So the car was misfiring on one cylinder and it’d done 100,000km+ so I thought it was time for a good solid service. And obviously that means a citroen garage where they’re used to seeing citroen cars coming in and doing this sort of thing, thinks me, and goes into Gowan Motors with my little car.

Some of you are already facepalming. Wait for it, it gets better.

A few hours later, the nice lady calls me at work to tell me that *everything* on my car (an 05 model that passed the NCT with flying colours on the first pass five months ago) was broken and needed to be replaced, they had no parts in stock and would have to order them in specially, and that they’d like €2,000 please.

Well that was nice, I’d like €2,000 myself. So I said thank you very much, came in and collected my car, paid the €50 or so for the inspection and then the €50 or so for the 6 hours of hiring a car while they inspected mine and left.

And called Myles Reilly, my local mechanic (22 Croke Park Industrial Estate, 087 242 7785) who said he’d be happy to give it a second opinion. By now the engine warning light was on and I was a tad worried, so he said to call by the night before I left the car in to be serviced with him, and he plugged the diagnostic computer into the car and sure enough, cylinder #4 is misfiring, but everything else is grand and so I drive away, reassured that my car isn’t about to die on me.

The next evening I drop it in and a day or so later I get a phone call. Did they say they ran an emissions … Read the rest

There’s something terribly nice about a box full of stuff Scan got the parts to me right on time so Thursday night was to be assembly night, with the goal of getting to a working POST by the end. So out came the boxcutter and I started unpacking…

So here are all the components, less the CPU which is hiding off to one side, just out of shot:

Looking at the case first of all (nice solid construction on this…):

The assembly went relatively smoothly, though it did take a few hours, mainly because I wasn’t really pushing myself. The PSU went in first, then the DVD drive and the hard drive, then the motherboard pillars went in and then the motherboard, then the graphics card, then some swearing, out came the graphics card and the hard drive was moved two bays down so the graphics card didn’t poke it, then the graphics card went in, then more swearing, the motherboard came off its pillars so I could pull it back an inch to fit the I/O facia panel, then back goes the motherboard and in goes the CPU and then I assemble  the CPU heatsink/cooler assembly and lots of swearing and poking later, it’s latched onto the mounting lugs. I’m rather paranoid about those lugs not being sufficient in a tower configuration – some tiewrapping is due there I think just in case. After all this, it was wiring time.

The less said about wiring time, the better, but put it this way:

Eventually, everything was where I wanted it, with everything plugged in, screwed on, clipped, latched, tiewrapped, twisted, pushed, poked, pulled, prodded, bent and scrunched as appropriate.

It won’t be winning any build awards for neatness, but it’s in, it’s secure, and it’s tidy enough. So … Read the rest

Doing a side project to help out in the job at the moment for a christmas thing, and getting to play with the new NXT mindstorms kit as a result (I only used the older mindstorms kit before now in TCD). They’re much beefier on the inside, the sensors are much more polished-looking, Robolab has come on a long way (but is still a wussy way to program these things, wish I had time to blast an open source firmware to the brick), and they’re even faster to get up and running with. In 20 minutes, I had this built:

The ultrasonic sensor is a nice addition to the kits – stick that on a servo mount and you’d have a 360° sensor for mapping your environment… albiet a really noisy crappy one

Ten minutes later I had Robolab installed on a WinXP virtualbox on my Debian-running laptop (sweet how far we’ve come – in the old days, I’d just have to dual-boot to get usable performance like this), and ten minutes of fiddling later, I had taught my new robot to fear me…

(You have to teach them to fear you first, otherwise they’ll turn around and shoot you in the face…)

It's getting a bit chilly out there. Last time it was this cold this early in the year was 25 years ago. What was that about climate change not existing again?

ON Thursday, Claire Nolan, daughter of Ann and Pat Nolan of College Road married Mark Dennehy from Kerry in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle, in a civil ceremony, surrounded by family and friends.

They say that every little girl dreams of getting married like a princess, but until recently if you did not want to marry in a church, you had no choice but to make your vows in a registry office. In Kilkenny that was inside the Health Service Executive building at Lacken, which, at least had some lawn and trees outside, unlike some other counties which had very unromantic settings indeed.

Since 2004, the registrar may perform a marriage outside of a registry office. There are conditions, however, and Ann Boyle, the registrar in Kilkenny says that they all make perfect sense considering existing regulations and our climate. The place must be public, in good repair and a solid structure, so no marquees in the garden and no beaches or mountaintops are allowed. It must be a dignified venue with no connection to any religion.  There must be room for the guests to sit comfortably and access for those with physical disability.

Claire Nolan arrived with her father by car to the Parade Tower. Staff at the castle, Frank Kavanagh and Anne Teehan were on hand to usher her  into the lift to the second floor where there ceremony took place in front of waiting guests.

Afterwards the celebration was in the Ormonde Hotel and the destination for the honeymoon, well, that was a secret.

All at 32.ie wish the happy couple well in their future together.

In both cases, I was contacted out of the blue by a Google recruiter. The first time I had been considering looking for a new role and pursued it immediately; the second time I hadn't been and put off the recruitment process for several months, during which the same recruiter contacted me again twice to follow up. If nothing else, that's a nice ego boost, but a more cynical mind might be considering the shotgun approach to a narrow recruiting filter and commissions :D

First, a quick data point, I was applying for an SRE(SA) position on both occasions - Site Reliability Engineer (System Administration), because in most of my roles to date, I've been doing both sysadmin and development work and I've never seemed to drift towards one pigeonhole or another. SRE(SA) seemed optimal - interesting sysadmin work on large-scale systems and quite a bit of tool-writing to boot. This was decided on between myself and the recruiter, based on the self-assessment form you are given to fill out. I would love to know how they get around illusory superiority and the Dunning-Kruger effect with those forms, especially given the wierd bias they'd have in the dataset from having so many of the best in their fields working there.

Both times, the process proceeded in the same way:

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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 gave up. Despite overnight charging, I was getting only about three hours of operating time; and since the charger in the headphones themselves wasn’t working, I only had the charged battery in the base unit, so I was getting maybe four hours a day from them.

The RS40s were (and are) really lovely headphones, with the great feature that if you stood up to walk to the printer and forgot you were wearing them, you didn’t treat the rest of the lab to the cartoon Yoink! Thud! sound effects as you nearly strangled yourself with the headset cord. Shame they were let down by the powerpacks…

You can’t even find the BA151′s easily anymore So the hunt was on for a better set of ‘phones for the lab…

Thing is, the lab can be a bit noisy at times – not enormously so, but enough to distract when you’re working. I’ll often work from home for a few hours each day when doing design work, just to get some quiet time. So I need my headphones to be good at reducing the office noise as well as being good at playing music or whatever.

And I hate the new in-ear bud headphones. I have a set, they work great for blocking noise and playing music, but they also work great for blocking any air movement at all so my head feels very stuffed up within an hour of plugging them in, even on a good day – and the next thing you know, I’ll have a headache from them. Not … Read the rest

 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 book site. I said I’d write things up once I was done, so…

Step one in this process was local testing. I already had a LAMP stack running locally on the r61 so I just had to create a directory, download the latest wordpress.org tarball and untar it into that directory, then edit wp-config.php, create a database for the site to use, and walk through the automatic install. Very easy, very clean, and took about ten minutes all told. Got to hand it to wordpress there, the man-hours that have gone into streamlining and debugging the install process really shows. Once it’s installed, I went back to the wordpress.com site, exported the blog and imported that into the local wordpress.org site, downloading the images and uploads as I went. It worked almost flawlessly, let down only by timeouts as my typical Irish "broadband" proved to be more "slimband" once more. Afterwards, though, the local blog and wordpress.com blog were nearly identical. Now I could install every plugin and theme and play about with them.

Step two was registering domain names. It’s step two because wordpress will allow you to map a domain name to an existing blog, and I hoped that would ease the handover slightly. However, wordpress.com charge you per domain, so I just mapped one.

Step three was to get the dedicated server itself; the choice for me came down to either server.lu or Hetzner and in the end I chose Hetzner’s DS3000 server offer. I did try to buy Irish, but noone comes even close to the offers Hetzner and … Read the rest

Zombie movies: the intersection of horror films and string theory?
“Branes…. branes….”

We ordered a 1610 Peli case from procases.co.uk to ferry the demo Suura system to Barcelona in, and … well

I know, I know, there’s probably a very good reason for this warning sign, but I still cracked up when I saw it.

I mentioned the Big Ideas 2009 presentations earlier. The video footage shot during the pitch itself and the Q&A session held afterwards has finally made it up to vimeo, so here it is, and it shows just how bad my voice got during the day

First the pitch:

Then the Q&A:

And then the post interview: