200 OK
• The status is not changed.

After a bunch of trial, error, and googling, I hit upon the solution:

Note:I tried posting the following on the Redmine topic about this, but it was rejected as spam, so I'm posting it here in the hopes that it'll help someone.

I was able to get it to work using XML:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<issue>
    <status_id>10</status_id>
</issue>

Note that I had to also set the Content-Type header to text/xml (despite .xml already being in the url) for the the update to take.

When I send the equivalent JSON (and Content-Type: application/json) I get an HTTP 500.

To me it's pretty bonkers that for an API claiming to be RESTful:

• you have to include .xml or .json in the url AND set the Content-Type. Content-Type alone should do the trick.
• the representation that you send to PUT an update is different than the one you GET from the server. (ie. 10 vs. )
• the server responds 200 OK for requests where it does no work for whatever reason.

But anyways, that's how I managed to update the status. Hope it helps someone.

I already talked about my motivations and the home theatre PC I put together, but I haven't talked about the software that makes it useful.

There are several options for PVR/DVR software, and there were a few things I wanted it to do:

• Have mostly the same capabilities as my existing Bell Satellite PVR
• Replace the current big, dumb file server I use for media files.
• Be controlled by my Harmony Remote
• Be stable once up and running.
• Not require much in the way of ongoing care and feeding.

With those in mind, I really only considered using Windows Media Center on Windows and MythTV on Linux. My gut told me MythTV would be a bigger hassle to set up, but less overall hassle over time, whereas WMC would probably basically work out of the box, but at the very least, Windows' need to frequently reboot itself for updates would become a pain. As well, the existing media server I use is Linux, so making this new box serve that role would be pretty straightforward.

So, I grabbed the latest Mythbuntu release (11.10) and installed it. Since I normally use Ubuntu when I can, and Mythbuntu is more or less Xbuntu with MythTV plonked on top, it seemed like the best place to start. I had already confirmed that my TV Tuner card had kernel support since 2.6.something, so I figured I was good to go.

As I talked about in Cutting the (space) cord, I'm currently pretty motivated to get rid of our satellite TV subscription and replace it with an over-the-air solution with little or no ongoing cost.

I've sorted out picking up the signals, but to be a true replacement for what we currently have I need to be able to record programs when they're on and play them back at a more convenient time. We watch nearly all of our TV this way and going back to caring about the actual schedule just won't work.

I searched around for stand-alone PVR appliances designed for OTA reception, and while a few exist (like the Tivo Premier or ChannelMaster 7000PAL but their support for Canadian stations' guide information is limited or non-existent and, in the case of the ChannelMaster, their software seems pretty poorly maintained and buggy with complaints galore to be found online.

This left me with a couple of options. I could abandon the whole endeavour, or build my own PVR/Home Theatre PC to do my bidding. I priced out components, and it seemed pretty clear I could comfortably build a pretty good one for around $500, even with skyrocketing hard drive prices caused by floods in Thailand. This meant a 5-6 month payback period after I cancel the Bell subscription, which is totally fine. If we decide a few months down the road that this was a bad idea, I'll have a decent PC I can use for something else for basically free. And honestly, it's been several years since I put together a PC and I kind of missed it.

I was pleased to see that the scrappy Mini-ITX form factor is still alive and well. Not only that, you can build a pretty capable Intel Sandy Bridge based system on it as a lot of vendors offer Mini-ITX sized motherboards with one of the Socket 1155 chipsets. I planned to stuff the finished product into the living room entertainment center, so the smaller I could make it, the better

If you're thinking really fancy, you can even get a chassis that makes the thing look like a typical home theatre component. Silverstone make, IMHO, the most convincingly home theatre-esque cases in this category, but they can be a bit spendy. I went with a cheaper InWin case for mine, because it seemed like it would blend in fine and didn't look obviously like a computer shoved under the TV.

For the internals, I went with an Intel Pentium G840 CPU, which is basically a Core i3 without hyperthreading and with the AES and virtualization extensions disabled. I figured I'd start there and in the unlikely event that it turned out to be too much of a weakling, I'd could pop in an i5 or something more beefy later. It also has the benefit of an on-die GPU, meaning I can use the single PCI-Express slot on the Gigabyte motherboard for the Dual Tuner TV capture card that will make all the magic happen. Add in a couple of hard drives, 8 GB of RAM, a cheap wireless keyboard and a Couch Mouse (who knew that was a thing?) and you've got yourself a PC. (I didn't bother with an optical drive. We already have a Blu-Ray player we rarely use). Hook it to your TV and stereo system using the motherboard's HDMI and optical SPDIF connectors, and you can (almost) call it a Home Theatre PC.

Of course, it still needs an operating system and some software to make it do stuff, so I'll write about that next.

I subscribed to Netflix streaming service basically the day it launched in Canada. Sure, the selection isn't great, but the $8/month price-tag makes places it firmly in the "good value for money" category in my mind.

One thing that Netflix brought into sharp contrast was the amount we spend on satellite TV. We're a pretty busy family, so we don't watch a lot of TV. What we do watch is almost exclusively recorded by our PVR when it airs and watched later when we have time in our schedule. Channel-surfing and the watching of random crap almost never happens, and when it does, it usually ends up being searching what's available on Netflix rather than channel-flipping. As a result, paying over $100/month to Bell for satellite TV at some point tipped into the "insufficient value for money" category.

After a shenanigan with Bell where cancelling my Internet service with them in July resulted in further bills and hassle lasting through October (long story), I became determined to stop giving them money as quickly as possible. I could have signed up for cable TV instead, which would have stopped the money hose I was pointing at Bell, but wouldn't have improved the value-for-money situation.

If you're using Hammock for REST under Mono and attempt to talk to an HTTPS endpoint, you may be surprised to see that it doesn't appear to work. This is because the HTTPS negotiation is failing due to the fact that Mono doesn't trust the root certificate of the site. (nor any other root certificates out of the box).

There are two main reasons not to include "defaults" root certificates in Mono.

1. Digital certificates are, like many digital files, copyrightable. This means that there are restrictions on how the roots certificates can be distributed.
2. We aren't in the business to decide on who you are going to trust. Certificates Authorities exists all around the world. The ones best suited to you aren't necessarily the ones best suited for everybody else and having a terribly long list of "trusted" roots isn't a very secure solution.

There are a few solutions to this that you can employ. You can:

• Seek out, download and install the individual root certificates that matter to you.
• Use the mozroots tool to download all of Mozilla's trusted root certicicates.
• Implement your own ICertificatePolicy in code to determine which certificates to accept.

If you want to write your own policy, you need to hook it into the ServicePointManager class:

   System.Net.ServicePointManager.CertificatePolicy = new
AcceptDodgyCertificatePolicy();

Be aware, that setting affects all of the web requests in your app that use the System.Net stack either explicitly or under the covers (as Hammock does), so make sure you know what you're doing before you go messing with it.

Before I even get started, I never use "Mother's Maiden Name" as a security question if I can avoid it, and if that's the only option, I generally lie because it's pretty easy to find out anyway. So, I'm hopefully not giving up anything that might facilitate identity theft in this post.

I've been digging in to my ancestry a bit, because, being Canadian, the topic of ones ancestral nationality sometimes comes up and to be honest, I didn't really know what mine was. I knew one line was primarily Scottish, but there was much still uncovered. As it turns out I'm a mixed bag of various western Europeans and my ancestors arrived in Canada a minimum of 4 generations ago depending on which line you follow so I'm going with "Canadian" as my nationality from here on out. It's the most accurate.

All this got me thinking, though, there are a lot of surnames in my ancestry that fell by the wayside because of the tradition of women taking their husband's name. But, I figure, one name is as good as the other, so my historically accurate (near as I can tell) full name, giving full credit to all* of the women and men who contributed to my genetic make up, is....

Every now and then I decide I want to try running Linux full-time on my primary computer (currently a Dell Studio 15 laptop). I've made efforts before, and I usually can't stick with it. The reasons usually being some combination of:

• Other family members have to use the computer and revolt at the change
• Some critical piece of hardware doesn't work
• Some necessary software isn't available

Since I now develop software on a Mac at work, I've had a great opportunity to re-familiarize myself with Bash and all of the awesomeness it provides, and found switching back to Windows on my laptop to be kind of a drag with it's single desktop workspace, no built-in SSH support, anemic command-line (yeah, I know about PowerShell, I don't care)

So, I decided to make the switch again a couple of weeks ago and so far it's been a relatively smooth transition. I no longer share my computer with other family members (we each have our own now), hardware support in Linux, particularly Ubuntu is pretty solid, and I can use [STRIKEOUT:Sun's] Oracle's Virtual Box to host a guest Windows OS for the odd piece of software that doesn't have a decent Linux alternative (*cough* iTunes *cough*).

I'm not a "compile-your-own-kernel" type of guy as I would rather have my computer serve my needs than vice-versa, so I went with Ubuntu 10.04 for easy setup. I was happy that everything worked pretty much right off the hop, even the non-standard Dell keys for volume/brightness/wifi/etc worked as-advertised.

I had a bit of trouble with sleep & hibernate. It would just hang instead of going to sleep and required a hard reboot to come back to life. A bit of Googling narrowed it down to the fact that I keep an SD card in the laptop's SD slot, and that causes some problems with the power management (unless the card's filesystem is unmounted first). That was easily solved with a shell script that automatically unmounts and remounts the card before and after sleep, and it's been working like a champ ever since.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to the developers of RedCar who've done a reasonably decent job of replicating the TextMate editor in a cross-platformy way. It's got a ways to go yet, but it's off to a good start.

Lastly, I'm just telling you what works for me. I don't care what you use. Do not read this as proselytizing, it ain't.

Back in January I bought a shiny new i7 Quad-Core laptop. It came with a 500GB disk drive, but I wanted it to perform as fast as possible, so after the laptop arrived I swapped out the hard disk for a 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD. Long-term, I knew 60GB wasn't going to be enough space for me, but I still had the 500GB drive which I put in an enclosure to use as an external drive (laptop has eSATA as well, so it willl perform at its full speed) to store large, infrequently accessed files.

By the way, the SSD made my already fast laptop fast. Like amazingly fast. I wouldn't be without it.

So, fast forward several months, and my 60GB SSD is, as I expected, running low on space. Since SSD is relatively new technology, the prices are falling pretty fast, so every extra month I can delay buying its replacement means saving money or getting more capacity for the same money on the next one.

I could move some stuff permanently to the external drive, but I want to use it as little as possible, since it's a pain to get out, plug in, etc.

Enter my trick:

My laptop, like most, has an SD card slot. I also happened to have a nice 32GB Class 10 SD card I wasn't using for anything important. I put that in to my laptop and, using WinDirStat tracked down the biggest space hogs on the main drive.

One thing that jumped out at me quickly was the folder C:\windows\installer Apparently that's the cache of all the MSI-based installers on the system, and they need to be there if you ever want to be able to uninstall the stuff. On my system this accounted for a bit over 3GB of space. Not a huge amount, but still 5% of my total capacity.

You can't officially move this folder, but you can use an NTFS junction to make Windows think it's still there when it's actually somewhere else (in my case, on that SD card) and it'll be none the wiser. (If you haven't used junctions or hard-links in Windows, check out the command mklink from an administrator level command prompt for details).

I spent an afternoon playing around with moving different stuff on and off the SD card with hardlinks and junctions and wound up freeing up about 10GB of space on my SSD, which should buy me a few more months.

Stuff I was successful in moving without noticeably impacting performance:

1. C:\windows\installer
2. The Streets & Trips data files.
3. C:\MSOCache
4. My Dropbox Folder
5. My Documents
6. Various and sundry single files.

The SD card is decidedly slower than pretty much anything else, so you'll want to limit what you move to infrequently used files, or large numbers of very small files.

Stuff I moved, but then moved back due to crappy performance:

1. My browser's data files (cache, etc).
2. My email client's data files.

Stuff I didn't even try to move because it seems like a recipe for disaster or terrible performance:

1. The Windows Swap file.
2. hiberfile.sys
3. Virtual machine virtual hard drives

And of course, if you do this, you have to leave the SD card in all of the time if you want it to be fully transparent and error-free.

Lastly, I'm sure none of this is officially sanctioned, so if you do it and it ruins your data, your computer, or your life, I'm not responsible.

I'm sure I'll be upgrading this disk soon enough, but in the meantime, I'm happy to dump off what I can onto another piece of internal storage that's half the size of my primary disk.