Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
08 2006
Completely failed to have a lazy day. Instead accidentally went to Galway. Met people and managed to catch some of the match where Mayo beat Dublin. I think the crowd in Monroes made it pretty clear who they were supporting.
posted at: 03:35 | path: | permanent link to this entry
I was in Limerick last weekend to host and attend a talk given by Martin F. Krafft on the Debian Linux distribution. Martin has been a user and developer for Debian since about 1997 and has written a book, The Debian System about the distribution.
He spoke for a 2 most interesting hours (and a few less than most interesting ones... nah! Only joking! sorry! ;) ) about the Debian distribution, how the Debian Social Contract makes it an almost unique project, and how Ubuntu Linux interacts with the Debian release timeline and process. It was most interesting to compare his description of the Debian community with the Apache / ASF (Apache Software Foundation) community that I was lucky enough to meet at the recent ApacheCon event in Dublin.
I've not got the slides for Martin's talk yet, but will put them up here as soon as I do. For now, here's the recording of the talk in a couple of useful formats. The quality is noticeably improved on the higher bit-rate versions, but grab whichever one is most appropriate to your needs.
Today I have managed to achieve the following:
I'm an advocate of learning how to program without worrying too much about the language implementation - but a small project at work recently reminded me of the benefits of having a pretty good understanding of the featureset available in your chosen language and platform. Sometimes, languages hand you cheap performance improvements on a plate, if you just know to use them.
In a 'couple of hundred lines of perl' script the difference between using an array:
Array:
and the exact same functionality using a perl hash:
real 3m3.544s
user 3m3.292s
sys 0m0.210s
Hash:
can be pretty significant - about 33% in the example here - and it was a line or two shorter.
real 1m57.281s
user 1m57.043s
sys 0m0.218s
Bottom line: a good programmer not only learns how to program in a language agnostic fashion, but also learns what features the implementation languages offers - and uses them.
posted at: 06:40 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
"I have become immune to 'urgent.'Sometimes other people manage to express how I feel in a beautifully elegant fashion. I overheard this today and smiled a little smile.
...has inspired me to think of a way to make the world a safer place. I reckon we should start a petition to the Oxford English, Collins and Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, politely requesting that they remove the word "Terrorism."
Perhaps then we can finally declare the war on an amorphous concept over.
posted at: 01:43 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
Today I was privileged to overhear the following interesting interjection from Laura and Ewan.
Ewan: I'm all covered in nail and bite marks! And we didn't even have sex.
Laura: It'll never happen.
Ewan: What a waste!
Laura: Go fuck yourself!
Ewan: Nah! That would be really messy...
At that point I decided that I should stuff my ears with cotton wool and ignore the pair of them... Sometimes, my friends scare me.
posted at: 20:21 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Tonight we decided to go to a session in the wilds of Wicklow. A taxi was duly booked to take us there, but was unavailable to bring us home again at 12:30am. Neither were any other taxis - useful++ (inappropriately...)
We walked home - with a guitar. Seb's knowledge of the local geography was optimistic. Fortunately, some other locals who had a more realistic view of directions were quick to tell us to turn around and retrace our steps as we were heading in the wrong direction. Seb's boundless curiosity led him to ask the helpful local where we had, in fact, been heading. "Wexford!" came the one word reply. Suffice it to say, Wexford - lovely as it is - was not on our travel itinerary for the evening.
We got home. We got wet. We got no tea. We found some inflatable beds. We got some sleeping bags. We were happy.
A good night was had by all.
posted at: 01:41 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry
Like many people and corporations, I use a .local TLD for internal DNS. It's neat, tidy and makes it entirely obvious as to which addresses are resolvable internally and which are available outside the LAN / HAN / MAN. Unfortunately, Apple decided to hijack the .local TLD for Rendevous, now renamed to Bonjour, with the result that normal DNS resolution will silently fail for any hosts with a .local TLD. Fortunately, there appears to be a way to reinstate your DNS functionality without interfering too much with the operation of Rendevous/Bonjour.
A quick look in the /etc/resolver/ directory reveals that the OS X resolver supports DNS name specific resolvers. So, for signal2noise.local, my local domain, I just create a file called /etc/resolver/signal2noise.local with contents similar to a standard resolv.conf. Works a treat and doesn't kill Rendevous - winner.
posted at: 01:32 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
I'm flying to London to take part in the second birthday celebrations of the Open StreetMap project tomorrow. Today, I have followed the events in airports up and down the UK - and the knock-on effects on the airports in Ireland in particular.
I have already resigned myeslf to going on this trip without a laptop, MP3 player and sans-GPS even - so I'll be mightily unimpressed if airport 'security' manage to delay me any further or encroach on my weekend any more than they've done so already.
I should probably go pack some stuff, or something...
posted at: 00:55 | path: | permanent link to this entry
My mother, who knows nothing about this broadband revolution or the internet, has decided it would be a good idea to get some. I think it's the attraction of being able to talk to her children for free instead of clocking up large phone bills.
43 days ago, she ordered the Wireless version of Perlico internet - because she doesn't want wires trailing across the floor - and has thus far received nothing other than a wired router (now boxed up again and sitting inside our front door, waiting for Perlico to organise collection of it) and a flat denial from the call centre that she placed any order with them for any internet at all.
She has spoken to a supervisor on some one of the customer call centres now and they have finally agreed to send out the wireless modem/router ordered over 6 weeks ago, though with the bank holiday this weekend I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to arrive.
I've been promised dinner if I visit and configure it for her. wooo! :-)
Why does broadband and broadband customer service in Ireland suck?
posted at: 17:11 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
...that some cats like the mice in iBooks - and that when a cat sits on your laptop, it's quite difficult to work around them.
My laptop keyboard is now full of cat hair...
posted at: 22:06 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
![[IPv6 Ready]](http://9-badges.ipv6ready.ie/9/94/2f/05/9942f05fd76ad162164ae4abe1b094cd49d0d070-m.png)
