Interesting Links for 18-12-2014

• The Definitive Ranking Of Willow's Sweaters On "Buffy The Vampire Slayer"
  (tags: Buffy clothing funny )
• Quite possibly the cutest cat video of all time
  (tags: cute cats video )
• If you liked Baldur's Gate you really should be playing Divinity: Original Sin
  (tags: games roleplaying )
• Horror Film Taglines Replaced With Pornhub Comments
  (tags: horror movies porn comments funny )
• 10 Surprisingly Effective 2 P.M. Pick-Me-Ups
  (tags: sleep advice funny energy viaErinMcElhinney )
• Porn Star Passes Most Difficult Bar Exam In America
  (tags: porn law usa )
• A New App Is Shattering a Major Myth About Polyamorous Relationships
  (tags: relationships polyamory apps organisation )
• The blogpost North Korea tried to ban
  (tags: NorthKorea )
• A fantastic smartphone comparison chart. Useful next time I want to choose a new phone!
  (tags: phones comparison visualisation )
• Portia spiders are _really_ smart. I had no idea spiders could make complex plans
  (tags: spiders intelligence )
• Fundamental plot arcs, seen through multidimensional analysis of thousands of TV and movie scripts
  (tags: movies tv structure writing plot )
• Mobile firms and government agree deal to reduce 'not-spots'
  (tags: phones uk )
• The Toxoplasma Of Rage - how we are incentivised into behaviour that doesn't help
  (tags: discussion memetics emotion tumblr )
• Autism linked to air pollution
  (tags: autism pollution )
• TTIP: The EU-US trade deal explained
  (tags: trade uk Europe standards )
• European court rules that UK must change its immigration policy on family members
  (tags: Europe family immigration )
• Global life expectancy has increased by 6 years since 1990
  (tags: LifeExpectancy )
• A child's popularity is related to where the teacher seats them in the classroom
  (tags: popularity children school )

Parsing IIS logs from PowerShell

Posted because there's no official way of converting IIS W3C logs to PowerShell objects, and the original script I found wasn't quite doing what I wanted.

# Define the location of log files and a temporary file
$LogFolder = "build1:\Logs\iis\W3SVC1\"
$LogFiles = ls "$logFolder\u_ex*.log" #Ensure we only get the correctly formatted log files if there's a mixture of styles

# Logs will store each line of the log files in an array
$Logs = @()
# Skip the comment lines
$LogFiles | % { Get-Content $_ | where {$_ -notLike "#[D,F,S,V]*" } | % { $Logs += $_ } }
# Then grab the first header line, and adjust its format for later
$LogColumns = ( $LogFiles | select -first 1 | % { Get-Content $_ | where {$_ -Like "#[F]*" } } ) `
-replace "#Fields: ", "" -replace "-","" -replace "\(","" -replace "\)",""

$newLine = "`r`n"

$tempCsv = "$($LogColumns[0])$newline$($Logs -join $newline)"

return $tempCsv | ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter " "

Had my nuts cracked, Чайко́вский style

Nice evening today. I left work at 5:15 and walked across town to Edinburgh's best Indian restaurant, had a delicious meal with Julie, and then went to see The Nutcracker with her.

The design of the sets and costumes was gorgeous, the dancing was great, and the music was...well, presumably you've heard large chunks of The Nutcracker before.

Ballet isn't generally my thing, but it held my attention marvellously for a good hour of the two hour length - and thankfully, that hour was spread out quite a lot. Lots of good moments distributed throughout the whole evening, some lovely little comedic touches from two "monkeys" sitting at the feet of Clara (the young girl whose dream forms the majority of the performance).

It wasn't life-changing, but I am glad I saw it.