Planet ILUG

Yesterday, I joined some of my colleagues on a cave walk. Having previously experienced Ailwee Cave in the Burren, I was expecting a leisurely walk through some beautiful geological features. In retrospect, the name of the cave–Hölloch, or Hell Hole–should perhaps have provided a clue.

Switzerland’s wonderful public transport got us easily to Muotathal, where the cave is situated. Four-minute connections between Swiss trains are a solid guarantee that you’ll get there on time – unlike Ireland, where they’d be a pretty good guarantee that you’ll miss your connecting journey and have to re-route via the furthest point on the island.

The first clue should perhaps have been when we got to the caving center, and they asked for name, address and phone number – specifying that they didn’t want our mobile numbers, but a number that could be used in case of emergency Next clue, had I been watching, might have been the welly boots, full suit overalls, heavy gardening gloves, and good solid helmets. But I wasn’t watching, and once we were all suited up, we headed off happily up the mountain to the cave entrance.

We crossed a few small bridges on the way up the mountain, which I found a bit terrifying – but I pressed on, assuming that once we got to the cave, all would be well. Our guide stopped for a moment along the way, and asked if anyone had asthma, was afraid of heights, or narrow spaces. Thinking back to the last time I was asked that latter question, in Newgrange, I thought “well, yeah, I am petrified of truly narrow spaces, but the spaces in Newgrange weren’t so bad, so maybe this will be fine.”

I am, I will readily admit, an idiot.

So, we walked in to the cave, it’s not nearly as beautiful as Ailwee (and we’re all on headlamps – no artistically arranged electric lighting here!), but that’s ok, we’re only at the entrance. Next up, the guide warns us, is a little bit of scrambling. I’m mostly ok with that – I’m afraid of real climbing, and heights, but this is more just low ceilings and craggy floors.

Mild terror sets in when we come to a bit where you have to lie down and wiggle through the crack, but it’s a very short stretch, and I can see that it opens up to standing-room on the other side, so it’s fine. We all get through, and the guide takes a photo of us from way above, down through a fairly narrow gap. He had gone around the other way, and I’m assuming we all now go back the way we came, and on the way he had gone. But no. Now we’re meant to climb up there!?

With a bit of a boost to get me up as far as the first foothold, and plenty of encouragement from those who’ve done it, I manage to get up. Argh! Scary!, but I’ve made it. We get everyone out, and start walking down further into the cave. As we walk along, I’m thinking “y’know, he asked about heights and claustrophobia, but he never asked about fear of the dark. It’s pretty dark in here. I’m kinda scared”. I try not to be a scaredy-cat, but heights, narrow spaces, climbing, and the dark are all things that will set me off.

Next stop, whaddaya know, it’s time to turn the lights off. There is no place darker than a cave with all the lights off, unless it’s a few hundred meters into the cave, and several hundred meters down, and even if there were cracks to the air above, they’re all filled in with an alpine winter’s worth of snow… And now he wants us to walk along like this!?

I put my left hand on the shoulder of the guy in front, and the guy behind me puts his left hand on my shoulder. Right hands are on the rock face, and off we go. The guy in front races ahead, and I’ve lost him within seconds – the guy behind keeps gently pushing me forward. I didn’t scream, but only because my breathing was far too panicked to get enough power into my lungs. I’m sure we can’t have gone too far, but it was horrific.

We spent about 3hrs exploring the cave, and I’d estimate less than half an hour of that was in spaces where I could stand straight. We climbed and crawled across sharp rocks, wedged ourselves into spaces to keep from slipping back on sandy spots, and at one stage traversed a two-foot-deep pool across a space that can’t have been more than 3′6″ before the water came. I was crying by the time I made it across – and I would never have made it at all if it weren’t for a colleague holding my hand, coaching me, telling me to breathe, keeping my balance right! Thank you Matthias!!

Two-thirds of the way through, we stopped for a rest, and an optional side tour. Stephen, Pierre and I opted out, and sat down on the rocks. Then, it started to get cold. So Steve and I found the one spot where we could stand mostly-upright, and broke into the Charleston With a bit of encouragement, he even managed to do a swing-out, although I had to be careful where I stepped, as we had a “slot” just wide enough for one foot at a time between the rocks!

The break, and the dancing, did me good. When the guide returned with the others, he suggested that I stick straight behind him – keeping the whole group at the pace of the slowest member. I would have felt bad at doing so earlier, but I was getting tired and sore, and I was glad of his help. With lots of grit, and plenty of help from my friends, I made it through to the last hurdle.

“There’s a ladder”, he said. “You should go last, so I can help you”, he said. We got to the spot, a ravine with a ladder stretched over it. Hard to see what was on the other side. The guide went over, then the first of our gang. Across the ladder, and then somehow “up”. Rocks in the way, no way to know what happened next. Sitting beside the chasm, petrified of the ladder. Everyone else goes across. The guide tells the other person who’s afraid of heights “just look at me, don’t look down”.

I can do that. I have to, to get out of the cave. I crawl across to the ladder, fix my eyes on the flame of the guide’s lamp, and slowly make my way across. Hang on, it’s a dead end. Where now? Up!?

The way out of the cave is a 50m climb, straight up. Through a narrow crack. In the dark.

I can’t even get my foot to the first foothold. I climb up on the guide’s knee, and make it from there. I have never been so afraid. There are metal rungs sticking out of the rock. Some of them, I can get. Most of them are a few inches too high. Sometimes, the guide can push my foot up, and I make it. Other times, I just have to wedge my back against the wall behind me and make that leap of faith. It was, without exaggeration, the scariest thing I’ve ever done. It seemed to go on forever. Towards the end, the rungs turn into a ladder. There’s more space, but there’s also a ladder in the way And it’s offset, a couple of feet to the left of the rungs I’ve been relying on.

I’ve screamed a couple of times along the way, and cried once. But it’s nothing to this ascent, which is punctuated by a stream of terrified invective against the cave, the ladder, and my slippery wellingtons! By the time I make it to the top, I’m barely breathing, and shaking from head to toe.

In the finest Swiss tradition, we finish with an Apéro. Beautiful plates of cold cuts are laid out, with fresh bread, and delicious wine. I go straight for the bottle of water, fill my cup, pass it on, take it back to refill my cup, and repeat until I’m almost calm. I’m still shaking, but the food helps a little. My lungs are full of cave dust – it’s a solid eighteen hours before I can breathe properly again. We head out of the cave, and back down the valley, where the wonderful Swiss transport system conveys us safely home.

Yesterday, every muscle in my body was jelly. I could barely stand (although I did an almost-convincing Charleston a couple of times on railway platforms to keep warm!). Every movement felt like fire. My legs were constantly threatening to cramp.

And yet, amazingly, today, I’m generally alright. By some miracle, I can move, I can walk, I’m not a solid mass of stiffness. My right shoulder is oh-so-sore, and my neck is beyond painful. My knees are skinned, and bruised to halfway down my shins. My back is blue and purple, my left forearm is yellow and blue, my right upperarm is just solid purple. But overall, I’m just thrilled that I made it out alive!

Lessons learned:

• When someone suggests an offsite, do some research before signing up.
• When someone suggests an offsite outdoors, be doubly careful.
• When someone suggests an offsite in a cave, just say no.
• When in doubt, Charleston! It’ll keep you warm if you’re cold, take your mind off the cave if you’re panicked, loosen your muscles if they’re threatening to get stiff (A swing-out is an acceptable alternative, but requires slightly more space, and should perhaps be avoided on busy train platforms.)

Does anyone have some arnica?

(March 13, 2010 02:14 PM)

Links to this site from Reddit.com are no longer allowed.

(March 13, 2010 03:30 AM)

Since I'm a bit of a coffee addict (as are a lot of our staff) I decided the time had come to upgrade our office coffee machine.

If you recall, we got ourselves quite a nice machine nearly two years ago.

Unfortunately that machine, while excellent in its own right, simply could not cope with our expanded numbers (our staff numbers have gone up quite a bit since we got it).

So I started shopping around for a new machine. Eventually we settled on the Jura Impressa X7. Like the other machine it's "bean to cup". The difference is that the Jura is a lot bigger and can be plumbed in. It also handles capuccino and latte directly ie. no more messing about with steamer nozzles etc.,

The only downside to the new machine is that our office milk consumption has sky rocketed!

Note the tube for the milk on the left of the machine (milk cooler has been ordered):
The coffee we're using at the moment came from Discount Coffee, who offer a good range of coffees at reasonable prices. As you can see in the photo above, the Jura has not one, but two spaces for beans, which means you don't have to refill it as often and you could even try mixing types of coffee if you were adventurous.

So what about mugs?

A few months ago we ordered a batch of mugs from Owen in Mug Revolution. We got mugs for all our own staff and for some clients / friends / partners etc.,

Like so many of these "silly" ideas the feedback has blown me away.

Yes, they are really nice mugs, but I wasn't honestly expecting so many people to be so passionate about them.

One person who got one sent me an email thanking us and, to be perfectly honest, it made it all worthwhile:

Thank You for the great coffee mug!!  It is twice the size of any of our mugs at home, which saves me the back and forth trip when I'm comfortable on the couch watching football. (Only a company run by guys could understand that benefit)

We have a couple of mugs left that we will probably give away in a competition at some point in the next couple of weeks,  but if you want to get your own mug you don't need to wait. Owen, who is a really cool guy, is now offering the Blacknight mug for sale on his site!

If you'd like to find out more about how the mugs are made, then have a look at some of Owen's videos on Youtube. Owen makes really nice mugs, but what's totally captivating from my point of view is his passion for his craft. If you exchange emails with him you'll be impressed with his attitude, but it's only when you actually see him talking about his work that you can get a real feel for it, so I'd recommend you take a minute or two to watch his videos. (And yes - I am a big fan of his work!)

(March 12, 2010 07:56 PM)

I got shortlisted for Best Technology Blog in the Irish Blog Awards!

(March 12, 2010 06:31 PM)

THIS IS A PROOF OF CONCEPT - its not going to be upstream unless someone else dedicates their life to it, (btw anyone know anyone in ASUS?)

So NVIDIA unveiled their optimus GPU selection solution for Windows 7, so I decided to see what it would take to implement something similar under DRI. I've named it PRIME for obvious reasons.

Goals:
1. Allow a second GPU to render 3D apps onto the screen of the first, pickable from the client side.
2. Just target the rendering side, I'm assuming the GPU power up/down is similiar to what was done for the older switching method.

Restrictions + limitations:
1. Must have compositing manager running
2. Must have second screen configured for slave card (doesn't need to be used)

Test system:
Intel 945 IGP + radeon r200 PCI card - yes this won't be a speed demon.

Terms:
Master: the IGP displaying the output - intel
Slave: the GPU rendering the app - radeon r200 in this case.

Step 1: kernel support

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-testing.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/drm-prime-test
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/drm/log/?h=prime-test

The kernel requirements were simple, we needed a way to share a memory managed object between two kernel device drivers.
The kernel has a GEM namespace per device, however this isn't good enough to share with other devices, so I introduced a new PRIME namespace with two ioctls. One ioctl allows the master device to associate a device buffer handle with a name in the prime namespace, and the other allows the slave device to associate a prime namespace handle with a buffer. When the master creates a prime buffer the kernel associates the list of pages with the handle, and when the slave looks up the same handle it retrieves the list of pages and fakes up a TTM buffer populated with those pages as backing store. I've added the concept of slave object to TTM to allow for this.

The drm repo contains the API wrappers + intel + radeon pieces to call the association functions for buffer objects.

Step two: DRI2 Protocol
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/prime/0001-dri2proto-add-prime-token.patch
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/prime/0001-prime-support-for-mesa.patch

From the X server point of view a recent change to the DRI2 layer allowed for multiple device driver names to be associated with a DRI2 end point. The client can request either a DRI or VDPAU device name currently. I firstly extended the DRI2 protocol, to add a new buffer type, called PRIME, and added a hack to mesa's glx loader to request the prime driver if an environment variable was specified.

Step 3: X server DRI2 module + drivers

http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/prime/0001-intel-add-prime-master-support.patch
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/xf86-video-ati/log/?h=prime-test
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/prime/0001-dri2-prime-hackfest.patch

This was the messiest bit and still requires a lot of change. First up I added an interface for the drivers to register as PRIME master and slaves. Intel driver registers as master, radeon as slave for my demo. We store these in an array. When a client connects and requests prime driver, we mark the drawable and redirect the dri2 buffer creation requests to the slave screen driver. Also the drm authentication is sent to both kernel drms. It then hooks the swapbuffers command where it does a region copy, and redirects this to the slave driver, and damages the pixmap in the master driver. Now the "interesting" part, my original implementation simply grabbed the window pixmap at the dri2 create buffers time, however there is an ordering issue with compositing, this pixmap is pre-composite redirection so isn't actually the pixmap you want to tell the kernel to bind to both gpus. This turned out to function badly, I could see gears all stretched over the front buffer.

So a quick coke + chocolate break later, I had enough sugar to bash out the hack that now exists. DRI2 calls the slave driver copy region callback, which checks if the drawable pixmap is on the same screen, if its not, it checks if we've marked the pixmap as a prime pixmap (i.e. one that belongs to the master). It is, it swaps in the slaves copy, otherwise it callsback into DRI2. This callback calls the Intel driver to make the buffer object backing the pixmap, shareable, and returns the handle,then calls into radeon with the handle to create a new pixmap pointing at the shared buffer object. Once all that is done, radeon copies the back buffer to the shared front pixmap, we return and damage is posted and the compositor grabs the window pixmap and displays it.

So does it work?
On my blistering fast test system with X + xcompmgr running glxgears was going at 150fps from the r200 PCI card. Hopefully I can get some time on a faster system or one of the dual laptops.

Caveats:
- When a window manager is running the gears get all corrupted, this looks like the clipping and/or stride matching between
the drivers isn't correct. I suspect something with reparenting and decorations, I'm not enough of an X guru to understand this yet, hopefully one of the other hackers can fill me in. Also before it gets reparented and redirected a frame can land on the real front buffer, again clipping should take care of this, but isn't working yet. I need to workout how clipping and that stuff works in X/DRI2. - talk to ppl about clipping then JDI.
- Once a client has connected as a prime, we don't tear it down properly, so later clients can end marked as prime. - work out some sort of resources to turn stuff off
- Reference counting on the pages in the kernel is iffy, currently i915 ups the page list refcount but never drops it. solution JDI
- hardcoded /dev/dri paths in dri2 for slave device - solution JDI
- radeon driver could in theory be a prime master - solution JDI
- nouveau could support prime master/slave also. - solution nouveau guys JDI
- requires an ugly second screen in xorg.conf to load the slave driver. Can we have a 0 sized screen or maybe a rootless second screen. - solution : rearchitect X server to allow drivers without screens (6m-1yr work)
- pageflipping needs to be hacked off in intel driver. - work out and then JDI

Where is the video?
Once I get it working with a window manager on a useful machine I might do a video of two gears going.

Where now?
Well this is a purely academic exercise so far, after a week of kernel fighting I decided to do something new and cool. To make this as good as Windows we need to seriously re-architect the X server + drivers. At the moment you can't load an X driver without having a screen to attach it to, I don't really want a screen for the slave driver, however I still have to have one all setup and doing nothing and hopefully not getting in the way. We'd need to separate screen + drivers a lot better. Having some sort of dynamic screens would probably fall out of this work if someone decides to actually do it.

The kernel bits aren't as ugly as I thought but I'm not sure if upstreaming them is a good idea without the others bits. The refcounting definitely needs work also the cleanup when clients exit.

DRI2 needs some more changes, I might try and flesh it out a bit more and then talk to krh about a sane interface.

I'm probably going to get forced task switch quite soon, so I might just get to having this running on a W500 or T500, before dropping it for 6 months, so if anyone wants a neat project to play with and has the hw feel free to try and take this on.


ASUS feel free to send me one of the real optimus laptops and I'll get nouveau guys hooked up and try and RE the nvidia DMA engine.

(March 12, 2010 06:16 AM)

I am glad to announce the immediate availability of the new Open Source Tripwire 2.4.2. It contains a couple of bug fixes and gave me the opportunity to get familiar with the software once more. As mentioned on my previous post, more releases will follow and hopefully new features also. Stay tuned :) Meanwhile, grab it while it’s hot : https://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/files/

(March 12, 2010 12:01 AM)

As the ICANN meeting in Nairobi draws to a close several big questions still hang in the air.

While many ICANN insiders may be wondering about new TLDs the world's media is firmly focussed on one topic an one topic only - .xxx.

Tomorrow morning the ICANN board will officially decide what will happen with .xxx.

Will it move forward?

Will they find some way to not take a decision?

I for one will be getting up early tomorrow morning to find out!

In other news, the hosts of the next ICANN meeting, which is scheduled for Brussels, today presented a short video to those attending the current meeting.

(March 11, 2010 03:39 PM)

Been taking my time on this one but starting to work on Tripwire again. To mark the occasion, I have started a brand new blog to get things done and announce stuff, so you can take a look here, this is where it will all be happening from now on: http://tripwire.sourceforge.net/

(March 10, 2010 11:49 PM)

Tuning a webserver in three minutes while it's being slashdotted.

(March 10, 2010 09:33 PM)

A balloon seller on Daunt Square in September 2009, during one of our photowalks. A shopper takes her ease in the foreground.

Related Posts

• Barry’s Balloons
• The witch and the balloons
• Unhappy Child

(March 10, 2010 09:30 PM)

My piano is going out of tune.

The local tuner says it can’t be tuned. but, seeing as he’s also the owner of the local piano shop, I really don’t think I can trust his word on that – especially as another tuner (in Dublin) laughed immediately when that was said to him.

I’m certain that I can tune the piano, but I’ve been told not to, by both the tuner in Dublin, and also by Bronwyn’s mum, who owns it – apparently the slightest mistake can be costly.

And so, I’m going to build my own keyboard, which I can tune if I want to.

Here’s a picture of the end-goal – a well-made clavichord:

To buy a ready-built clavichord would cost 8000 euro or higher. To get a kit version which you put together yourself would cost 3500 or higher.

I feel that’s a little bit high, so I’m trying to make a simple clavichord, where the materials cost 50 euro or less. I’m not counting the cost of the tools.

So far, the materials have cost less than 25 euro – a sheet of 22mm plywood, and some wood glue.

Today’s progress is that I have the basic shell of the thing created. It’s 100cm x 30cm in size, with internal walls of 10cm.

The keyboard will be four-octaves in length. 49 keys, from C two octaves below middle.

I’ll start cutting the keyboard out tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish off all the woodwork by then.

Then it’s time to start thinking about the strings.

(March 10, 2010 09:04 PM)

DEV300_m74 +5 overall unused, though sal becomes unused method free.

(March 10, 2010 09:33 AM)

...disk has corrupted. that would explain its inability to run backups for some time. Thanks Apple for such useful error messages ("Failed!") - helpful. *sigh*
Fortunately it's only my backup that's corrupted, and hopefully a 'Disk Utility' repair will put that back in a working state.

(March 09, 2010 11:31 PM)

On getting sneakily banned from reddit without reason, warning, process or notification.

(March 09, 2010 10:44 PM)

One of the rather odder bugs. OOo’s file menu suddenly appears for no good reason (while playing embedded video in Firefox on another workspace). Story is that OOo has the focus while the video is playing in totem-mozplugin, totem-mozplugin seems to want to inhibit the screensaver from kicking in so sends regular Left Alt strokes to the display via XTest. If OOo has the focus, it receives the Alts, and one of its quirks is that the file menu appears on press and release of Left Alt.

(March 09, 2010 04:18 PM)

This article is based on work which will be expanded more fully in the book, when I get to that chapter.

Every time we do an online store here in webworks, the postage/packaging is different. In one case, for example, postage is free over €50 euro, in another, it depends on where it’s going, and in the latest, it depends on a load of factors including where it’s going, what the weight of the products is, and what delivery option was chosen.

Up until now, hand-coded the postage rules. Everything else was handled by user-friendly parts of our CMS, but postage was such a random thing that we couldn’t find anything common enough that we could make a generic P&P handler.

The finished product is more complex than this example, but I’ll describe a cut-down version of what we’ve done, with countries and parcel-types removed.

admin demo – demo of UI for generating P&P rules

The first demo shows how the postage-and-packaging rule-set is created, using an “if-else” flow generator to build up the logic of the thing, and after each major action, convert the current state into a JSON string which can be saved.

The PHP is not really important in this one. The JavaScript handles everything. It translates a “seed” JSON string into a graphical representation of the rules, which can then be manipulated and finally translated back (automatically) into a JSON string to be saved in a DB (or session in this case). source for the PHP, source for the JS.

The frontend does its work in the background:

frontend demo – using those rules to evaluate P&P (visit admin first).

In this case, we enter values – total, weight – and run through the rule-set to find out what the P&P ends up as.

The source is suprisingly small, using a small recursive function to dig through the rules, no matter how deep and complex they go.

Here’s the recursive function (see source for rest of file):

function os_getPostageAndPackagingSubtotal($cstrs,$total,$weight){
  foreach($cstrs as $cstr){
    if($cstr->type=='total_weight_less_than_or_equal_to' && $weight<=$cstr->value)return os_getPostageAndPackagingSubtotal($cstr->constraints,$total,$weight);
    if($cstr->type=='total_weight_more_than_or_equal_to' && $weight>=$cstr->value)return os_getPostageAndPackagingSubtotal($cstr->constraints,$total,$weight);
    if($cstr->type=='total_less_than_or_equal_to' && $total<=$cstr->value)return os_getPostageAndPackagingSubtotal($cstr->constraints,$total,$weight);
    if($cstr->type=='total_more_than_or_equal_to' && $total>=$cstr->value)return os_getPostageAndPackagingSubtotal($cstr->constraints,$total,$weight);
  }
  $val=str_replace('weight',$weight,$cstr->value);
  $val=str_replace('total',$total,$val);
  $val=preg_replace('#[^0-9*/\-+.\(\)]#','',$val);
  if(preg_match('/[^0-9.]/',$val))eval('$val=('.$val.');');
  return (float)$val;
}

The switch block goes through the various “if” types that can exist in the flow model, handling each of them recursively and return their values to the caller.

If no “if”s are encountered, then the ruleset has found an answer, and we return that answer.

Before returning it, though, we parse the value of the answer. This is in case the answer is a math formula to do with the weight or total of the item.

For example, An Post have definite prices for packets to Europe up to 2kg (which is 10.75), and beyond that, it’s 3 euro extra for every extra kg.

That translates to a load of definite “if” statements, and an end value of “(weight-2)*3+10.75″ for the final “else”.

So, we convert recognisable words such as “weight” or “total” to numbers, make sure that we’re only left with parseable characters (and not something that can be used to hack), and eval it to produce the result.

Obviously, the full product is more complete than this, with safeguards against faulty formulas, extras to handle countries and envelope types (parcel/packet/envelope), but this example should give you a few ideas if you’re building your own P&P handler.

(March 09, 2010 04:07 PM)

Filmed before Mobile World Congress:

…

(March 09, 2010 03:00 PM)

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

While I doubt this is Oracle's normal policy, they really do need to teach their staff how to market properly.

Using email to help promote sales is a good idea, but the way that this is being done is incredibly bad and damages email marketing in general.

So far today I have received 5 separate copies of an Oracle "offer" on my work domain. I also received multiple emails a couple of weeks ago in my personal email.

It is incredibly annoying.

Why?

Because I never signed up for ANY of these emails and now I'm being asked to unsubscribe, which in some cases is going to be nigh on impossible as the emails in question do not send - they are only setup to receive only.

So how can I get off Oracle's spam list?

I can't reply to the emails, as they seem to be coming from some automated system.

And judging by the email addresses that are being targetted it's pretty obvious that the email addresses were scraped off websites.

(March 09, 2010 10:31 AM)

Earlier today (around 6am Irish time) the 37th public ICANN meeting opened officially in Nairobi, Kenya.

I stress the "official", as the meeting's activities had already started on Saturday with a large number of meetings taking place over the weekend.

The official opening ceremony in Kenya included the usual welcomes from the local hosts and dignataries followed by an address by ICANN's CEO, Rod Beckstrom.

What made this opening a little different is that Beckstrom did not just open the event. No. ICANN's new CEO made certain that his opening words would resonate and called out the African Telcos on their pricing:

As the vice president mentioned, there's now a fiber connection to
Mombasa, which actually goes all the way to this conference center.
We have some of the best, if not the best fiberoptic connectivity
that ICANN has ever had in the world is right here, right now in
Nairobi.  Thanks for this important work.  The government and the
private sector together working together has done.

That service is so good, do you know what it cost to get high-speed
broadband access at your home here in Kenya?  $13 a month.

$13 a month!

That's an excellent price.  But I'd say it's also too high, and we
hope it comes down even lower all over Africa where we have one
billion people, many of whom want access to the Internet.  And no one
needs to take my word for it because a survey of 1700 Kenyans was
just completed three days ago, and published by TNS.  And the
research said that 77% of Kenyans want better Internet access, and
63% of Kenyans value better Internet access more than good telephone
service.  More than good telephone service.  Can you imagine what
that means?

Maria Farrell has an interesting post from Nairobi covering the opening speech, which is worth reading. You can see the full opening speech below:



This week's meeting is going to attract a lot of media attention and it will be interesting to see how things pan out as the week progresses.

Unfortunately I am not attending in person this week, though I will be following the meeting remotely, which means a lot of early mornings this week! (Nairobi is 3 hours ahead of Ireland)

Fortunately there are plenty of tools available for people to follow the meeting from afar, with both audio and video feeds for most of the meeting being made available.

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(March 08, 2010 07:59 PM)

Whilst BIND is a nameserver I use nearly every day, it’s somewhat large and unwieldy being a reference implementation of the DNS spec.

Where possible, I always like to split out resolving and authoritative functionality into two seperate pieces of software. Unbound does a great job in the latter role – also from the authors of NSD, NLnetlabs – so I thought I’d give NSD a go on ns.spoofedpacket.net.

This machine serves only handful of zones, so it’s easy enough to migrate. The transition is made even simpler since NSD supports the old bind zonefile format out of the box. I decided to install NSD from source, following the tried and tested method:

 cd /usr/local/src
 wget http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/nsd/nsd-3.2.4.tar.gz
 tar zxvf nsd-3.2.4.tar.gz
 cd nsd-3.2.4
 ./configure
 make
 make install

The dependencies are very few, it should compile without much fuss on nearly any modern *nix system.

By default, all configuration files and zones go into /etc/nsd. There is also an nsd.conf.sample that you can use as a base config. The config file is extremely simple, for a basic setup you only need to look at the server: and the n-number of zone: sections. In the server: section, I only changed the location of the zone files:

 zonesdir: "/etc/nsd/zones"

At this point, it’s always good practice to organise your zonefiles into directories according to their roles. Here is what I have:

 /etc/nsd/zones/master
 /etc/nsd/zones/slave (nothing here yet)
 /etc/nsd/zones/master/forward
 /etc/nsd/zones/master/reverse
 /etc/nsd/zones/master/reverse/IPv4
 /etc/nsd/zones/master/reverse/IPv6

If you have an old BIND install that you are replacing, it is just a simple matter of copying/moving the existing zonefiles to their new locations. The zones can then be configured in nsd.conf as follows:

# spoofedpacket.net
zone:
        name: "spoofedpacket.net"
        zonefile: "master/forward/spoofedpacket.net.zone"

        notify: 193.1.193.194 NOKEY
        provide-xfr: 193.1.193.194 NOKEY

name and zonefile are pretty self explanatory, just remember that the path to your zonefile is always prefixed with the zonesdir statement from earlier on. notify lists all the nameservers you wish to send DNS notifies to when a zone is updated. provide-xfr controls who can carry out zone transfers (AFXR) from your nameserver. The NOKEY statement tells NSD that no cryptographic keys are required to authenticate the notifies or zone transfers between your nameserver and the secondary nameservers.

Once you’ve finished editing nsd.conf, you must now compile your zonefiles into the binary format that NSD understands. This is one of the main reasons for NSDs speed and low footprint:

 nsdc rebuild
 nsdc reload

Verify that nsd is running and serving zones:

 pgrep -lf nsd

 dig @ns.spoofedpacket.net www.spoofedpacket.net

(March 07, 2010 06:22 PM)

I feel that that after working for 4 years (IT dept) on a project that employed up to 400 people across Europe and further afield, I can’t understand why a short film that took six months to make is getting more headlines than a the first FEATURE film out of Ireland since the Bluth studios. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Bluth_Studios Again today RTE compound [...]

(March 07, 2010 11:20 AM)

So, day one of WordCamp Ireland draws to a close, there is a dinner tonight but the talks and sessions are over for the day.

I briefly helped John Handelaar during his talk on WordPress MU, but my main talk was on WP Super Cache. Thank you Hanni, Jane and Sheri for recording the talk. Hopefully it’ll be available online next week. In the meantime here’s the OpenOffice slides of my talk.

I must extend a big thank you to Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan for organising a great day and to the sponsors who made the weekend possible.

Looking forward to the dinner tonight, and the rest of the conference tomorrow.

Update! I’ve added a few photos from Day 2. I was shattered tired though as I was up until 1.30am chatting with Donnacha!

Update 2! Sabrina has written a thoughtful post about WordCamp Ireland. I for one had a great time there and so did everyone I spoke to. I totally agree with her about child minding facilities. My son Adam had a whale of a time, and is still talking about it. (and for an almost three year old, that’s a very good sign!)

Oh, more photos on Pix.ie!

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(March 06, 2010 05:35 PM)

AZ8MFBCNWD84

…

(March 05, 2010 10:11 PM)

I mentioned earlier this week that we were sponsoring WordCamp in Kilkenny and that I was attending.

It now transpires that a large number of our staff will be attending, so it looks like Blacknight will be invading Kilkenny!

By the sounds of things the event itself has completely sold out, so it should be a good weekend

See you there!

(March 05, 2010 05:17 PM)

I had a very boring lunch hour today, made yummy scrambled eggs with ham on toast and a large mug of tea.  Now what, not in the mood to go out side as I may not come back in it’s so sunny out there.

I was curious on the Yahoo V Google search so decided to have some fun at lunch, though as one of the charming folks in the #ubuntu-uk channel “If that’s what you call fun … sheesh”. Anyway I chose 4 things very simply Laura Czajkowski, Ossbarcamp and something not related to me but I enjoy Ubuntu UK Podcast and finally I asked in channel for a topic any topic, “Pubs” was the final one. The reason behind the first two topics was I was curious what the results would be and had an idea already what Google would return.  The final two were just random ones that I could compare the results from.

I’m a little shocked over the disparaging results returned.  At present I run Karmic, and once I get a chance will upgrade my laptop run lucid and  then switch to Yahoo for a while as long as results improve as at present the results aren’t great for yahoo compared to Google.

Laura Czajkowski Google Results

Laura Czajkowski Yahoo Results

Ossbarcamp Google Results

Ossbarcamp Yahoo Results

UUPC Google Results

UUPC Yahoo Results

Pubs  Google Results

Pubs Yahoo Results

All of the results in a larger form are HERE

(March 05, 2010 02:32 PM)

In honour of the recent discussions on foundation-list, I would like to resend everyone to this piece by Dan Spalding, which I’ve mentioned previously. It had a huge influence on me, and hopefully will on others too.

As a teaser, here’s an extract of the target audience:

Consensus decision making is a model of the society we want to live in, and a tool we use to get there. Men often dominate consensus at the expense of everyone else. Think about the man who…

• Speaks for a long, loud, first and often
• Offers his opinion immediately whenever someone makes a proposal, asks a question, or if there’s a lull in discussion
• Speaks with too much authority: “Actually, it’s like this…”
• Can’t amend a proposal or idea he disagrees with, but trashes it instead
• Makes faces every time someone says something he disagrees with
• Rephrases everything a woman says, as in, “I think what Mary was trying to say is…”
• Makes a proposal, then responds to each and every question and criticism of it – thus speaking as often as everyone else put together (Note: This man often ends up being the facilitator)

It’s rarely just one man who exhibits every problem trait. Instead it’s two or three competing to do all the above. But the result is the same: everyone who can’t (or won’t) compete on these terms – talking long, loud, first and often – gets drowned out.

This is a result of society’s programming. Almost no men can actually live up to our culture’s fucked up standards of masculinity. And our society has standards for women that are equally ridiculous. In one way, we both suffer equally. That’s why we all yearn and strive for a world where these standards – which serve to divide us and reduce us and prop up those in control – are destroyed.

In another way these standards serve those who come closest to living up to them. Sure, we all lose when a few men dominate a meeting. But it’s those men who get to make decisions, take credit for the work everyone does, and come out feeling more inspired and confident.

Like I said, Dan’s piece opened my eyes to my own bad behaviour, and also enabled me to improve as a meeting/round-table/discussion facilitator. Hopefully a reasoned reflective analysis of their behaviour by the most disruptive elements of foundation-list will also have a similar effect on them. I certainly hope so.

(March 05, 2010 02:07 PM)

The old and fairly reliable Sennheiser RS40’s I was using up until a few weeks ago finally gave up the ghost in the run-up to Mobile World Congress this year – or to be more accurate, the battery packs finally…

(March 04, 2010 11:49 PM)

What do you do when you’ve successfully gotten a demo to Mobile World Congress and you want to reward yourself?

Go order a little light reading of course!

Amazon are really getting to…

(March 04, 2010 03:44 PM)

Ubuntu, which is one of the more popular Linux distributions these days, has unveiled a completely new look.

It's got a new logo:
And a whole new range of styles for just about every other visual asset associated with the brand, both online and on the users' desktops.

The new look is very slick compared to the "old" image of Linux distributions as being ugly, yet functional

Full details here

Thanks to Laura for mentioning it earlier this evening

(March 04, 2010 01:27 AM)

WordPress MU 2.9.2 has just been released and is mostly a security and bugfix release based on WordPress 2.9.2. Grab it from the download page.

As well as the security fix mentioned above, this version also fixes a few bugs, makes the blog signup process much faster and adds a new “Global Terms” Site Admin page.

The “Global Terms” page is one I should have added years ago. Currently it’s fairly bare, but hopefully in future versions of WordPress it will be expanded. It allows the Site Admin to “fix” the terms (tags and categories) used in MU blogs. These terms are normally synced with the “sitecategories” table but sometimes they go astray. This can happen if you “import” a blog using PHPMyAdmin without going through the WordPress importer, or if a plugin manipulates the terms table directly.
WordPress MU forces the “slug” used by terms to be a sanitized version of the “name”, which isn’t the case in WordPress. This page can optionally rename the terms so they match the slug. It doesn’t do the opposite because that would break public facing URLs on the site. (I must extend a big thank you to Deanna for helping debug that page)

Enjoy!

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(March 03, 2010 05:01 PM)

I just ran the following code on the 2009 archive of my inbox.

grep "From: " 2009|cut -f 1 --complement -d " "|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|less

I received the most email from bots and scripts, among them WordPress.com, Twitter and Facebook. Of the real people here are the top 5 names you may recognise:

1. Maya Desai (109)
2. Matt Mullenweg (96)
3. Sheri Bigelow (76)
4. Michael D Adams (37)
5. Barry Abrahamson (34)

This was of course inspired by Matt’s post in January. I should do the same for Twitter replies/messages and for blog comments. I somehow doubt there would be much overlap between Twitter DMs and emails.

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(March 03, 2010 12:17 PM)

Grim faced people walking along O’Connell Street in Dublin a month ago.

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(March 03, 2010 10:18 AM)

Two years ago while I was working at dotMobi, I was one of the programmers working on the DeviceAtlas project, which launched at Mobile World Congress 2008. At the time, it was the…

(March 02, 2010 03:32 PM)

Vodafone Ireland have announced today that the iPhone and iPhone 3GS will be available from March 25th 2010.

What is semi-interesting is that Vodafone are pitching the device at their full range of clients ie. both pre-paid and monthly and also business users.

They're also going to be offering "tethering" which allows you to use your iPhone as a modem.

Though "tethering" is a "special" feature on the iPhone it's standard on most "smart" phones, such as the Nokia N95, for example.

The pricing seems to be quite competitive, but how well that will integrate with existing contracts is not at all clear. In our case, for example, we have about 15 handsets with Vodafone. I don't see why I'd want to pay a premium just for an iPhone - which I already have, as I bought an unlocked one from Expansys.

Trying to make sense of the pricing options on the Vodafone site would give you grey hair!

The price of the actual handsets (same model) vary from FREE to around €99 for the 8 Gb 3G, while the 32 GB 3GS can cost up to €300.

It's also not clear if the handsets will be 100% locked to Vodafone's network, which would render the incompatible with Maxroam and other services when travelling overseas.

Of course Vodafone already asked us all to sign up to be informed about the iPhone months ago, but have been silent ever since.

What kind of demand will they get?

Will they have enough hardware to handle it?

Will people be switching from rival carriers?

(March 02, 2010 12:39 PM)

...or at least not annoy those attempting to respond to it.
For whatever reason, I've been asked to complete an unusually large number of surveys recently. I get customer surveys from suppliers I deal with at work and as a student I frequently get asked to participate in questionnaires to assist other students in their research. If I feel a survey is reasonable I'll happily respond to it - but I find myself getting annoyed with surveys for the same reasons over and over again. Some surveys have been so annoying I've abandoned them half way through, wasting my time and probably not providing any feedback to the surveyor.
Remember that most people who fill in surveys are giving of their limited free time to provide you with some useful feedback. Respect their time and good will and try to make things easy for them. Here, for reference of anyone who would like me to respond to their survey, are my top tips for making your survey more likely to be completed and returned:

1. Be up front and open about what information you are trying to gather and why you are trying to gather it. While multiple-choice answers are unlikely to change depending on the reason for the questionnaire, free-form text answers are likely to be quite different. I'll except those doing psychological research from this rule, since they typically have their own reasons for asking certain things in certain ways.
2. Be honest about how long it will take. Give an estimate at the start so people can decide if (a) they want to devote that much time and (b) if they have that much time available in one block now, or should wait until later to start. Estimate on the high side. Ask three friends of yours to take the survey and time them - see how long it takes them to fill it in and use that as a gauge. If it's a multi-page survey, provide a progress bar. Make sure the progress bar is honest and realistic about progress at every page.
3. Use less pages, particularly on web surveys. Remember that ever time I have to click next wastes time as my browser has to download a new page, render it, etc., etc. In particular, stop the foolishness of asking one question per page. If I wanted to click next all day, I'd install Windows software for a living.
4. Don't make questions compulsory. Allow me to progress without answering a question. It might be that I don't have an answer, don't want to give an answer, or that I want to come back to it later.
5. Don't ask for personal details, in particular things like date of birth. If there is a genuine reason you need such information, state why you need it and don't make it compulsory. Any survey I get asking me for date of birth is ignored. If you are building up a statistical model that requires the person's age, ask them that - or ask them their year of birth, or even the month and year. If you need such information, explain why and detail how you are going to protect such personal information from abuse (e.g. By only storing anonymised data, or similar.)
6. Get someone else to check your questions. For preference, get someone who does not intimately understand your research or line of work to check your questions. See if they can understand all your questions, and indeed that their understanding is the same as yours.
7. Make it clear whether you expect one or multiple answers to each question. For online surveys, radio buttons should be used to allow selection of a single option, and check boxes allow selection of multiple options.
8. Do not make free-form text answers compulsory, ever. By all means allow free-form text answers or extra 'any other comments' style questions at the end, but do not make them compulsory. In particular, do not echo one recent survey which asked "What made you pick option X?" after each question - and forced some answer to be given before proceeding. This is a classic example of how to erode any good will the survey respondent feels towards you.
9. Thank the respondents and most importantly, tell them what's going to happen to the information and how it will help you. A poor survey will thank the respondent for answering their questions and leave them wondering what, if anything, will happen next. Consider offering to collect an e-mail address and send them a copy of your research when it's ready for publication. If you're a commercial company, offer to provide an update in a reasonable time frame on the results of the survey and what improvements customers can expect because of it. If the respondent declines to give an e-mail address or contact details, consider giving them a URL where they can find more information about what will happen with the information they've just given you. People like feeling useful - make your survey respondents feel useful!

These tips are not all encompassing - far from it. They do capture some of the most irritating and repeated failures I've seen in a sequence of recent surveys. For some more general tips on writing good surveys check here, here or use the power of your favourite internet search engine to find innumerable other resources on the subject. Consider reading a book, made of paper on the topic; there are many. Stick to the guidelines above though and you're at least likely to get a prompt response to your survey from me.
Happy surveying!

(March 01, 2010 11:23 PM)

I blogged a while ago about the Ubuntu LoCo Re Approval process and how we the Ubuntu LoCo Council were going to be contacting people regarding their Teams Re Approval.  We’ll the process is under way.

The first team to be re approved was the Belgian LoCo so congrats to them! Having a re approval wiki page set up for this made it simple to see and easy to navigate the review which was great. Listing past events they’ve taken part in, organised and the day to day stuff the do laid out easily for us to see was great. Photos make things very clear, and a great way to track events that have happened.

I’ve mailed more teams now and we’re hoping to step up the process by perhaps adding another meeting to get through the list.  If you do receive mails from us, it’s natural don’t panic you can find all of us on IRC or drop us an email asking for help or if you want to check things out. Each team is assigned a LoCo Council member, and they are there to help and answer any questions you have. Mail them or poke them on IRC.

The more you ask and are prepared means we can go through the process easily.  Please, Do reply and acknowledge you have received the mail, we will attempt three times in one month to contact a team after that they will be unapproved if they have not answered us.

We chose a random amount of teams for the Lucid Cycle for the LoCo Council to re-approve, don’t worry if we’ve not gotten around to you we’ll be continuing this process from now on choosing a number of teams for each cycle.

(March 01, 2010 09:52 PM)

This is more for my own use than anyone else...

If you remove a package in Debian / Ubuntu you often end up with legacy configuration files lying around.

Running the following command removes all the crud left lying around your system and may fix silly issues that you run into. As it's Linux, there's probably about 10 other ways to do this!

Here's the command:

sudo aptitude purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | awk '{print $1}'`

Enjoy!

(March 01, 2010 09:08 PM)

I had a pretty amazing weekend down home last weekend.  I was asked back to give  a talk as part of a weekend of talks that took place at my old University. It was a great honour and rather amusing at the same time.  Years ago I had set up the Skynet talks, where you’d invite a Skynet member back and members of the Industry.

Friday night kicked off in the stables, a flash back from my college days. We have two pubs on campus and a small bar. Walking into the Stables bar it was a flash back to the 90’s music.  All of the cheesy head wrecking songs that you know once your heard them the lyrics were going to be in your head for the night.

Clearly my age showed as I couldn’t hear myself and moved out to the courtyard to have conversations, albeit it was a bit chilly I could hear the music and have a conversations so worked out better.

Saturday morning, I was up in time to go into the Market for breakfast and collected Matt Zimmerman who kindly agreed to come over and take part in the days talks.  After a cup of tea in the what looked to be someones kitchen and listening to a Trad Session at 11am we were fed and set up for the day headed to UL for the talks.

1. “Talk 1″ - Paul O’Connor
2. “Google Summer of Code” - Jimmy O’Regan
3. “So you want to build a Hackerspace” - Jeffrey Roe
4. “Ubuntu Inside Out” - Matt Zimmerman
5. “To Ubuntu and Beyond – Where individual participation can take you” - Laura Czajkowski
6. “An introduction to CouchDB” - David Coallier

This time I was a little less nervous talking, but not by much! I gave a similar talk to the one last month but this time was a bit slower and updated slides as I knew the target audience had a clue about Ubuntu and Open Source.

Matt gave his talk with such ease and clarity and it was very enjoyable. All of the talks during the day were interesting and nice to bring people together. they covered a range of topics so there was something there for most people. Students came from Cork, Dublin and Galway so that was great that it wasn’t just one college having these talks. It was a nice way to spend an  afternoon. David and his entertaining ways gave his talk on CouchDB, and very nicely obliged to get us to the pub for the last half of the Ireland V England Rugby game.

It was great to be back again and I had a lovely weekend. glad I gave the talk, and I believe it was recorded and will be up at some point.  Here are the slides at least.

(March 01, 2010 01:12 PM)

Next weekend Kilkenny will be playing host to Wordcamp Ireland.

We're the headline sponsor, though admittedly I've been a bit remiss in promoting our involvement!

In any case the event runs over two days, with three tracks:

• Intro track
  
• Blogger's track
• Tech track

The schedule includes some very interesting topics regardless of your level of experience with blogging or Wordpress, so deciding on which sessions to attend could be "interesting"!

Speakers lined up include both Irish and international figures covering a very broad range of topics including business blogging, SEO, design, usability, mobile web and a whole lot more.

So if you are interested in blogging, or want to learn more about how to make the most of your Wordpress blog (or site), then WordCamp Ireland is probably the event for you.

I'm planning on attending, though I'm also meant to be giving a presentation to the ICANN meeting in Nairobi on Saturday (remotely), so I still have to work out the logistics!

(February 28, 2010 06:26 PM)

If you've been following the EU vs. Microsoft over the last few years this latest titbit should interest you.

From the beginning of March 2010 (ie. tomorrow) Microsoft will be rolling out a new update to its users which will give them a choice of browser.

While users have always been able to install alternative browsers to the default Internet Explorer the software company will now make that choice more explicit and obvious.

Have Microsoft suddenly changed tack? Not really. They're only doing this it would appear as a result of the EU's pressure on them.

More details on the Microsoft legal and policy site.

Will this have much impact on browser usage?

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(February 28, 2010 11:38 AM)

I've no idea why anyone would buy these unless it was a joke, but they're still fun:



You'd have to be a real geek to want salt and pepper from these oversized computer keys!

More info here

(February 28, 2010 07:59 AM)

We’ve just released newirishplans.com, a site for finding commencement notices. This is extremely useful for people in the construction industry, as I’ll explain.

Companies that work in construction need to be constantly on the lookout for new projects that are starting up. If you find a project just before it starts, you can call up and advertise your business, instead of waiting for the project manager to get around to finding someone else when the time comes.

As an example, if you sell bricks, it is better to call the manager of a house-building project just before they start building the house, than to not call at all, and realised when the house is built that the manager found a different brick supplier and didn’t realise you even existed.

You need to time the call as well – if you call too late, it’s obviously too late, but if you call months before the project starts, then the manager may totally forget you exist by the time the build actually needs your wares.

One way to find these builds that are starting up is to go around to all the planning authorities in your area of interest, and inspect any “commencement notices” that have been submitted since the last time you visited. A “commencement notice” is notification that you are about to start work on your build. All planning applications have this as a requirement.

Obviously, this can take hours out of your working week (and therefore, money), and even after you have the notice, you need to match the notice to the application and see if you’re actually interested in it at all.

The new irish plans project does this all for you. At the moment, the project covers about 17 counties, but we are always adding to this. For example, I’m working on getting Fingal added to the mix at the moment.

An account on the site costs 35 euro a month, and with that, you get an email once a week telling you of any commencements that the system has uncovered during that week.

But anyway – €35 euro a month. Just over one euro a day, and it’s all emailed to you.

If you know anyone in construction (does windows, landscapes, roofs, electrics, etc.) that is looking for work, tell them to go to newirishplans.com – the information is handed to you on a plate.

On the programming side, we wanted to make the search engine stand out, so we used the inline multiselect jQuery plugin (with a few small modifications) to help make selection of features and dates easier.

When I first came across that plugin, I was surprised and kinda proud to find that it’s based on some of my own work from 5 years ago! Open source is brilliant – you write a small piece of code and give it away, then 5 years later you find that someone has taken it and improved it vastly.

Commencements go through a “vetting” process. When a commencement is found, details about it are placed in a system where someone reads through the planning application, and marks down any interesting features about it. Those that have been vetted are then imported once a day into the main site itself, where you can search for them online, filtered by whatever interests you.

The system has been very long in the building, and has changed quite a bit over time. We’re very happy to finally make it public!

There’s still a few things that need to be completed on it (for example, we’re still organising WorldPay integration, but in the meantime we have PayPal), but on the whole, it’s ready for public use.

(February 27, 2010 05:48 PM)

Just a note of congratulations to Phillips who appear to provide electronic copies of their product manuals online. I'm torn though between pointing out how this is a good thing(tm) and berating them for the fact that it is not at all obvious how to remove the dust collecting cylinder of their FC 8738 Animal Care vacuum cleaner.
As an aside, despite the label 'Animal Care' neither Puppy nor Kitten are too enamoured by the scary noisy machine. Perhaps they read 'care' in a more Al Pacino sense of the word. (Completely justified in Puppy's case as everyone knows vacuum cleaners are canine specific interdimensional portals.)

(February 27, 2010 02:21 PM)

If you want to get your own "slice" of the internet to setup a blog or to publish your CV then why not look at .me?

Unlike some country code domain names .me is completely free from restrictions - so you can register a .me domain name as easily as you can register a .com.

The .me domain is one of the few ccTLD extensions that Google allows you to target to ANY country - so you don't have to worry about Google "thinking" you want to use it for the wrong country!

"Me" says it all. It's about YOU. And what's wrong with that?

Nothing!

You could use a .me domain for a whole range of different things.

Don't limit yourself to just personal domains - you can also use a .me domain as a "call to action" (love.me, kiss.me, buy.me etc., etc.)

A personal blog is pretty obvious, but how about using it for your CV? Impress a prospective employer with an online version of your CV, or simply point it at your LinkedIn profile.

Or how about an online photo gallery?

The possibilities are endless.

You could setup email.....

Or grab your family name and give each member of the family their own subdomain.

What would you do with a .me?

Have you seen anybody doing really cool things with a .me domain name?

(February 27, 2010 12:47 PM)

The IE Domain Registry (IEDR) have informed us of a small change that they will be introducing to their processes.

Currently any registration or modification request is valid for 30 days, so you have 30 days to provide the supporting documentation.

As of April 8 2010 this period will be reduced to 27 days

We will be implementing some minor changes on our domain registration backend to accommodate this change.

(February 27, 2010 11:31 AM)

Je viens de finaliser aujourd’hui les présentateurs pour l’inauguration de Ignite Lyon. Les sujets sont assez diverses, du vache à lait à l’informatique bio en passant par la course à pied et l’art libre. Pour ceux qui sont plus du tendance entrepreneur, nous avons également des présentations sur la démarche commerciale ou créer sa première boîte jeune.

Voici la liste des présentateurs pour ce premier Ignite Lyon en order alphabétique, sauf modifications de dernier minute:

• Emmanuel Aldeguer: La vache à lait est morte vive la vache à lait
• Laurent Alliod: L’informatique Bio
• Francois Aubriot: The Day after (your PC & iChose)
• Encolpe Degoute: Connectivité, neutralité, universalité
• Gabriel Foin: Démarche commerciale! Pourquoi développer l’esprit positif pour gagner!
• Alain Giscloux: The Digital Washboard: not a musical instrument, not a video game, Only a digital art installation
• Alain Imbaud: Culture Libre ? … !
• Vincent Mabillot: OS-delà (la trancendance divine ou matérialiste des environnements informatiques)
• Dave Neary: Hackez votre corps
• Nathael Pajani: initrd VS initramfs
• Ludovic Rerolle: Comment planter sa première boîte le plus vite possible
• Guillaume Smet: Et si un wombat gérait vos projets informatiques ?
• Florent Souliere: La paresse met la vie (privée) en danger

Avec une salle qui prendrai autour de 100 personnes, les places risquent d’être chères, même si l’entrée est libre!

Je vous suggére vivement d’être à votre place dans la salle D101 de l’Université Lyon 2, Quai Claude Bernard, à l’ouverture des portes à 18h30 jeudi prochain le 4. Les festivités commenceront vers 19h, jusqu’à 20h30 à peu près, avec une pause pipi au millieu.

Vous pouvez également vous inscrire pour manger un bout après l’événement au Chevreuil, ou nous allons nous retrouver quor quelques boissons raffraichissantes à partir de 20h30.

Vous pouvez trouver plus d’informations sur le site Ignite Lyon. A la semaine prochaine!

(February 26, 2010 08:14 PM)

River Island used one of my photos on a tshirt. Without telling me. I never got around to calling them out on it at the time and the tshirt has since disappeared from their clothing range but I want to post this anyway.

The first I knew that a tshirt had a photo of mine on it was when Dan, the skateboarder in the photo, contacted me and asked why a member of Irish band “The Script” was wearing a tshirt with his image on it. The band were interviewed on RTE and the interview ended up on Youtube where he saw it. I tried to get in touch with the band without any success.

Some time after, Dan got in touch again. He had spotted that River Island were selling the tshirt with my photo! At the time he was very upset and angry, and so was I. Unfortunately I was in Canada at the time and didn’t follow up with River Island when I got back.

It boggles the mind that such a large clothing chain would use an image without permission. It really does. It makes me wonder how often other multi-national companies do it.

(Thanks Alan for encouraging me to post about this!)

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(February 26, 2010 03:10 PM)

In DEV300_m72 filter and desktop are now unused method free. Though additional unused methods in scripting and sc appear. -16 overall

(February 26, 2010 09:55 AM)

Okay I've been busy elsewhere but dragged myself back to try and finish this for upstream

v10 of the patch is up
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/vgaswitcheroo/0001-vga_switcheroo-initial-implementation-v10.patch

changes are mainly that mjg59 was right about keeping ugly things in the drivers.

adding ATRM support to get the ROMs on ATI hybrid for the discrete card was actually a pain with the previous code design,
so I moved lots of it around again, and now the discrete ROM can be retrieved via the ATRM method.

I've tested it on the W500 and it works as well as before, which means still the 3rd or 4th switch fails and locks the machine up,
I need to debug this further.

The refactored code should hopefully make it easier to fill in the nvidia/nvidia and intel/nvidia blanks for mjg59.

Update 1: v11 is now up
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/vgaswitcheroo/0001-vga_switcheroo-initial-implementation-v11.patch
It should fix the failure to switch to IGD the 2nd time hopefully.

Update 2: v13 is now up, it blindly implements nvidia DSM changing, but I've no idea if it works. Hopefully someone can test it and give me some feedback. Its nearly all guesswork from work mjg59 did.

(February 26, 2010 05:04 AM)

Who knew it’d be next to impossible to find a free evening to meet some friends, finally we found a Sunday to meet up and have some brunch.

Most folks know I’m not from Dublin, and while it’s great here, I have a job and live in a nice place  and a lot of the Ubuntu folks are here I miss hanging out with mates and just going for a chin wag over a cup of tea.  When I first moved up I was invited to a Girl Geek Dinner.  Not sure what it was or where it would lead to, but I’m damn glad I went as I’ve met some great friends there and I look forward to the discussions we have.

I have to first say there are not that many Ubuntu women over here, but that’s fine I don’t mind. It’s nice just to meet other women in technology and we discuss random bits of stuff happening in Ireland. Events, conferences, new technologies, showing off the new phone we’ve brought to lunch and just general hanging out.

I finally got to catch up with Martha, Ana and Andrea for brunch two weeks ago after not getting a chance to meet up since November before Jaime went back down under to Oz and left Ireland.  I thought I’d introduce you to folks over here that I interact with in the women in technology area who like me embrace technology, go to conferences and get our Geek fixes by talking about gadgets and new technologies.

Martha Rotter – Is a technology evangelist, and  has been her whole life.  There’s very little she find boring.  She’s  that kinda geek who can’t wait to try out everything new and shiny.  And when  she  find things she loves, she can’t help but share her enthusiasm with others who might benefit from new technology.  Lucky enough that this is now her full time job, she spends time with developers in Ireland and Northern Ireland working on brand new tech in areas like web applications, video games, robotics, 3D, touch interfaces and more.  When  not in front of a computer or a crowd, you can probably find her at community events like OpenCoffee, BarCamp, Age Action or Girl Geek Dinners.

Ana Nelson – Having fallen in love with programming while studying for her Ph.D. in economics, she now develop open source software and write web applications. Currently  she works as an investment analyst based in Dublin, Ireland and loves to build tools to analyze and visualize data, run simulations and automate anything boring. She spoke at OSSBarcamp and hopefully she will do again.

Andrea Magnorsky – Andrea is a professional software developer and has accrued many years of experience building solid applications. Looking for ways to improve code she came across Rails and the Castle stack, which includes Monorail. Andrea is heavily involved in the organisation of Alt Net in Dublin.  She is also involved in Ruby Ireland as she has a growing interest in Ruby. Andrea liked the Castle stack so much that she co-developed an eCommerce solution using Monorail in her spare time.

These are just some of the cool women I get to meet in Ireland working in technology, it’s fascinating the diverse topics that come up and the lengthy and interesting conversation we have. I don’t necessarily get to meet women in Open Source, but that’s fine. Meeting others from different groups and areas leads to more discussions and learning from one another.

(February 25, 2010 10:44 PM)

Folks may have missed this or indeed just don’t know the new shape up for the Ubuntu Women Project.

Since UDS Lucid we’ve been working on some changes as a team, most know about the Ubuntu team leader, but also a big change was the decision to have a LOGGED CHANNEL. These came about from discussions and meetings discussing the IRC purpose, as again the team is more than IRC.

Many many conversations were happening on IRC and not on mailing list of indeed the forums.  If you weren’t on IRC you missed the information or indeed the lengthy and interesting discussions taking place.  The idea to create a logged channel means if you don’t IRC, not on IRC at the time, and perhaps you don’t run a screen session you don’t lose out on these conversations and discussions, you can catch up and read the logs like many other teams.

We now have two channels and I’d like to point out to folks to perhaps join and update their autojoin

#ubuntu-women-project is the new channel created, it is the logged channel for the Ubuntu Women Project This is the Ubuntu, technical, and project discussions take place, of course social chat is going to happen.

#ubuntu-women is the non logged channel should there be a need to discuss private issues that people may not want logged, it is also marked as the social channel.

If anyone has any questions pop onto IRC and chat to us there

(February 25, 2010 04:23 PM)

We've got yet another nice little promotion to share with you. This time round it's on .tv domain names!

Use the coupon code: tvpromo (no space - cASe SeNSitive) and you'll be able to get a .tv domain for a mere €19.99 ex-VAT

You will be able to register a .tv domain name at this special IF you use the coupon code. No code - no discount!

What is the .tv domain?

Originally .tv was for the island of Tuvalu, however it has become synonymous with "TV" or online video.

We have been using Blacknight.tv to promote our Youtube channel, for example and there are literally thousands of online video services that rely on the .tv extension to promote themselves online.

You can also check out or other promotions on domain registration.

Do you like this promo?

Would you like us to do a promotion on a particular domain extension?

Why not let us know what you think?

Feel free to post a comment below!

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(February 25, 2010 03:50 PM)

UPDATE 28/2: New screenshot added below
The Blacknight hosting platform is very powerful and has a lot of fantastic features.

However, the control panel is not perfect and we are all too aware of this.

The control panel vendors, Parallels, have been working closely with us to improve aspects of the system so that:

• You are happier
• We are happier
• We all have a more pleasant life

Unfortunately we cannot read people's minds, so we're going to be asking YOU, our clients,   for feedback on certain aspects of the system in the coming months.

We will do our best to take all the feedback that we receive back to the control panel vendors and get as many of the changes implemented as possible.

One of the areas that we know people have been having issues with is the billing section of the control panel.

We've held several conference calls with Parallels and our staff over the last few weeks and they've come up with a draft view of how it *could* look moving forward. (NB: there are plans to for an extensive reworking of the billing side of the system in the pipeline, but that could be over 12 months away)

So here is a preview (click to enlarge):

Do you think this is better than the current display?

Is it worse?

How could it be improved?

What would you like to see here?

Do you want to see this information in this way?

Is there something on the billing side that isn't clear (with this screenshot)?

Any and all feedback is welcome, though please try to give us something to work with! Comments like "I hate it" may be valid, but they won't help us improve it.

You can leave comments here or if you prefer feel free to email management@blacknight.com with your feelings.

Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback - we really do appreciate it.

UPDATE: We have received several very helpful emails from clients with quite detailed feedback. Please keep it coming!

UPDATE 2 - Parallels have made some changes based on feedback from us, you and other clients. They've supplied an updated screenshot (click to enlarge):
All feedback welcome as before

Thanks!

(February 24, 2010 01:42 PM)

Well, this is a surprise. One of my .ie email addresses got a very targeted phishing email. It was so specific that it was actually written in Irish! It wasn’t directed at me, but at a list owner address at linux.ie.
I wonder if the spammers know how many Irish people could actually read their email easily? It’d certainly be easier for most people to read in English.

Aire

Tá mé an tUasal Patrick KW Chan an Stiúrthóir Feidhmiúcháin agus Príomh-Oifigeach airgeadais Hang Seng Bank Ltd, Hong Cong.
Tá mé togra gnó brabúsaí leasa choitinn a roinnt le leat;
Baineann sé leis an aistriú suim mhór airgid.
Fuair mé do tagairt i mo cuardach a dhéanamh ar dhuine a oireann mo chaidreamh gnó molta.
Má tá suim agat i obair liom teagmháil a dhéanamh liom mo trí r-phost príobháideach (mrpatkwchan52@yahoo.com.hk) le haghaidh tuilleadh sonraí

Dearbhófar do fhreagra túisce chun an litir seo a mhór.

An tUasal Patrick Chan
E-mail: mrpatkwchan52@yahoo.com.hk

I suppose it was bound to happen now that Google translates text into Irish. Well done to Gmail for marking it as spam!

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(February 24, 2010 01:32 PM)

As you may have already guessed, that’s not the dawn. It’s the lights of Cork City (and Blarney) shining and into the sky in a long exposure shot I made last August.

I had meant to mention this sooner but 2 weeks ago I was shocked to hear about the death of Debbie Metrustry (@debbiemet), a wonderful person I had the pleasure of conversing with by tweet and by email over the course of the last year or so. She even won a print on this blog last year, but between this and that I never got around to sending it to her. I hope I can get in touch with her family at some stage and offer it to them instead.

Debbie’s blog on WordPress.com is still there and will be as long as the service is there (which is forever, right?), I’ve seen to that.

If you knew Debbie you might like to read the reaction from other people who knew her.

• Sabrina Dent
• Peter Donegan
• Phil O’Kane
• Grannymar
• There was a BTW in honour of Debbie on the 16th.

RIP Debbie.

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(February 23, 2010 03:17 PM)

This is weird, a huge number of POST requests started to hit the Shite Drivers website a few days ago. The requests came from lots of IP addresses and all requests went to the non existent /bc/123kah.php

The payload was an array that looked like this:

Array
(
    [showed] =>
    [clicked] =>
    [version] => 2.6.2.4
    [id] => c3b342beb6ad7adf39499e7a38f93c09f681611d
    [tm] => 1266855758
    [aff_id] => gooochi
    [net_id] => gooochi
    [safe] => 1
    [exceed] => 2505,2507,2582,2597,2602
)

So I presume it’s the Gooochi malware referenced in this search for that word. Strange that the infected PCs hit my server though.

The traffic was never overwhelming but I decided to put a stop to it with a simple deny from all in a .htaccess file. Much better than having WordPress serve up a 404 page.

I mentioned the 123kah.php file on Twitter and I’m not the only one to see these odd requests. I guess even malware has bugs! (which is all the more reason to keep your anti-virus software up to date if you use Windows)

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(February 23, 2010 10:06 AM)

Sometime last year I noticed that links to my blog on Feedburner had attracted a few extra parameters. A simple link to a post became this huge monstrosity:

http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner-095/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+HolyShmoly+(Holy+Shmoly!)&
utm_content=Google+Reader

It’s a marketing thing right? It’s all useful information but I don’t really care about it, have never used it and don’t like my URLs getting mangled. It annoys me for two reasons:

• People will probably use that big long url in their own posts. Other people will use the shortened custom permalink that my blog provides. Won’t the pagerank earned by the post be split in two now?
• It makes caching less efficient. Supercache won’t create a static cached file of the page. It will create a regular php powered cache file but when you’re running Supercache you want the very best performance don’t you?

So I added a new option to Supercache to redirect the url and get rid of the utm_source bloat.

If you want to give it a go, grab the development version of the plugin and upgrade.

Oh, and if someone has decent docs on utm_source and it’s friends I’d love to read it. Google didn’t return much when I went looking.

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(February 22, 2010 01:36 PM)

Many many moons ago when I was in college and involved in Skynet, I set up the Skynet talks.  The idea behind them was Limerick was not Dublin. Dublin had all these big companies and developers up here and we should meet these people and hear what they are doing, also we should invite back past members of Skynet and see what they are up to.

This year I’m being invited back. I’m going to do the same titled talk I gave to the MSc students in DIT- To Ubuntu and Beyond where Individual participation can take you, but with different content, so I need to work on that this week. Also Mat Zimmerman has been asked over so looking forward to hearing him talk.  Skynet have also nicely asked a few other speakers to come along and make an afternoon of it.

Everyone is welcome to come along and we’ve created a wiki page for the event.

(February 22, 2010 12:57 PM)

 As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been planning a move from wordpress.com to my own dedicated server for a while now, not only for this blog but also for On Target and Wallpaper and herself’s…

(February 22, 2010 02:28 AM)

OOO 3.2.0 “vanilla” install sets for minority Linux ports are now available from download.openoffice.org. 3.2.0 rpms for
* PPC (32bit powerpc)
* s390x (64bit z/Series)
* IA64 (64bit Itanium)
and 3.2.0 .debs for
* parisc (32bit HPPA).

(February 19, 2010 08:49 PM)