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Back to archive index Summary 13th May 1998 The beginning and scene setter - Kathryn, who is she? 14th May 1998 15th May 1998 17th May 1998 20th May 1998 Trinity College Dublin and its relation this university, Hull 21st May 1998 22nd May 1998 Types of cainers, A & B. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st June 1998 Cool night at the Adelphi, going into the SU Council 2nd June 1998 Bloke who did Cecilia, more on Sarah, Laura story, Kathryn 3rd June 1998 Email to Kathryn, going to Joana's, that night, Niall's theory of women 5th June 1998 Details of pint with Kathryn, thoughts on that conversation 12th June 1998 First update from Cambridge, lots of smack here 15th June 1998 Job options 17th June 1998 22nd June 1998 First day at my new job, YMCA first impressions 25th June 1998 Thoughts on Joana, reasons for moving into the expensive YMCA 28th June 1998 Ramblings after one week of soon to be normal life . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st July 1998 Life in the YMCA, some busts ... 6th July 1998 More life in the YMCA, more busts, my sister visits ... 9th July 1998 Musings on contentment - Aristotle vs. Dionysian. Cycles of chaos and order 17th July 1998 Poverty, end of serenity 19th July 1998 Details of weekend, thoughts of this summer so far 22nd July 1998 24th July 1998 Reactions to Kathryn's letter, rant about Kathryn in general 28th July 1998 Back to FP98, proposal of Niall's theory of relationships 29th July 1998 30th July 1998 1st July 1998: 2. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 3rd August 1998 Niall gets busted for possession of cannabis, details of what happened 4th August 1998 Joining the legalisation movement, wrangles with the YMCA, statistics on government money spent on trying to stop cannabis 5th August 1998 Differences between Niall's theory of future society and Plato's vision of the perfect Republic 7th August 1998 10th August 1998 A good weekend, cycling with cows, thoughts of freedom 11th August 1998 12th August 1998 stupid browsers and their inability to render tables properly . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st September 1998 Niall gets a taste of married life once more, Notting Hill 4th September 1998 Showering with Suzanna, losing your hair, crackheads 14th September 1998 Back to Hull, life begins to return to normality 16th September 1998 Catching up with loose ends, drinking much . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 15th October 1998 What's been happening recently 21st October 1998 I entangle with yet another woman ... and rant about condoms 24th October 1998 Met Kathryn for the first time since before the summer, how Elli fits into Niall's theory of women 27th October 1998 Elli adds her shininess and her thoughts of me to these hallowed pages . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 2nd November 1998 Details of Garage and House music night, other LRA stuff 9th November 1998 11th November 1998 How not well the Garage and House music night went, what I learned etc. 16th November 1998 Got angry with uni officials, told them what I thought 22nd November 1998 Programming, shattering of dreams, Acorns 23rd November 1998 Meet Melanie, why uni is so cool to be at Monday 2nd November 1998: 8. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 2nd December 1998 Holland, update on little things happening 5th December 1998 History of Ronan and Siorca, Niall's attempt to define love 6th December 1998 Niall feels depressed and useless 12th December 1998 16th December 1998 Niall goes for a drink with Kathryn, catches up with various people 26th December 1998 Back to Cork, Ireland, Home for many years. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st January 1999 New Year's review of the year 6th January 1999 Worries about my support of cannabis legalisation 10th January 1999 Niall leaves home for the last time (on a regular visit anyway) 14th January 1999 Niall is 21! Entries from years gone by feature, plus this year's expectations 22nd January 1999 Birthday present bike gets stolen, Niall feels like crap 26th January 1999 Niall's 21st birthday party, Kathryn, Elli, Niall isn't allowed to go to Amsterdam 31st January 1999 Worries about not being in Amsterdam, inter-semester week trickles away 1st January 1999: 4. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 4th February 1999 Progress on legalisation, thoughts on relationships and women and my lifestyle 11th February 1999 Talked to Kathryn properly for the first time, HUU Legalise Cannabis society comes into being 19th February 1999 Thoughts on where I am and where I'm going Thursday 4th February 1999: 6. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 3rd March 1999 Follow up to the last gloomy entry 6th March 1999 Speeding the night away after New Horizons ... 16th March 1999 19th March 1999 Last entry of term before the Easter break 29th March 1999 Ruth and I make an entry from Madrid, Spain Wednesday 3rd March 1999: 8. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 13th April 1999 First entry after easter break 22nd April 1999 Smoking some strong shit, aftermath of Howard Marks' visit 30th April 1999 Day before Jay Day, thoughts Tuesday 13th April 1999: 2.24am. Well, the Easter break is over and I'm back in Hull. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 3rd May 1999 Happenings on May Day 10th May 1999 Niall begins to binge on drugs 13th May 1999 HAPPY 1ST BIRTHDAY TO THIS DIARY! 19th May 1999 Post Deja Vu 6th birthday party night entry Monday 3rd May 1999: 12.42am. I was thinking it's now ten days until this diary is exactly one year old. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 12th June 1999 Last entry before summer break 29th June 1999 Account of Westbourne Ave party, first thoughts of Canada Saturday 12th June 1999: 1.07pm. All around me right now people are moving their stuff out - yup, it's end of term time again. And what has happened to the last three weeks since an entry was made? ...
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Back to archive index Summary 2nd July 1999 More first impressions of Canada 9th July 1999 Niall finally cracks the secret of women, and realises he has achieved inner happiness 19th July 1999 Niall tries drinking lots of cough syrup to relieve the boredom 27th July 1999 A space filling entry 2nd July 1999: 5. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 3rd August 1999 Niall reports on his trip to Vancouver 10th August 1999 Niall recontemplates America and its inhabitants 16th August 1999 Thoughts on how Ruth scares me 25th August 1999 Last entry before returning to Hull Tuesday 3rd August 1999: Written across two days . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 14th September 1999 Niall goes to a London squat rave Tuesday 14th September 1999: 4.56pm. Agh. My brain feels like it's in a pressure cooker. Any form of brain action (eg; like walking) causes extreme pain. Needless to say, forming these sentences and telling my hands to type them is really hurting . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 5th October 1999 First entry since returning to the Lawns 14th October 1999 22nd October 1999 Taking loads of pills again at various places, some words on the death of Kev Murphy 30th October 1999 Thoughts of Cream, the super-club! Tuesday 5th October 1999: 5. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 3rd November 1999 14th November 1999 Paul Oakenfold plays at Hull uni + parties! 16th November 1999 Hull uni Students Union dissolves my Legalise Cannabis Society, Niall bends but doesn't break under the pressure 24th November 1999 Last entry before Niall yet again attends the annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam Wednesday 3rd November 1999: 5. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 10th December 1999 Returning after many weeks of international travel 13th December 1999 Severe depression kicks in 22nd December 1999 Update from my first time in Ireland for a year 30th December 1999 Niall has fun in Ireland Friday 10th December 1999: 7. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 16th January 2000 Birthday entry Sunday 16th January 2000: 12.56am. For one more time it's ...
HAPPY 22ND BIRTHDAY NIALL!
Sorry I didn't get in a new year's message, it was lack of effort + a lot of email to get through. What did I get up to? ...
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Back to archive index Summary 17th February 2000 Not a lot! Thursday 17th February 2000: 3.36am. Just wanted to let you all know that I'm still alive (thanks for the emails BTW!). Nah, sorry for the month long delay, it was a case of birthday celebrations, then the annual january blues, then the hard drive crashed, then I got most of a new computer, then I spent two weeks figuring why it wouldn't work culminating in sending the bastard motherboard back, then another while getting everything working again. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 8th March 2000 Life plods on nicely 30th March 2000 Life goes very well indeed Tuesday 8th March 2000: 6.31am. Wow, that's like another three weeks gone. Amazing. Life goes very well at the moment, probably not least to the excellenet hashish supply I've acquired. I've smoked Moroccan Blond Hash (v. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 5th April 2000 Melanie leaves uni, Niall feels a bit lonely 23rd April 2000 Ruth comes to visit for Easter break, and she leaves me Wednesday 5th April 2000: 4.06am. I finished my project today, all that remains is to make a few spelling corrections, print it off and have it bound. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 17th May 2000 Second birthday of the diary; a Buffy episode really gets to Niall 23rd May 2000 Site moves to HTML 4.0 + style sheets 28th May 2000 Niall gatecrashes a party in London Wednesday 17th May 2000: STOP PRESS!
HAPPY2NDBIRTHDAYTONIALL'SVIRTUALDIARY!
I feel like such an idiot, forgetting this diary's second whole birthday (it was on last saturday). ...
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Back to archive index Summary 8th June 2000 My formal education comes to an end! 19th June 2000 Hot summer days ... 29th June 2000 First entry to recognise that I am losing my mind ... Thursday 8th June 2000: 11.50pm. So it's all over at last, I have finally finished my degree! ...
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Back to archive index Summary 11th July 2000 Tuesday 11th July 2000: 8.24am. Jeesh, I thought it was Wednesday today, not Tuesday. Guess the weekend has thrown me off ... anyway, this entry is to put lots of people's minds at rest after the last gloomy entry. I thought it was quite upbeat when I finished it, but the emails of concern would seem to indicate I was wrong. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 8th August 2000 Things are not going well 27th August 2000 The long August weekend Tuesday 8th August 2000: 3.40am. I can't believe a whole month has just flown away. Summer's nearly over already. Christ, it's madness! I only have around four weeks before Spain . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 9th September 2000 Bad spin out at a party 14th September 2000 Niall expands on his feelings of vulnerabilities 16th September 2000 More expansion 17th September 2000 The beginning of the end of me and Ruth 18th September 2000 More angst . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st October 2000 Finally a beginning of some decent self-analysis 8th October 2000 More self-analysis 15th October 2000 First entry from Spain 17th October 2000 Re-realisation of Ruth's virtues 19th October 2000 Things are improving 22nd October 2000 Things get very intense, Niall thinks he's going to be a daddy at last 24th October 2000 Hopes dashed 25th October 2000 Pain turns to anger . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 2nd November 2000 Bad day 7th November 2000 Things getting better 9th November 2000 I admit I'm still having mental problems 15th November 2000 Things getting better again 27th November 2000 Questions, questions, eating my mind away Thursday 2nd November 2000: 11. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st December 2000 Ruth and I end 5th December 2000 General stuff 14th December 2000 Chomsky, capitalism, new world orders, other heavy thoughts 17th December 2000 Niall gives up smoking weed (argh!), more heavy thoughts 31st December 2000 End of year with some heavy thoughts Friday 1st December 2000: 5. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 6th January 2001 Annual end of year summary 15th January 2001 Bad case of the birthday blues + extracts from old paper diaries 16th January 2001 26th January 2001 Money talk Saturday 6th January 2001:10.00pm exactly. Wow, still can't believe it's 2001, despite the last entry being clearly the last of the turn of the millennium. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 9th February 2001 Psychiatrist sticks me on anti-depressants 16th February 2001 I realise my self-definition was based on the existence of Ruth 24th February 2001 I flesh out a little more why the loss of her affected me as it has Friday 9th February 2001: 8. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 3rd March 2001 Computer upgrade 25th March 2001 ADSL gets put in Saturday 3rd March 2001: 10.11pm. Well, these are the first few hours of my latest computer upgrade. The computer locked up about half an hour ago and I'm hoping very much it won't do this again cos I'm in the middle of downloading lots of new drivers. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 8th April 2001 Questions about the future 28th April 2001 Return from travelling Sunday 8th April 2001: 9.06pm. And another two weeks have gone. Life is really sliding by now, barely even notice its passage anymore. So what's happened? Well, nothing, I've been enjoying my ADSL. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 27th May 2001 A somewhat cynical entry Saturday 27th May 2001: 4.32am. Just got back from inner Madrid, took over an hour and a half to get a bus. Real busy there. Said goodbye to Dominic whom I know from a mailing list I'm on, for the last four weeks he's been getting me out. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 16th June 2001 Discotheque 26th June 2001 Visit to England Saturday 16th June 2001: 8.18pm. Went to see Paul Van Dyk play last night, wasn't bad, the club clearly had shit loads of money invested in it but the staff were a little too "do what we tell you" for my tastes although it didn't approach most of the super-clubs in the UK. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st July 2001 War on cockroaches 9th July 2001 Big rave 14th July 2001 More ideas on the future 15th July 2001 Quick comment 22nd July 2001 Mmm Jessica ... Sunday 1st July 2001: 4.12pm. Wow, we're now into the second half of 2001. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 4th August 2001 Another depressing entry 26th August 2001 Thoughts for a new computer Sunday 4th August 2001: 7.10pm. It's hard realising that it's August already. That's about six more weeks or so until the one year anniversary of me coming to Spain. In other words, it's been a year in not very long now at all. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 12th September 2001 Terrorists Wednesday 12th September 2001: 11.11pm. Woke up about an hour ago, spent three hours in siesta - was tired after a stressful day and indeed period since I last made an entry - indeed, spending time in Ireland is always stressful.
Yeah, I got my one week of holidays and did the dutiful thing. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 5th October 2001 Thoughts on psychology 20th October 2001 Went to Hull, more psychology 31st October 2001 Working in England Friday 5th October 2001: 8.29am. Yeah, I'm making the entry from work (bad Niall!), the internet's down and until it's back up I can't really do much. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 17th November 2001 Work drags on Saturday 17th November 2001: 10.48am. The project is definitely on now until Christmas, and most likely sometime into the new year. Arse. I am beginning to feel like I am living in a prison. No music. No going out. No access to internet except for brief spasmic bursts which are always rushed and never give enough chance to study at leisure. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 8th December 2001 Very short entry Saturday 8th December 2001: 9.06pm.Back in Spain again, just for this weekend. Not done much, just slept mostly and watched passive entertainment on the computer. Bought my new computer, fried two Athlon processors last Thursday, 180 quid to replace. Not good. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 6th January 2002 Traditional annual year round-up 31st January 2002 Birthday and Linux thoughts Sunday 6th January 2002: 9.23pm. This is the first day the new computer hasn't been exhibiting some sort of annoying weirdness, so it's been time to do other things eg; this diary. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 24th February 2002 Back in Bordon Sunday 24th February 2002: 2.50pm. God damn this is a small screen. It's like 800x600 and I'm typing into an area around half that size cos the rest is full of the usual FrontPage toolbars and crap. It's almost comical that I am using a dual Athlon 1700 with 1Gb of RAM with a monitor so ancient its max resolution is 800x600. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 18th March 2002 Work causes lots of inner tension Monday 18th March 2002: 11.19pm. Grrr, the anger-at-nothing levels build ever higher ... I don't know if there's a proper word for that, it's not quite frustration, it's more just ... well, indiscriminate anger. If it weren't another week till the Easter break, well, I don't quite know what I'd do . ...
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Back to archive index Summary 4th April 2002 Programming thoughts 27th April 2002 Work turns nasty - the foundations of me later suing them Thursday 4th April 2002: 11.14pm. It feels like I've been here for weeks, but in fact it's only been four days. Weird. We returned here last Sunday after having taken the previous week off for Easter holidays as it were. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 11th May 2002 Productivity & Women 22nd May 2002 Time to sue former employer! Saturday 11th May 2002: 5.39am. You know, I must have spent all of thirty seconds deciding whether to use Friday or Saturday. Unlike normal time, Niall's virtual diary time runs according to when I wake and sleep and hence if I'm still up at 5am when I make an entry, it gets called the day before and not the actual date. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 5th June 2002 Court case won! 12th June 2002 Dream interpretations 25th June 2002 Beautiful French women Tuesday 5th June 2002: 12.29am. Most of the last week has been occupied with legal case stuff as arbitration was on Friday. You'll be glad to know when they saw the evidence, they backed down and offered me half the money and full social security rights, which given legal fees and other overheads I felt probably was a win-win solution, and so I took it. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 11th July 2002 Sad news 14th July 2002 Where's my productivity??? 27th July 2002 Monitor blows up 30th July 2002 A pretty face Thursday 11th July 2002: 10.55pm. Somehow or other I slept from about half six today up till about half ten, so I guess I'm not going to be sleeping again any time soon. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 22nd August 2002 Niall's summer holidays 26th August 2002 The quantum multiverse & women Thursday 22nd August 2002: 8.22pm. I'm probably going to write this over two days, mainly cos there'll be lots to write. Yeah, essentially, I'm back from my holidays which involved travelling to Barcelona, Cerbere (southern France), Montpellier (also southern France), Paris, venerable old Amsterdam and then a two day whisk back to Madrid through Portbou (as near to France as you can get without leaving Spain) arriving here last night. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 24th September 2002 Random stuff Tuesday 24th September 2002: 9.40pm. I've just been trying to think of what I've been doing for the last month. I read some books - The Passing of the Techno-Mages trilogy by Jeanne Cavelos particularly disrupted almost everything because I kept staying up until extremely late reading them and obviously then everything went to pot the following day. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 12th October 2002 The project advances 29th October 2002 Sense of ending Saturday 12th October 2002: 5.48pm. God, I must have worked sixty hours last week on the project. Yeah, it finally booting this time last week and since then it's been all about enabling bits of the technology. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 6th November 2002 Braindead 28th November 2002 Pharmaceuticals Wednesday 6th November 2002: 5.21pm. These last two days have been like my brain has run out of food or something. It's getting really hard to think about anything at all. I woke up this afternoon, spent the first half hour with my eyes closed and brain very very empty and then proceeded to have a shower and shave and yet during all of it my brain continued to be conspicuously empty. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 21st December 2003 No one wants the project Friday 21st December 2002: 12.44am. I am sitting here on the eve of my journey back home for Christmas with air whistling around me - my new computer has been particularly troublesome recently and the first processor in the stupid thing keeps overheating - so its case is open with a desktop ventilator pointing directly inwards. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 9th January 2003 Traditional end of year review Thursday 9th January 2003: 3.50am. Let me begin with a "happy new year"! These past christmas holidays I think were some of the best in many years, probably because (a) I'm not the morose git of past christmases and (b) I spent a lot more of the two week break drinking. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 12th February 2003 Back from UK, preparing to leave Spain 19th February 2003 Ruth, the final episode Wednesday 12th February 2003: 11.26pm. Some five weeks have passed, but it feels like months. I have done an awful lot of travelling in the last two months and I think I have seen virtually everyone I am still in contact with, with a few more beyond that too. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 4th March 2003 Naive optimism 26th March 2003 Reality sets in Tuesday 4th March 2003:5.42pm. Well well, I am now most definitely in the UK permanently! The final move from Madrid actually went quite well - lots more boxes got lugged down to the post office, and I still bear the bruises. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 30th April 2003 Jobs, jobs & jobs Wednesday 30th April 2003: 2.00pm. Wow, eight and a half weeks into job-finding! I even stopped looking for work about two weeks ago now having concluded that after 152 jobs applied for and no interviews, England would not give me a job! ...
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Back to archive index Summary 14th May 2003 Failed the last job interview Wednesday 14th May 2003: 8.31pm. Got back from the Trolltech interview yesterday - and since they rang up on the Monday night and said not to bother coming in on Tuesday, it was a fairly spectacular failure The main reason for my rejection was one of the technical tests I had to do for the Oslo interview was to design a C++ list class which worked equally with by-reference members as with by-value members (by-reference means the list is of pointers to the list's contents - by-value means the list actually contains each item in the list) ...
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Back to archive index Summary 11th June 2003 Bye bye Tornado, hello TnFOX & Ireland Wednesday 11th June 2003: 7.40pm. Spent a bit longer in London than I had thought I would last entry because I got some manual labour work installing computers for Red Hat - for which they still have to pay me. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 20th July 2003 Random thoughts Sunday 20th July 2003: 5.26pm. In some ways time has dragged and in others it has gone very quickly. In most respects my day strongly resembles last summer in Madrid in that during most of it I spend programming. However, it definitely has a different flavour, most notably that you feel fed-up more often here than there - probably because there was more variety of occupation there, whereas here I couldn't even mow the grass this past two weeks due to the constant rain. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 26th August 2003 Tuesday 26th August 2003: 12.14am. I spent a week at the start of the month in bed sick for no real good reason. I guess people sometimes just fall ill suddenly, but it sure has put a dent in my schedule. It most certainly is not looking hopeful before the end of August However, that's partially due to feature creep - it now has strong encryption support which I had always meant to have, but I thought well stop dawdling and add it. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 27th September 2003 Creating a business Saturday 27th September 2003: 9.28pm. Coo, end of September. Didn't I say that I'd have my library finished by now? Well, I might have done, but then I went to visit Enterprise Ireland about getting some funding.
They pointed me to these two good books called "The New Business Road Test" by John W. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 24th October 2003 What to do in the future? Friday 24th October 2003: 4.22am. It's late, and after I write this and archive off the older entries I'm going to bed. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow cleaning showers, sinks and toilets as two friends of mine from university are coming to visit next Tuesday. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 17th November 2003 Moving the website Monday 17th November 2003: 12.06am. Friends came and then went and I returned to TnFOX whose v0.4 release happened this time last week. I then felt that with this huge backlog of other stuff to do, time to take a break (especially with the hours, that release consumed perhaps 750 hours of my life) and get on with things. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 19th December 2003 Assorted uninteresting things Friday 19th December 2003: 8.37pm. I'm hoping that no one noticed, but nedprod.com moved web host some twenty days ago now. The switch was almost seamless in operational terms except that as you may have noticed, the web counter at the top of each page is now textually based. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 15th January 2004 End of year round up Thursday 15th January 2004: 7.14am. Heh, strange to read my thoughts this time last year. Yes, it's the annual end of year review - so what do I think were my most important achievements of 2003? But before that, as regular readers will have noticed, my frequency of posts has diminished still further in 2003 and so it's more or less a month since my last post - therefore, happy christmas everyone and may you have a prosperous new year - feliz navidad y un prospero año nuevo! ...
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Back to archive index Summary 21st February 2004 Plans Saturday 21st February 2004: 4.16pm. God I feel shattered! Last night as it turned 4am I really felt unable to do much more productive work though because I had felt pretty whacked since about 2am I'd only been doing simple tasks anyway. Little tidy up details. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 23rd March 2004 St. Andrews again Tuesday 23rd March 2004: 1.19pm. Just back from Scotland where I was visiting St. Andrews with a view to deciding whether I'll be going there or not for the next four years. It's a nice place - in fact, I liked Edinburgh too - the people were surprisingly cheerful and the weather better than I had expected. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 18th April 2004 New glasses needed! Sunday 18th April 2004: 2.26am. I've had a persistent headache these last two days, on the left side at the front. It could be that I need new glasses - I've been doing that thing everyone who has ever worn eyesight corrective lenses has, you know, trying to look at something and then alternate the closing of one of the eyes to see if it refocuses. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 24th May 2004 Definitely new glasses needed! Monday 24th May 2004: 12.44am. About once a year I must use the computer as I am using it now - with a pillow case on my head and one eye covered, sometimes the left and sometimes the right (right now it's my right, so I must keep a fair distance from the screen). ...
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Back to archive index Summary 29th June 2004 Costly Tuesday 29th June 2004: 11.52pm. For some odd reason, I tend to write diary entries when I'm feeling poorly. I hadn't even noticed the passage of time which if I had been just two days later than now, I would have finally for the very first time not made an entry during a calendar month. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 20th July 2004 A superior econometric model? Tuesday 20th July 2004: 12:16am. In the shower tonight after spending an afternoon powerhosing my father's boat I was thinking that it would be useful to be able to mathematically model the behaviour of computer software fully integrating the high-level (widespread collection of myriad bits of software working together) with the low-level (the actual implementation of the software). ...
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Back to archive index Summary 26th August 2004 MDP vs. GDP Thursday 26th August 2004:9.54am. Yes, it is rather early for me to be making an entry and indeed it would have been more normal for me to have been up all night and making it at the end just before bed rather than now which is just after waking. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 21st September 2004 St. Andrews kicks off 24th September 2004 Oh look! It's a woman! Tuesday 21st September 2004: 11.40am. Today is my fourth day in St. Andrews and second actually spending time in halls as I was spending time with my father until Sunday night. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st October 2004 Hmm, looks like the old noggin was working well that day 30th October 2004 Woman go bad and I overreact Friday 1st October 2004: 2.43pm. One week into lectures, so far it's all very easy stuff. Met some more interesting people though the beginning of the society events has yet to really kick off. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 11th November 2004 Realised that by waking early one can code more - solution! 22nd November 2004 Beginning to realise that a moment of confluence was happening 25th November 2004 And finally did realise. This will become ever more important in the future. Thursday 11th November 2004: 8. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 16th December 2004 Women, women, women - which should I choose? Thursday 16th December 2004: 5.11pm. Right now I should be at a christmas party, but I just realised that it's on the other side of town and it's too wet & cold outside for me to bother. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 14th January 2005 Women troubles (yet again!) 24th January 2005 Birthday review Friday 14th January 2005: 10.48am. I have an exam at 2pm so I'm not sure if I'll have time to do my usual birthday entry's yearly review but as it isn't my birthday quite just yet, I'm in no rush. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 16th March 2005 Web hosting woes Wednesday 16th March 2005: 6.55pm. This is the FIRST time in all the years of this diary's operation that I haven't made an entry in a whole month, and furthermore it's the first time nedprod.com has been down for more than an hour ever too so February 2005 is a historic one! ...
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Back to archive index Summary 8th April 2005 First thoughts on a new economic model 24th April 2005 Johanna ill Friday 8th April 2005: 8.05pm. Easter break is nearly over, and it's not been a quiet one! I've had more or less one day entirely to myself during which I did get some chill time in, but I could have done with at least two days more. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 6th May 2005 Johanna writes Friday 6th May 2005: 2.29am. Well, it is all over - no more first year lectures! And exams are only a week away. Anyway, I'm okay - slept a lot this evening and my limbs have felt heavy all day yesterday and especially today which is annoying. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 10th June 2005 Summer begins Thursday 10th June 2005: 2.18am. Ugh, I feel tired. I'm in the middle of yet another compile run of the Python bindings for my TnFOX library as slowly, oh so slowly, I tease out the bugs. Actual Tn coding won't start until this is finished, and I can only counsel myself that at least on this laptop compiling the bindings doesn't take so long - roughly a half hour. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 8th August 2005 Mid summer coding Monday 8th August 2005: 10.17am. Well I really must apologise - this is the second time ever that I have missed a month in this diary in seven years. Johanna says that it's her fault again as she was also responsible for the first, but I can't remember and couldn't be arsed to look. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 13th September 2005 End of summer Tuesday 13th September 2005: 12.39pm. Well tis almost the night before the battle begins - tomorrow morning I return to St. Andrews. It's been an excellent summer - we had good weather, I learned how hard work it is to shovel 40 tonnes of rock from one place to another, went to Sweden for the first time and managed to add 9,196 lines of new code to my project, more than a 20% increase on two years of work. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 25th October 2005 Economics ... Tuesday 25th October 2005: 9.13am. Ergh, it is rather early, but then I'm glad I'm up. So, a month and a bit in, I suppose it's settled into a fairly respectable routine though I'm making use of this week being slightly lighter a workload than usual (because I don't have one of the tutorials this week). ...
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Back to archive index Summary 30th November 2005 Wednesday 30th November 2005: 11.41pm. What have I been up to the last five weeks? I'm really not quite sure. Lots of stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Emm, let's see, did a few class tests, went to visit Stuart and Anne from Colton/Protechnic with Johanna during reading week, wrote an essay or two, got the Union to invite Fritjof Capra to give us a talk, organising mine and Johanna's intersemester break which involves a lot of travelling, did some work on a memory allocator, tested a new python bindings generator, finished my lecture slides for February, fixed some bugs and ran some tests and generally, overall, worked rather hard on just about everything including study. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 26th December 2005 Christmas Monday 26th December 2005: 3.05pm. Just woken up with a mild hangover - at least I drank plenty of water before bed and I was only on beer last night. And thinking about it, it's hard to think of a St. Stephen's Day in the last ten or fifteen years when I wasn't in more or less this same state after having done almost the same thing in the same neighbour's house on Christmas Day night. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 23rd January 2006 Summary of past year Monday 23rd January 2006: 9.23pm. Strange how my todo list now is pretty similar to the one I outlined last entry, but hey - I can only work so fast. The lecture series is more or less rolling despite not having a lecture hall and such, but I didn't clear more than 150 of those emails in the end. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 26th March 2006 Whoops, missed a month again! Sunday 26th March 2006: 6.45pm. I think this is the third ever time I missed a month. Johanna reckons that since I have been missing entries only during the time we have been going out, then therefore I must be too happy to have anything to write here. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 25th April 2006 Johanna Problems I and My most wonderful academic daughter I Tuesday 25th April 2006: 3.19pm. I just got up from having a nap after lunch today. I'm still quite hung over, but I have a tutorial at 4pm which if I miss I get kicked out of uni so I'll need to leave soon. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 15th May 2006 Insomnia 22nd May 2006 Johanna Problems II 25th May 2006 My most wonderful academic daughter II Monday 15th May 2006: 12.06pm. That week of that last entry ended up being one of unending insomnia with me finally only getting some sleep on the Saturday night I think it was. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 19th June 2006 Reflections on the end of last term Monday 19th June 2006: 3.12pm. Another birthday of this online diary slips past without me noticing ... yes, it's eight years old now. Incredible if you think about it. I'm currently sitting in UCC in my Dad's office theoretically using his supposedly really fast internet connection. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 1st July 2006 3D graphing 7th July 2006 Cognitive Economic Modelling Notes 1 13th July 2006 Cognitive Economic Modelling Notes 2 17th July 2006 Cognitive Economic Modelling Notes 3 25th July 2006 Cognitive Economic Modelling Notes 4 Saturday 1st July 2006: 3. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 6th August 2006 Cognitive Economic Modelling Notes 5 21st August 2006 Cognitive Economic Modelling Notes 6 22nd August 2006 Cognitive Economic Modelling Notes 7 Sunday 6th August 2006: 12.43pm. This will probably be the last entry with detail about my model as I've decided to change tack. ...
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Back to archive index Summary 27th September 2006 The pain of being back in St. Andrews Wednesday 27th September 2006: 11.22pm. The number of times now that I have wanted to write an entry but haven't had the time in the last few weeks has been many. I think half the problem is fully accepting that you're back - your subconscious doesn't want to be here, it knows what's really good for you and it keeps making you not want to engage fully. ...
Tuesday 31st October 2006: 8.42pm. It's not been a fun few weeks recently. There has been a run of bad events, and I'm hoping it will stop soon and things turn around.
Chronological is good. The Future Society events have not seen much attendance which is not good, and it was very small at the last lecture on the 12th with about six people. On Friday the 13th a bifurcation point occurred in St. ...
Friday 17th November 2006: 4pm. Things are slowly turning upward. Last two weeks or so have also not been good, but they do feel stabilised at least. And with stability, things can move forward.
Johanna and I have stabilised into some sort of quasi-relationship - we are broken up, and we're partially behaving as though we're single. But we're also partially behaving as though we're still going out which is to be expected as we're both still very much in love with one another - that has never come into question - and of course we still live together. ...
Tuesday 19th December 2006: 12.38pm. Tis the night before I go home for Christmas, and despite the coming 6am start I am not in bed yet despite being very tired given I was up till 5am last night and was up since about 10am this morning. At least I will sleep well!
I am more or less back on form after the worst semester I have been at St. Andrews - these would be my academic daughter's words, but I generally agree. ...
Saturday 20th January 2007: 11.32am. Johanna's friends have just left, so now I finally have time to sit down and write up my traditional birthday entry. I finished my exams a long time ago now, well over a week and half and they went reasonably well - I should get a 2.2 overall, maybe a 2.1 which isn't bad given the crappy semester and poor coursework grades I received. ...
Sunday 18th February 2007: 1.39pm. God, it feels like two months since my last entry - hardly one! I suppose that that's good - it does mean I've been doing plenty of living during the last month. Went to Liverpool, then Barcelona not long after the last entry - both went very well. Once back here, studies began again in earnest - a lot more coursework this semester than last, I feel like second semester in second year (ie; this time last year) where you have this mountain of work to do, and no matter how often you attend to it, you are always feeling like the mountain is growing faster than you can get through it. ...
Thursday 8th March 2007: 6.05pm. Things have been noticeably brighter last two weeks - I think entirely helped by weekly Friday visits to my home here by S- and I- where despite being very, very tired (especially last Friday), I did have a lot of fun. Additionally, I quite fancy this girl I've met though rather unfortunately she's a fourth year and of course will be leaving for good within three months. ...
Sunday 22nd April 2007: 5.10pm. After some amount of mucking around, I now have this front page on nedprod fully compliant with XHTML v1.0 Transitional and nearly fully compliant with XHTML v1.1 - the only three problems are the use of the HTML instead of XHTML MIME type, <a name> and <a href target> all of which I have to keep in order to maintain compatibility with older HTML browsers. ...
Monday 28th May 2007: 5.37pm. This diary is now NINE years old - how nuts! It's not been a fun month of May for me at all sadly. It started out very well, but within just a few days it became very bad indeed and it has stayed pretty bad since then. I missed my Economics exam completely and have totally screwed up Corporate Finance and Sustainable Development, so I have had the entire semester S-coded which means it is partially eliminated from the final degree classification process. ...
Wednesday 13th June 2007: 10pm. I have just woken up after a two and a half hour nap and until this cup of tea I am drinking takes effect, I am feeling really rather groggy! But I was absolutely exhausted, mostly due to lack of sleep - I went to bed last night at 11pm because I was so tired, but couldn't sleep until at least 5am and I am refusing to let myself sleep in past 12pm. ...
Thursday 5th July 2007: 6.28pm. Once again here I am feeling groggy drinking a cup of tea after rather a lack of sleep last night! I have been back here from being home in Ireland for a week and a half now, and there is no let up in substantial change occurring within.
This has caused problems. Last night myself and Johanna had one of the biggest bust ups since we broke up, and we both haven't had much sleep since then. ...
Sunday 29th July 2007: 11.30am. A lot of students spending their summers in St. Andrews are finding it boring here - a lack of people means a lack of things to do, and they find themselves yearning for the excitement of term time. I can't say I have found that myself, nor has Johanna for that matter. People like us seem to create drama out of nothing. It certainly has not been boring! ...
Sunday 5th August 2007: 1 1.54pm. Things are definitely better this past week. I have given up smoking, having had restarted it since Easter break due to stress, and I am feeling much the better for it. I still can't quite believe we're into August already - I have my resit in Economics in just under a month when I'll also be ending all contact with the girls permanently now M- has made her choice. ...
Sunday 12th August 2007: 12.18pm. Well, what an interesting week! Last Friday plus one week I gave M- the first part of her goodbye letter. Now that's probably one of the harshest pieces of writing I have ever put on paper and furthermore I wrote and finished it mid-June, but it all needed to be said. It was on how she has treated me and others during the last two years, and on the processes and mechanisms within her (in my opinion) that lead to such malevolent behaviour. ...
Wednesday 22nd August 2007: 2.10pm. I've just upgraded the website's PHP to considerably improve the speed of accessing this website. Due to the web counter at the top of each page, hitherto each and every HTML page fetched from nedprod wasn't cacheable which meant it was being refetched each and every time, plus because the web browser didn't know how long the page was, it had to assume it was very long (and thus it can hold back on showing it to you early). ...
Tuesday 2nd October 2007: 1.16pm. Lectures began for my last & final year of undergraduate study (hopefully) yesterday. I am finding myself grumpier this year than any previous year with the shite they pass off as knowledge in this place, and on at least two occasions yesterday I loudly corrected the lecturer who had made a factual error - one of many I might add, but I was too tired to bother correcting them any further. ...
Tuesday 13th November 2007: 4.16pm. Here we are in Reading Week at long last! To think that a month and a half has passed ... gee, it felt a lot longer. There's been lots of drama in everyone else's life, but mine, well mine is pleasantly dull. And I'm very glad for it!
I basically spend most of my time with Megan which continues to go well. I squeeze a few hours in per week to work on Brook and as of yesterday, its CPU backend is about forty times faster than it used to be and is stable and working well. ...
Saturday 22nd December 2007: 2.17pm. It's nuts that it's only three days till Christmas even though today is the official end of term in St. Andrews! Johanna has just left and Megan left last Wednesday, and I handed in my last group coursework assignment on Thursday. To achieve that I had to defer one of my essays via Student Support, so it along with another essay hangs over my Christmas. ...
Friday 25th January 2008: 9pm. My last exam was last Monday and since then it's been mainly catching up on various chores and pottering around doing random stuff as part of recuperating from last semester. A good week of my Christmas break was spent doing essays, so really I only had one week off and that week was spent meeting up with various people eg; Kev's memorial football match. It's been good last few days, been sitting up till 6am watching a lot of Doctor Who (the new series) in particular. ...
Saturday 16th February 2008: 3.52pm. Just woken up, and I do feel pretty damn knackered but then for once it's entirely & very much my own fault! I was going to get an early night last night because I had been extremely tired yesterday after staying up till 7am trying to get my new printer to work - actually, to be more specific, it was to fix Johanna's computer because I accidentally broke its ability to print anything at all during the process of testing the new printer. ...
Tuesday 18th March 2008: 4.17am. As you have probably barely noticed, I have been busy "monetising" my website during the past month - the summary of which you can find on a new page "How to Monetise your Website". Lest you think me in terribly bad form given that nedprod hasn't had adverts previously, in fact back in 1998 when this site was first launched it had adverts almost from the start. ...
Monday 24th March 2008: 6.53pm. Got back from the stag in Budapest yesterday and am slowly recovering today. I was so tired yesterday after the previous week so lacking in sleep that I was hallucinating quite profoundly - which certainly made the trip rather interesting!
I promised myself I wouldn't do any coursework today in order to give myself some rest. However, I wanted to continue the previous entry especially with the collapse of Bear Stearns last week - a classic, and very typical, example of how evil banks truly are - though, I must strongly add that Bear Stearns itself was hardly that evil and if anything, the fact it collapsed was precisely because it wasn't being evil enough. ...
Tuesday 25th March 2008: 1.51pm. Bleh I feel groggy! After coming back from a lovely time at Megan's where she cooked me lobster, I sat up smoking sheesha and reading the Economist which had just arrived. I was really rather glad to see they were writing about exactly what I had been writing about here, except that they were also calling for severe & swift disciplinary measures to be taken with implications of dealing with bank CEO's much as Enron's were - by hauling them out in handcuffs. ...
Sunday 30th March 2008: 4.04pm. Phew, it's end of term at long, long last! Well, it was two days ago, but I have been catching up on my sleep as with the MSc in High Performance Computing interview on Friday, I didn't get much of it this past week. They accepted me BTW, but without help for the fees of £5,600 - which basically means I can't go as such a high fee would cripple me. ...
Wednesday 30th April 2008: 1pm exactly. I am, as of yesterday, now done with university at St. Andrews as I handed in my dissertation yay! It's quite a thought to think that I am now coming to the end of what I began well over five years ago now - I just got a book to spit out, and this cycle will have been completed. My dissertation is on modelling the costs of climate change - unlike most Economic treatises on the matter, mine is actually based on scientific evidence which makes it rather different - and I have an awful lot of good stuff in there (having once again leached most of it off my notes for my book). ...
Saturday 31st May 2008: 2.37am. Nuttily enough, I finished exams five days ago now - not that it quite seems that way despite that quite a lot has happened since then - and well, now there is definitely & absolutely no doubt that I'm done! It's been an interesting month - little bits done here & there, even was in the Student's Association last night for the last night of term which was lacklustre - a lot of people just seemed to not be there probably having already gone home. ...
Monday 30th June 2008: 6.51pm. Graduation was last week, the Leaving Ball last Friday and as of today, the last of my close friends departs for good with the exception of Johanna who will depart in August. In a soundbite, it's definitely finally all over. What a four years it has been ...
I spent about two weeks after the last entry releasing TnFOX which I try to do once a year as a minimum - this keeps it up to date and fixes any bugs which updated software components might introduce (especially on Linux). ...
Friday 25th July 2008: 7.47pm. One month of summer break down, one month to go before I move back to Ireland with Megan! I was rejected from my PhD application today so it'll definitely be a Masters next year, still not sure which because most of UCC is on holiday so there is no progress. I suppose admittedly the closing date for Masters applications isn't until the 1st August. ...
Tuesday 12th August 2008: 11.08pm. It's taken a while, but I have finally transferred most of my day to day work stuff like email to my mini-laptop as I prepare for moving back to Ireland. It's an excellent wee laptop, everything I always wanted one to be: light as a feather, quiet, small, cool (doesn't burn you) and powerful enough to not be annoyingly slow. In fact editing this page in Microsoft Expression is the very first time its speed has been a problem as there is a definite lag between me typing and it drawing it on the screen - but at least it is keeping up, and it is after all my own fault for having such a ginormous page! ...
Wednesday 27th August 2008: 8.31pm. Do you know that the more I use this mini-laptop (the MSI Wind clone) the more I like it? I don't think I have ever bought a consumer appliance that just keeps on growing upon me day after day and I keep finding new and even more convenient uses for it! This little thing really is worth its weight in gold.
Furthermore, it's fairly shocking how powerful computers have become. ...
Sunday 12th October 2008: 5.31pm. Gee, what a few months. This weekend I "finished" the book in the sense that every chapter has been written and contains more or less what will end up in the final book. Of course, some chapters are missing small sections, plus I definitely need some extra graphs and pictures to illustrate myself - then comes the weeks of copy editing when you run through lots of other people's notes on where you're not making sense. ...
Thursday 30th October 2008: 12.53pm. I have taken today off seeing as Megan is away in Scotland and I don't have to drive her in and besides, I was becoming very exhausted again. I don't know what it is about me but for some reason I just don't handle sixty hour plus weeks well despite that plenty of other people seem to - I am at the edge of my capacity at present, and this is despite that my load is far less than it was in St. ...
Sunday 21st December 2008: 2.21pm. Whoah, such a long time since the last update and unlike normally when I am too busy to make more than a monthly entry, these past two months have been arduous indeed - as you might imagine considering the last entry, but even more was added to the mix again:
Firstly, I got a part-time lecturing position in Economics for UCC's Adult Education, and me being me I fed them a post-structuralist modernised interpretation of Economics rather than the standard dry & boring Neo-Classical stuff, despite how much extra time it cost me in prep. ...
Sunday 18th January 2009: 7.39pm, and it's my annual birthday entry - yes, I have become thirty-one years old now. Thirty-one is a silly age in my mind: it's not thirty, and it's not thirty two. Thirty-one is somehow in between everything else - even thirty-one's Wikipedia page is significantly shorter than thirty's or thirty-two's!
It's been a long year, and much to my surprise I can once again say for the third year in a row that I did not feel any depression at the lack of things accomplished in the past year. ...
Saturday 14th March 2009: 9.48pm. Just a little entry to let everyone know that I'm not dead (yet) or anything, just as always very, very busy and not a huge amount to report of much interest. Astute readers may have noticed the magic appearance of a next to the latest entry and indeed in the address bar of most web browsers. So what's one of those then?
Well, that's a syndicated feed which lets people " ...
Friday 17th April 2009: 6.05pm. It's sure been a busy few weeks - I have been making very good use of my free time now that lectures are done. I have added a "feed of feeds", the "All Things Niall Feed" which uses Yahoo Pipes to draw together all the feeds from all my websites into one giant feed. In fact, last entry the feed ripper for this website didn't work very well - it didn't pass Atom 1. ...
Wednesday 27th May 2009: 7.23pm. Tempus fugit and as of yesterday, I am supposedly finished my Masters apart from the submission of one of those stupid learning journals. Exams finished a week ago - with a bit of God's grace I will never again have to sit in a lecture or take another exam. This very much pleases me as I have hated the "waste" of this past academic year which was not dead time, but certainly felt that way in terms of lack of productivity in anything what I'd consider useful. ...
Monday 22nd June 2009: 12pm exactly. It is strange to think that three weeks or so have passed since the last entry yet it feels like I have still accomplished nothing. We ended up winning the Export Capability Award of that Student Enterprise Award which earned me €1500 and therefore the means to keep myself and Megan alive above near-destitution levels until welfare hopefully finally pays out in October/November - speaking of which, I have heard nothing from them in a month now so I must remember to ring them up and ask what the hell is going on? ...
Thursday 23rd July 2009: 9.04am. Another month passes, yet once again I sit here wondering what the hell have I actually accomplished? Where does the time go? I have especially been wishing for forty hours in day of late because there is such a long list of things to do which never seems to shrink no matter how hard I work nor how many hours I invest. With such thoughts, I would be the first to counsel others to instigate a re-evaluation of one's efficiency: where is one wasting the hours? ...
Monday 31st August 2009: 10.25pm. Well the summer is almost over - Dad comes back from his holidays on Thursday which is the usual signifier of being back to work, and the weather is definitely becoming much cooler - I had to turn on the heating a few days ago because it was getting too nippy even under a blanket.
This month, much like last month and the month before it, has once again very little evidence to show for its passing. ...
Sunday 27th September 2009: 12pm. Heh, what can I write about this entry which is any different from the last entry? A good question to be sure! I've accomplished a few small things: the first is that I have finally, finally, finally finished converting my CV into XML and it is available online here. I have wanted to get that done for oh about five years now because maintaining the Word edition was becoming increasingly annoying over time: any time you applied for a job you'd have to manually cut & paste the bits relevant to the job, and the Gantt chart had to be separately maintained from the main listings. ...
Sunday 3rd January 2010: 4.28pm. Wow, some three months have passed and it's suddenly 2010! Has this been the longest break in virtual diary entries in twelve years? I think so. And yet again when I consider what I have done since the last entry, I know that I did loads of stuff but I can't quite think of any of it. What I have done recently is fix the " ...
Wednesday 3rd February 2010: 5.42pm. So much for my birthday entry being anywhere near my birthday! Still, being two weeks late is not that bad considering the three month gap before the last entry I guess ... and I have been oh so busy since the last entry. Firstly we had that great freeze in Ireland (and indeed Europe) which effectively extended everyone's Christmas holidays by quite a bit, and because everyone was marooned in their houses not a lot happened for anyone at all really. ...
Wednesday 5th May 2010: 5.00pm. Rather like in the last entry, the last three months feel more like six! Which I suppose is probably a good thing in a way, but I do feel quite tired-in-a-way-sleep-can't-cure sort of way. Right now I am on a three day break from working on the extended Applied Research Associates contract in order to catch up on all the many, many things that need doing (writing this entry being one of them), and I must admit to looking forward to contract completion at the end of May. ...
Monday 4th October 2010: 3.30pm. A simply stunning five month hiatus later, here's a new entry! It has to be admitted I never thought I'd see the day in the past twelve years that I'd leave more than two months pass between entries, but there you go. Looking back, I don't think it was deliberate per se, more that I just didn't think of it at all until late August - already an unprecedented three month gap - which must mean that the intervening months must have been both busy and boring. ...
Wednesday 27th April 2011: 1.26am. My, my, twas five months since the previous entry last time and this time it's like ... is it nearly seven months? Doesn't time just fly! What on earth could I have been up to for seven months? Didn't even bother with my traditional January birthday review of the past year ... I did think of it at the time, but I couldn't really think of much to say about 2010. ...
Wednesday 18th May 2011: 9.50pm. Last entry I mentioned that I was going to review some "custom" or "bespoke" clothing which really is "Made to Measure", or "MTM" clothing because custom/bespoke is when the tailor performs multiple fittings on you personally (and of course charges for it). I actually got into the idea because of the lack of affordable quality shirts for potential work/interviews, and because the great trouble with my body shape is that I'm still fairly slim and all the reasonably priced shirts you see in the stores are way, way too baggy for me. ...
Sunday 17th July 2011: 1.50pm. Definitely a much less fussy user interface than FB while somehow containing more functionality. Google + is impressive so far, though quite buggy indeed!
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Sunday 17th July 2011: 2.05pm. Location: 51.91294479370117,-8.574605941772461. Here is testing photo sharing from an android phone. One is that excellent self portrait taken by that monkey I posted about on facebook, the other is what woodlands looks like right this moment ...
Sunday 17th July 2011: 2.14pm. Ooo in the google plus app try sliding to the left. It will show you all posts made by all people who are geographically closest to you right now. That could be really cool in a soccer game or concert or something, or even just students at the same university. Impressive.
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Monday 18th July 2011: 10.05pm. My thoughts on Google Plus vs. Facebook vs. LinkedIn:Having watched which of the people I know who have joined G+, and watching what each of these post to G+ vs. what they post to Facebook, I'd say there's a reasonably strong chance that this will become the social networking of choice for the technologically keen, while the less keen probably will stay where they are. ...
Thursday 21st July 2011: 1.23am. Location: Cork. I have to say, the posts from the people of cork (swipe left when on your phone) are fascinating! I especially like the pictures from people's nights out!
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Thursday 21st July 2011: 1.17pm. Link shared: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nyan-cat-pop-tart-cat Loads more info about the Pop Tart Cat I posted earlier. Turns out it's really new and recent, who would have guessed!
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Sunday 24th July 2011: 10.16pm. Has anyone else found that the suggested additions to your circles has gone mad? Apparently I ought to circle William Shatner, Alyssa Milano, Sergei Brin and Chris Pirillo. If only I socialised around such hallowed company!
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Friday 29th July 2011: 2.45am. Link shared: http://bugseverywhere.org/ Finding my memory fading as I age, and can no longer remember what's wrong with my code without writing it down, thought I ought to write a pretty tortoisegit interface for a distributed issue tracker so I can dispense with the paper notes. Then I can annotate my code with thoughts as I look at it, commit changes fixing the issues and it all distributes itself transparently with my main git repo. ...
Thursday 11th August 2011: 6.05pm. Plenty of progress once again in my life since the last update, though still not much of it is yielding tangible results which is becoming a little disheartening. In May I received news that the two memory allocation academic articles I wrote last year had been rejected, so I fired them onto arxiv.org and one can find both of them either here on arXiv or via Google Scholar along with my other academic writing. ...
Monday 5th September 2011: 11.15am. Just finished one of my periodic upgrades of nedprod.com's implementation technologies to include the latest state-of-the-art improvements - as you may have noticed, commenting has finally been added to most but not all of the website (in particular, I haven't bothered upgrading pre-2000 bits of the website as much of it is basically tag soup). This accomplishes something that I have meant to get around to since, well, oh about ten years ago. ...
Sunday 20th November 2011: 10.29pm. God damn sand force ssd suddenly started hanging about five minutes after booting up the computer. Too short to copy much off so I've lost my install. Anyway, did a factory reset and suddenly it appears to no longer hang even with a dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=1M. Have run this twice using md5sum to verify and it's working. Should I trust it again???
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Tuesday 13th December 2011: 12.24am. Link shared: http://www.freeinggrowth.org/books My first book, the one I wrote just after graduating from St. Andrews "Freeing Growth: A Neo-Capitalist Manifesto" is finally launched and on sale from US$1.99 from all the usual eBook and book stores. More details at http://www.freeinggrowth.org/books. Reviews should be appearing on various Economics blogs and websites before Christmas.Next book is being coauthored with the German Economist Norbert Häring which will be called " ...
Monday 23rd January 2012: 4.00pm. Link shared: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page Been experimenting recently with virtualisation solutions to solve bitrot, drive failure, remote mirroring never mind improve redundancy and reduce downtimes during migrations throughout all my server infrastructure both internally and externally. Was fairly disappointed with Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure in 12.04 LTS Alpha 1 - it's nowhere near ready for small cluster deployments as they seem to assume a three machine minimum, all running a minimum of KVM. ...
Tuesday 28th February 2012: 3.16pm. Link shared: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/nialldouglas/ To anyone technical: Stackoverflow have very kindly given me a few invites to their Careers 2.0 service which is an "IT resume aggregator". Basically you give it access to your LinkedIn, GitHub, Sourceforge etc. accounts and it aggregates a resume for you, and rather more importantly keeps it up to date for you too. You can see mine at http://careers.stackoverflow.com/nialldouglas/ for reference. ...
Monday 12th March 2012: 11.09am. Link shared: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/windows-7-map-drive-skydrive-using-url-address-network/ Much to my astonishment, Microsoft lets you map their Skydrive to a drive letter in Windows using good old fashioned SMB. 25Gb of online cloud space suddenly is built into Windows, including Windows XP.Yet AGAIN, here's something cool and useful from Microsoft that no one has advertised, no one knows about and more importantly, would have saved me time in the past. ...
Monday 19th March 2012: 5.00pm. Wow, a full six months between diary entries! Unfortunately it's been a combination of both being incredibly busy and not having a massive amount of anything interesting to say which has been the cause of my tardiness. Much of September went on getting the World Economics Association launched, in particular upon writing lengthy email replies, and getting all editions of the Freeing Growth manifesto into print. ...
Monday 2nd April 2012: 10.01pm. Link shared: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2164732/google-announces-android-404-gsm-nexus-galaxy-nexus-phones Android v4.0.4 fixes SOOOO many bugs .... By god this phone is now actually mostly glitch and bug free (almost, I just saw a sync bug). Still, about time! So called flagship phones shouldn't be left four months without fixes for a lot of very serious bugs!!!
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Saturday 7th April 2012: 9.32pm. Been doing a LOT of interviewing with various North American companies as myself and Megan limber up to emigrating this H1B visa cycle. Seeing as it's the first time I've engaged with an interviewing process in a decade, it's been a very interesting experience, especially to see how Silicon Valley startups compare to the big multinationals.I won't name names, however one widely admired and very successful household name Fortune 20 multinational has consistently stunned me with the astonishing mediocrity of the people who have interviewed me, and I've gone through a fair few interviews with them now. ...
Sunday 8th April 2012: 2.01pm. Continuing my last post about interviewing with North American companies, I have to say that my impressions of Silicon Valley startups has generally been uniformly good with a few dark exceptions. Some good points:1. They put effort into writing their job adverts and tell you lots of useful information in that advert. Try comparing any multinational's job adverts with any startup's. The former look like they were written by a HR bod who could not care less about the position, and some multinationals seem to go out of their way to make their roles look as boring and undesirable as possible (sorry, I have to mention a name here: Microsoft has consistently the most off-putting job adverts out there). ...
Wednesday 25th April 2012: 7.32pm. Finally got round to the third of my posts on interviewing with North American companies. Last time round I mentioned that there were a few horror stories, so here's the worst of the worst.One of the companies I applied to had an employee review on glassdoor suggesting that the company contractually mandated ownership of all IP generated by their employees, including all open source contributions right down to bug fixes. ...
Monday 7th May 2012: 6.53pm. I've finished rejecting the last of the job offers made to me by North American companies, so after many, many months of interviewing I am glad to finally be able to announce that I have accepted a conditional offer by Research In Motion, the makers of +BlackBerry, to join their Native SDK team as a Senior Software Engineer in their Waterloo, Ontario HQ this summer. ...
Wednesday 9th May 2012: 7.39pm. Got a fruit fly infestation which defies all (expensive) attempts to eliminate it? Some got into our bottle bin last week, and though Megan fixed that source they used it to multiply heavily and got into everything else, constantly staying one step ahead of our best attempts to stop their reproduction cycle. Anyway, forget about expensive remedies. Turns out through trial and error that putting cheap ant powder into many small dishes and sploshing on a little (preferably sweet) beer brings them in their dozens to each dish to try and eat the beer. ...
Saturday 12th May 2012: 3.17pm. After four months of prep, in the next two days I'm going to slowly switch off my old server infrastructure and "seamlessly" migrate everything to my shiny new hand built cloud architecture. Wish me luck, for if I pull this off without a single service outage I will be truly amazed ... :)
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Saturday 12th May 2012: 10.00pm. Plone migration was as painful as always. The company website, being a little old, appears to be borked on Plone 4.1 while all the others are just fine. Weird. Anyway, seeing as I don't need my company website anymore, I just hacked around it with a nasty temporary fix :)Migration is done! Just switched over the DNS. In theory, email and web will slowly move onto the new cloud infrastructure during the next 24 hours. ...
Sunday 13th May 2012: 2.01pm. Link shared: http://bugzilla.openvz.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2268 So, I wake up this afternoon expecting something to have gone wrong ... we're only half way through the DNS propagation after all ... but no, websites are there and functioning, the nice pretty Proxmox monitoring graphs are showing data going in and out, email has started arriving on the new mail server rather than the old etc. All good?Ah, but there is this in my new mailbox:This is the mail system at host mail. ...
Monday 14th May 2012: 11.13am. Link shared: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B5QDPUNHLpKMcF9CbTc2LVJ6WVE Forgot to share this on the web last month, but here's an updated 2012 plot of the history of storage capacity per inflation adjusted dollar for magnetic and flash storage from 1980 to April 2012. There is a clear logistic growth curve for magnetic media showing its terminal decline in density per dollar, whereas flash media seems to show a logarithmically constant growth (I know, go figure! ...
Tuesday 15th May 2012: 6.46pm. Had to securely wipe the old server. Amazingly this works:screen ssh <server>sudo -s# swapoff <swap device># dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16Mdd: writing `/dev/sda': No space left on device14905+0 records in14904+0 records out250059350016 bytes (250 GB) copied, 4087.39 s, 61.2 MB/s# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq# echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger... and just like that your headless remote server no longer contains data and is shutdown (the echoing values into /proc is because the shutdown command no longer exists). ...
Thursday 17th May 2012: 11.46pm. Just upgraded our #pfSense firewall to 2.1 dev which has shiny new IPv6 support. Turns out, fairly amazingly, that my ISP Imagine Ireland (part of Irish Broadband) supports native #IPv6 via 6to4, so all you have to do is tell pfSense to use 6to4 and voila, every machine in your network gets its own, real IPv6 address. Unlike with using a 6to4 tunnel from say tunnelbroker, 6to4 requires zero configuration. ...
Thursday 24th May 2012: 8.05pm. Link shared: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5843/asus-zenbook-prime-ux21a-review Really like the look of the 11" 1080p Asus Zenbook UX21A-DB7x, first thing outside a netbook I've seriously thought about. However I think my ancient ubercheap MSI Atom netbook will have its touchpad get worn through from overuse before the netbook itself dies - bits have dropped off, the case is cracked from my surgeries to add components not supposed to be in it, the bearings on the fan have gone and it rattles loudly, the AC connector is electrically loose and yet it goes on and on and on . ...
Monday 28th May 2012: 7.13pm. You've probably noticed that I've wired in my Google Plus feed to an iframe on the right - I finally got round to configuring the very useful IFTTT to auto-replicate my Google Plus posts to Facebook and Twitter, so I figured why not have them appear here too? Yeah, I guess I'm about a decade behind everyone else there in getting my content to replicate around, but well to be honest I didn't have a need to spam people with my inanity, so I didn't bother. ...
Friday 1st June 2012: 5.24pm. Due to more immigration delays, emigration to Canada has been pushed out to October!!! Currently won't be starting with RIM until November! Wow!
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Sunday 3rd June 2012: 1.46pm. Congratulations to my sister +Aoife Douglas and her new husband +Donal Browne on their wedding in #newyorkcity yesterday! ...
Sunday 3rd June 2012: 6.21pm. Link shared: http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/institute-education/educational-social-research-mres-postgraduate-diploma-postgraduate-certificate Beginning to really fucking hate my #PGCert with the #InstituteOfEducation at the +University of London International Programmes. Thank god it's over and I'm finally free in seven days! I hate pure regurgitation at the best of times, but this course takes it to a whole new level - they want nothing but pure, unfiltered, unedited regurgitation and I am finding very, very hard to revise when from previous courses I not only know all of this material backwards, sideways, and then some but I have to write nothing but their uninsightful opinions and their not very good material all taken from - no prizes for guessing - no one except IoE staff. ...
Monday 4th June 2012: 9.34am. Actually sat in the +McDonald's drive through car park this morning for an hour rather than come home to study what I already know in spades. Though, my, what a glorious day, blazing sunshine, first day like this in a long while ... rain after lunchtime sadly, but I might go sit out for a while as a reward for finishing another A4 of regurgitated model answer shite for the +Institute of Education at the +University of London. ...
Tuesday 5th June 2012: 2.56pm. So, after much head hurt last few days in trying my best to write and learn off the "correct" #regurgitation of #research methods in educational research according to the IoE's ivory tower, I'm onto trying to think of the "correct" answer for the mandatory question discussing #positivism vs. #interpretivism in educational research discourse according to the #IoE. This, at least, is challenging, because last year I wrote the truth which (paraphrased for brevity here) is that it is an artificial storm in a teacup generated by the numerate and non-numerate Bourdieuian cultural fields competing for scarce government research funding resources, so basically positivist research tends to be well funded by government and all the people ignorant or incapable of university level maths feel a need to justify why they too are right to parasite off the state despite that their research rarely is useful for government to declare its policy as " ...
Friday 8th June 2012: 4.44pm. My thanks to +Anthem Press, my publisher of +Economists and the Powerful today for having me over to visit which was very interesting and useful. I hope you like the Irish chocolates I brought!Exam went okay yesterday, there was a bit of a curve ball in the mandatory question in that it was different from past papers for the first time ever. Who knows how I did! ...
Monday 11th June 2012: 3.24pm. My time with the +The Institute of Education at the +University of London International Programmes is finally over. Assuming they don't fail me again, I have finished my PGCert in educational and social research. Just pure maths left to go!
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Monday 11th June 2012: 8.14pm. Link shared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis Just wrote this in reply to an +The Open University discussion thread. Might of be interest to others.--- cut ---I'm glad you like GEB! Some find it too overwhelming, some really dislike the pretentious style (he typeset the entire thing himself too - the original edition is absolutely beautiful - and given the age he did all this at he makes us all look pretty dumb and lazy). ...
Monday 11th June 2012: 8.44pm. Link shared: http://apc.io/ I just got an email from VIA to say their long awaited #APC has just gone on pre-sale for US$49 including worldwide delivery early July. Now should I get this or a +Raspberry Pi for US$42 inc. delivery? The APC is better bang for the buck with 512Mb RAM and 2Gb onboard flash and an #ARM11 @ 800Mhz, whereas the #raspberrypi only has 256Mb RAM and an #ARM11 @ 700Mhz. ...
Thursday 14th June 2012: 12.44am. Location: Carrigrohane, County Cork. Thanks to never ending fruit flies, bought this from Amazon and put it on a nightly timer when they're most active. Catches about thirty a night ...
Friday 15th June 2012: 3.32pm. Link shared: http://economistsandthepowerful.anthempressblog.com/ "Economists and the Powerful" has had its website raised for the first time :)
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Friday 15th June 2012: 4.11pm. Canada has returned a favourable Labour Market Opinion for my application to RIM. Sixteen week processing time my arse!
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Tuesday 19th June 2012: 7.10pm. Link shared: http://www.nedprod.com. Was fairly shocked to discover a bad Google #PageSpeed score on http://www.nedprod.com so I have spent the afternoon doing ...* Made javascript commenting infrastructure async* Replaced language translation flag images with CSS sprites* Fiddled .htaccess to set cache control age and compression for all images and text* Made loading whizzy work on all browsers and dumped compat header* Replaced Google Analytics with async snippetNow getting 85/100 according to Google PageSpeed. ...
Thursday 21st June 2012: 8.35am. Location: Carrigrohane, County Cork. This is what a summer lawn looks like after many weeks of rain and a niall preoccupied with exams! Still pure maths M208 TMA04 is just about to be written out for submission, so later today freeeeeedom for the first time since Christmas! ...
Thursday 21st June 2012: 9.47am. nedprod.com's host turned on mod_deflate. Google PageSpeed now rates nedprod.com at 96/100 and just 947Kb is downloaded for an uncached page load as compared to 1.67Mb before (still 12 seconds to pipelined load though). Cached page load is now just 19.8Kb which I've never seen before and is almost entirely non-nedprod assets which I can't control (I'm looking at you Google!). Job's a very good un! ...
Thursday 21st June 2012: 2.20pm. M208 TMA04 is done. Unfortunately I'm about half an hour too late for today's post from out here in the sticks, so now must drive to the GPO in cork as it must arrive by tomorrow :)
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Thursday 21st June 2012: 4.52pm. Coursework is posted. Six months of taking two distance courses simultaneously completed. My summer officially begins today! Hooray!
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Niall’s virtual diary was one of the very first of what is now called a “blog” on the internet (at the time it was created, there was no such word “blog”, hence me choosing the unoriginal “virtual diary”). Back in 1998, believe it or not, it was considered eccentric to write personal details and thoughts on the internet. I was actually for a while in the top few hundred most popular websites in the world, with a large regular readership who read only because I was one of a few thousand people doing this at all – or perhaps because I used to be interesting once upon a time. ...
Saturday 23rd June 2012: 12.23pm. Was kinda surprised to get this in the post - a +Hurricane Electric t-shirt thanking me for getting my sites IPv6 ready. Too geeky to wear in public mind you, at least in Europe anyway. ...
Sunday 24th June 2012: 5.19pm. I got back from my PGCert exams about ten days ago, rested for a day, then launched into my Pure Maths coursework which I posted off on Thursday. I then spent a day writing up my summer todo list before we emigrate to Canada which is as follows:
Sign up to swimming pool and substantially improve fitness before emigration. Solve nedprod diary archival problem once and for all, and finally shrink that enormous front page! ...
Friday 29th June 2012: 12.34am. Just finished +Mass Effect 3 with the new Extended Cut made to placate the many like me who thought the original was crap. Much improved! I particularly like that you can now tell the star child to go screw himself, though this Reject ending (Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut: Alternate Reject Ending ( Harbinger Destroyed )) would have been better :)In short, #ME3 is still the weakest of the trilogy due to EA's laziness: monotony of combat, buggy camera, inferior level design, lack of ME1 and ME2's sometimes stunning vistas and lack of any depth in conversations or interactions with your teammates. ...
Monday 2nd July 2012: 5.36pm. Fourth time swimming in twenty years today, feeling much fitter already. Swam two hundred metres in about twenty minutes which is a vast improvement over the 160 in 40 minutes last week which nearly killed me :) Today just kinda brushed off the exercise, though I still have trouble walking after.
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Friday 6th July 2012: 5.15pm. Location: Carrigrohane, County Cork. Link shared: http://www.aerlingus.com/travelinformation/planandbook/pricelock/ Just used this for the first time. Lets you pay five euro to hold a flight price for 24 hours. Good idea, just wish aer lingus weren't about to get bought out by ryanair because the Irish state is broke.#aerlingus #ryanair #pricelock
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Sunday 8th July 2012: 11.17am. Didn't get much done yesterday thanks to glorious sunshine. We even went to buy a 99 ice cream! Missing that sun now though, it's back to being grey :(
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Monday 9th July 2012: 10.31am. Two weeks after showing my pre-emigration todo list on nedprod and I have achieved exactly the following:1. Substantially improve fitness before emigration [it's quite astonishing how much stronger and healthier I feel, though probably helped by lack of beer, anything fatty and the iron supplements I've added to my diet after the My Fitness Pal app on my phone showed I was generally getting about 8% of the iron I was supposed to. ...
Monday 9th July 2012: 8.33pm. Link shared: http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedtries/index.html My library nedtries v1.02 Final is out. First ever stable nedtries release after two years of debugging!
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Tuesday 10th July 2012: 2.06pm. Link shared: http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedmalloc/index.html nedmalloc v1.10 beta 2 is out. That's the annual release for two out of three libraries done, now only BEurtle to go. As it was undergoing heavy redevelopment when I last worked on it back in ... wow, is it really more than three months ago now? Anyway, must finish it and get it out of the door by the end of this month, so just fourteen days or so to get it done and pushed! ...
Wednesday 11th July 2012: 8.29pm. Location: Carrigrohane, County Cork. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/BEXML +Redmine issue parser for BEXML is nearly done. I have used a particularly cool lazy asynchronous depaginating iterable file like python object which virtualises an XML stream of issues over a pool of pipelined HTTP connections. This lets the rest of the code work as if Redmine were local and indeed, weren't Redmine, and can hide a lot of network latency. ...
Thursday 12th July 2012: 1.38pm. So, yesterday +Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OTA update comes out for my +Galaxy Nexus so at about 11pm I go to apply it. An assert barfs that my build.prop has been changed, so I hand edit it to make it look like stock. It still barfs (it's not like build.prop having a single character out should fail an OTA update). I try manually downloading the update in case it got corrupted. ...
Thursday 12th July 2012: 2.57pm. Just spent half an hour playing with my new +Android 4.1. In fairness, it's a reasonable update from Android 4.0 - in particular, Google have finally - and at long last - matched the +iPhone for flashy, fadey UI gimmicks, and the UI is now fast enough you can't usually outpace it with your tapping. It now feels very like an iPhone in use, except that everything is darkly themed whereas the iPhone is brightly themed. ...
Thursday 12th July 2012: 4.19pm. Ugh, looks like Titanium Backup doesn't bother backing up apps, just their data by default under the assumption that Google automagically restores apps when you switch devices. Problem is, after my hard reset to Android 4.1.1, Google restored exactly a random three of about 40 apps I regularly use. That means now Niall has to manually go through my list of previously installed apps and install them, then get Titanium Backup to restore their settings. ...
Thursday 12th July 2012: 11.45pm. Seven hours later and I think I have my phone more or less back to where it was yesterday. Only thing I couldn't fix was my email settings oddly, had to reenter those. What a stressful 24 hours! Though #jellybean really is very good, actually was worth the pain which would have happened one way or another. Anyway bed time definitely! Night.
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Friday 13th July 2012: 12.07pm. Immigration pack arrived from RIM's lawyers. Looks like they got Megan a work permit that permits everything except teaching! (she needs to get some extra certs first, but after that she's completely free). Good news!
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Saturday 14th July 2012: 8.11am. Location: Carrigrohane, County Cork. Link shared: http://www.smithscoffee.co.uk/Products/productDetails.aspx?pid=579&pname=Yauco+Selecto+(Puerto+Rico)&cid=1&cname=Origin+Coffees Had this Yauco Selecto for three mornings now. It's the official coffee of the Vatican and it is not cheap. Maybe I've been unlucky, but my batch seems over roasted, almost burned for what is supposed to be a mild coffee. Dad though would love that, for me it's over powering. Anyway got to get going, got an OU maths tutorial . ...
Sunday 15th July 2012: 12.51pm. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/BEurtle My source control embedded bug tracker UI BEurtle (https://github.com/ned14/BEurtle) is beginning to shape up into a v1.5 alpha. Its code (it's written in C# .NET) is a mess and definitely not a proud creation of mine, but it does work ... mostly. Anyway, today's and this coming week's fun fun fun will be with my old least favourite task of smacking my head against the mess that is Windows Installer (see Thursday_11th_August_2011). ...
Monday 16th July 2012: 9.39am. Link shared: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/5/28/WiX-v3.6-Release-Candidate-available Much to my amazement, I completed a fully functional (according to the new virgin Windows XP VirtualBox unit test) suite of Windows installers including fancy-dancy bootstrapping self-.NET-2.0-downloading installer yesterday. That's about three days less than expected, and I can thank the v3.6 RC release of WiX for that. Its new burn bootstrapper actually made doing Windows Installers much better than "fun, fun, fun" ...
Tuesday 17th July 2012: 10.19am. Link shared: http://www.newgrange.com/ You know, that Yauco Selecto Vatican coffee has been growing on me over the last few days. The trick is not just slapping in any old amount of coffee and water, but to get the quantities exactly right. If you do get them exactly right, the coffee is quite sublime. Way over-roasted I still think, and from searching Google Yauco Selecto is a mild roast, not Old Government Java style way-over-the-top roast, but it's hard to completely wreck quality coffee. ...
Wednesday 18th July 2012: 11.37am. Link shared: http://www.privoxy.org/ Didn't get BEurtle v1.50 alpha 1 out yesterday thanks to being stumped by how to sign Windows Installer files (turns out you must hack the MSBuild project files directly with a text editor, and then you must hack your Windows certificate store also directly via the command line). Definitely, surely will be today though.Did however get round to installing Privoxy onto the the main pfsense gateway for the house (which is actually a VM instance in the house cloud node). ...
Wednesday 18th July 2012: 10.58pm. Link shared: http://www.nedprod.com/programs/Win32/BEurtle/index.html Beurtle v1.5 alpha 1 is out the door at least. Hurrah!http://www.nedprod.com/programs/Win32/BEurtle/
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Wednesday 25th July 2012: 12.35pm. Back from northern Ireland and facing into doing a month of maths coursework in just two days as the deadline is Friday. Bleh! Also, RIM likely can't get a dev alpha device to me before I start work there, so am going to buy a second hand playbook off ebay so I can get in some experience with as close to BB10 as I can get before I start. ...
Thursday 26th July 2012: 10.22am. New 65w laptop power brick arrived today - a Wei Xin Da Electronics device just £7 delivered to Ireland. I had been thinking it couldn't possibly be any good at that price, but given that the netbook is ancient and draws a max of 20w I figured it was worth the risk (one aims for less than 50% load with cheap PSUs). Anyway, it has about the right weight for its wattage and looks and feels of reasonable quality. ...
Sunday 29th July 2012: 8.36pm. Link shared: http://www.behardware.com/articles/862-1/components-returns-rates-6.html As I need to configure a ZFS software RAID-Z redundant storage pool for my cloud before I emigrate to Canada (i.e. buy a new 3Tb hard drive), I was very pleased to find a hardware vendor that publishes the return rates of the products it sells which is very, very rare anywhere on the internet. Turns out those 2nd gen Sandforce SSDs are seeing a 10-15% return rate which is astronomical, and it's not like that technology is remotely new yet they keep fobbing off consumers with SSDs that just don't work. ...
Monday 30th July 2012: 2.42am. Just driven back from a 3am visit to the GPO post office in Cork city to post my overdue M208 Pure Maths coursework assignment. It should have been posted Thursday at the absolute latest to arrive Friday, but hey stuff came up. Hell I've driven the length of Ireland and the breadth of Ireland in the past seven days, so sure my TMA is late, so sue me! ...
Monday 30th July 2012: 3.16pm. Got my second hand +BlackBerry #PlayBook today. Typically the thing refuses to boot - at all. What I get is a single red light for about seven seconds, then it flashes yellow five times, then it hard switches off and refuses to notice the power button.Turns out this is a very common problem - the Playbook refuses to boot if its battery charge is too low. ...
Tuesday 31st July 2012: 12.18am. So, I finally got my new second hand +BlackBerry #playbook working and up to date with the bleeding edge v2.1 beta Playbook OS. First impressions: I really wasn't expecting it to match or exceed Android 4.0, yet it repeatedly does - for the most part.Things way better than #Android or #iOS : multitasking, task switching, having a touch sensitive bezel you can do gestures with, third party services integration (e. ...
Tuesday 31st July 2012: 11.24pm. Just got back results from my 2012 summer exams with the #IoE for my PGCert in Educational and Social Research. Got 59% in Approaches to Educational Research (that's the exam I failed last year and so rote learned and regurgitated for in the resit, and because it's a resit it's capped to 59%. I shudder to think what my actual grade was), 87% in Quantitative Data Analysis and I remember I got somewhere between 50% and 59% in Writing and Presenting Educational Research. ...
Wednesday 1st August 2012: 10.51am. +Economists and the Powerful is submitted. Now begins doing accounts and filing tax returns for both myself in two countries and Dad.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012: 3.30pm. After three hours of groking the intricacies of Irish corporate tax law - one of the least complex tax laws in the OECD, so I should count myself lucky - I got my company's corporation tax for 2011 filed. It tells me I have a tax rebate of €673 coming which is nice except for the €5,296 loss I made last year due to those damn Meizu M9 phones, each of which I lost a good €70 on. ...
Wednesday 1st August 2012: 3.57pm. Filed my Irish Income tax for 2011, it tells me I have a cheque for €437 coming my way. Almost makes it worth having to fill in these 20+ page forms!
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Thursday 2nd August 2012: 5.07pm. Link shared: Sunday_24th_June_2012 Dad's accounts and tax returns are done. That means every todo entry on the before Canada todo list (Sunday_24th_June_2012) is either completed or nearly completed. Yay! Sarah and James arrive tomorrow for the long weekend, then I'm off to Belgium next week to say goodbye to Natasja and Kris. I guess it's time to get going with planning the UK farewell trip end of this month . ...
Wednesday 8th August 2012: 12.03am. Sarah has departed after a four day visit here in Cork to say goodbye. Tomorrow morning it's to Belgium to say goodbye to Natasja, returning Friday. Then comes maths coursework, wind up Dad's company, then to London to say goodbye to a wide variety of people across just five days, some from St. Andrews, some from Hull, some even from Cambridge. Then comes a week of packing up everything we own, though Olga gets her own special visit in Birmingham for just a day as she returns from looking after nuclear reactors in Germany. ...
Wednesday 8th August 2012: 10.46am. Just forgot my passport for the first time since 1997. They wouldn't let me board, so no visit to Belgium for me :(
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Wednesday 8th August 2012: 5.40pm. I'm glad to say that every item on my summer todo list from the last entry has been completed or nearly completed - unfortunately, it is at the expense of being so very tired and not thinking properly. This morning I forgot my passport for the first time since 1997 for my flight to Belgium to say goodbye to Natasja - and this being post 9/11, they wouldn't let me fly, so that was €190 down the tube and much disappointment caused for all. ...
Thursday 9th August 2012: 9.35pm. Looks like my +Corsair #Force #SSD boot drive (based on the infamously crap #Sandforce #SF-1200 chipset) really is truly dead. Last time it died I was able to resurrect it with a Secure ATA erase i.e. hard factory reset, but this time it's completely unresponsive to anything and appears to lock up during device initialisation. Thankfully, given it had hosed my Windows 7 install twice before, I had nothing important on it, but it's still irritating and inconvenient. ...
Saturday 11th August 2012: 1.18pm. Link shared: http://zfsonlinux.org/ So, my 3Tb WD Red passed its 'badblocks' test which does four passes of write and read verification (only taking four days), so I passed it as a whole device into my Ubuntu #KVM running #zfsonlinux and configured it as a #ZFS pool device. I set it running copying all the files off my old NTFS external USB drive into the new ZFS pool and . ...
Saturday 11th August 2012: 6.36pm. Link shared: http://www.freenas.org/ After a considerable amount of experimentation with every conceivable combination of caching mode, I give up on #zfsonlinux as I simply couldn't find anything to get it to exceed 1.6Mb/sec. Maybe it's the 32-bit linux kernel I was running it within, maybe it's some weird interaction, either way I can't make it work.So ... thanks to my Promox cloud being basically fantastic, I simply created a new KVM for a copy of #FreeNAS 8. ...
Sunday 12th August 2012: 4.51pm. While waiting around for the ZFS replication to finish, thought I should upgrade Megan's #galaxys #i9000 phone to +CyanogenMod 9 stable now it's out. While vastly better than the android 2.3 samsung touchwiz hack of before, it does chug rather, especially when switching or opening applications where many second pauses are common. Some of that is ice cream sandwich with its lack of fluidity, much is the lack of RAM, and some is simply that it's a two year old phone. ...
Sunday 12th August 2012: 5.07pm. Here's the first proof of the book's cover - yes, we know it contains a number of typos :). Looking good for launch in Q3 2012. ...
Monday 13th August 2012: 11.55am. So, woke up this morning and my "rsync -avc --delete" (synchronise two filing systems exactly, checking each file by bitwise checksum) from the old NTFS external USB drive to new ZFS pool had completed. I had run that after copying over all files to make absolutely, 100% sure that a bit-for-bit copy had successfully worked - and I knew it worked because I had done a ZFS snapshot before the rsync, and it told me not a byte nor a bit had been changed during the checksum comparison. ...
Monday 13th August 2012: 4.50pm. Fairly nervewracking deliberately hosing your external USB drive containing all your stuff, but it's done now:[root@freenas]/mnt/IcyBoxZ# zpool status -v pool: IcyBoxZ state: ONLINEstatus: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.action: Wait for the resilver to complete. scan: resilver in progress since Mon Aug 13 17:07:21 2012 170G scanned out of 1.70T at 69. ...
Tuesday 14th August 2012: 3.35pm. My new mirrored ZFS pool has finished synchronising, so I thought I'd try a quick performance test as supposedly ZFS knows it can pluck every second block from each mirror and therefore double read performance, and I was keen to see ~240Mb/sec reads. Here's what I got instead:[root@freenas]/mnt/IcyBoxZ# dd if=Windows\ Easy\ Transfer\ -\ Items\ from\ old\ computer.MIG of=/dev/null bs=1M65669+1 records in65669+1 records out68859136109 bytes transferred in 893. ...
Wednesday 15th August 2012: 10.45am. Woke up this morning to drop Megan into work and my phone didn't have an IP. Hmm, I thought. Turns out the cloud node had hanged itself which is the first time that ever happened. Moreover, it appeared to refuse to boot. I worried to myself that the end was nigh and all that work of all these months was gone ...Thankfully after returning from dropping Megan in on an extremely rainy morning, it does indeed boot - it just takes about five minutes to do so due to repeated network timeouts which I didn't know about as I never reboot (it access the net through a VM inside itself, but repeatedly times out before starting that VM). ...
Wednesday 15th August 2012: 5.36pm. Interestingly the #Samsung 830 #ssd in my cloud node hit a write cycle count of 50 today, and with its 25ns flash that's 1% down 99% to go. The 830 gives a fair few stats actually, so the SSD has been powered on for 2500 hours and has written 2.679Tb which makes an average of about 1.1Gb/hour or 26.26Gb/day. The only concern I've ever had with this SSD is a UDMA CRC error count of 23925, but when I replaced the SATA cable it seems to have stopped increasing so it's all good. ...
Wednesday 15th August 2012: 10.59pm. Courtesy of my shiny new 256Gb #Samsung 830 #ssd replacing that #POS #Sandforce SSD 60Gb boot drive which died, I have the space to install Linux alongside Windows for the first time in some years. I've always been a #KDE man personally, I find it's close enough to Windows I don't have to think too hard, so I fired on a copy of #Kubuntu 12. ...
Thursday 16th August 2012: 1.00am. So, here's what a #Sandforce 1200 #SSD on SATA II looks like against a #Samsung 830 SSD also on SATA II (same PC, an old 2.67Ghz Core 2 Quad with dual channel PC2-6400 RAM). The 830 clearly slams hard into the 3Gbps max speed of SATA II - seeing as it can max out SATA III this is no surprise. The #SF-1200 has broken TRIM support so at that time of testing I hadn't figured out how to hack the registry to work around it, so write speed was a pathetic ~60Mb/sec, but it could get itself up to 120Mb/sec or so with TRIM working. ...
Monday 20th August 2012: 11.30am. Just about to leave cork for my London goodbye trip. Looking forward to seeing the London posse during the coming week!
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Tuesday 21st August 2012: 11.24am. About to leave for lunch with a friend in the houses of parliament, followed by a personal tour of the Chambers later in the day. I think I might take in a revolution of that London eye actually, worth doing once I'd have thought.
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Friday 24th August 2012: 9.28am. Location: London. Link shared: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/9338718/Yes-Prime-Minister-returns-to-the-West-End.html Going to go see this for my last night in London as one of my friend goodbyes didn't work out. Apparently it's been updated for 2012 and very shortly will be turned into a new tv series. My last maths coursework has gone well, should finish today.
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Saturday 25th August 2012: 7.16pm. Sitting in gatwick on way home from London goodbye trip. Was great to see all those I did, was sorry to miss the two groups I did. Thanks to David Bean for lending me a sofa to sleep on! Next week just Olga to say goodbye to in Birmingham, then on to Canada to hunt houses!
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Wednesday 29th August 2012: 9.44am. Location: Cork International Airport. Birmingham here I come! This will be my last trip alone to say goodbye to people, in just three weeks now myself and Megan will do a four country sprint in exactly seven days. We won't be able to see everybody, but between these trips and the September trip we will see about 60% of the people we had on our list. ...
Monday 3rd September 2012: 5.33am. Location: Cork International Airport. Up since 2.30am to get ready to fly to Canada to go house hunting. God I'm run down, it's been some month. Spent well over a thousand quid visiting people alone, and haven't had a decent night sleep in a many weeks. Megan had her birthday, last day of work and work goodbye party all in the last three days, so she's not much better. ...
Friday 7th September 2012: 3.33pm. Location: 43.49814987182617,-80.54002380371094. Last full day in Canada until the end of the month. Was great to meet my team at RIM at last, turns out I'll be doing a very different role than any I interviewed for which will be interesting. My thanks to Deborah with RIM relocation services who has been patiently driving us around to look at houses, open bank accounts etc. Food and drink have been better here than expected, however we have blown through €2000 this week alone which is a problem as I only have a grand (out of five grand only six weeks ago) left. ...
Friday 7th September 2012: 11.37pm. Link shared: http://www.speakout7eleven.ca/ Been playing around this past week with a pay as you go (prepaid) GSM mobile SIM called "Speakout" by 7-11 (the convenience stores) in Canada. It features a European style charging model (i.e. you don't pay when someone rings or texts you and there are no automatic monthly charges), $0.25/min flat rate call charges and all you can eat (really 2Gb monthly before they cap your speed) mobile " ...
Sunday 9th September 2012: 7.19am. Location: Heathrow Airport. Waiting in the special terminal one section for the Irish in Heathrow. They've actually prettied it up quite nicely. Canada was great, but tiring. Only three more weeks of effort left to go, then oddly I can sort of relax in a way in my new job. I definitely wouldn't recommend moving countries to anyone, it's a lot of work.
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Wednesday 12th September 2012: 4.10pm. Location: 51.9129753112793,-8.57480525970459. Just back after telling the government I'm emigrating to Canada. Rather sweetly they're giving me €90 to help with costs! Seeing as it's going to cost us approx €15,000 in temporary cash to make this move (repaid eventually by RIM), the €90 isn't much use. Still though, gotta say it's real decent and sweet of them, and it all helps!
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Sunday 16th September 2012: 6.21pm. Link shared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series Packing has begun! One room out of four packed, and I'll hopefully get another two rooms done tonight as they're all my stuff rather than Megan's. Late start today - I woke at 4pm which wasn't ideal thanks to rising at 6am to drop Megan to the airport, then I couldn't get back to sleep. Definitely have to crack on with packing, as I leave for the UK again early tomorrow morning, this time to say goodbye to Megan's friends. ...
Sunday 16th September 2012: 11.59pm. Ugh, I ache from the lifting, carrying and climbing up and down the ladder into the attic, plus in the attic you can't quite stand up straight since we had 2ft of insulation added so my back hurts! But that's three out of four rooms now packed, plus the attic is now clear of everything of mine except rubbish. Just clothes and the main workstation room left, and there's the least work in that room anyway because I regularly tidy it to make more space, and in so doing everything is already categorised into bags and boxes anyway, so all I need to do is to move it out of that room and into the relocation room. ...
Monday 17th September 2012: 9.13am. Location: Cork International Airport. Bit hectic getting to the airport in time this morning. Had to be in Blarney for business opening at 9am, then get to a 10.45am flight after parking the car for the week at an off site car park. Still, made it to the boarding gate for 10.15am. Lucky nothing went wrong!
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Tuesday 18th September 2012: 2.13pm. Location: Sandvik. We were up till 9am talking with Johanna, so feeling a little jagged today, though oddly not as jagged as after staying up talking with Olga till 6am a few weeks ago. Still though, as the penultimate of revisiting the old St. Andrews intensity of experience as I and we say goodbye, probably last night is well fitting and a good peak to exit upon. ...
Sunday 23rd September 2012: 8.41pm. Location: 53.448482513427734,-2.23781681060791. Last stop here in Manchester before home to cork for the very last time early tomorrow morning. After Sweden was Edinburgh, Aberfeldy, York and finally Windermere, so despite me catching extended sleep whenever I could - to the annoyance of Megan - I'm pretty tired. Not looking forward to finishing packing tomorrow! Removers collect on Wednesday, we emigrate on Friday!
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Wednesday 26th September 2012: 8.08am. Location: 51.9129638671875,-8.57455825805664. Just waiting for the removers to arrive so the fun and games can begin. Had about two hours of sleep, partially due to packing, partially due to nerves and couldn't sleep. After all any mistakes up to now come with an eight week lifetime before they can be fixed. Today, for me at least, is the 'real' emigration day - the moment of true no return. ...
Saturday 29th September 2012: 11.54pm. So that's it - we now live in Canada! Very glad it's over. Unfortunately I misjudged a Canadian kerb last night and badly sprained my ankle which has made sorting out bus passes today etc. rather unpleasant. But I can rest up tomorrow, then hobble my way through orientation on Monday at RIM. One thing I'm missing a lot here in Canada is the ability to do any form of online shopping at all - we don't have the credit history for credit cards yet, and our European cards have the wrong address on them. ...
Monday 1st October 2012: 10.28pm. First day of work at +Research In Motion done! Got allocated a corner office rather than a cubicle - quite the surprise! Should collect my new BB10 prototype and new laptop tomorrow morning - looking forward to seeing it.Feeling good about my first task - wrapping my head around QNX and the "Core Native" SDK. I might even attempt a little kernel coding task this week if my development workstation turns up :) ...
Tuesday 9th October 2012: 12.00am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Waterloo Ontario on thanksgiving today. Chilly, but gorgeously sunny. Thankfully the winter jackets arrived from Ireland on Friday! ...
Wednesday 10th October 2012: 10.58pm. So, here is my work issued +BlackBerry 10 phone running BB10 built yesterday. I had the device last week but I couldn't get it to boot, but this week it's good. I finally got it hooked up to BES today so I now have work email from outside the office (RIM is a very email centric company). Still waiting on the SIM to activate, but Wifi works well for the time being. ...
Sunday 14th October 2012: 11.14pm. The post-intercontinental relocation adrenaline flow finally broke, so I've just done two lots of 12 hours of sleep plus another two hour nap just there. Just two days now until my M208 Pure Maths exam, and I've been too tired last few days to do any revision so hopefully that's fixed now. Megan got annoyed with me though because I've spent no time with her this weekend, and she has no one to talk to. ...
Wednesday 17th October 2012: 11.12pm. Location: King St, London, Ontario. Just finished my pure maths exam! Unfortunately due to taking a lie in this morning due to being utterly exhausted yesterday, while my mind was working well it was working slowly. Ended up running badly out of time, so 75% maximum grade I'd say. Real shame, I easily could have approached 100% had I been running at normal throttle. Oh well, it's done now, nine months of study completed! ...
Sunday 21st October 2012: 10.49pm. Just back from Sunday lunch. Had the "love boat" sushi, sashimi and roll for two special plus a proper bottle of sake, as you can see by a very smiley Megan! Pricey, but very good. ...
Tuesday 23rd October 2012: 2.00pm. Location: Phillip St, Waterloo, Ontario. Some people have been asking to see the inside of my office at RIM. So here you are. Nothing to see here, move along ... ...
Wednesday 24th October 2012: 1.51pm. Started swimming after a two month hiatus this morning. Must remember it takes two weeks to not feel awful afterwards...
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Saturday 27th October 2012: 2.50pm. My first entry from our new life in Canada! Looking back over the past three months, it is striking how both expensive and stressful moving continents is, requiring about €15,000 in temporary bridging money and a good €5000 in non-retrievable costs, and that was with RIM paying directly for about half the total cost and them reimbursing us about €3,000 of expenses. Now, admittedly, we didn't need all of that €15,000 at all - perhaps about €10,000, but I deliberately added on 50% before I began to cover any unexpected surprises. ...
Sunday 28th October 2012: 5.27pm. Location: Regina St N, Waterloo, Ontario. Had a bottle of the very local vino last night, literally comes from just down the road. Wasn't expecting much - after all, never heard of Canadian wine before and American stuff isn't great, but we were very pleasantly surprised. You could have mistaken it for southern French near the spanish border. Cost about $20. ...
Monday 29th October 2012: 11.39am. Never had thought much of this very expensive coffee before, but this morning must have got something right by accident. My God, it's like angels dancing on my tongue.... As good as any coffee I ever had in Spain, really superb. Yet yesterday this was a sour, bitter, not great coffee. I guess I'll keep experimenting during the week! ...
Friday 2nd November 2012: 11.40am. Struggled to repeat that jamaican blue mountain wonder on Monday. Must have gotten something wrong since. Until today - once again, this is the perfect cup of coffee, like on Monday. Just wow, my God it's good. Wish I could nail it every morning!
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Wednesday 7th November 2012: 2.48pm. RIM says no to any form of me discussing them on any forum including nedprod on viable terms unfortunately. Shame, I had ten thousand words in flight, some great, deep thought stuff too. P.S. Starbucks sell lousy coffee. Drinking an Americano right now which is slaughterIng my taste buds compared to the jamaican nectar I drank this morning. Today is going to be trying. ...
Saturday 10th November 2012: 12.22am. Link shared: http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/best-economics-read-of-2012 A very positive review of this book, calling it the best economics read of 2012: http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/best-economics-read-of-2012
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Monday 12th November 2012: 11.45pm. Another positive review of the book, this time by the Cambridge Business Review (Nov/Dec 2012 edition):"Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards by Norbert Haring and Niall Douglas (Anthem Press, £16.99) nails one central fact with impeccable and uncompromising clarity: the concentration of power in the hands of a very few has ensured that the rewards at the top of the finance and business pyramids are increasingly disproportionate in relation to the economic contribution they make. ...
Tuesday 13th November 2012: 5.19pm. Just picked up the android 4.2 update. Somehow it's even smoother than 4.1. They've also turned up the contrast for text. Many new changes to the camera. And of course the biggest new feature for everyone is that the default android keyboard now does swype and moreover does it very well indeed. Bye bye slide it!
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Wednesday 14th November 2012: 9.34pm. Link shared: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Stephan-T-Lavavej-Core-C-/STLCCSeries6 Visual Studio finally adds variadic templates, so very very long overdue. The addition of delegating constructors are pretty useful too, but anyone using MSVC for any form of post-1990s C++ has definitely felt the pain of not having variadic templates. Well done +Microsoft Visual Studio! And thank you.#visualstudio #visualstudio2012 ...
Friday 16th November 2012: 1.58pm. Ended up hosing Megan's phone last night during a +CyanogenMod 10 upgrade, so had to restore from backups. Which meant late to bed, which meant me missing the alarm this morning and therefore missing swimming. Annoying. That Kona coffee isn't a patch on the Jamaican stuff either :(
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Sunday 2nd December 2012: 11.02pm. Achieved the moving of home which wasn't fun due to illness. Currently nursing a splitting headache. Ought to go to bed, yet need to do email which has been untouched these past seven days. Also, nedprod.com is under DDoS attack, got to do something about that too. Really would prefer to curl up somewhere and do nothing.Below is Google Android 4.2's best effort at stitching together a 3D spatial panoramic (it's one of the new features in 4. ...
Tuesday 4th December 2012: 6.23pm. Waiting for the bus to go to the office for the first time in a week. Not exactly healthy yet, but can't work from home forever (though I am making good progress wrestling with the vagaries of Boost Spirit's fairly abtuse metaprogrammed recursive descent parser). Wish the headache would go away though.
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Monday 10th December 2012: 5.37am. Link shared: http://www.google.com Something very odd this past week since we moved into our new flat has been the appalling internet performance with our Rogers High Speed Cable Internet. Instead of the 36Mbit we're supposed to be getting, we were seeing about 2.5Mbit. Why? Well, a traceroute showed this:C:\Documents and Settings\ned>tracert www.google.comTracing route to www.google.com [173.194.38.145] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 2 ms 3 ms 3 ms pfsense. ...
Wednesday 12th December 2012: 3.18pm. It is a gorgeous sunny morning here in Waterloo, and I didn't get out of bed early enough to make it to the gym, so walked to work from our new flat for the first time today which takes about 25 mins. And wow, it's amazing how much shite is still in my lungs after that illness from two weeks ago, I must have coughed up at least half a lungful of gunk. ...
Saturday 15th December 2012: 9.58pm. After some argumentation with Megan last weekend regarding placement and space allowed, I've been (very slowly) setting up a work/game space in the TV room. Basically we pushed the landlord's sofa forwards and put the landlord's kitchen table behind it - this gets to be "my space" out of the entire flat. And two days ago I got my workstation put in, albeit that it deeply dislikes the ethernet cable I'm using and keeps flaking out (I therefore ordered a new 25ft CAT6 cable). ...
Wednesday 19th December 2012: 3.52pm. Finished my internal prototype last night after a month of hard work! 11,821 lines written, 6638 of which were C++11 (I used that exclusively, it was an eye opening experience) and a good third of it was template metaprogramming, a personal best so far. Looking forward to several weeks of rest!
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Monday 24th December 2012: 10.48pm. After an eight hour, 840km drive from Waterloo, Ontario to Lebanon, Indiana, we've reached Megan's parents for the holiday season. My first Christmas ever not with my family!!! On the way back we'll take a few days in Detroit as a low key holiday, then it's back to work for the BB10 launch end of January.The service which copies this Google Plus feed into Facebook, LinkedIn etc. ...
Thursday 27th December 2012: 8.12pm. Blizzard in Indiana has cleared and we now have sunshine! Heading to Detroit for a mini-holiday in two days, so we are relieved. ...
Sunday 30th December 2012: 3.29am. Location: Downtown, Detroit, Michigan. Turns out that blizzard came back just in time for our drive to Detroit! Made it safely thankfully. Just watched the local news. Only one shooting and murder, a rape and kidnap of a woman clearing snow, a missing person in a love triangle presumed dead, and two appeals from families recently bereaved by a hit and run and another random murder. ...
Sunday 30th December 2012: 9.05pm. Location: MotorCity Casino. Had a very, very late lie in given it's now 4pm. We really needed the sleep though, and that fourteen hours already has me feeling much improved. As we've missed pretty much everything day time in Detroit, probably will head straight to MotorCity casino hotel where we'll be for the night. Then the zoo tomorrow, and home to Canada.
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Monday 31st December 2012: 4.38pm. Location: Downtown, Detroit, Michigan. Ended up in a bar called Flames last night after the meal (which was in a restaurant called Iridescence, located next to a club called Amnesia on the top floor of the casino. Yeah you couldn't make up these names ... The design and decor really reminded me of the clubs in the Mass Effect games too ...). So feeling a little delicate this morning! ...
Wednesday 2nd January 2013: 1.44pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Just moved from a 6am to 3am holidays sleep cycle to wake for work this morning. Not feeling good one bit. Also have a humongous to do list for the new year. Welcome to 2013!
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Thursday 3rd January 2013: 3.06pm. Location: RIM 1. Was so dozy this morning I missed my bus stop and reached Laurier university before I realised! One health inducing walk through up to a few feet of snow later and I'm at work. Strange I'm so groggy - I easily had nine hours of very restful sleep last night. Could do with another three hours though.
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Friday 4th January 2013: 4.22pm. Link shared: http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ Just been using Windows 8 for the first time this morning, as I upgraded a few days ago before the Jan 31st cheap $40 upgrade offer expires. Jesus Windows 8 is not good, I mean, what the hell were Microsoft thinking? Firstly it's ugly as sin, second they've hidden Shutdown in a very awkward to reach place, thirdly the "modern" and the " ...
Monday 7th January 2013: 12.26am. Due to accidentally spending $5000 over the holiday period which was a bit more than intended, I thought it wise to scale back my new workstation intentions, so I pulled an old H67 chipset LGA1155 Sandy Bridge motherboard which was our former mediacentre back in Ireland and paired it with a new i7-3770K, and you can see the difference in synthetic benchmarks below. I also threw in, for good measure, results from the Celeron G530 which had been in there - this is the same CPU as is in my cloud node at home (total system power draw, including four hard drives, is just 28W). ...
Wednesday 9th January 2013: 2.57pm. So tired ... Was up to 12 last night trying to diagnose substantial incoming packet loss on our internet. We're losing about 3% of packets, enough to drop a 40mbit connection down to less than 1mbit. And with the new cable modem I actually don't think it's Rogers' fault, something is wrong in my cloud. Bah! I want to fix it rather than go to work . ...
Friday 11th January 2013: 5.46am. Been up to 12-12.30am after work every night this week trying to figure out this packet loss problem, despite that every utility I ran didn't show any unexpected packet loss, and it was really, really bugging me. Just nailed it ... it was the laptop-mode daemon putting the internet NIC into power saving and not waking it despite substantial traffic. Some system update must have changed the behaviour or broken a bridged traffic detection routine . ...
Saturday 12th January 2013: 7.06pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Just slept for exactly 12 hours last night. Needed it. It's my Irish company AGM this week, so lots of accounts and forms to be completed for submission to the Irish government this weekend. Anti-yay. Only good thing is it'll be the last time it's work to do, I'll put the company dormant after this last lot of corporate tax is paid as I won't be trading from now on, so from now it'll be easy each year. ...
Tuesday 15th January 2013: 11.22pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Got a new acquisition from eBay today, a stock clearance GBC ShredMaster GSM128 which is GBC's baby shredder for about a third the retail price. Normally I wouldn't bother posting about an acquisition, but this one had me lug it from the UPS store albeit by bus, but even still my coworkers thought it dead funny as I came huffing and puffing carrying the thing which is very not light. ...
Sunday 20th January 2013: 1.19am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Is that really a CD in its paper packet jammed between the graphics card and the cooler? Yes it is! The metal fan clips stick out which would short the graphics card. And I have no second slot. So what can you do eh? Kinda worried it'll melt though ... ...
Monday 21st January 2013: 2.53am. My laptop just got infected by a webpage via a Java exploit which loaded a load of viruses onto it while I was looking at golfers' opinions on sunglasses! I only noticed because the hard drive went nuts during page load, and I thought "hmm that's odd, even for Java". So I fired up task explorer and lo and behold, there were running processes downloading and writing files with random hexadecimal names all over the hidden parts of Windows. ...
Wednesday 23rd January 2013: 2.38pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Speaking of brrr, something that I never realised about snow at minus 15C or so is how like sandpaper it is. When you're walking to work and it's windy, your face actually gets exfoliated. Which is painful at the time. I'm told if it gets even colder, it actually gets better because the snow no longer melts when it hits your skin, so it bounces off instead of freezing your face off. ...
Saturday 26th January 2013: 1.26am. Link shared: http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/mainboard/50713-msi-z77a-g45-thunderbolt/ Might have found the Ivy Bridge Z77 chipset motherboard I will buy one day post-Haswell when prices drop: the Z77A-G45 Thunderbolt. As it has to be good for six to seven years, I mostly have been looking for durability: top quality components, nearly the lowest idle power consumption of any Z77 motherboard, nearly the best signal to noise ratio for its audio, and of course it has Thunderbolt which surely is the next-gen USB of the future. ...
Wednesday 30th January 2013: 5.06am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Well we finally launch BB10 tomorrow morning. Even if I've only been with RIM for four months, I am feeling pretty exhausted from all the work planning and prototyping and writing internally on what comes straight next from now. I only wish I could share! Still, it'll be quite a day tomorrow I think. RIM saved itself from a software complexity failure, something only 20% of tech companies ever do, and so many mobile platforms recently failed to do: Nokia Meego, WinMobile, perhaps even Sun Microsystems as they were hollowed out by Android. ...
Sunday 3rd February 2013: 7.13pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Did my first ever migration of a large cloud VM yesterday. I had a VM on the house cloud node which was eating 30gb of data a week, and I got billed $40 last month for exceeding our Rogers cap. So it had to go. Took much of the day to replicate out, and just before bed last night I went to activate it. ...
Sunday 3rd February 2013: 10.51pm. Ugh, you forget just how incredibly slow magnetic storage is when trying to upgrade a server still using it. Where you're normally used to upgrade logs just flying past you thanks to having Samsung 830 SSDs everywhere in my house, with the magnetic storage on my public cloud node you actually have to sit around and wait :( Anyway, hacked a solution to my iptables problems by sticking a copy of haproxy in there to do port forwarding for me - yeah, I know, way overkill, but I have the free RAM on the house node. ...
Sunday 3rd February 2013: 11.23pm. As I continue to wait around for magnetic storage, I'm looking forward to the Plone 4.2 series (the 4.3 series is about to be released, which is why I'm now upgrading to the 4.2 series :) ). Plone 4.1 was based on venerable old Python 2.6, and while its RAM consumption was much improved over the Python 2.3 days, it still weighs in at a good 330Mb or so. ...
Monday 4th February 2013: 3.19am. I've just set the upgrade to the Plone VM to Plone 4.2.4 replicating across the cloud, so that's that done. Another item off the post-immigration todo list. Now I can sleep, thank god. Some interesting things learned: when fed a 7Gb store file, the varnish reverse proxy will map all 7Gb into RAM even if it only uses the 100Mb you told it. I assume on a 64 bit machine who cares, but it certainly pumps up the virtual address space usage. ...
Saturday 9th February 2013: 11.59pm. Thought I'd share some interesting data ... this graph shows how compressible a dump of physical RAM from a series of virtual machines containing various operating systems is. This might give some idea as to how efficiently physical RAM is used by those operating systems on the basis that the less compressible their dump is, the more information they are packing into physical RAM, and therefore the less wasteful of physical RAM they are being. ...
Sunday 10th February 2013: 11.47pm. Sigh ... since I relocated one of my big heavy VMs from the house cloud node to the French cloud node last weekend, I've been seeing some terrible disc i/o problems within the VMs. Witness this:root@plone1:~#./pveperfCPU BOGOMIPS: 3990.19REGEX/SECOND: 531012HD SIZE: 4.00 GB (/dev/simfs)FSYNCS/SECOND: 40.93DNS EXT: 40.92 msDNS INT: 31.92 ms (nedland)Yeah that's just forty fsyncs/sec when the disc is easily capable of doing 1000 fsyncs/sec - the entire node is seeing a constant 60-80% i/o delay. ...
Thursday 14th February 2013: 5.29am. Just waiting around for an automated solver I wrote to solve BB10 system memory usage to finish. It basically throws statistical pattern matching at the problem of discovering what uses what resources, and it is not quick (not helped by me writing it in Python). Annoyingly, my work laptop has been crunching it for nearly twelve hours now and during that time BlackBerry pushed critical updates at it, and now it wants to reboot and keeps counting down to auto reboot which would lose me the results of all those hours of data crunching. ...
Saturday 16th February 2013: 10.57pm. Finally got round to calculating my living costs since arriving here ... until now I had no idea how much we were spending, only that it wasn't more than what was coming in. Anyway, in the four months leading up till the end of January 2013, we spent ... $16,089. Or more than what Megan earns in her new job in a year. Ouch! ...
Monday 18th February 2013: 6.00pm. This is the first weekend where after fixing the lack of copy & paste in my BEurtle program which has been a problem since July, my todo list has finally became empty for now. The next big ticket item is going to be buying and insuring a car, currently scheduled for April/May as we won't have the cash until then, and we're going to have to pay in cash because no one will lend to us given our lack of credit history in Canada. ...
Friday 1st March 2013: 5.32am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Started an experimental "test the waters" programming project after work hours this week. I'm beginning to feel those extra hours ... Bleh ... And hoping to invest at least six hours this weekend into it too. What's the project? I'm curious if an idea I had for the world's stupidest database is feasible. What I have in mind is so stupid it doesn't even know what data it stores and therefore can't index anything. ...
Saturday 2nd March 2013: 9.43pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Today is do my Canadian tax return day. The tax rebate from it will hopefully buy us our first Canadian car. Auto insurance here is crazy, min $2000 a year and everybody sues everybody for car anything all the time. Pedestrian casualties are very common here, not helped by the cross now sign not requiring motorists to stop I.e. they can and do plough on. ...
Sunday 3rd March 2013: 7.39pm. So, after spending yesterday filling in the dozen page Canadian tax return and scratching my head a few times (there are LOTS of calculations and sub-worksheets and even sub-sub-worksheets, it's clearly been designed by accountants rather than anyone thinking in terms of human convenience), and perhaps even wishing I had the straightforward British form or especially the uber simple Irish tax return instead, I suddenly realised why the sums weren't adding up: the T4 end of year statement RIM sent me is incorrect! ...
Wednesday 6th March 2013: 5.15am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. My little blue sky project is slowly ticking along, albeit slowly given the lack of hours available. Nearly got my SIMD optimised parallelized batch hashing and random 256 bit integer generation implementation done and unit tested. Next will be a batch asynchronous file i/o implementation, which I expect will take me at least two weeks. Then comes the acyclic directed graph implementation. ...
Monday 11th March 2013: 12.34am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Just got stung $90 for internet over usage by Rogers ... We were on 120gb for the month on Friday with 30gb left. Then I ran a script Friday night which had a bug where if it ran out of disc space instead of halting it simply looped. It ate 80gb by the following morning :( and $90 of my money. I have to say, I'm looking forward to being able to leave Rogers. ...
Monday 11th March 2013: 12.41pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Was wide awake until after 6am last night. Just couldn't sleep. No idea why, but today at work isn't going to be productive nor fun. Maybe it was the clocks changing?
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Friday 15th March 2013: 12.52am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. It's very rare I'd recommend clothing, but I have to say these slush proof boots found by Megan in Mark's Work Warehouse are superb for the Canadian weather. The bottom inch is a welly you see, the top is leather so they look okay in the office but don't suffer salt damage. I've tramped around Waterloo for the last few weeks and they cope easily with up to two foot snow and puddles and heavy rain. ...
Friday 22nd March 2013: 12.47am. Pulled the trigger on this ugly as sin car yesterday, but the price and feature set was right, costing me $10k including insurance for Megan (I'm not allowed drive in Canada yet, we're waiting on an Ireland-Canada treaty for licence exchange). It's a 2005 Honda Accord with fancy LX trim, 2.4L VTEC 160bhp engine, with 131k on the clock and would have cost about $23k when new. ...
Saturday 23rd March 2013: 5.27pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. This Saturday is the first in many Saturdays I don't have to be somewhere or do something apart from the usual weekend chores of laundry, recycling, coursework etc. I also have minus 25 dollars in the bank after buying that car. I think I'm going to do the least possible this weekend for once. I've earned it!
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Thursday 28th March 2013: 2.36pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Link shared: http://tedxwaterloo.com Went to TEDx Waterloo last night after work. Very well executed, though the talks were a bit lightweight for me personally. So very tired today though, I really can't cope with doing anything after work sadly :(
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Friday 29th March 2013: 6.55pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Another weekend of rest for Niall I think. Work leaves you fairly dead inside, the kind of tired which makes you a zombie if you try socialising. If there ever were a profession which could do with shorter work days for its own good, this is one: it doesn't help your productivity, especially in Email centric BlackBerry, if you're too mentally tired to communicate effectively. ...
Saturday 30th March 2013: 11.04pm. Link shared: http://www.geekbuying.com/item/Tronsmart-T428-Quad-Core-Mini-PC-Android-4-2-Rockchip-RK3188-2G-DDR3-Wifi-Bluetooth-TV-BOX-314524.html I have this ... gut feeling shall we say ... that the test devices at work have something odd about them ... some sort of non-linear timing or harmonic about them or something. My problem is I don't have anything to compare them directly against i.e. the same hardware, more or less, but running Linux instead of BB10. So I figured, what the hell, I'll buy a cheap chinese Linux-on-a-USB-stick: a not-that-cheap Tronsmart T428 at $100 with a RK3188 chipset from the famous ultra-cheap Rockchip vendor. ...
Tuesday 2nd April 2013: 1.11am. Link shared: http://www.openssl.org/~appro/Snapdragon-S4.html Figured out the non-linear weird timing problem at work ... turns out to be that Qualcomm Snapdragon Krait, the ARM CPU in the Z10 and most high end smartphones from 2012/2013, has weird non-linear latencies on arithmetic instructions. The OpenSSL guys found the same (see http://www.openssl.org/~appro/Snapdragon-S4.html) where the sustained ILP throughput is great and hence the chip's dominance of mobile phones, but if and only if you don't chain register dependencies in sequential instructions because the Krait has up to a two cycle non-deterministic instruction latency (OpenSSL found a 1. ...
Saturday 6th April 2013: 5.44am. Picked up a cheap Cortex-A15 laptop for $250, the Samsung ARM Chromebook. It's surprisingly non-crap for the price: my Dad would love it actually as it's very much trouble free, has no moving parts and it barely registers on the watt meter. It is however very plasticky, not hugely well held together, the screen is barely visible if not looked at straight on, and I detest the keyboard, though much of that is those stupid chiclet keys. ...
Saturday 6th April 2013: 11.56pm. Following on from last night's post, I fired that Sandisk microSDHC Extreme Pro into the SDCard slot of my Atom netbook for comparison. Got 19Mb/sec sustained read/write. That suggests that it's the SD card physical interface itself which is the bottleneck. Interesting then that a BB10 device at work gets 40Mb/sec read speeds with this card, I must remember to look into what SD hardware spec it supports. ...
Sunday 7th April 2013: 7.23am. It occurred to me that for my workstation an upgrade of its Renesas USB 3.0 controller's firmware might help: it now has firmware 3034 and driver v2.1.39. And look at the difference it makes: 86Mb/sec reads and 63Mb/sec writes for that Sandisk Extreme Pro microSDHC. Write speeds are still a good bit below what they should be, but I ain't complaining.For comparison I threw in a Sandisk Ultra UHS-I microSDHC, and it gets 43Mb/sec reads and 9Mb/sec writes. ...
Sunday 7th April 2013: 8.34pm. Link shared: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton Getting KDE and Ubuntu onto this cheap Chromebook turned out to be surprisingly trivial: Google semi-officially provides a script called "crouton" (https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton) which installs a chrooted Ubuntu of your choice which runs side by side with Chrome OS, so you can flip between your Chrome UI and KDE with a single keypress. KDE, despite running off a SD card and having software-only OpenGL (a fault of the ARM xorg video driver, it can't currently cope with nested GL screens), is snappy enough, though it definitely lags whenever you open or close an application or do anything disc bound. ...
Monday 8th April 2013: 8.06pm. Link shared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-precision_floating-point_format Just spent several hours trying to figure out how to write a floating point double truncation routine which can't use a C library, not even anything from <math.h>. I can't use compiler intrinsics either (don't ask!). I also can't cast to a 64-bit integer, as the double is highly likely to overflow a 64-bit integer and would therefore cause a floating point exception. ...
Saturday 13th April 2013: 12.20am. As part of my blue sky non work side project, I've had to write a large scale batch asynchronous file i/o engine, which I've based on Boost.ASIO. Some quick benchmarks:For 1000 file open, write one byte, fsync + close, then delete:Windows Overlapped IOCP backend on Windows 7 x64, 2.4Ghz Sandy Bridge on 256Gb Samsung 840 Pro SSD:It took 0.010001 secs to dispatch all operationsIt took 0. ...
Saturday 13th April 2013: 4.55am. Turns out Linux sucks:POSIX compat backend on Linux 3.2 x64, 3.5Ghz Ivy Bridge on 256Gb Samsung 830 SSD:It took 0.004284 secs to dispatch all operationsIt took 7.51752 secs to finish all operationsIt took 6.38049 secs to do 156.728 file opens per sec It took 6.3762 secs to synchronise file opensIt took 1.1153 secs to do 896.619 file writes per secIt took 0.023602 secs to do 42369. ...
Saturday 13th April 2013: 5.15am. Whoops, Windows wasn't fsyncing before file close! Now for 1000 file open, write one byte, fsync + close, then delete:Windows Overlapped IOCP backend on Windows 7 x64, 3.5Ghz Ivy Bridge on 256Gb Samsung 830 SSD:It took 0.0060016 secs to dispatch all operationsIt took 10.5304 secs to finish all operationsIt took 0.0946942 secs to do 10560.3 file opens per sec It took 0.0886926 secs to synchronise file opensIt took 0. ...
Sunday 14th April 2013: 6.49pm. Finished Mass Effect 3's final DLC, Citadel, last night, and with that the entire game trilogy. Now that was much more like all of the disappointing Mass Effect 3 should have been - beautiful environments, huge attention to detail, plenty of detailed conversation with your crewmates, lots of stuff to interact with in your environment, actual humour ... in order words, the Citadel DLC looked and felt like Mass Effect 2, not the hacky half arsed rush job that was Mass Effect 3. ...
Monday 15th April 2013: 6.36pm. Link shared: https://plus.google.com/109885711759115445224/posts/Ltn4JzAS9LX Finally got my mSATA USB 3.0 enclosure which I had to order from the US. With a Crucial M4 mSATA SSD inserted, my Samsung ARM Chromebook gets:iozone -e -I -a -s 1000M -r 4k -r 512k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 random random bkwd record stride KB reclen write rewrite read reread read write read rewrite read fwrite frewrite fread freread 1024000 4 10509 11524 11235 11548 9039 11808 1024000 512 38881 39764 40345 40290 39491 38930 In other words, about 10Mb/sec for 4k reads and writes with no real difference if they're random. ...
Friday 19th April 2013: 3.31pm. Link shared: http://meetingcpp.com/index.php/br/items/the-bristol-papers-the-state-of-c.html Looks like std::filesystem ain't going to make it into C++14 after all. It's a shame, as I've been using it extensively recently and it's actually pretty good (i.e. v3 is non-obtrusive, unlike v2, and I especially like its auto-conversion to 16-bit unicode for Windows APIs). I am pleased about polymorphic lambdas though, I run into the lack of those regularly. I think it's right to leave off Concepts-lite, as much as it's a pain without them it would be more of a pain with them if they are flawed. ...
Monday 22nd April 2013: 3.16am. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/NiallsCPP11Utilities/blob/master/hashes/sha256/sha256-neon.c Finally got round to implementing an ARM NEON 4-SHA256 implementation which you can see at https://github.com/ned14/NiallsCPP11Utilities/blob/master/hashes/sha256/sha256-neon.c. Results are disappointing: even with GCC 4.8, I'm only seeing a 33% improvement over straight SHA256 on ARM NEON as against a ~60% improvement on 32-bit SSE2 on Intel Ivy Bridge. Much of that is GCC being crap: it riddles what ought to be pure NEON with lots of ARM scalar code which guarantees multiple NEON<=>ARM unit pipeline syncs, and it spills to the stack excessively. ...
Tuesday 23rd April 2013: 1.07pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Been unable to sleep since a sneezing fit around 4am this morning which will suck for the rest of today. Also still recovering from a weekend of migraines, nausea and diarrhea spent mostly on the toilet, this time might have been a bug as Megan had a touch of it too. Might need to cut back on the workload for a while maybe . ...
Wednesday 24th April 2013: 11.20pm. Link shared: https://plus.google.com/109885711759115445224/posts/8WLubGBm1ma Finally got clang bleeding edge (3.3 trunk) running on ARM hf (it took quite a few runs of trial and error with the build config). I had hoped that my carefully written 4-SHA256 NEON implementation would be super-optimised by clang 3.3's hopefully much superior NEON intrinsic implementation but ...Niall's nasty 256 bit hash does 8.86986 cycles/byteReference SHA-256 hash does 35.9639 cycles/byteBatch SHA-256 hash does 18. ...
Thursday 25th April 2013: 12.57am. Link shared: http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/10-cool-office-spaces/ LOL I'm in BlackBerry 1, the original building, and it's a grey concrete nuclear bunker filled with little but shades of grey and beige under florescent lighting on electrostatic inducing nylon carpet so everyone electrocutes themselves and one another. Furniture is exclusively plastic covered chipboard rather than mock New York sub ways, though the chairs are very comfy in fairness. I kinda wish we had a slide in the foyer though, I think I'd take it every day if we did . ...
Monday 29th April 2013: 1.10am. Twenty-four Google Summer of Code applications to Boost and rising. About half of them are serious applications, each with detailed and lengthy technical information needing a thoughtful consideration before scoring. Surprising the lack of Western names, I guess Western students don't think GSoC worth the time anymore? It's certainly a lot of work for what I suppose isn't considered much money (US$5000) in Western countries - we'd pay our interns in BlackBerry a lot more than that, and I don't think we'd work them quite as hard. ...
Friday 3rd May 2013: 5.05am. It's 1.02am and I just nailed a memory corruption bug in my async file i/o library which I've submitted to Google Summer of Code 2013 as a proposed new Boost library (turns out you must be careful of overriding Boost macro defaults). Was up till 1.24am last night getting a clean compile on GCC 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 and clang 3.2 on ARM. Student coding test example solution is finished and working. ...
Thursday 9th May 2013: 5.15am. Just finished our two day research retreat on "Alternatives to Growth" held by the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation attached to UW. Lots of valuable information and thoughts. Pretty drained and mentally tired though, kinda could do with the next two days of work off, but that can't happen. Saturday I fly to Aspen, Colorado for the C++ Now 2013 conference which lasts all of next week. ...
Sunday 12th May 2013: 5.06pm. Link shared: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Aspen+Meadows+Resort,+Meadows+Road,+Aspen,+CO&hl=en&sll=39.185034,-106.821957&sspn=0.062403,0.110378&oq=aspen+meadow&hq=Aspen+Meadows+Resort,+Meadows+Road,+Aspen,+CO&t=m&z=14&source=gplus-ogsb Currently in Aspen Meadows, Colorado for the C++ Now 2013 conference. Never been into the Rockie Mountains before, always was either on one side or the other looking up at them rather than being surrounded by them. Scenic place this, albeit highly manufactured. Pricey too - before joining BlackBerry I wouldn't have been able to justify the expense, but now after ten days of exhaustion with Boost GSoC, the UW research retreat on alternatives to growth, plus of course a full BlackBerry workload, well yeah I'm taking today off. ...
Friday 17th May 2013: 5.50am. Location: Aspen Meadows Resort. For me C++ Now 2013 is over as I fly onto Megan's school reunion in Culver early tomorrow morning. What a conference! Am extremely drained though. Could have done with an extra day of doing nothing after really to recover.#c++now #c++ #boost #boostcon
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Thursday 23rd May 2013: 10.27pm. I seem to have crashed with a dose of man flu from the busyness of the past two weeks. I guess it figures: I get home from the US late Monday night, spend Tuesday catching up on laundry etc as well as work and getting insufficient sleep, and Wed afternoon at work my nose starts dripping, throat gets sore and I find I'm out of steam :( Thursday (today) I work from home with a bad head cold. ...
Saturday 25th May 2013: 1.39am. It's time for my annual Magnetic vs Flash Storage Capacity per Inflation-Adjusted Dollar update including 2013 figures. I've updated the 2012 and 2013 flash figures to include Samsung SSDs where before it was exclusively Intel-only as Intel seem to have stopped bothering to compete in the consumer segment. You'll note that 2013's figures for hard drives are bang on historical trend - the Thai flooding effect is abating. ...
Thursday 30th May 2013: 2.59pm. Link shared: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/ub:apsys12.pdf Just read a superb paper on undefined behaviours in C and C++ and these will, quite literally, silently delete chunks of your code. Think you've written code to check inputs for validity? Watch the compiler silently eliminate those entirely :)
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Sunday 2nd June 2013: 12.02am. Link shared: https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/ I guess it's now safe to announce that I have been appointed by Google as a Google Summer of Code 2013 mentor for two Boost C++ libraries, proposed Boost.AFIO (asynchronous file i/o support for C++) and proposed Boost.Trie (a prefix tree indexed STL C++ container). Both of these GSoC projects will be of immense benefit to the C++ ecosystem for all C++ users, and stand as strong candidates for future incorporation into a future ISO C++ language standard. ...
Sunday 2nd June 2013: 9.10pm. Link shared: https://travis-ci.org/ned14/TripleGit In preparation for Paul to start work next week on his GSoC project of porting my code to Boost, I've been fixing up my code with Continuous Integration (for every change you commit a bot runs a full set of unit tests to ensure everything works) using the free-for-open source Travis CI.I have to say, I have been impressed with Travis CI: despite its clunky UI and less than great reporting, it's far more powerful than the CI we use in BlackBerry. ...
Monday 3rd June 2013: 3.23pm. Link shared: http://isocpp.org/blog/2013/05/gcc-4.8.1-released-c11-feature-complete Big week for C++ heads this: no less than two C++11 language complete compiler implementations will be released in the form of GCC 4.8.1 and clang 3.3. Now all we need is for the standard libraries and Visual Studio to catch up ... Dinkumware's STL has every C++11 feature I've reached for so far, alas libstdc++ is missing many bits of extremely vital functionality. ...
Thursday 6th June 2013: 4.10am. Link shared: https://coveralls.io/r/ned14/TripleGit It's taken quite a few nights of fiddling while the TV was on - and much to Megan's annoyance, as she felt ignored - but I finally hooked the Travis CI buildbot I mentioned before into coveralls.io, an automated code coverage reporting tool which tracks how much of your code is being exercised by your unit and functional tests. For the forthcoming Boost. ...
Friday 7th June 2013: 5.35am. Proposed GSoC Boost.Afio passes its torture test for the first time, but only on POSIX not Windows yet, almost certainly due to a bug in Boost.Asio. God I'm tired. Sleep now ...
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Sunday 9th June 2013: 10.53pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Just finished upgrading our ZFS storage pool with an extra 3Tb. It took two hours of typing commands where a single mistyped character could mean bye bye all your data, so you check and recheck everything before hitting return. I now feel rather fraught and nervy! Glad it's over for another year or two.
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Tuesday 11th June 2013: 3.02pm. It's very rare I can show and tell anything from my work at BlackBerry, but I think this will be safe enough: this is the 29,554 functions of code which make up the rendering of an email by the BB10 Cascades Email Card with arrowed lines drawn between them showing which calls which, arranged using a repulsing gravity equation such that most interconnected items cluster while less connected items push apart. ...
Thursday 13th June 2013: 4.05am. Link shared: https://github.com/BoostGSoC/boost.afio/tree/pre_boost_import My async file i/o library is done! Feature complete, valgrind clean, 90% unit test coverage. Paul now has a free run for GSoC Boost.AFIO!#boostcon #gsoc2013 #gsoc #boost #c++ ...
Friday 14th June 2013: 4.56am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. It's a bit late for a Thursday, but we spent the evening celebrating the completion and hand off to GSoC of that software library I've been writing after work every day for the past four months. Going to take a week of evenings off before returning to the Google Summer of Code grindstone. Besides, it's all on the poor student now. It'll be real tough learning curve climb next two weeks especially, so I'll need to be quick on answering the email! ...
Sunday 16th June 2013: 12.01am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Spent the last five hours packing and moving boxes from the flat into a storage locker like those from storage wars. Three car loads so far ... I ache :(
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Tuesday 18th June 2013: 5.58am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Just spent the last three hours patching PHP scripts to work around some bad input in a queue which was causing PHP in its VM to eat 1Gb of RAM, get OOMed, get restarted and rinse and repeat to the detriment of everything else on the cloud node. Anyway finally cleared the queue and it's propped up for another while. So tired though, just five hours of sleep to come. ...
Thursday 20th June 2013: 3.54pm. Link shared: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/04/23/stephen-hawkings-advice-for-twenty-first-century-grads-embrace-complexity/ Apparently Stephen Hawking agrees with me! :)
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Friday 21st June 2013: 4.37am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Dozed off when I got home by accident, it's made me late tonight including getting to bed. Big day tomorrow, it may determine my future in BlackBerry for the next year.
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Tuesday 25th June 2013: 2.23pm. We move from RIM 1 to RIM D today, so today is my last day with my office as we all get 6x6 cubicles from now on. Office: you had no natural light, but I am going to miss you.
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Thursday 27th June 2013: 4.45am. Link shared: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=htc_one I was going to shell out for one of these today as I thought they'd be a top end phone with Android delivered and maintained by Google as if they were Nexus devices, but when I did some searching around I found out they'll be OEM updated, not Google updated. Which means an update frequency like Samsung does for my Galaxy Nexus, which, despite being exactly identical code to the Google updates, takes Samsung about three months longer to get round to it for no especial reason. ...
Sunday 30th June 2013: 7.28am. Link shared: http://www.nedproductions.biz/wiki/configuring-a-proxmox-ve-2.x-cluster-running-over-an-openvpn-intranet/configuring-a-proxmox-ve-2.x-cluster-running-over-an-openvpn-intranet-part-1 First page of configuring my third cloud node to be added to my personal private cloud has been completed! This new node is a fair beast and is the most powerful node of them all: it has 16Gb of RAM and will be mostly acting as a build bot unit test slave for my Google Summer of Code work on the Boost C++ libraries to ensure everything compiles and works perfectly on FreeBSD and Windows, two platforms not covered by Travis CI which only does Linux. ...
Monday 1st July 2013: 7.49am. A long, long day today. Managed to bork the upgrade of my French cloud node resulting in a 3+ hour outage of everything including email until I finally figured out that Debian wheezy didn't like IPv6 config stuff I had added to /etc/network/interfaces that Debian squeeze was perfectly fine with. Lots of other stuff broke too during the upgrade from Proxmox 2.3 to Proxmox 3. ...
Saturday 6th July 2013: 1.13am. Got an email from my new monster dedicated Canadian server today to tell me its second hard drive had failed, and it has fallen back onto its last remaining mirror drive. This sucks, because now I have to copy ~20Gb of stuff off before I can ask tech support to replace the bad drive (in case they replace the wrong one, which can and does happen). ...
Monday 8th July 2013: 5.22am. Link shared: https://ci.nedprod.com/ Another long weekend. I got a Windows XP unit test slave mostly working on my new cloud node: I configured a copy of Jenkins CI inside an OpenVZ container with the reverse caching proxy varnish (https://www.varnish-cache.org/) fronted by the web server nginx which you can see at https://ci.nedprod.com/. As one of its backends, I have a snapshotted VM running Windows XP with Visual Studio 2010 Express which is rolled back to the snapshot after every test using some cunning AJAX I wrote which uses the Proxmox REST API. ...
Sunday 14th July 2013: 9.05pm. A long but productive week. The documentation for proposed Boost.AFIO is beginning to resemble something approaching final, despite having been a real pain to get working right. Paul continues to do great work in ripping bits out. As Google Summer of Code Milestone 1 is just three weeks away now, the race is on to deliver a peer review ready new Boost library by then. ...
Wednesday 17th July 2013: 3.57am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Off to BlackBerry Ottawa (aka QNX) at 7am tomorrow for two days, so a 5am rise for me! Unfortunately dozed off for an hour earlier after a large meal at an American styled diner, so now not feeling hugely tired. Arse.
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Sunday 21st July 2013: 2.33am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. A non GSoC weekend this one! That's because I'm creating a wooden adapter to fit the baby window air conditioner unit I bought below to the casement double sliding window shown which is in our bedroom, because the humidity more than the temperature is not aiding restful sleep. Spent over $400 on tools and materials because I don't have any yet in Canada. ...
Sunday 21st July 2013: 10.01pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Bedroom air conditioner installed! As you can see, I made a wooden adapter to fit a cheap vertical sliding window unit into a horizontally sliding casement window. The foam wrapped bottom simulates a sill lip, and I used the double window to clamp both the unit and a wooden top insert which also braces the unit. The three quarter inch plywood exactly slots into the aluminium frame, and I used a little plug top left to apply pressure to keep the top panel in place. ...
Sunday 28th July 2013: 6.52pm. Link shared: https://github.com/BoostGSoC/boost.afio Last weekend before Google Summer of Code Milestone 1! The race is definitely on, so I was up till 7am poking the unit test bot with a stick and I have a lovely live build matrix showing whether, per-commit, the proposed library compiles and passes a unit test run on these platform and toolset combinations:Static analysis: clang + oclintLinux: GCC + libstdc++ 4. ...
Friday 2nd August 2013: 10.19pm. Location: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Just arrived in Niagra on the Lake for our vacation. Lots of grapes and wineries. Shame I'm off the drink!
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Saturday 3rd August 2013: 8.12pm. Location: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Lake Ontario from Niagara on the Lake. It's weird that only a few hundred metres away you're in the US. ...
Sunday 4th August 2013: 9.11pm. Location: Elements on the Falls. OK I'm in the most touristy restaurant in Niagara, the one right next to the falls. Same place they filmed Superman 2. But wow what a view! ...
Sunday 11th August 2013: 11.22pm. Proposed Boost.AFIO is now within spitting distance of all green :) Just that pesky VS2010 support to go really, Paul's been working hard on the C preprocessor programming to emulate variadic templates.#gsoc2013 #boostcpp #cpp #cpp11https://ci.nedprod.com/ ...
Wednesday 14th August 2013: 3.59am. VS2010 now compiles proposed Boost.AFIO. It has even been known to, sometimes, pass it its unit tests ... still some work to go there, though there is sadly a showstopping segfault in the VS2010 runtime regarding null exception_ptr returns from std::current_exception(), so we may have look into patching in the greatly fixed VS2010 runtime from VS2012. My congrats to Paul for doing such great work in C preprocessor programming! ...
Monday 19th August 2013: 9.34pm. Well today I was fired from BlackBerry as part of their downsizing! I was barely there, just ten and a half months, but in my short time there I think it is safe to say I certainly made an impression - I think I even achieved the fastest internal Stackoverflow karma points rise ever, but don't quote me on that!Some of the highlights of my time there included single handedly porting clang/LLVM to QNX, something I only finished last Friday and it was wizard to watch LLVM being live JITed into ARM on device. ...
Wednesday 21st August 2013: 1.37am. Man it's surreal resume writing up your past year of life ... still, job interviews start tomorrow morning. Not bad for being 31 hours unemployed! I just hope I sleep well tonight!
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Wednesday 21st August 2013: 10.12pm. Link shared: http://www.communitech.ca/ Spent this afternoon being taken around Kitchener-Waterloo's Communitech's tech startup incubation space (http://www.communitech.ca/), and thanks to Paul Doherty for facilitating that. All very impressive, they're so much better resourced than similar spaces in Ireland! The hard question, unfortunately, is whether there can be a living for me there, and on that it's too early yet to say.#communitech #kitchener-waterloo #techstartups ...
Thursday 22nd August 2013: 7.28pm. Finally beginning to clear the rush of work after being fired, so all networks have now been prodded, a custom targeted two page resume extracting from my life has been written more than a dozen times, and I'm strangely a mix of being tired from the workload and rested because I finally slept reasonably well last night now the adrenaline and shock is wearing off. ...
Friday 23rd August 2013: 2.28pm. Waking up is becoming harder, definitely a good thing as I get more relaxed after the week's events. That constant daily headache I always had working 9 to 5 is lifting, also good. Soon I'll feel healthier than at any time in the past year. AFIO's last remaining unit tests problems are only on windows and I can only replicate them here in mingw GCC 4. ...
Saturday 24th August 2013: 5.18am. Boost.AFIO finally goes all green on the CI ... you have no idea how many dozens and dozens of hours of debugging race conditions in other people's code (and then figuring out workarounds in AFIO code) it has taken to reach this point.I am actually quite emotional. Such a huge amount of effort. So many, many bugs and weirdnesses in the older STLs and Boost. ...
Thursday 29th August 2013: 1.15am. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/FastDirectoryEnumerator So last few days I've been doing some prototyping and experimentation with how to enumerate directories far, far quicker than one usually can as part of implementing the #1 requested feature for proposed Boost.AFIO before GSoC ends, Directory Monitoring Support (http://boostafio.uservoice.com/forums/218980-boost-afio-feature-request/filters/top), and I have discovered many interesting things worth sharing.We all know the common advice to never put too many files into a single directory because " ...
Monday 2nd September 2013: 6.21pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Kinda feels like I've done nothing and achieved nothing past five days, yet every day has been long and busy, including discovering from a visit to the dentist that I need five fillings which won't be fun. Anyway it's Megan's birthday today, so taking her to get ice cream (little is open today, it's a national holiday).
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Saturday 7th September 2013: 12.14am. Assuming the CI goes all green, fast, asynchronous directory enumeration for Boost.AFIO is done! I'm feeling pretty wrecked, it's been one of those "burn the candle at both ends while you have the open window of time" sorts of things.The process of finding a new job in North America has taken a turn for the worse: the initial very positive recruitment feedback from the tech multinationals - and mention, in at least one instance, of me being the best candidate seen in some years - has been stopped in its tracks once they realised that there is currently a nine month backlog in US green card processing, and a three month backlog in Canadian Labour Market Opinion processing. ...
Monday 9th September 2013: 3.51pm. Link shared: https://ci.nedprod.com/job/Boost.AFIO%20Test%20WinXP%20VS2010/95/testReport/Boost.AFIO/libs_afio_test_tests_async_io_lstat_works/async_io_lstat_works/ Pushed directory enumeration to AFIO last night, and the CI reports my direct NT kernel implementation of lstat() doesn't work on Windows XP due to this wonderful demonstration of my excellent error handling https://ci.nedprod.com/job/Boost.AFIO%20Test%20WinXP%20VS2010/95/testReport/Boost.AFIO/libs_afio_test_tests_async_io_lstat_works/async_io_lstat_works/.As you can see in the CI's test failure report, the error report says "The specified information class is not a valid information class for the specified object" at line 788 of my lstat() implementation which corresponds to a query for FILE_FS_SECTOR_SIZE_INFORMATION which it turns out, correctly, is a Windows 7 or later only API providing support for 4Kb sector sized storage (http://msdn. ...
Monday 9th September 2013: 7.22pm. These are a pair of the famous Park Avenues by Allen Edmonds which are hand made out of Shell Cordovan horse leather, and these are the second pair I've tried. Sadly, due to my unshapely wide feet, they'll have to go back for a third try - they're too narrow for me at the ball of the foot, though I think I've got the length correct at last. ...
Thursday 12th September 2013: 6.29am. Location: Fitzpatrick Grand Central. So I am now in New York for the very first time ever for a job interview on Friday (tomorrow I interview the city to see if it's suitable for raising small children). Spent seven hours stuck in Toronto airport mostly in a plane waiting to take off (storms). Am more than tired and hungry, but I'll sleep well tonight methinks. ...
Friday 13th September 2013: 3.05am. Location: Manhattan, New York, New York. I guess most people would have a lot more pictures of New York after a day there, but I have just one which is of the Hudson river from the upper east side. Given the terrible wet weather today, I thought it looked pretty good. ...
Saturday 14th September 2013: 12.13am. Location: John F. Kennedy International Airport. So I didn't get the job in New York I was interviewing today for. I can now say it was with Bloomberg and it was the fearsome and famous John Lakos who got me in there, along with Kevin Fleming of Asterisk VoIP fame. Anyway went for drinks with John and his team after and there is definitely no hard feelings, Bloomberg were looking for someone I am not and probably never will be. ...
Monday 16th September 2013: 6.20pm. Location: Conestoga Mall. Just had four fillings and a second descale, this one a lot more vigorous than the first. The work was urgent as BlackBerry's dental insurance expires shortly. All I can say is owww ...
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Monday 16th September 2013: 8.27pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Wednesday I interview with Google, and here is my practice whiteboard as I'll be spending up to five hours in front of one of these writing programs as they try to overwhelm and break me. Bought the special thin markers recommended online to fit more code into the very limited space. Now it's just study study study to cram in what Google thinks distinguishes " ...
Thursday 19th September 2013: 3.23am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. So Google interviews went okay today. I'm not great on answering algorithms on the spot (I'm much better giving it a few hours to let my subconscious figure it out) so I guess that was a scraping pass for four out of five. The system design interview went very well though, and that's usually the one which goes terribly for candidates and gets them rejected. ...
Thursday 19th September 2013: 5.43pm. So back to the GSoC grindstone now I have a few days before more interviews. Current problem, the one which kept me up last night, is that the newly released VS2013 provides an unusual mix of variadic templates, a brittle decltype() and a std::result_of<> that isn't SFINAE friendly. The result is that code fails when trying to use AFIO's variadic template overloads because VS2013 tries instantiating std::result_of<> for template types it doesn't like, and instead of disabling the overload as an overload resolution possibility like on any other compiler, VS2013 barfs a compilation error. ...
Friday 20th September 2013: 5.45pm. Link shared: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323808204579083250005557232.html Looks like I got out of BlackBerry just in time - they're going to nearly halve the company next, and all those redundancy cheques will put a huge strain on cash flow I would imagine. As bad as losing your job is - and the inconvenience in my case of having to move continent yet again - my redundancy payment from BlackBerry was extremely generous, so much so I need not work (arguably, if it were not for the baby on the way) for three months or so and I very much doubt they can be as generous when firing nearly half the company! ...
Saturday 21st September 2013: 11.47pm. Link shared: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/20/us-blackberry-warning-idUSBRE98J0V220130920 Even worse news about BlackBerry - not only are they shedding 40% of the company, they also managed to lose $1 billion dollars last three months alone. I knew the phones weren't selling well when I was working there, but I didn't know it was a billllllllllion dollars bad ... :(
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Tuesday 24th September 2013: 1.14am. So Google Summer of Code 2013 ended today! Boost.AFIO is more or less peer review ready - some additional unit tests to be added mainly to get the code coverage back up, otherwise it's done. Paul will still need some time to finish his directory monitoring feature, but that is fairly orthogonal to the existing code base and its lack of presence doesn't disturb anything. ...
Thursday 26th September 2013: 6.18am. Just had a very stressful and long day! Last night I upgraded my cloud's software and expanded the hard drive in one of my VMs as I was running out of space on it, all looked good, so I went to bed. I woke up this morning, and hmm my encrypted offsite personal data store is gone, something important as I need to file my Irish tax return and it contains the tax return login keys. ...
Thursday 26th September 2013: 5.22pm. Just got rejected by Google due to inconsistencies in my technical interviews. I'm not surprised, I don't hold a wealth of algorithmic theory on tap - rather, I sleep on a problem and "just know" the answer the next day. That sort of algorithmic knowledge will always interview badly, plus I should imagine that the lack of focus in my life history on nothing but software engineering would put many off (or as they would see it, there are " ...
Sunday 29th September 2013: 7.03pm. Bleh I'm feeling rough today. Last night whilst watching TV with Megan I had this crazy idea of how to make proposed Boost.AFIO - yes I know it's supposed to be finished as of last Monday - lock free, even wait free apart from the pesky std::unordered_map<> which would need locks around it. And it sufficiently excited me that I just had to get to work on it right now i. ...
Monday 30th September 2013: 9.10am. Link shared: https://github.com/BoostGSoC/boost.afio/blob/increase_parallelism2/boost/afio/detail/MemoryTransactions.hpp Added a further 15% to AFIO's performance :) I noticed that the standard spinlock was being stupid and was looping compare-exchange which of course sends a ton load of cache line invalidations to all other CPUs. Adding a simple read check to my custom spin lock implementation before the compare-exchange eliminates those cache line invalidations, and voila up goes performance again. My new custom spin lock class is very nice, you compose its behaviour out of templated policy types and it is written using C++ 11 atomics. ...
Sunday 6th October 2013: 5.12am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Spent all day today with Megan sketching out scenarios for our next move - disposable incomes, schooling, commute times, strategic positioning of the various countries and potential jobs I might do. That whiteboard we bought came in very handy actually. I won't go into details of our thoughts, but I will say this: we were really surprised how expensive London UK is to anywhere else in the world. ...
Tuesday 8th October 2013: 2.37pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Big day today - I should be able to send AFIO into the Boost peer review queue, and hence drawing a line under what has probably been my main excuse against getting a job. It's been a long, long summer indeed! Next week I go to the Googleplex in California for the Google summer of code mentors summit - never been to California before, so that should be interesting. ...
Wednesday 9th October 2013: 4.52am. Looks like AFIO won't enter peer review tonight ... the GCC 4.6 Linux build hangs some of the time on the CI, but I'm dammed if I can replicate the problem on my workstation here. Other than specifically GCC 4.6 on Linux, it's all green across the board, which is great, except for that one remaining obstacle. Grrr ...#boostafio #boostcpp ...
Thursday 10th October 2013: 12.51am. Boost.AFIO has just been submitted for Boost peer review. After so many months of effort, I'd like to thank Megan for putting up with all the hours I spent after work pattering away on it; I'd like to thank Paul for doing such a great job in porting the code to Boost for Google Summer of Code; I'd like to thank Google for sponsoring Paul, and the Boost C++ Libraries for voting for AFIO as a GSoC sponsorship candidate; and finally, I'd like to thank my former colleagues at BlackBerry who pulled a lot of favours internally to get BlackBerry Legal to eventually sign off on me working on this in my free time (first ever in BlackBerry history I believe that permission was granted for an employee to contribute to a non-work related open source library). ...
Friday 11th October 2013: 3.10pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Off to Indiana to see Megan's Parents for the weekend. Long old drive that, but the weather is very pleasant thankfully. And I'm going to miss our car, as ugly as it is, once we have to sell it as it's a lot fancier than anything we'll be able to afford in Europe with our 80% less disposable income. It certainly makes driving for eight hours a lot nicer. ...
Thursday 17th October 2013: 4.07pm. Descaled the espresso machine yesterday as I do every three months, and was amazed at the clumps (crystals even) of limescale which had accumulated in the water tank, inlet filter, and everywhere else. Twelve hours of being soaked in concentrated lemon juice later, and it's much better if not entirely clear. Similarly, I replaced the water filter for the fridge and was surprised how much it improved the rate of flow. ...
Thursday 17th October 2013: 11.26pm. If you're upgrading to Windows 8.1 today, make SURE you uninstall ALL graphics and video card drivers before the upgrade: for me that was a minimum of Intel's onboard video, ATI Radeon drivers and MVP Virtu software for letting you do fast video conversion using the video card. Once Windows 8.1 is installed, make SURE you install the very latest version of Intel's and ATI's drivers, because anything older than brand new won't do. ...
Friday 18th October 2013: 7.40pm. Location: Region of Waterloo International Airport. Off to Silicon Valley for the Google Summer of Code mentors summit this weekend. Never been to California before. Should be interesting.#gsoc2013
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Wednesday 23rd October 2013: 12.08am. Location: Bai Tong Restaurant. Nearly at the end of my day studying the Microsoft technologies implemented by the team who will interview me tomorrow. Hadn't realised they are behind C++ AMP which lets your closures span onto GPUs - weirdly I worked on half of one of those about five years ago via Brook GPU. Anyway currently sitting in the best restaurant in the area which is a Thai. ...
Saturday 26th October 2013: 6.49pm. I posted this as a comment to a post on what to expect during tech interviews with the major tech multinationals. Maybe it might be useful as a main post too, so I expanded it a bit on detail. BTW the photo is of the gift basket that Microsoft interview attendees receive, at least for ones arriving in Redmond - myself and Megan are currently munching through its very ample (and certainly girth widening) contents :) It's a nice touch, and one I don't believe any of the other tech multinationals do. ...
Tuesday 29th October 2013: 10.27pm. Link shared: http://www.privoxy.org/ Instead of doing my graph algorithms coursework like I'm supposed to, I ended up today trying to insert Privoxy (a privacy web content filter) into the encrypted HTTPS connections that Google and Facebook et al now enforce and you can't disable. I run Privoxy on all HTTP going in and out of the house as a matter of course to eliminate a lot of the shite which gets sent to you as part of trying to browse the modern web, but it can only do unencrypted HTTP, and Google and Facebook install a big chunk of tracking stuff into your browser every time you visit (never mind pushing ads and other intrusions at you). ...
Sunday 3rd November 2013: 3.36pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Seeing as we'll be leaving Canada in about seven weeks now, we've been doing tourist stuff each weekend around Ontario, Michigan and New York state i.e. within a four hour drive. Amazingly we never have been to Toronto city centre, so today we shall. Looks like we have lucked out with the weather today. Below freezing, but sunny. Next weekend we'll be visiting my old boss from ARM Peter in Rochester. ...
Tuesday 5th November 2013: 4.53am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Microsoft rejected my job application today - much the same problem as with Google: lack of apparent analysis ability, and lack of being able to say how other (ie not me) people would go about solving a problem. It was also mentioned that the interviewers couldn't wrap their head around how I think, and therefore couldn't say if it was a good way of thinking about things. ...
Friday 8th November 2013: 7.17am. I got my new Nexus 5 to replace my poor treacle slow Galaxy Nexus today. And it's a very nice phone for the money indeed. BUT, and here comes a rant, it is FAR FAR harder to do an exact device image from one Nexus device to another than it ought to be. The Android File Transfer implementation is crap - I've never got it to work reliably for anything more than minimal transfers. ...
Tuesday 12th November 2013: 7.00pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Last few weeks been playing Half Life 2 as I know I won't get any free time again until after Christmas, and probably not much at all after the baby arrives. It's a very old game, nearly a decade old, and despite being the highest rated game of all time I have never much cared for it (it was boring, and it lacks . ...
Thursday 14th November 2013: 7.40pm. Link shared: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/246214/ My first time peer review managing a new Boost library appears to be going well, with a lengthy ongoing thread of discussion which suggests I did okay in persuading Boost community members to have a look at the proposed library at all. I'm very glad! I had been worried no one would comment at all! Instead I've got over 30 responses (so far! ...
Friday 15th November 2013: 8.07pm. I've been using my new Nexus 5 for a week now whenever I can, so I suppose it's time for a mini-review. Bear in mind I'm coming from a Galaxy Nexus, while Megan has a Nexus 4. I won't mention the changes in Android 4.4 over 4.3 which are mostly UI changes except for adding printing support (which BTW is very cool, our Epson printer has Google Cloud Print support and printing to it from any phone or Chromebook is now absolutely seamless). ...
Monday 18th November 2013: 5.08pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Five weeks to go before returning to Europe! But for me at least Thanksgiving is more important right now, because we can use that opportunity to bring back cheap stuff from the US which costs a fortune in Europe: simple stuff such as printer ink (€70 vs $50), baby breathing monitors, all boring but stuff which saves money long run. I am slowly winding up finding some way of relocating everything we own . ...
Tuesday 19th November 2013: 4.19pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Finished my graph algorithms coursework. Finished cleaning the house. Finally got some time to do some coding, first time in over a week!
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Thursday 21st November 2013: 6.01am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. My 'coding sprint' of two days is over as I have a complex systems conference next two days and this weekend will be busy. My sprint was to further evolve the design of my async hash engine which needs to spot when hash op rounds can be coalesced into SIMD 4-Hash rounds, or whether to throw (hyper)threads at the work queue instead. ...
Saturday 23rd November 2013: 6.31pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Complex systems data visualisation conference plus after dinner party is over. Slept in too much today but we both needed it. Now must get ready to go to another dinner party. And must start filtering through that week of email backlog which has built up. And try canceling the return flight from Europe. Could really do with a day off really . ...
Monday 25th November 2013: 12.26am. Link shared: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/Peer-Review-Report-for-proposed-Boost-TypeIndex-v2-1-Nov-12th-21st-2013-td4655327.html My peer review managership for the Boost C++ Libraries is over! The link links to my report of the peer review.#boostcpp ...
Wednesday 27th November 2013: 3.52am. Link shared: https://github.com/BoostGSoC/boost.afio/commits/content_hashing_merge Was very pleased today with my fourth attempt at an asynchronous batch hash engine for Boost.AFIO which can schedule digest hashing of arbitrary length texts to all SIMD streams on all CPU cores (with a preference for filling SIMD streams before CPU cores). Getting the scheduler design right was quite tricky, because as individual hash operations end, the tail operations from the end of the scheduled batch need moving downwards to fill holes such that individual SIMD streams in CPUs aren't doing useless work, and this must be done while each CPU core runs entirely independently from the others (a CPU core only breaks processing if one stream runs out of data) so getting the locking semantics correct was non-trivial. ...
Tuesday 3rd December 2013: 1.30am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Into our last three weeks in North America so I'm breaking my many month fast from alcohol in order to sample some of the best alcohol of Canada before we leave. Below are three beers made by the famous Chambly brewery of Quebec. I bought these at some expense as my favourite Canadian beer is "La Fin Du Monde", which as its name suggests, is hard to consume more than three pints of and stay standing, but is also very tasty and in my opinion beats most Belgian Trappist beers which is saying something. ...
Tuesday 3rd December 2013: 7.10am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Just wasted four hours of my life trying to upgrade Windows XP to Windows 8.1 - lots of deeply unhelpful error messages about missing entry points in DLLs instead of telling me the real reason: only Windows 8.0 permits upgrade from XP. God I hate you Microsoft right now :(
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Wednesday 4th December 2013: 9.08pm. First lie in this morning in what seems like forever. Very congested and groggy today as a result, plus bits of me ache due to healing, but boy do I feel a lot better. Finally got Windows 8.1 onto this netbook after a huge amount of hassle spanning multiple days. Works a lot smoother than XP did in fairness, now just have to reinstall all my applications and reconfigure everything. ...
Thursday 5th December 2013: 2.01am. So quotes for relocation from Waterloo, Canada to Cork, Ireland are in! I asked only FIDI FAIM accredited relocators as those relocation companies in Canada advertising their ability to "internationally relocate" mean by "international" as equal to North America, not global, so the FIDI FAIM accreditation ought to mean they really do have global experience. There are in fact only six FIDI FAIM removers servicing Ontario, and here are the quotes for 221 cubic feet including $30,000 of goods insurance:AMJ Campbell (Groupage) $3305Brytor (Groupage) $3539Taylor (Groupage) $4050Tippet (Groupage) $5000Armstrong (Groupage) $5410Armstrong (LCL) $6945MI Group Failed to provide quote within a weekGroupage is where you share a container, and therefore must wait until the container is full before it ships which could be many months. ...
Friday 6th December 2013: 4.53pm. Removal of all our stuff is booked for the 18th! What comes next is to sell as much of our stuff we can't use in Europe (anything electrical particularly) as we can on eBay, and give gifts of everything else. On Sunday we'll remove everything from storage back into the flat so I can catalogue it, plus we still need to figure out a way of selling the car at a convenient date and finish buying Christmas presents for people. ...
Saturday 7th December 2013: 1.51am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Next stop on my tour of Canadian alcohol before we return to Europe is this unreasonably priced all rye 100% Canadian whiskey from Alberta. I'm not a fan of Canadian whiskey, I find it generally tasteless though there are a few which are quite drinkable for their price, one of which is the 20 year old Canadian Club which is pretty good for $50 (remember any decent old world whiskey starts at $80 moving rapidly upwards in Canada). ...
Tuesday 10th December 2013: 1.19am. Just took the suggested OTA upgrade of my Nexus 5 to Android 4.4.2. Bricked the device. Lucky I did a full backup before, but that is really not on Google! :(
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Tuesday 10th December 2013: 10.51pm. A tip of my hat to Titanium Backup which appears to have perfectly restored my Nexus 5 after Google's 4.4.2 OTA update bricked it and I had to do a full purge and factory reimage to get it working (yes, the Google OTA completely wrecked the phone). Thank you Titanium Backup!#titaniumbackup ...
Thursday 12th December 2013: 7.44am. Just spent the last nine hours form filling and itemising everything we own for shipping insurance and customs from Canada into Ireland via the UK which has to be one of the most soul destroying activities a person can do. Interestingly turns out everything we own is worth about $27,000 :). Anyway, I am now very definitely going to bed, it's nearly 3am sigh . ...
Thursday 12th December 2013: 3.43pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Minus 13C outside today here in Waterloo. That's unusually cold for this time of year, though there isn't too much snow yet. Poor Megan has to walk to work through it!
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Friday 13th December 2013: 4.08pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Last weekend in North America! We're off to Ann Arbor to vacation with Megan's parents, last time we'll see her family for a while. Spent much of yesterday moving things around, I am feeling very stiff!
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Sunday 15th December 2013: 5.52pm. Location: Detroit St, Ann Arbor, Michigan. An awful lot of snow here in Michigan. Kinda worried just how much more snow there will be on the trip back to Canada - it had been forecast to stop snowing by now :(
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Monday 16th December 2013: 3.29pm. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. Less than 36 hours before the removers. Five days to emigration. At least everything I put on eBay sold, though they all got real bargains, my stuff was worth a lot more :(
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Wednesday 18th December 2013: 6.42am. Location: Waterloo, Ontario. It's finally done. Everything apart from some clothes and the coffee maker is in that pile there: that is pretty much everything me and Megan owns! Removers arrive at 8am tomorrow ... bleh ... ...
Friday 20th December 2013: 4.24am. Location: Verses. Last fine meal in Canada! This is Verses Restaurant, the most expensive restaurant in the Kitchener Waterloo region where all the local super rich eat (the new CEO of BlackBerry John Chen was there, as were senior executives from Sun Life etc). And unlike most expensive restaurants, Verses does have the most consistently excellent food in this region, and KW does (unusually for its size) have five world class food restaurants (in our opinion) so fair enough about the pricing. ...
Saturday 21st December 2013: 11.59pm. Location: BEST WESTERN PLUS Travel Hotel Toronto Airport. Due to an incoming ice storm, had to move out from our rented flat in Waterloo a day early to miss the storm, otherwise we risked not making it to Toronto airport on Sunday morning and getting tapped two grand for new flights to Ireland. Hence staying at a hotel next to the airport tonight, our last night in Canada. ...
Sunday 22nd December 2013: 6.25am. Location: BEST WESTERN PLUS Travel Hotel Toronto Airport. Some were asking why is an ice storm so important we needed to travel a day early? Well here are some pictures explaining why ice storms incapacitate travel and communications. It's beautiful if it doesn't cut out your electricity or food delivery! ...
Sunday 22nd December 2013: 6.39pm. Location: Toronto Pearson International Airport. All checked into Pearson finally. Getting past US customs only took an hour this time, much better than the two plus hour wait last time. Hopefully there will be no surprises at Chicago, then we'll reach Dublin tomorrow 9am.
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Sunday 22nd December 2013: 10.36pm. Flight out of Toronto has just been cancelled, so we'll miss our connecting flight from Chicago to Dublin. I assume that means we'll fly out tomorrow instead and get to Dublin on Tuesday, unless they fly us to Amsterdam or something instead.
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Monday 23rd December 2013: 6.30pm. Location: Ambler Airport Hotel. Link shared: http://m.thestar.com/#!/gta/flight-delays-at-pearson-airport-cause-headaches/b7698242ebd095ee085bc4a0f5404697 A news item about the cancellations at Pearson yesterday, a lot of misery. For us it wasn't as bad as it was for many as we didn't experience the super long queues taking hours each, and we got a hotel earlier than most so we grabbed an available room (even though it's a smoking room, so it stinks). ...
Tuesday 24th December 2013: 9.53am. Location: Kamato Rd, Mississauga, Ontario. Second attempt at emigrating from Canada today. The three hours of sleep won't help, but the early morning flight ought to put us front of the queue to take off at least, as Pearson is still experiencing substantial delays from the ice storm.
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Tuesday 24th December 2013: 12.47pm. Just got bumped to first class for the flight from Toronto to London. Never flown transatlantic in first class before ... nice. As Megan said, the two day delay might actually be worth it!
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Saturday 28th December 2013: 2.08am. Apologies for dropping off all communications these past four days. Got to Dad's house after three days of trying to emigrate from Canada to Ireland to find the phone line and ADSL are completely dead, so no internet nor means to ring anyone about it. And his house is in a valley, so barely a mobile phone signal either. It took several trial and error runs - including walking to the top of the nearest hill and standing there trying to enter credit card details on a mobile phone - to figure out which of Ireland's remaining three mobile networks can deliver something like a reliable 3g signal to the house, and so as of a few hours ago thanks to Android's local wifi hotspot feature we have some viably useful, if incredibly laggy due to the 150ms ping time, internet. ...
Sunday 29th December 2013: 5.47pm. Beginning to feel "normal" again finally, helped by enough sleep at long last to pay back a lot of that sleep debt incurred during relocation. Bought a car, a year 2000 1.4L Ford Focus, insurance for the two of us was €350 which was a €70 penalty or so for having been a year outside Ireland. My jury rigged internet via a well positioned mobile phone hotspot at the top left of the window in the sitting room (only place it gets reliable 3g) is working okay enough to get work done. ...
Tuesday 31st December 2013: 9.30am. With a bit of luck this second and last possible virtual diary entry for 2013 (yes, just two entries this year, worst ever) will shortly appear after another large revamp of nedprod's internals - as you may or may not notice, the content from my Google+ posts now also appears here as if they were virtual diary posts, which means that the almost entirely static HTML content which is nedprod. ...
Thursday 2nd January 2014: 12.09am. Had a bug report in Boost.AFIO, so have been trying to compile Boost on an Intel Atom 220 with Visual Studio 2013. In short: it's painful. Even after the substantial build refactoring I've just done to speed things up to a workably slow speed. Roll on our stuff from Canada getting here soon, I need my workstation back to me!
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Saturday 4th January 2014: 3.42am. Link shared: Tuesday_31st_December_2013 Just made live another very significant upgrade of nedprod.com's internals which I've been working on part time over the past three weeks. nedprod.com's virtual diary is now fully dynamically generated from an XML database using lots of Niall's hand written custom PHP, and you can read all about it at the supplied link. I might be about fifteen years late to database driven blogging, but hey it's finally there, and it's all custom. ...
Monday 6th January 2014: 11.40am. Grr ... even with my very substantial improvements to Boost.AFIO's build speed, it still takes half an hour to do a sanity unit test compilation check pass on an Intel Atom 220, something which takes less than a minute on my workstation. I am actually seriously considering setting up Megan's tablet as my development machine ... even a 1.2Ghz Intel Sandy Bridge would be like greased lightning compared to this . ...
Saturday 11th January 2014: 5.37pm. After another day spent optimising proposed Boost.AFIO's build infrastructure and patching in precompiled headers support, I now have total rebuild time including all unit tests and code examples on my Intel Atom 220 down to 5 minutes 8 seconds. That's down from somewhere north of 40 minutes originally, which makes for an eightfold improvement in build times.It's quite amazing how lazy modern CPUs make us actually. ...
Sunday 12th January 2014: 6.32pm. Location: Cork. I am currently experiencing the unpleasant realisation that after six weeks of doing no study on my OU graph algorithms course, my current coursework assignment makes absolutely no sense to me. Which surely bodes poorly for the summer exam ...
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Monday 13th January 2014: 2.04pm. Forgot to mention this rather outstanding deal for a baby travel system we picked up last Friday during the January sales, so here it is. A Quinny/Maxi-Cosi system (these are one of the premium brands made by the same manufacturer Dorel Industries who are a Canadian company) normally costing nearly €800 for just over €300 instead. The cause of such a hefty reduction was a somewhat fugly colour, but hey for a €500 discount we're happy to be unfashionable! ...
Tuesday 14th January 2014: 7.59pm. Location: Cork. It gets cold and dark in a house you've just rented! Heating oil comes tomorrow. Still, till then it's nice to go back to medieval times eh back to how our ancestors lived ... ...
Saturday 18th January 2014: 7.08pm. Location: Cork. Finally moved into our new house in Dromahane, as you'll see in the pictures. Not bad for 500 a month. Now I can finally turn my exclusive attention to maths coursework! ...
Sunday 19th January 2014: 5.46pm. Just picked up 200kg of this fairly sulphurous but good strong heat Polish coal plus three bales of peat briquettes for €92, which made the poor Ford Focus groan a bit given the weight transporting it back to the house. At 20kg of coal consumption per week, I'm hoping this will see us through to early April hopefully. What's crazy, really, is how cheap this stuff still is relative to other forms of heating, especially given how noxious it is and choking smog forming! ...
Monday 20th January 2014: 10.08am. Someone asked about my last post's assertion about coal being so cheap relative to other fuels here in Ireland, thinking surely gas beats it? So I figured why not supply some numbers which are my calculations for various home heating sources here in Dromahane, Mallow in € cent per kWh including VAT and carbon taxes:Premium Polish Coal: 4.82Natural gas (from pipe, not bottle): 5.1 (not including standing charge)Peat Briquettes: 5. ...
Wednesday 22nd January 2014: 2.36pm. Location: Mallow, Cork. Link shared: http://www.brightwater.ie/documents/brightwater_salary_surveys_ROI_2014.pdf Found this 2014 salary survey of how much professionals earn in regions of Ireland. I had no idea there was such a thing in Ireland! Anyway now I can tell you that a C++ developer in Ireland earns a 10k bump in minimum salary over other developers, but earns just a few thousand more on average. I can also tell you that one only earns an extra 5k for working in Dublin, which surely isn't worth the extra cost of living! ...
Thursday 23rd January 2014: 10.48pm. Average ping times on "my mobile phone acting as if we had broadband into the house already" are currently exceeding 2000ms, and it's definitely not my fault - it's the time of day, which is quarter to 11pm and obviously a few people locally are downloading a lot of data right now and it's saturated the cell tower I'm connected to. Anyway, real broadband supposedly gets installed on Monday, two weeks after I ordered it. ...
Friday 24th January 2014: 1.03am. Location: Cork. So Megan got annoyed with me for sticking extra bright CFLs into the electric sconces either side of the fireplace. I said I had a plan! Which you can see my first prototype of in the attached pictures. Basically I bought some embossed wedding vellum from Amazon, cut some notches into it to get it to wrap around into a cone, cut off the bottom and voila, instant uplighting lamp shades! ...
Monday 27th January 2014: 3.48am. Link shared: https://ci.nedprod.com/job/Boost.AFIO%20Valgrind%20Linux%20GCC%204.8/143/valgrindResult/pid=31061,0x0/ It's half three in the morning and I spent much of today replacing Boost.AFIO's use of std::packaged_task<> with a custom implementation which is much faster and simplifies the internals, plus removes a chicken-and-egg block on the next feature I intend to add. Unfortunately, there is something wrong with my new custom implementation - basically, on Linux only and on the Jenkins CI only it shows a timing race condition which definitely wasn't there in the old code. ...
Monday 27th January 2014: 4.23pm. Eircom man arrived to connect up our phone line and left, so now we have actual fibre broadband exactly two weeks after ordering it! The speed is pretty good with the modem reporting the following VDSL stats:2.4 Line Rate (Down / Up) 71678 Kbps / 20479 Kbps2.5 Noise Margin (Down / Up) 10.5 dB / 10.5 dB2.6 Attenuation (Down / Up) 10.5 dB / 3. ...
Wednesday 29th January 2014: 3.25am. Took quite some hours of fiddling, but now have our Irish landline-over-IP configured and working well for €2.93/month line rental. Why bother with a landline in this day and age you might ask? Well, ringing an Irish mobile phone costs just 1.75 euro cent per minute (versus 35 euro cent per minute from my mobile), or ringing a UK mobile phone just 1.2 euro cent per minute (versus also 35 euro cent per minute from my mobile, which is actually cheap as most Irish mobile providers charge 50c/minute for the UK). ...
Friday 31st January 2014: 2.21am. Link shared: https://github.com/BoostGSoC/boost.afio/tree/completion_handler_refactor2 About two thirds way through my "refactor Boost.AFIO before the baby arrives" sprint - I've half reworked all the completion handlers such that it is all green on the CI for Linux and BSD, yet it hangs on Windows annoyingly. I'm hoping my second half of the rework and the fact I can delete whole sections of boilerplate completely given the new improved structure will fix the problems on Windows. ...
Saturday 1st February 2014: 4.06am. Location: Cork. After much testing to determine perfection, final lampshades are completed! Entirely held together using counter opposing folds cut into the vellum and its natural springiness. No glue or sticky tape was used! ...
Monday 3rd February 2014: 2.43am. There is some extremely unpleasant weather here in Mallow tonight! Outside is bad enough, but the gusts keep downdrafting my fire and blowing smoke and fumes into where I am trying to debug code. Feeling a bit light headed and worried about carbon monoxide poisoning, so I've opened a window which is rather negating the whole point of having a fire! Brrr ...
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Monday 3rd February 2014: 5.47am. Link shared: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21520308/is-it-intended-by-the-c-standards-committee-that-in-c11-unordered-map-destro After three days of work, finally nailed the last bug in my third major refactoring of Boost.AFIO's core dispatch engine (which has had its line count reduced by fifty lines, so the implementation is now quite considerably shorter and simpler than before), so now the baby is welcome to turn up whenever it likes! :) This last bug was a real corker only affecting the very most recent C++11 compilers only, not helped by me being completely unable to replicate it here at home on VS2013 which doesn't exhibit the problem (I had my poor netbook soak testing the unit test suite, repeatedly running it for hours and nary a crash nor failure in sight! ...
Wednesday 5th February 2014: 2.51am. The third refactoring of Boost.AFIO's core engine is complete - witness that beautiful sea of green on the continuous integration server! Anyway, that's version 1.2 done for now, onto having a baby next!https://github.com/BoostGSoC/boost.afio#boostafio ...
Friday 7th February 2014: 8.30pm. So, here is our new dishwasher! It's rather small, or big, depending on how you look at it, but it certainly solves the problem of doing the washing up which neither myself nor Megan particularly care for. We picked it up from Currys on sale for a very low price, about half what a normal dishwasher would cost and you can see its Currys page at http://www. ...
Saturday 8th February 2014: 2.22pm. Location: Cork. Look at what the post office gave me yesterday! Pretty, but completely useless in any shop in Ireland, so it'll be a trip to a bank for me to swap them for useful money. ...
Tuesday 18th February 2014: 2.49am. In fact, I'll just test the new photo album posting feature which might hopefully work. Here are two pictures of the Blackwater valley from near our house in Dromahane. Sadly, they look more like fields of mud than anything pretty, but at the time I took them they looked great. Enjoy! ...
Tuesday 18th February 2014: 4.59am. Apologies to everyone on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter who have seen a lot of old post spam due to IFTTT constantly reposting old posts. Today it went particularly mad and posted no less than three old posts in three hours, so it's bye bye to IFTTT. What hopefully you'll be reading this on is more hand written code by me, so I adapted the Google+ API reader which extracts these posts to nedprod. ...
Wednesday 19th February 2014: 6.08pm. Link shared: https://www.rwe.com/web/cms/en/481952/heizprofi/ You may remember this post (https://plus.google.com/109885711759115445224/posts/Jv5jWGjyjz6) of mine where I talked about costs of heating your home here in Ireland using different sources. Well, yesterday I was in the Dairygold where I spotted some funny looking briquettes marked as "Union Coal Briquettes", €10.73 for 25kg. I figured why not give them a try given they looked similar to the same price per kg as Bord na Mona peat briquettes, so I bought a bale. ...
Thursday 20th February 2014: 6.15pm. Location: Cork University Hospital. It turns out the maternity ward is pretty nice despite us being here uninsured. Semi private room, en suite bathroom and shower, really dark lighting to help sleep. Much nicer than expected! Anyway just waiting around now for labour to begin.
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Friday 21st February 2014: 12.05am. Location: Cork. Kicked out of the hospital as it's too late. No new baby nor sign thereof. Gone to woodlands to sleep, back in tomorrow to try again.
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Friday 21st February 2014: 12.52pm. Location: Cork University Hospital. I'm getting pretty tired let alone Megan. Contractions are about thirty seconds apart, though they're waiting for the baby's head to rotate so they sent me out for lunch. Estimated delivery time is around 3pm.
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Sunday 23rd February 2014: 1.24am. Megan and baby continue to do very well. Spent quite some time with my new daughter today, she may look very like Megan but she's definitely got the cranky "I don't like external change" personality I would imagine myself at age 0 to have - in fact, I still have - so I'm thinking that the child is more or less me in a female body hehe :)I sadly pulled the trigger on eBay today for a replacement for my much loved Atom 220 MSI Wind netbook - not, by the way, is she even remotely not functioning very well as she's running absolutely beautifully even with the brushes on the fan gone, even though the screen no longer can turn off during inactivity, even though the wifi card spazzes out sometimes and stops working, even though it hangs when turned on frequently, even though the entire right side is cracked and in bits, no, she's still running absolutely fine with Windows 8. ...
Sunday 23rd February 2014: 10.14pm. Baby and mother doing even better again today. Baby is now feeding avidly from the breast, to the extent that she was trying her best with me below. Turns out she has a broken collar bone due to the violence of her birth which explains a great deal of her crankiness when moved. The next major problem is settling on a name, not entirely easy. ...
Wednesday 26th February 2014: 6.40am. Location: Dromahane. Onto day six of the endurance test. Just was woken up by alarm and not feeling good. Had just fifteen hours sleep in the past three very long days. Want more than anything to sleep, but I have an all day job interview today, six hours of testing. I feel like a blank sheet ... Still tonight I'll get to sleep. Unless the child decides not of course, but I think I won't notice. ...
Thursday 27th February 2014: 5.21am. Location: Dromahane. Just woke up at 5am after nine hours of sleep. Feeling much better, and have swapped child with Megan so she can get some sleep too. Resurrected the fire, so soon will have heat too. And I have cold dinner to eat, which looks tasty so I must be very hungry, just too groggy to realise. Kinda at a loss for what to do next actually. ...
Friday 28th February 2014: 1.25am. Here is the next generation of energy saving light bulb! This is an early model "LED filament" bulb and is a completely different technology to the LED bulbs of yore which were basically a cylinder circuit board with some SMD LEDs on it. And by "different", I really mean "vastly improved". The previous generation LED light bulbs were little more efficient than a Compact Florescent (CFL) at about 60-70 lumen per watt, yet cost a lot more and did not cast a wide dispersed beam meaning you got large holes in the room where there was little illumination. ...
Saturday 1st March 2014: 9.17pm. Location: Dromahane. Just finished my OU coursework despite Clara being clamped onto my shoulder snoring. As much as this lack of sleep thing is a bore, I think so far productivity has increased. Next step: rehash my C++ Now conference presentation as its submission deadline is this week. Step after that: finish the monadic continuations prototype for the Boost C++ libraries and send it in for peer feedback before I finish it. ...
Sunday 9th March 2014: 1.39am. Unfortunately the one and only Irish company I was interviewing with rejected me on Friday. Still, first time I have ever made it to final stage interviews with any Irish employer - I guess Irish tech employers are finally waking up to the idea that open source developers actually might be comparable to corporate permies rather than being mere eccentric hobbyists with "no real experience" ...
Wednesday 12th March 2014: 10.26pm. Got my third lot of OU graph algorithms coursework submitted today, and only in the nick of time. Man, kinda feel a bit run off my feet recently ... in some ways, being woken up by Clara is great for productivity, but it feels like my todo list has swollen massively recently.Our stuff turns up from Canada on Friday at long long last - we last saw it before Christmas! ...
Friday 14th March 2014: 4.34pm. After three months spent being shipped from Canada to Ireland in some pretty cold weather with no doubt many hard jolts, ZFS found and repaired just 128Kb out of 2.93Tb of data, or 0.004%. As a single bit error is reported by ZFS as 4Kb, let us assume that was 32 bit flips, in which case that was an error rate of 1.242 x 10^-12, or about 1000 times more than I typically see in this configuration. ...
Saturday 15th March 2014: 3.58am. Just learned the hard way: when replacing a failing drive in ZFS, add the new drive as a third mirror before removing the failing drive. Me, I tried to be clever and tried to dd the old drive to the new in lvm outside the virtualised FreeBSD, but ZFS twigged I'd changed out the drive from beneath the virtualisation somehow and broke the mirror. Now ZFS is resilvering the mirror, but it's from a single copy so I'm quite screwed if some bit flips have happened between earlier today and now :( Note to self: seriously look into OVH Hubic (https://hubic. ...
Saturday 15th March 2014: 4.28am. Link shared: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/14/tony-benn-obituary I've just realised that Tony Benn died yesterday. Like pretty much well ... everyone ... I didn't agree with almost everything Tony Benn said and believed. He was sufficiently competent to have done a great deal of harm to Britain back when he was in power, and his actions nearly brought about a military coup against the British government by a desperate industrial elite, the first since the 17th century. ...
Sunday 16th March 2014: 8.44pm. Location: Dromahane. Finally got my dev workstation set up since our stuff arrived on Thursday. All ready to start work tomorrow morning! ...
Monday 17th March 2014: 2.09am. Now I have my cloud node back and once again fully functional after I replaced and resilvered a failing hard drive in my ZFS array, I let it loose on catching up with changes of the past three months i.e. let it go full bore at syncing data over this supposedly 70Mbit vDSL internet which is the fastest I have ever had into my house (the Canadian connection was 54Mbit, St. ...
Thursday 20th March 2014: 5.09pm. Currently recompiling a large code base with -fsanitize=thread, and said code base's build system won't parallel build correctly. Which means a lot of waiting around which I'm trying to fill in with reading technical papers, which reminds me how I am back at work once again :(
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Saturday 22nd March 2014: 7.19pm. It's the weekend, so been trying to get through my list of todos, or at least the ones possible whilst holding a laptop above a sleeping newborn (ouch my wrists!). I got round to hooking up the house power monitor (an inexpensive Owl CM160) to my cloud node, and witness below the pretty web gui which is thanks to this open source project https://github.com/cornetp/eagle-owl. You can clearly tell when we got our stuff from Canada last week and the cloud node started being on 24/7: that doubled our baseload from 100w to 200w, costing me an extra €0. ...
Friday 28th March 2014: 9.23am. Location: Dromahane. Feeling very groggy this morning. Was doing fifteen months worth of company accounts until 10pm last night. Which is like staying up to 3am in "have a baby" time, not helped that she has a bit of chestiness and freaks out when she can't breathe. Anyway another step closer to earning money again!
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Friday 28th March 2014: 3.14pm. Location: Dromahane. Apparently baby Clara is now over 5kg at five weeks old! That puts her into the top 5% of all babies her weight and age!
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Friday 28th March 2014: 8.36pm. Link shared: https://travis-ci.org/BoostGSoC13/boost.afio/jobs/21789340 Finally got round to adding a clang 3.4 ThreadSanitize and UndefinedBehaviorSanitize pass per commit to proposed Boost.AFIO. The reason I put it off for so long was the labour of writing the suppressions file to filter out all the false positives generated by the Boost libraries - I really wish the maintainers of those Boost libraries would get round to fixing up their code with _attribute_((no_sanitize_thread)) where needed :( Anyway, tis done now, and if I should ever accidentally introduce racy code in the future, Travis CI will shout at me :)#boostcpp #boostafio #clang #llvm #racecondition ...
Monday 31st March 2014: 8.45am. Location: Dromahane. Last night the cloud node died, and with it goes access to our TV, all my company files, in fact pretty much everything which makes for a very bored Megan. Data itself is fine, just inaccessible. Anyway got about four hours of sleep last night after trial and error diagnosis of what was hanging the machine so I know what replacements to buy. ...
Monday 7th April 2014: 2.45am. Location: Dromahane. As you can tell by the very late hour, been burning the candle at both ends last two weekends. Just finished converting over my ancient workhorse Atom netbook which has served me so well since 2008 to that ex-corporate Dell I got off eBay some weeks ago - yes, it has taken me weeks to get round to the conversion :( The only other to do item I achieved was to start my Canadian tax return so I'd have some idea how much I owe them - it'll be more than a grand which sucks, due to BlackBerry claiming I got over 100k off them last year which makes no sense seeing as they fired me in August. ...
Wednesday 9th April 2014: 8.51am. Location: Dromahane. Clara has been of the opinion that night time is play time last two nights in a row. So the tiredness I am feeling right now borders on the insane, especially as debugging a new threading primitive object for the Boost libraries (I'm contributing a permit object) is my current work item. Race condition finding is definitely best done after plenty of sleep! ...
Wednesday 9th April 2014: 10.43am. Link shared: http://heartbleed.com Just finished upgrading all my servers with the fixed OpenSSL not having the "Heart Bleed" vuln (http://heartbleed.com/) which effectively makes encryption useless - that means all your encryption keys, passwords, identification, all of it is stealable. Next step (after coffee) is regenerating all my server encryption keys, and then paying $100 per SSL certificate to have the old ones revoked and new ones issued. ...
Thursday 10th April 2014: 7.47pm. Link shared: http://code.google.com/p/i7z So, the parts for my replacement cloud server finally arrived - I had to order the Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard from the US and import it to Ireland as the only places I could find it reasonably priced in Europe were in Germany, and none of those companies would deduct VAT for my company. The X10SL7-F is quite literally the only motherboard in its niche - high end Haswell home servers - so I had little choice in the selection unfortunately (or cost actually, but in fairness it's quarter the cost of other Xeon server solutions of a similar spec). ...
Saturday 12th April 2014: 12.00pm. Location: Dromahane. Last night finally got all our content and media back online, it was offline for just twelve days after the old motherboard failed. A nasty surprise last night was just before my "early night" so I can do maths homework all this weekend was that the ZFS pool corrupted itself and kernel panicked FreeBSD on boot, seriously not good, and so was up till 4am fixing it. ...
Sunday 13th April 2014: 9.55pm. Location: Dromahane. Well "Networks 4" which is the second last topic of my OU graph algorithms course is the first of this course to defeat me! They have you optimising an electrical system graph with partial differential equations in it using matrices, and that part I can do. The problem is what is the answer they want, and that final part of doing Gaussian elimination on the matrices is fine but I am defeated when reducing the differential equations (which are time and starting state dependant) into a final state equation. ...
Monday 21st April 2014: 11.56am. Location: Dromahane. Been having this weird finger joint pain, can't close my grip on right hand especially in the mornings after I wake up. Clearly there is a 'pop' in the tendons during motion, which indicates swelling in the middle of the hand. Feeling slightly worried about that rusty nail I grazed myself in the right hand with a few weeks ago (didn't bother with tetanus shots, the wound wasn't past the surface), but even if this definitely isn't tetanus there are other muscle infections than tetanus from rusty things of course. ...
Tuesday 22nd April 2014: 11.44pm. Location: Dromahane. Just finished with Megan the last of the most excellent Yellow Spot to celebrate finishing the first draft of my C++ Now conference paper, and all the coursework for my OU graph algorithms course. It's been a very long and hard month to get this far, but the end is finally coming into sight. Hoorah!#cppnow#boostcpp ...
Thursday 24th April 2014: 11.57pm. Location: Dromahane. Just discovered that your phone will consume 3g data even with a strong WiFi signal after I ran out of credit after only two months rather than the three months expected. Been losing an average twenty cent per day in little tiny increments, not good. Anyway Tasker to the rescue, it now turns off mobile data if you have a WiFi connection and doesn't turn it back on until I am no longer near my home WiFi name. ...
Sunday 27th April 2014: 2.08am. Location: Dromahane. Second night of looking after Clara on my own for the first time. Tonight is going FAR better than it was this time last night at least. Just need to feed her once more and then I can sleep myself. ...
Monday 28th April 2014: 5.16pm. Just paid $1,566 canadian dollars to the Canadian tax man for my 2013 tax return to pay for the pleasure of being laid off. It was a royal pain in the hole to get that tax return completed - I was missing important documents, which had to get rushed to Megan's parents so they could scan them to me; I was capped at how much moving expenses I could deduct to my Irish 2013 earnings, which were virtually nil, turning my expected refund into a large bill; online submission refused to work, so it was a rush job to the post office today with printed copies which weigh in a 36 pages each (one for me, another for Megan), coupled with a direct bank transfer all of which had to be set up because the Canadian revenue agency make it surprisingly hard to pay taxes - forget about using a credit or debit card, for example. ...
Monday 28th April 2014: 11.57pm. Actually got stuff done today. Not only finished Canadian taxes, after a drive to Cork I finally got my new SSL certs and keys to replace the ones possibly compromised by that Heart bleed bug a few weeks ago which are now installed. I also successfully migrated my automated testing server from Canada to here at home, it doesn't actually work yet but it is serving pages appearing correctly at https://ci. ...
Saturday 3rd May 2014: 3.37pm. One week to go to the C++ Now conference in Aspen, Colorado where I'll be presenting. I have not, as yet:* Completed the academic paper for the proceedings. It has become like a hydra, ever-bloating with yet more information and supporting evidence, having been intended to be ten pages, and now up to nineteen with twenty pages expected. Bleh.* Submitted the new Boost permit object for review. ...
Sunday 4th May 2014: 12.38pm. Location: Dromahane. Drank a bottle of champers last night to celebrate getting in first money since Canada and first baby! Forgotten what you can feel like the day after drinking alcohol, which reminds one how little time I have nowadays for drinking which is why I am no longer used to it! Anyway as of 10pm last night that Boost permit object is submitted, next step peer review manager report for TypeIndex. ...
Thursday 8th May 2014: 10.23am. Looks like my talk at C++ Now is going to be even more controversial than originally planned. I've been scraping together my evidence that C++ and especially the Boost libraries are in a terminal decline as part of the rationale on why Boost and C++ needs an embedded graph database in its core runtime, and even I was surprised at how much worse things have become this past year (it's been about a year since I last looked at the empirical numbers). ...
Sunday 11th May 2014: 6.21pm. Location: Newark Terminal C. On my way to the C++ Now conference where I will be speaking. Been searching Newark Airport during my four hour layover for a Coney Island lager which has a clown face in it, a beer I had last time I was in JFK, and which was tasty. Sadly no joy, though there is a surplus of Sam Adams here which is okay, so not all is lost. ...
Monday 12th May 2014: 2.33am. Location: Embassy Suites Denver - International Airport. Had to take a hotel in Denver as the flight to Aspen got cancelled. You read about these sorts of places in magazines, so very American! ...
Monday 12th May 2014: 3.59pm. Location: Denver International Airport. +Daniel Dilts is giving me a lift from Denver to Aspen for C++ Now so I need not wait for standby. Much appreciated Daniel!
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Tuesday 13th May 2014: 4.16pm. Location: Aspen Institute. So the C++ Now conference has begun! My bag remains stuck in Denver which is annoying. Making do with my carry on okay so far. Everything here is covered with snow ... reminds me of Christmas!#cppnow #boostcpp
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Tuesday 13th May 2014: 10.51pm. Some of the view from the Aspen Institute for Physics which is where the C++ Now conference is held. Quite literally everything was covered with snow only hours beforehand.#cppnow ...
Thursday 15th May 2014: 4.05pm. Location: Aspen Institute. Link shared: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.3323 The position paper for my talk at the C++ Now conference has been published! Enjoy!
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Saturday 17th May 2014: 10.32pm. Location: Aspen Meadows Resort. Link shared: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QgqNU7FMRaYpg6eHdRXU0LwFqMPP9iOkAJKTS1Q3zlg/edit?usp=docslist_api The slides for my presentation at C++ Now today.#cppnow
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Monday 19th May 2014: 4.37pm. Photos from my trip to Aspen for +C++Now. It was a great conference and a great week up in the mountains. We started with a snow storm that shut down the airport and by the end of the week had beautiful sunny days and gorgeous views of the mountains. I've only done significant work on a couple of these shots.I also have a bunch of photos of people, but I'll share those privately lest someone not wish their photo to be publicly posted. ...
Wednesday 21st May 2014: 10.12am. Location: Dromahane. Finally beginning to feel okay after returning from C++ Now - I always find that return journey west to east the worst, you end up sleeping weird hours, plus the conference doesn't permit much sleep. Back to work today, first task is entering receipts and buying a proper work chair. Tomorrow I visit a physiotherapist to see what we can do about this RSI. ...
Tuesday 27th May 2014: 6.04pm. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/dvb_ttusb_ned So, I spent today at the day job wondering why the hell the FreeBSD Jenkins CI slave kept timing out during build, which I originally assumed was due to my fiddling with the day job code. Turns out it was because the VM's disc i/o was rather slower than usual. I reboot the VM, and see it is like treacle, plus logging into the hypervisor is slow. ...
Wednesday 28th May 2014: 12.21am. Link shared: https://www.google.ie/search?q=xbmc+live+tv+mythtv&client=ms-android-google&espv=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sboxchip=Images&sa=X&ei=NCqFU-TMLKWR7Abv-4HgBA&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAg&biw=360&bih=519#facrc=_&imgrc=DI-KFi7egwIqRM%253A%3Bjd38g6DFSnCa6M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.softwarecrew.com%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2013%252F02%252Fxbmc12-tv.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.softwarecrew.com%252F2013%252F02%252Fget-live-tv-and-pvr-working-in-xbmc-12-0-final%252F%3B800%3B450 Much to my surprise, satellite TV via my hacked Linux driver through mythtv backend on my cloud node over the ethernet network to xbmc running on a cheap Chinese Android TV stick now works! It's a bit flaky, especially on the HD channels, and the EPG pictured is far too small to read on a 24 inch other side of the room, but it does work, and well at that. ...
Friday 30th May 2014: 9.12am. Location: Dromahane. This RSI doesn't appear to be curing itself despite me taking care of myself for two weeks now, and I avoided typing during the week in Aspen so that's three weeks now of restraint. Yesterday for example I barely used the right at all, using the left to click and type. The finger joints and knuckles simply ache at the end of the day, and I worry I'll see bleeds from them again. ...
Wednesday 4th June 2014: 9.42am. The next step in curing the RSI arrived. Below is the Steelcase Please task chair, normally retailing for about a grand but second hand for £120 including delivery to Ireland from eBay UK. The Please is the European (French) alternative to the famous Steelcase Leap chair, and some would claim is superior, but for my purposes it doesn't hold its value as well as the Leap which would be about twice as expensive second hand (and a quarter the cost of a Herman Miller second hand), so from a cost perspective it was a real steal for what it is. ...
Monday 9th June 2014: 11.22am. Link shared: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/03/mastercoin-maidsafe-crowdsale/ A surprisingly useful article on cryptocurrencies with the company I'm currently doing work for at its centre.
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Monday 9th June 2014: 7.07pm. My graph algorithms written exam with the Open University is tomorrow at 2.30pm in Limerick. It's been a valuable course and definitely worth doing, but after doing three past papers I realise there are entire sections I really couldn't be bothered with (electrical graphs and kinematic graphs in particular, I have neither the interest nor the ability). If tomorrow I strike unlucky and my choice of questions forces an electrical, a kinematic and a polygonal animal question, I will be quite literally failing the exam. ...
Friday 13th June 2014: 8.12pm. Location: Glenlo Abbey Hotel. So made it to the very expensive hotel which was booked last minute because Clara wouldn't take a bottle and the original place wouldn't take babies, and now Clara is constipated and in a very poor mood and thus we cancelled our dinner plans and had room service instead. I think it's the first time I've ever had room service actually. ...
Friday 13th June 2014: 11.51pm. Location: Glenlo Abbey Hotel. Some pictures from our late evening walk around Glenlo Abbey Hotel in Galway after we finally got Clara to calm down. The train carriages by the way are one of the three on site restaurants, they are carriages from the Orient Express from sixty years ago. You sit literally in the same seats used by Winston Churchill and Lawrence Olivier and eat the same food they would have eaten, even the toilets are original. ...
Saturday 14th June 2014: 10.41pm. Location: Glenlo Abbey Hotel. Had to keep swapping with Megan as we took turns keeping Clara happy during the meal, but succeeded in having a semi romantic dinner as if we were on an Orient Express if you could randomly exit with a baby! That's the first time we've eaten out together since Clara! We're going to Kylemore Abbey tomorrow, hopefully Sushi tomorrow night so we can compare Canadian sushi to Irish. ...
Friday 20th June 2014: 2.53pm. Conference over, exams over, holidays over, proposal over, Northern Ireland done for another year ... The way is hopefully now clear of all obstacles to getting some real progress made on work after an awful lot of interruptions. Apart from the stupid RSI of course ... So I'm giving up alcohol and going on a diet until I've lost two stone as being overweight increases inflammation, plus my cholesterol is 6. ...
Sunday 22nd June 2014: 10.55pm. Link shared: http://www.factory-beds-direct.co.uk/mattress-sho/double-mattresses-categories/artisan-1500-double So next month after money comes in my next step in improving the RSI will be a better mattress to sleep on than the current one which came with the house rental, something Megan also sorely desires. Unfortunately, I am in a pickle as to what to choose as I haven't much cared for most of the mattresses I've tried in this locality, and the mattresses which I've researched as being likely very good are rather pricey. ...
Thursday 26th June 2014: 8.24pm. Our new mattress arrived this morning, and despite being in huge pain from a deep tissue massage for the RSI the preceding night I managed to get it upstairs. And here it is with a Clara attached! It certainly wasn't my first choice ... £199 or €275 delivered to Ireland, it's a British Bed Company 1000 pocket sprung medium tensioned mattress (http://www.mattressman.co.uk/mattresses/british-bed-company/anniversary-pocket-ortho-double-mattress.aspx) which the internet mattress geeks think is okay for the price. ...
Monday 30th June 2014: 11.54pm. Link shared: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm&p=5166163&viewfull=1#post5166163 Just spent a surprisingly long evening adding another 16Gb of RAM and a 512Gb SSD to the cloud node (the dayjob's code gets soak tested every night, but one of the tests OOMs before it's done; also said soak tests murder a poor old spinning disc drive, too many things going on not helped by a lack of RAM for read caching). ...
Wednesday 9th July 2014: 9.14am. Location: Dromahane. Normally she's an excellent alarm clock and starts screeching from 8am, so much so I don't bother setting an alarm anymore. But this morning no for some reason, in fact she was awake and has passed out again. Which has made me late to work, oddly enough. ...
Thursday 10th July 2014: 10.55pm. Location: Dromahane. Been visiting a sports deep tissue physiotherapist for the RSI weekly. Well today he really particularly mangled me, everything hurts, even after repeated icing. Hope I'll sleep!
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Friday 11th July 2014: 7.25am. Location: Dromahane. Less than five hours of sleep last night due to muscle pain from the Physio. When every position hurts it's hard to rest, plus I'm no longer allowed painkillers. Poo.
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Saturday 12th July 2014: 3.01pm. Location: Dromahane. Two of these finally turned up today, plus a similar bed. They're the first furniture I think I've ever bought apart from a work chair. Solid pine throughout, they're Brazilian and very cheap for solid wood, only slightly more expensive than IKEA. Construction quality is generally good. And they'll help solve the many boxes of books in the hallway. One does wonder slightly about the sustainability, they claim they're from southern Brazil where they employ the indigenous peoples in high tech factories using only sustainable wood. ...
Sunday 13th July 2014: 11.06pm. Location: Dromahane. Spent today assembling this bed and removing the one which came with the tenancy into the attic, plus tidying the office to make space for the other bookcase which is now installed and filled. Suddenly have space in the office for once, plus hopefully a bed which is no longer so noisy when you turn that it wakes everyone including baby. Is €220 for being able to turn quietly a wise expense? ...
Tuesday 15th July 2014: 7.40am. Location: Dromahane. Funny how only a few days ago she rolled herself over for the first time and now suddenly she regularly sleeps on her side. At times it's hard to remember she isn't even five months yet, she's started doing lots of older baby things this past week, including sitting up on her own (almost), I even gave her a bit of ripe soft pear which we know she likes and despite no teeth yet she munched that down and got annoyed I wouldn't give her more (it was my pear not hers! ...
Thursday 17th July 2014: 7.22pm. Spent the last few weeks after work trying to write a concurrent_unordered_map which has safe erase and uses memory transactions. It's my fourth design iteration, and I've currently achieved a 2x insert/remove and a 9x find performance improvement over a spinlocked unordered_map on a 4 core Xeon. I tried turning on HLE for the spinlocks, and here's the weirdness:Standard spinlocks:=== Large unordered_map spinlock write performance ===1. ...
Friday 18th July 2014: 9.43am. Location: Dromahane. I haven't written anything yet about my new ARM dev board which is a NVidia Jetson TK1 featuring the quad Cortex A15 Tegra K1 chip. These very affordable boards have goodies such as a SATA controller to which you can attach a SSD, fast Ethernet and onboard eMMC storage which by the time you've added those to a raspberry pi, odroid or cheap android TV stick make them similarly priced - except this fellow is amongst the fastest ARM chips in existence and comes with fully functioning and supported drivers on Ubuntu 14. ...
Sunday 20th July 2014: 1.20am. Shortly forthcoming Boost v1.56 is the first source code modularised Boost to be released, and the breakages it has imposed on proposed Boost.AFIO meant I had to throw out the old CI and start from scratch. Below is the new CI test matrix dashboard for AFIO, so far I only have build working, testing is still some way off. Even just to reach building everything including docs and PDFs correctly has taken several weeks of after work time, there was an enormous amount of breakage to work around - quite a lot of Boost is broken in subtle ways too. ...
Monday 21st July 2014: 10.54am. Link shared: https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/62621/remote-c-plus-plus-11-14-open-source-software-engineer-maidsafe Job going with my current employer: https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/62621/remote-c-plus-plus-11-14-open-source-software-engineer-maidsafe. There is an interesting story about that format of job advert actually (i.e. one where you are asked to send a list of URLs pointing to evidence to a series of questions about your history in open source, nothing else requested) - I originally pushed that idea whilst at BlackBerry as a way of fully automating via scripts the early stages of recruitment, and thus saving an enormous amount of otherwise wasted engineering time in filtering out the 80% of total time wasters and preventing HR from filtering out some of the really good candidates with unconventional backgrounds. ...
Tuesday 22nd July 2014: 11.30pm. Spent most of Sunday and far too much of Monday sorting out this handmade case for the nVidia Jetson TK1 board I bought - it's an excellent example of why it makes sense to simply buy a case actually, as I lost four hours of work time on Monday finishing the case which far more than a case would have cost. Anyway, the case is made out of two green acrylic sheets from eBay (cost £1) and a sheet of transparent polycarbonate donated by my brother in law. ...
Sunday 27th July 2014: 5.52pm. I forgot to post my annual SSD vs magnetic hard drive capacity per inflation adjusted dollar graph which I updated in May, so here it is. The trend of deexponentialisation of SSD capacity per dollar growth has continued as I first predicted in 2012 (http://www.nedprod.com/studystuff/SSDsVsHardDrives_201204.png), and currently SSDs are growing slower than magnetic storage which implies they will never catch up in terms of capacity per dollar. ...
Sunday 27th July 2014: 9.51pm. Link shared: http://arrayfire.com/arrayfire-on-nvidia-tegra-tk1 Some interesting benchmarks for my quad core nVidia Tegra K1 Jetson TK1 board @ 2.3Ghz fitted with a SSD SATA drive. I compare them, quite unfairly, to a quad core Intel Xeon CPU E3-1230 v3 @ 3.3GHz which is a Haswell unit:$ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=8000 --num-threads=4 runTegra: 13.53 secsXeon: 1.64 secs(the Xeon is 8.25x faster)Tegra storage performance:$ hdparm -t /dev/mmcblk0p1 Timing buffered disk reads: 208 MB in 3. ...
Wednesday 30th July 2014: 11.08pm. Link shared: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/Request-for-feedback-on-design-of-concurrent-unordered-map-plus-notes-on-use-of-memory-transactions-td4665594.html Realised earlier tonight that the design for a concurrent_unordered_map which I posted to http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/Request-for-feedback-on-design-of-concurrent-unordered-map-plus-notes-on-use-of-memory-transactions-td4665594.html is flawed in two ways: (i) references could invalidate during inserts if the load factor was high, which makes concurrent use hard (ii) I couldn't make rehashing meet the Abrahams exception guarantees. Which is probably why unordered_map always uses malloc to store objects, and which drove a stake through my own attempt to avoid malloc :(So, restoring malloc in there has had obvious severe consequences to performance. ...
Friday 1st August 2014: 9.03pm. After three weeks of very tedious searching for a needle in a haystack at the dayjob, a 24 hour unit soak test starting from build #480 shows just one failure under all packet loss testing scenarios which happens to be a random OS failure. Tonight I shall break my diet and eat real food + drink beer! ...
Sunday 3rd August 2014: 1.54am. It's taken four weekends of effort to get that (almost) sea of green for the newly rebuilt CI for the newly modularised proposed Boost.AFIO as the modularisation broke the old CI config so badly I decided I might as well begin afresh with a much more orchestrated and scripted automation. I've learned an enormous amount about modularised Boost, Jenkins and how clang 3.4 simply does not produce actually working C++ executables on ARMv7 - yes, 3. ...
Wednesday 6th August 2014: 1.10am. Instead of earning money, spent a full two days trying to fix our unstable internet with a new vDSL modem whose firmware I had been tinkering with. I officially give up on that as I'm losing too much money, back to the double NAT with the ISP's piece of shit modem which drops out three or four times a day, it would appear they have locked their service to their modem and only their modem and none other may perform PPPoE CHAP authentication, this is despite them very kindly supplying me with the PPPoE username and password as their TR-069 autoconfig refused to work with my replacement modem :( Grrr . ...
Thursday 7th August 2014: 12.15am. Given all the changes I did Monday and Tuesday when trying to improve internet stability, I finally bit the bullet and rewired the house's network tonight, with it now being 1am and rather later than I expected. Gone is most of the reliance on Homeplug AVs which while they are great and renter friendly, I had a mixed AV1 and AV2 network and that didn't let the AV2's superiority shine e. ...
Wednesday 20th August 2014: 5.27pm. Just got visited by the TV licence inspectors, which I believe is my first time ever in my life. I said we didn't have one because it comes in over the internet, and I showed him my extremely cheap XBMC-on-a-chinese-TV-stick solution which uses an old computer monitor and old computer speakers. He checked there was no connection between it and any form of aerial - which would be hard, as the chinese TV stick has no such ability - and that was that, no €1000 fine for me. ...
Friday 22nd August 2014: 11.32am. Link shared: http://www.exantediet.com Just ordered a second pack of diet food from http://www.exantediet.com/ after being on the first pack for two months. I am not probably the first person anyone thinks of as likely to live off of shakes and soups, in fact I originally started out looking for Soylent (http://www.soylent.me/) the meal replacement drink in Europe. As that stuff hasn't cleared European regulators, I looked for a nearest equivalent - 100% RDA vitamins and minerals, ability to be total food replacement, mostly fibre, protein and fat based to ward off hunger and prevent constipation common with diet products - and that turns out to be Exante Diet in the UK who will mail order you a month's supply for about €130 to Ireland. ...
Sunday 24th August 2014: 1.56am. Just spent most of today upgrading my Plone websites from 4.2.1 to 4.3.3. As always, it never goes smoothly and is a pain in the hole. But equally, it's done now, and I don't have to do it again for another two years (yeah, I trail by a major release or more, too much hassle to be newer, even with 4.3 which has been out for ages I had plugins not compatible and I had to go fetch them from trunk and compile them myself). ...
Sunday 31st August 2014: 4.47pm. Location: Curragower Pub Limerick. Decided to go to Limerick for a day out as part of Megan's birthday celebrations. Never actually willingly gone to Limerick before in my life, nor to its city centre ever before. It actually isn't bad, a bit deserted maybe. Weather warm but wet, still I got some okay photos from the turrets of King John's Castle which is Limerick's main defensive and is more impressive than expected. ...
Sunday 31st August 2014: 11.44pm. Link shared: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/atomic/memory_order Was up till 3.30am on Saturday night deracing proposed boost::concurrent_unordered_map, and I have found myself pondering the problem during the drive to and from Limerick today.valgrind drd and helgrind say the code is absolutely clean. And I believe those tools, yet the ThreadSanitiser reports 15Mb of warnings. I initially dismissed the tool as surely producing false positives, but that many???It occurs to me that proposed concurrent_unordered_map probably is definitely race free on Intel CPUs - not hard as those are strongly ordered where all memory loads are acquires and all memory writes are releases with no extra effort. ...
Tuesday 2nd September 2014: 9.02am. Location: Dromahane. Three month's worth of breakfast and lunch arrived. The weight loss has finally begun after the first two months of stasis, so this past month have lost 3 kg (6.6lbs), or about 1.65 lbs per week. 13kg to go, so three months from now should be getting quite close ... ...
Wednesday 3rd September 2014: 11.00pm. Just spent the past 90 minutes mostly fishing through our bin for a part out of the coffee grinder I was disassembling which fell in there. Real nasty. After nearly gacking, decided I could fake the part using cardboard instead. Speaking of which, I am not feeling love towards coffee grinders right now, our one is an expensive fully automatic Breville Smart which cost me three hundred dollars factory refurbished second hand back when I had money in Canada. ...
Sunday 7th September 2014: 5.09pm. Location: Walton on the Naze. First time the poor thing has ever been sick! Just a head cold, still not bad making a six month run without any illness. ...
Monday 8th September 2014: 12.19pm. Location: Walton Pier Co Ltd. Sun finally came out so we took a walk along Walton pier. Apart from the lack of sleep and the damp you get in mobile homes, it's been an okay family reunion. ...
Thursday 11th September 2014: 7.08pm. Location: Dromahane. Link shared: https://github.com/ptal/expected/pull/69 Just got proposed experimental::expected<T, E> working on Visual Studio 14 CTP 3. This is a fairly heavy generalised constexpr C++14 library proposed for C++17, and it happily segfaulted Microsoft's compiler and blew it up in all sorts of fun ways. With a bit of working around and disabling constexpr completely, it compiles and passes all unit tests. Took two days of head scratching though. ...
Monday 15th September 2014: 3.59pm. Been struggling to get my brain into gear to write out the spec for my contract renewal which would be for a reliable messaging library extending Boost.ASIO, as it's my last week of the existing contract and I need to come up with some unified document coalescing an awful lot of disparate feedback, most of which is from people all coming from totally different angles and assumptions. ...
Tuesday 16th September 2014: 11.10am. Location: Dromahane. Got this year's Google Summer of Code T-shirt. Not massively liking the new design, especially the lack of anything on the front. ...
Thursday 18th September 2014: 7.29am. Location: Dromahane. Clara decides to wake up at 7.30am today. Megan claims I snored all night, so she's my problem not hers. I only managed to get to bed at half one due to needing to clear my personal email backlog ... So my second last day of my contract is going to be tough going ... Will have logged over 200 hours this month, which is a lot for contracting for which I would consider 140 hours a heavy month (remember you don't get paid for lunch or state holidays, so a forty hour week permie equals about 32 contracting in terms of daily effort). ...
Saturday 20th September 2014: 1.14pm. Location: Dromahane. As it always is with vacation time as an adult with responsibilities, I have a long list of tedious chores I have been putting off to do which is a bit like work but you don't get paid - certainly in my case where I can work when I want, if these chores had any attraction I'd have done them already instead of putting them off in some cases for a year now (it's weird to think how just thirteen months ago I was still working for BlackBerry in Canada! ...
Saturday 20th September 2014: 4.19pm. Location: Dromahane. New bed for Clara. That crib we bought didn't last long, she already thraps herself off the sides at night because it's too narrow to roll onto her sides. This much larger thing with pocket sprung fancy mattress and parent back strengthening depth should give much more freedom to turn over at night. And hopefully a comfy sleep on what is a very good mattress actually, I tried it and I was impressed. ...
Monday 22nd September 2014: 10.16am. Location: Dromahane. First weekday of my week long vacation. Was woken at 7.50am by the postman, which I had been expecting which is why I went to bed early - besides I was surprisingly tired after we went to the donkey sanctuary yesterday (one of the largest in the British Isles is near us) and we saw a very large number of donkeys, all of whom seem to very much enjoy humans pawing them which surprised me given their origins. ...
Monday 22nd September 2014: 10.45pm. Location: Dromahane. Persuaded the bin man to let me chuck about fifty large flattened cardboard boxes into the back of his bin lorry today (in Ireland waste collection is privatised and the crew operate a very tight schedule, they can personally lose wages if they exceed their time quota, so they tend to not be accommodating about anything not in a bin). I actually jammed his squashing mechanism briefly such was the amount of cardboard . ...
Wednesday 24th September 2014: 2.44pm. Location: The Goat Street Bistro. Very, very lucky with the weather today on the Dingle peninsula. Forecast was for dull overcast rain! ...
Friday 26th September 2014: 1.43am. Getting towards the end of my week long vacation ... and the chores are getting harder! There has been something subtly wrong with our internet here for a long time, but I could never quite put my finger on it. A few days ago I got annoyed that incoming phone calls to the house phone didn't present audio - stupid double NAT strikes again - so I resolved to actually do something about it, which culminated in me declaring defeat in persuading that crap residential vDSL modem from Magnet Broadband to behave itself, and simply ordering a Business Broadband connection not encumbered by all that crap instead. ...
Friday 26th September 2014: 7.15pm. Location: Dromahane. One of my chores of today was to permanently fix the toilet seat in addition to mowing grass back and front. I bought this nice oak wooden seat a month or two so to replace the one which came with the house whose hinge snapped. Last week this new seat with its "unbreakable hinges with 10 year guarantee" according to its packet also snapped a hinge :) so we got a new all brass full cross bar hinge from Amazon rather than those cheap hinges it came with, and today I took some hours to fit it to the wooden seat and lid with extra rim support to hopefully take some of the load off the hinges in future. ...
Saturday 27th September 2014: 8.16pm. Location: Dromahane. Finished my last chore of my vacation week of doing nothing but chores and playing computer games, and it was the biggest chore of all: putting the ever growing pile of old electronics on eBay. Been at it since 11am this morning and it's 9pm now ... You might think it shouldn't take so long, but every item needs secure erasing, updating to latest, finding all its original packaging and me trying to write a reasonable description of its life history and any problems with it with photos. ...
Sunday 28th September 2014: 12.15pm. My last day of my week long vacation - which is possibly a candidate for one of the most productive unpaid weeks of my life! It looks like my contract with MaidSafe will be renewed, so that is the next six months ahead looking clear. I've started to retain money in the company to prepare for the end of the tax year, a large DWT tax payment is likely due because of close company rules on taxable benefits, and I'd rather be under than over at the end of the year otherwise you have to ask for taxes overpaid back, which I'd prefer to avoid. ...
Monday 29th September 2014: 1.50pm. Location: Dromahane. Finished Saints Row 4 last night, it took me just under 17 hours spread out over this past week of vacation. It is, for once given how the games industry buys overly positive reviews, a much better game than its top 250 position by aggregate critic review would suggest - by rights it should be at least top 50, especially as borrows heavily from (whilst openly mocking) the format of Mass Effect 2 and in a good way. ...
Thursday 2nd October 2014: 10.22pm. Location: Dromahane. Spent the last few hours shearing through metal plate with metal cutting pliers to create this hole for a new graphics card. They just seem to keep getting longer don't they ... This one is nearly a foot long, I know it has 3gb of RAM but still ... Reminds me of the old fashioned ISA full length AT graphics cards. Anyway I made the hole especially big, hopefully will never ever have this problem ever again! ...
Friday 3rd October 2014: 11.39am. Ended up awake until 4am last night despite it being a work day today. Yeah that hole I cut for the video card, it was actually too small ... And of course it took some hours to rebuild the computer (which is also my development workstation) because all the cable routing had changed very significantly with me fashioning an 8 pin power connector for the card out of a 6 pin and two ATA connectors (so tons and tons of new wiring), and it's not like the Antec Solo (the model of case) is spacious because it is most definitely not. ...
Sunday 5th October 2014: 2.50am. You might remember I recently installed a new graphics card plus I bought the DLC for Saints Row 4 (I'm going to miss that game, it was fun), so tonight being my sole non-working tomorrow night of freedom I played the DLCs. And wow is that new graphics card astonishing ... it's an XFX R9 280 Black Edition which is the factory overclocked by 17% model, so the very top range R9 280 there is, and normally costing a premium except that all the 280's saw huge price cuts this month as they are clearing the shelves for its replacement the 285, so I picked up the Black Edition for a song (just €30 more than the absolute cheapest) and had it delivered to Ireland for less than €180 ex VAT, a real steal given what those cards used to cost, and they deliver the same performance as cards costing about €250 ex VAT upwards right now. ...
Wednesday 15th October 2014: 11.35am. Gave up on working yesterday as Clara had kept us up all night Monday night, and I was sufficiently tired yesterday there was no point in trying to work with computer code. It made me think though, if I weren't my own company I'd have been obliged to go to work where my day would have been quite literally a waste of time for everybody, and I would probably have been in a mood and snapped at someone, thus damaging morale and helping to create a negative work atmosphere. ...
Thursday 16th October 2014: 10.39am. Location: Dromahane. Nexus 6 32Gb is going to cost €550 when the Nexus 5 32Gb is €400? I am seriously struggling with that ... I was going to get Megan the Nexus 6 for Christmas but over €500 for a phone is beyond my budget ... If there were a less expensive option with Google support and updates I'd take it :(. Nothing wrong with the Nexus 5 of course, but I am disappointed. ...
Friday 17th October 2014: 5.22pm. Lost power today at 4.09pm due to storms and it came back at 5.49pm. The UPS running the essential stuff ran out at 4.43pm, so it lasted 34 mins. Them batteries are getting old, I'm going to have to buy new ones soon :(
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Monday 20th October 2014: 2.40am. So what weird contraption is this that I have built this weekend? It's basically a webcam on a tall stand ... the second picture shows its utility, and the third and fourth pictures show it in action where as you can see you get a Full HD high resolution 1080p picture, including in pitch darkness, and the fifth picture is actually Clara sleeping right at this very moment in a very dark room. ...
Sunday 26th October 2014: 8.35am. Location: Dromahane. Not the happiest bunny this morning. Her first night in her life without milk, she's only had pureed food since yesterday afternoon and not much of it at that. She didn't sleep particularly well either as she didn't get her normal comfort feeds, and only very sullenly took six or seven spoons about 4am last night after pouting for an hour. I am definitely an inferior substitute to her mother (who is in Killarney). ...
Sunday 26th October 2014: 12.55pm. So she was getting increasingly cranky during the morning despite me changing her nappy, filling her to the brim with baby food and naps. Nothing would console her, until I gave her an onion bahji and nan bread which she devoured, and she is looking very happy again. Obviously she prefers real food over baby food. You'd think they'd make baby food out of real food wouldn't you? ...
Tuesday 28th October 2014: 10.50am. Location: Dromahane. The virtualization software for my cloud node Proxmox finally released a fix for running 64 bit BSD in virtual machines on Intel Haswell CPUs like mine (let this be a lesson: never use latest edition hardware for infrastructure computers! It's not worth the added hassle!). And so last night I was finally able to upgrade the virtual machine providing our central reliable ZFS data store to something less castrated, as the lack of 64 bit had forced me onto a really ancient BSD version, the last one reasonably reliable with ZFS on 32 bit (the 8 series) and with memory settings so restrictive that performance was dire. ...
Wednesday 5th November 2014: 2.57pm. Link shared: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net Started seeing hard read errors on the cloud node in the ZFS mirror set recently. Turns out my oldest hard drive in that cloud node (excluding the Samsung 830 SSD, I don't think that will ever get old) at a venerable 1.92 years of being switched on has started to see Raw Read Errors. Poo, that means I'll need to replace it, it's so tedious :(Still, I once again have much gratititude to FreeNAS for regularly testing drives every two weeks for this stuff and emailing me to tell me of the problem, and of course it's on a mirror pair, so no data loss is expected. ...
Friday 7th November 2014: 5.08pm. Link shared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ello_%28social_network%29 Anyone want to be invited to join Ello (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ello_%28social_network%29)? I just got in finally, and supposedly it's the social network which will displace Facebook. I will say its content is very arty and graphical, a bit like Pinterest fused with a social network, and you definitely find yourself browsing the stream for far longer than you could be bothered with Google or especially Facebook since 50% of the content on Facebook is some form of advertising. ...
Friday 14th November 2014: 7.10pm. Location: Dromahane. Upgraded to android 5.0. Relatively seamless and no problems with crashing Google apps after which I think is actually a first ever. To succeed you have to undo any custom bootloaders before it will work, and then after enabling root takes considerable effort (patching the kernel which no longer lets root "take hold"). Kinda annoyed it took a lot longer than expected, I lost quite a few work hours, I had thought I could get work done as it worked in the background :( ...
Friday 14th November 2014: 9.14pm. Link shared: https://www.backblaze.com/blog-smart-stats-2014-8.html This link gives you the correlation between hard drive diagnostics and actual failure - kinda appropriate for me given I have a hard drive giving hard read errors and a rising raw error count. Turns out read errors, even hard ones, have little correlation to imminent drive death. The uncorrected error count though is amazing - as soon as it goes from zero to one your drive has a 70% chance of dying this next year! ...
Saturday 15th November 2014: 2.31pm. Location: Dromahane. Woke up this morning definitely sick with headache and drippy nose. First time with head cold in a long long time though, I was surprised at how far past the expiry date all my flu medicines are, I guess I must be getting healthier or something these recent years.
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Monday 17th November 2014: 8.56am. The house next door is up for sale: €75,000 asking, so probably less than seventy. There are advantages to the Irish economic crash ... Imagine no more rent to pay and mortgage fully paid off after ten years! Still, it's too small for us, even this house which is much bigger and with nicer trim feels cramped. I can only imagine what losing the garage and 20% of your floor space would be like. ...
Tuesday 18th November 2014: 12.42pm. Location: Dromahane. Spent a few days with Android 5.0 now. Best parts are the enormous improvement in battery life (40%!) and notifications, plus the face unlock is actually usable now. Worst part is lots of new random stalls during use which I assume is lack of RAM - it's starting to feel like my Galaxy Nexus did before it was retired. Poor Megan's Nexus 4 is really clunking along after the upgrade to 5. ...
Monday 24th November 2014: 12.37am. Relented today and turned on the heating to run four times per day from now on. Up till now it only ran first thing in the morning, after that you light a fire if you want heat. It's been a warm autumn, but it's below freezing outside at nighttimes now, and that means where Clara sleeps was getting down to 14 C or so which is probably as cold as a nine month old should sleep in. ...
Saturday 6th December 2014: 3.02pm. A funny thing, reliability. After my first full month of Magnet Business Broadband, my xDSL reliability has shot up to 99.51% up from about 83% on the residential service. Guess at which point the Business Broadband SLA pays out compensation? Yep, < 99.5%. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to have a working internet, but it's still annoying when it drops out on me, though in fairness I can now safely ring somebody with a good expectation the call won't get cut off. ...
Sunday 7th December 2014: 11.56pm. Just paid €351 to Allianz for next year's car insurance for me and Megan, fully comp, full NCD protect (60% discount!), can drive any car, but no windscreen, no breakdown, no personal insurance and an excess of €500 on a 14 year old car barely worth €1000. It came down to between AIG and Allianz who were about equal price wise, but AIG required you to install their app on your phone and always take it with you when driving. ...
Friday 12th December 2014: 3.15am. Location: Dromahane. Last day of work for me in 2014 is tomorrow, and this Monday we depart to the States for Christmas. Despite not getting many paid hours in these last few weeks (Megan is sick so I get extra Clara duty, and I'm not feeling particularly well myself either, I have a sore throat and I haven't been able to breath well through my nose for some weeks), I raised a comprehensive build test matrix for Boost Thread this week. ...
Sunday 28th December 2014: 11.54am. Location: Topaz. You always forget how tough it is driving distance after a transatlantic flight eastward, it's oddly much easier the other way going to the States from Europe. Currently as far as Cashel, so two thirds done and stocking up on coffee and cake before the final push home to bed. Gorgeous day though, sunny but icy and cold, and it's a Sunday so traffic is okay. ...
Tuesday 30th December 2014: 6.02pm. Location: Dromahane. It's 6pm and I have just woken up after 16 hours of continuous sleep. Obviously I was very tired and much more so than I had realised so this isn't a bad thing, but today was supposed to have been a work day as I have to run end of year accounts and payroll :(Also, weirdly, lots of things are aching. Teeth, muscles, hands, eyes and I'm very stuffy. ...
Thursday 1st January 2015: 9.38pm. Just woken after another twelve hours of sleep, and unfortunately I am still on US time :(. Now accounts and taxes are mostly done and new year celebrated, next step is clearing an enormous email backlog. I expect this to take all of today :(
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Friday 2nd January 2015: 2.04am. Ok, here's hoping that the Google Plus to Facebook post conversion is working again after many months of being broken. Meanwhile, despite waking at 8pm after twelve hours of sleep I am feeling exhausted, so about to eat something and go to bed. Maybe tomorrow I return to a European body clock at last?
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Friday 9th January 2015: 11.44pm. Link shared: http://www.s21.com/samsung-ue40h6400.htm Just dropped €500 all inclusive on a new 40" Samsung UE40H6470 television, which oddly enough is only the second TV I have ever bought in my life. The 6470 is essentially a 6400 with additional satellite and cable tuners and it's a Central European model, and therefore for some reason €150-250 cheaper than the closest UK/Irish equivalent which is the 6500 despite being better specced. ...
Tuesday 13th January 2015: 11.00am. Location: Dromahane. Last night was one of those annoying nights where you go to bed at a good time expecting to sleep well, and then for absolutely no good reason you don't sleep until 3am and you wake up exhausted. I wish I could say there was a cause, but no there is none, not even Clara or a rich dinner. Poo.
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Wednesday 14th January 2015: 12.24am. Location: Dromahane. You know the Nexus 5 camera on Android 5 is really remarkable if the camera app allows it. Below is the rare Irish snow to stay settled outside at midnight using RAW image capture by the L Android camera app. Exposure time was 0.8 seconds, ISO 400 for the front images (the orange ones), ISO 1000 for the back. As a comparator, the last photo is the best the standard Android camera can do i. ...
Wednesday 14th January 2015: 10.25am. Location: Dromahane. Really amazing the snow didn't melt last night, but it sure is melting now. I gather from the noise outside that none of the local children nor teenagers have gone to school today! ...
Wednesday 14th January 2015: 9.17pm. Location: Dromahane. I think I know why I didn't sleep well recently, today got sore throat, drippy nose and swollen breathing passages, and of course a headache. Must have caught it during Sunday shopping :( The annoying thing is I only was just being to feel normal again after whatever I caught during the flight home from the States which knocked all the energy out of me for two weeks. ...
Sunday 18th January 2015: 12.32am. Location: Dromahane. My very clever fiancé found this beer whilst in the States - it's one of my favorites from our time in Canada, a spiced Quebecois triple fermented ale, which unlike what the mediocre stuff Americans call "Belgian style", I think any Belgian brewery would be proud to call this their own. And it's called La Fin Du Monde for a good reason . ...
Wednesday 21st January 2015: 8.45pm. Location: Dromahane. New TV finally turned up, the photos show after and before. I do wish it were bigger personally, but of the much reduced price German quad core six series Samsung's I had the choice between only 40" and 48", and the latter would add three inches to each side which unfortunately wouldn't fit. Anyway I got it converted from German to UK with a bit of work, to get access to the sufficiently privileged service menu had to program my Logitech Harmony remote with a special factory settings IR code found on the internet. ...
Friday 23rd January 2015: 1.31am. Been using our new 40" Samsung 6H series Smart TV for a few days now. Pros:+ I can actually see the screen now compared to the 24" monitor.- I can now easily tell the difference between standard and hi def, and most of Freesat is still low quality standard def and despite the TV's postprocessing to make it not quite so crappy, you just get a fuzzy soft image instead. ...
Saturday 24th January 2015: 3.59am. Link shared: https://boards.4chan.org/b/catalog Just learned about 4chan /b/ (https://boards.4chan.org/b/catalog) for the first time - I knew about 4chan, not about the /b/ isn't that weird? Yes the randomness of the content burned my old tired brain. And yes I am very, very old and out of touch for not knowing it has been around for like a decade now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#.2Fb.2F_imageboard). I genuinely feel like how I think my father must feel like right now. ...
Monday 26th January 2015: 12.20am. Link shared: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trekcontinues/star-trek-continues-2015-kirkstarter-20 Pledged my first ever Kickstarter, a whole US$75!, to the hobbyists at Star Trek Continues, who make in their spare time eerily authentic additional episodes to the original 1960s Star Trek (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trekcontinues/star-trek-continues-2015-kirkstarter-20). Lighting, sets, dialogue, mini skirt uniforms and 1960s crazy stories are all very close to the originals. Acting isn't bad, especially amongst the principals, I think the only major deviation is the audio quality where the use of modern sound equipment is very obvious, plus occasionally the set creaks noticeably and they missed it during post production audio filtering. ...
Saturday 31st January 2015: 2.12pm. Location: Dromahane. Two days ago my work computer stopped booting due to the brittleness of getting all three of Windows, Linux and FreeBSD to triple boot on the same machine. Because Windows and BSD require a primary partition each and Windows wants another primary partition for its boot manager, that consumes all four primary partitions available on MBR partitioning and you end up having to construct brittle chains of multi stage boot loaders. ...
Thursday 5th February 2015: 12.26am. Location: Dromahane. Replaced the under counter lighting which had blown a bulb yet again with this snazzy LED kit off Amazon. Consumes just 12w versus the fifty something of the old tube bulb one so I no longer will be annoyed when Megan leaves it turned on all the time. Note the remote control brightness adjustment, there are actually several "party" flashing modes too which vary between slow fade in and out or a strobe (speed is adjustable). ...
Saturday 7th February 2015: 6.13pm. Just spent a few hours scratching my head about how to install a custom FreeBSD kernel on a ZFS on root install. It turns out that your boot config lives in its own self contained ZFS snapshot which is managed by a utility called 'beadm'. The idea is if you screw up, when you revert to an older boot you really do genuinely get an unmodified undamaged previous boot config. ...
Monday 16th February 2015: 12.01am. Just cleared two weeks of email backlog. About the same time that I have been burning the midnight oil staying up after Megan and Clara go to bed trying to get the next release of proposed Boost.AFIO out the door ... and it is still not there, nor will it be for many more nights :(. I have bought myself a raft of alcohol which is to be my reward after I finish and ship the release - until then, I get to look at it and not touch a drop, maybe it might aid motivation. ...
Monday 23rd February 2015: 5.45pm. Location: Dromahane. We now have the ability to store frozen food. And more than two days of fresh food for that matter. And with added chilled water! Frost free for both freezer and fridge, including delivery came to just under €400 from Argos who are clearing them out so 150 cheaper than usual, the water dispenser made this model quite hard to sell actually. Build quality is cheap but not terrible, plastics are thin but rough edges are hidden, I will say the heat exchanger on the back is barely attached though and would fall off with the first tap. ...
Thursday 26th February 2015: 4.12am. Link shared: http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd First time in a long time I've seen a Dell laptop I liked the look of: the new Dell XPS 13. My current laptop is an ex corporate Dell E6410 I imported from the US for €200, and with a new battery and dock I got a very robust if a bit legacy setup for €300. I've no complaints with this laptop for the price, it does everything I want and more, but the heft of the thing annoys me, as does the truly dreadful colour reproduction on its display panel. ...
Friday 27th February 2015: 10.56pm. Location: Dromahane. We've had the ability to store frozen food for five days now, but only just got to buying our first frozen food. Clara already understands which is ice cream! I'm sure once she has the teeth for pizza she'll show interest in that too! ...
Tuesday 3rd March 2015: 1.30pm. Woke up after particularly little sleep last night to find a sea of green on the AFIO CI dashboard as you can see below (yes, the number of test targets is very considerably higher now, plus there is now official support for Apple OS X/iOS and Android). Which was a surprise actually. Megan returned to work four weeks ago now, and I was supposed to have shipped AFIO v1. ...
Sunday 8th March 2015: 4.00am. This is our new water filter which replaces an Aqua Optima jug (a cheaper variant of a Brita jug) as I personally find our tap water quite unpleasant (though nothing like as bad as in Madrid or Waterloo Canada in the summer when the reservoirs were low). That our tap water should not be beautiful is surprising as the water is pumped from a 60m borehole into the bedrock literally just outside our house, and it comes through Devionian Old Red Sandstone and ought to be as pure as you get, with the only likely risk being nitrates and pesticides from the surrounding agriculture. ...
Tuesday 10th March 2015: 12.27am. Rather irritated to discover that Amazon UK will no longer sell you bulk cheap nappies unless you subscribe to their Prime service :(. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely no way they weren't making a loss by the time they had sent a large box to Ireland from the UK for Super Saver Free Delivery when the nappies cost less than £20 and the last time I tried sending a similar sized box from here to the UK cost me €40 with An Post, but still it was convenient and cheap. ...
Thursday 12th March 2015: 8.56pm. Megan and Clara are away till Sunday. I have a release of a Boost library to finish by then. It's already only six weeks behind schedule ... Bleh!
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Monday 16th March 2015: 12.39am. Cloud node hanged itself for a second time recently today. Network got stuck again, which makes it very hard to shutdown or reboot and you end up having to pull the plug which always makes me very nervous, especially when watching the fsck repair the damage to your drives during boot :(. Removed all virtio network drivers in all the virtual machines to see if that makes a difference. ...
Monday 16th March 2015: 6.57am. Six weeks have now passed with me staying up till 5am each night on top of the day job working on proposed Boost AFIO to finish it to a release quality for the v1.3 release. Probably 200 extra hours invested or so now on what was supposed to be almost ready to go, absolutely crazy. I had originally thought maybe a week or two maximum so get it out the door, I was in fact very wrong. ...
Wednesday 18th March 2015: 5.02am. Location: Dromahane. So why have I just opened a bottle of Inis and Gunn beer at ten to five am? Well I just shipped v1.3 of proposed Boost AFIO after six never ending weeks of working till 5am night after night somehow achieved with a job and a family and without me getting sick for once (last year it was RSI, thankfully held at bay so far this year). ...
Monday 23rd March 2015: 12.24am. Cloud node hanged itself again today, this being the second time this week :(. This was after me doing a lot of work removing anything which could be the cause the previous two times. I thought back to when all this began happening and realised it was about when I upgraded to FreeNAS 9.3 for the ZFS store. Which adds NFSv4 support. Which could be why the hangs are very likely to occur during the weekly (Sunday) backup of all the VMs. ...
Thursday 26th March 2015: 12.41pm. Location: Dromahane. Added 50% to the value of our fifteen year old car with this hideously expensive new car seat for Clara which ought to last her till she is four. As you can see, it faces backwards - this is one of the extended rear facing toddler seats so expensive in Britain and Ireland as we don't have a tradition of facing toddlers backwards here, unlike in Europe where in some countries it is illegal for them to face forwards before age five (facing backwards is five times safer for toddlers). ...
Friday 3rd April 2015: 1.55am. See the glowing red power button on my dev workstation below? It's red when the computer is sleeping and blue, like the rest of the panel, when the computer is running. That's been a two month long odyssey to implement :), plus I ended up spending €50 on a power LED, rather considerably more than I had hoped.Anyway, just in case anyone else has their power LED - or any other LED - suddenly die on them let me tell you what you actually need to fix this. ...
Saturday 4th April 2015: 8.36pm. Just emailed off the very early outline of a white paper proposing APIs for asynchronous file byte range locking on Linux and POSIX ... and with that, I am now on "true vacation" rather than the past two weeks of "not earning money but still working as if I was vacation" preparing for my C++ Now conference presentation. Man, those two weeks just evaporated as if they were nothing . ...
Monday 6th April 2015: 10.59pm. Location: Ballyrobin Country Lodge. I thought traveling with babies got easier as they aged. Turns out actually they need more entertaining as they age. First day of real vacation down and we are exhausted!
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Tuesday 7th April 2015: 6.04pm. Location: Carrick-a-Rede. Earlier today at that world famous "the Irish rope bridge" as if there is only the one of them. Still, nice to get some air outside away from a computer for once, as it's a good hike to get to the bridge ...
Tuesday 7th April 2015: 6.13pm. Location: Adelphi Portrush. Last night was surprisingly restful for a hotel in Aldergrove which is where Belfast International Airport lives, we aren't tired today which is a huge help. Tonight is one of our fancy hotel nights at the Adelphi Portrush. As you can see we have two rooms in our rental and I think Clara is the happiest of the three of us with the space to explore as you can also see. ...
Wednesday 8th April 2015: 5.44pm. Location: Greenan Mountain. On the way between Derry and the hotel in Letterkenny we thought we'd have a look at a 5th century mountain fort, formerly a high kings location. You can see five counties from it, and the weather this week so far made the view spectacular. ...
Thursday 9th April 2015: 4.49pm. Location: Glenveagh National Park. Earlier today cycling around Lough Beagh with Clara and Megan. As you can see, the weather was spectacular. As was the scenery and lake. ...
Thursday 9th April 2015: 7.55pm. Location: Lough Eske Castle, a Solís Hotel & Spa. Probably the fanciest hotel of this vacation, this is indeed a very nice hotel in Donegal indeed. Stunning scenery, onsite massage, swimming pool, gym, rainfall showers, and each room is more like a self contained flat. Two restaurants, both excellent. We went somewhere like this during our engagement in Galway which was excellent and Galway's only five star hotel, but this so far is better I think. ...
Sunday 12th April 2015: 2.59am. Location: Lough Mask. Some of the views of Lough Mask on the way home from Westport in County Mayo which was our last night of vacation. An Atlantic front was closing in, so we were losing the great weather we had all week. ...
Sunday 12th April 2015: 4.03am. Our vacation according to Google. We stayed in a different hotel each night, each had something distinctively good about it as one would expect given we chose from internet rankings only the very top rated locations (8.5 out of 10 or higher):Ballyrobin Country Lodge in Aldergrove Northern Ireland: the most affordable stay of our trip at less than 100 euro. Punched far above its weight, here was as good as others costing twice as much. ...
Monday 13th April 2015: 1.13am. Link shared: https://www.joylent.eu/ Probably most people reading this have heard of Soylent, the powdered meal replacement currently the fashion with computer programmery types. These may look like either diet shakes or protein shakes favoured by body builders, however they are probably much better for you than either of those as they aim for a totally nutritionally balanced meal replacement, so exactly 100% RDA of everything nutritious plus exactly 100% of RDA calories. ...
Wednesday 15th April 2015: 8.35pm. Location: Dromahane. Grand Theft Auto V for the PC finally arrived. It had been bought for me by Megan for my birthday in January, and yes it's now April. As you can see, it comes on no less than 7 DVDs, which makes it about 60Gb of game. Reminds me of when games (and Windows) took like twenty CDs to install. And it came too late for my mid contract vacation, so it'll have to wait until October unfortunately. ...
Sunday 19th April 2015: 6.12pm. Weather is definitely improving. It was quite pleasant drinking coffee in the sun this afternoon before the day's work began. ...
Wednesday 22nd April 2015: 12.29am. Link shared: http://www.rust-lang.org/ As part of the day job I’ve started to learn the +Rust programming language (http://www.rust-lang.org/) and I thought I’d keep a reflective journal as I worked through the examples and started writing my first Rust code. #Rust #RustLang Bear in mind in the following discussion I have just 20 hours of practice with no experience beforehand, and I’m coming from C/C++ background and as a +Boost C++ library developer and maintainer. ...
Friday 24th April 2015: 8.56am. Location: Cork Airport. On my way to the ACCU conference in Bristol. Feeling quite under the weather due to a chest infection, but as this is an already sunk cost will have to persevere and I hope I can grab a quick power nap this afternoon before I need to go perform tonight.
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Saturday 25th April 2015: 7.39am. Location: Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre. Took an early night at the ACCU conference which was a shame as the Bloomberg sponsored bar was just livening up, but I was exhausted. Today is the last and my only day here. Not sure what talks I'll go to at all, I either have a very deep understanding of the topic or I have no interest nor need :(#accu ...
Thursday 30th April 2015: 1.43pm. Been knocked for six since the ACCU conference last weekend with something viral - with a constant pounding headache I struggle to stay awake more than three or four hours before needing yet more sleep, and I have zero ability to concentrate which makes doing email or expenses very tough - and forget about programming, or particularly important given the lack of remaining time, my C++ Now Presentation which remains only half finished. ...
Sunday 3rd May 2015: 3.35am. Just finished my C++ Now 2015 presentation with exactly one week to go! Currently 90 slides for a 90 minute long presentation, I had originally been worried I'd be boring but I think, even if I do say so myself, that this will be one of the more interesting talks at C++ Now this year. It reviews ten C++ 11/14 only libraries close to entering Boost, three of which in detail (Boost. ...
Monday 4th May 2015: 12.59am. Link shared: https://queal.eu/ Went to my box of Joylent to prepare tomorrow's work food and realised I have just three bags left! So I ordered a refill, this time banana flavour, and I also thought I'd try out their main competitor in Europe which is Queal. Queal costs €10 more for the powder, but €8 less for the P&P to Ireland so the price actually came out almost the same. ...
Thursday 7th May 2015: 4.05pm. Link shared: http://cppnow2015.sched.org/event/37beb4ec955c082f70729e4f6d1a1a05#.VUuMqvkUUuU As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 1 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:1. CONVENIENCE: Strongly consider using git and GitHub to host a copy of your library and its documentationThere are many source code control systems, with subversion and CVS being the two most recently popular of yesteryear. ...
Thursday 7th May 2015: 4.11pm. Link shared: http://cppnow2015.sched.org/event/37beb4ec955c082f70729e4f6d1a1a05#.VUuMqvkUUuU As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 2 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:2. COUPLING: Strongly consider versioning your library's namespace using inline namespaces and requesting users to alias a versioned namespace instead of using it directlyC++ 11 adds a new feature called inline namespaces which are far more powerful than they first appear:namespace boost { namespace afio { inline namespace v1 { /* stuff */ } } }// Stuff is generated at the ABI link layer in boost::afio::v1// But to the compiler everything boost::afio::v1::* appears identically in boost::afio::*// INCLUDING for ADL and overload resolution// In other words you can declare your code in boost::afio::v1, and use it as if declared in boost::afio. ...
Friday 8th May 2015: 10.27am. Link shared: http://cppnow2015.sched.org/event/37beb4ec955c082f70729e4f6d1a1a05#.VUuMqvkUUuU As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 3 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:3. PORTABILITY: Strongly consider trying your library on Microsoft Visual Studio 2015More than half the libraries reviewed had no support for Microsoft Visual Studio, and only supported GCC and clang. When the authors were asked why, in many cases it was simply assumed that MSVC didn't implement much C++ 11/14 and the authors hadn't attempted MSVC support. ...
Saturday 9th May 2015: 12.28am. Link shared: http://cppnow2015.sched.org/event/37beb4ec955c082f70729e4f6d1a1a05#.VUuMqvkUUuU As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 4 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:4. QUALITY: Strongly consider using free CI per-commit testing, even if you have a private CIDespite that Travis provides free of cost per-commit continuous integration testing for Linux and OS X, and that Appveyor provides the same for Microsoft Windows, there were still libraries in those reviewed which made use of neither and furthermore had no per-commit CI testing whatsoever. ...
Saturday 9th May 2015: 7.51am. Location: Shannon Airport. On plane ready to depart Ireland for Aspen. Should arrive about eighteen hours from now, having not slept at all last night. This plane from United is unfortunately much smaller than usual, indeed it's positively sized for short European flights with a corresponding lack of elbow space plus my legs are against the next seat. Thank God I'm short!
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Saturday 9th May 2015: 3.48pm. Location: Newark Liberty International Airport. Next leg to Denver, Colorado. My am I tired, haven't slept now in thirty something hours :(
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Saturday 9th May 2015: 9.54pm. Location: Denver International Airport. Final leg to Aspen. Storms caused a reroute making us late into Denver. Had to eat a McDonalds whilst walking to the gate, it's been quite a few years since I last did that, very stressful. Anyway here just in the nick of time. By the way, domestic flights here in the US are a bit of a ripoff. Seven euros for a Heineken! ...
Saturday 9th May 2015: 11.55pm. Location: Denver International Airport. Weather suddenly turned here in Colorado and we couldn't land in Aspen due to zero visibility. Had to return to Denver. Almost exactly a repeat of last year!
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Sunday 10th May 2015: 1.58am. Location: Embassy Suites Denver-International Airport. So flight to Aspen couldn't land due to the weather changing and we had to return to Denver. I'm actually sitting in the exact same hotel from when this happened last year. I was impressed then for the price. I still am - half the cost of Aspen Meadows for much bigger and nicer rooms. Nice hotel this for a chain, well executed. ...
Monday 11th May 2015: 12.18am. Location: Aspen Meadows Resort. Finally to the conference! Apologies for not posting more of the guide, that should resume later tonight.
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Monday 11th May 2015: 6.01pm. Link shared: http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/scan-build.html As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 5 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:5. QUALITY: Strongly consider per-commit compiling your code with static analysis toolsIn Travis and Appveyor it is easy to configure a special build job which uses the clang static analyser on Linux/OS X and the MSVC static analyser on Windows. ...
Monday 11th May 2015: 6.05pm. Link shared: http://cppnow2015.sched.org/event/37beb4ec955c082f70729e4f6d1a1a05#.VUuMqvkUUuU As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 6 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:6. QUALITY/SAFETY: Strongly consider running a per-commit pass of your unit tests under both valgrind and the runtime sanitisersIn Travis it is highly worth adding a special build job which runs your unit tests under:valgrind memcheck (Linux only)This detects illegal reads and writes, use of uninit values, use of unaddressable memory, illegal/double frees, and memory leaks. ...
Monday 11th May 2015: 6.06pm. Link shared: http://llvm.org/docs/LibFuzzer.html As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 7 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:7. SAFETY: Strongly consider a nightly or weekly input fuzz automated test if your library is able to accept untrusted inputIf your library can consume any form of serialisation or parameters supplied from a network or file or query, including any regular expressions or any type of string even if you don't process it yourself and hand it off to another library, then you need to be doing input fuzz testing for a few hours weekly. ...
Monday 11th May 2015: 6.12pm. Link shared: http://cppnow2015.sched.org/event/37beb4ec955c082f70729e4f6d1a1a05#.VUuMqvkUUuU As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 8 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:8. DESIGN: (Strongly) consider using constexpr semantic wrapper transport types to return states from functionsThanks to constexpr and rvalue refs, C++ 11 codebases have much superior ways of returning states from functions. ...
Tuesday 12th May 2015: 5.46pm. Link shared: https://github.com/boostorg/test As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 9 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:9. MAINTENANCE: Consider making it possible to use an XML outputting unit testing framework, even if not enabled by defaultA very noticeable trend in the libraries reviewed above is that around half use good old C assert() and static_assert() instead of a unit testing framework. ...
Tuesday 12th May 2015: 5.49pm. Link shared: http://ispras.linuxbase.org/index.php/API_Sanity_Autotest As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk next week, here is part 10 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:10. DESIGN/QUALITY: Consider breaking up your testing into per-commit CI testing, 24 hour soak testing, and parameter fuzz testingWhen a library is small, you can generally get away with running all tests per commit, and as that is easier that is usually what one does. ...
Wednesday 13th May 2015: 11.10pm. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/Boost.APIBind/blob/master/include/cpp_feature.h As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk this week, here is part 11 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:11. PORTABILITY: Consider not doing compiler feature detection yourselfSomething extremely noticeable about nearly all the reviewed C++ 11/14 libraries is that they manually do compiler feature detection in their config.hpp, usually via old fashioned compiler version checking. ...
Wednesday 13th May 2015: 11.12pm. Link shared: https://coveralls.io/r/krzysztof-jusiak/di?branch=cpp14 As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk this week, here is part 12 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:12. CONVENIENCE: Consider having Travis send your unit test code coverage results to Coveralls.ioThere is quite a neat web service called coveralls.io free for open source projects which graphically displays unit test line coverage in a pretty colour coded source code browser UI. ...
Thursday 14th May 2015: 9.13pm. Link shared: https://boostgsoc13.github.io/boost.afio As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk this week, here is part 13 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:13. CONVENIENCE: Consider creating a status dashboard for your library with everything you need to know shown in one placeI like all-in-one-place software status dashboards where with a quick glance one can tell if there is a problem or not. ...
Friday 15th May 2015: 4.23pm. Link shared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_design As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk this week, here is part 14 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:14. DESIGN: Consider making (more) use of ADL C++ namespace composure as a design patternMost C++ programmers are aware of C++ template policy based design. This example is taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_design:#include <iostream>#include <string> template <typename OutputPolicy, typename LanguagePolicy>class HelloWorld : private OutputPolicy, private LanguagePolicy{ using OutputPolicy::print; using LanguagePolicy::message; public: // Behaviour method void run() const { // Two policy methods print(message()); }}; class OutputPolicyWriteToCout{protected: template<typename MessageType> void print(MessageType const &message) const { std::cout << message << std::endl; }}; class LanguagePolicyEnglish{protected: std::string message() const { return " ...
Tuesday 19th May 2015: 5.00pm. Link shared: https://github.com/sakra/cotire As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk last week, here is part 15 of 20 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:15. BUILD: Consider defaulting to header only, but actively manage facilities for reducing build timesMaking your library header only is incredibly convenient for your users - they simply drop in a copy of your project and get to work, no build system worries. ...
Wednesday 20th May 2015: 11.10am. Link shared: https://queal.eu/ I'm sure you all remember I've been living mostly off of Joylent last few months. Thought I'd try another European near alternative to Soylent, Queal, which I just tried there for breakfast for the first time. As a quick summary: it's not as good. Much more watery and sweet than Joylent which is surprising as it's mainly the same ingredients, except with more whey instead of flaxseed. ...
Wednesday 20th May 2015: 4.01pm. Over the past two years my cloud infrastructure has had 10h 45m offline, or 99.94% reliability.Over the past year my cloud infrastructure has had 1h 10m offline, or 99.9867% reliability.That's not half bad for a hand rolled infrastructure made up of very cheap VPSs and very cheap dedicated servers! Total annual cost is €250 not including my home internet connection (my cloud straddles my home network via a VPN). ...
Saturday 23rd May 2015: 12.51pm. Location: Dromahane. Ireland has become the first nation to make same sex marriage equal by national plebiscite. I must admit a degree of surprise given this is a country where abortion is nearly impossible and drugs are kept much more illegal than most western countries. However divorce here is pretty liberal, so maybe they are liberal about life long unions, deeply conservative about everything else? ...
Tuesday 26th May 2015: 1.47am. Link shared: http://www.startrekcontinues.com/episodes.html Just watched the prerelease of Star Trek Continues Ep. 4 "The White Iris" which I got early access to as part of the Kickstarter. It's their first "feelings" episode. Now, I never much cared for the touchy feely episodes from the original, they were always brutally cringeworthy and I suspect they were brutally cringe even back in the 60s. Original Star Trek was not a subtle show full of realistic emotional scenes! ...
Thursday 28th May 2015: 6.22pm. Link shared: https://github.com/BoostGSoC13/boost.afio/blob/master/include/boost/afio/config.hpp As part of publicising my C++ Now 2015 talk two weeks ago, here is part 16 of 19 from its accompanying Handbook of Examples of Best Practice for C++ 11/14 (Boost) libraries:16. COUPLING: Consider allowing your library users to dependency inject your dependencies on other librariesAs mentioned earlier, the libraries reviewed overwhelmingly chose to use STL11 over any equivalent Boost libraries, so hardcoded std::thread instead of boost::thread, hardcoded std::shared_ptr over boost::shared_ptr and so on. ...
Tuesday 2nd June 2015: 12.17am. Every year I update my graph comparing hard drive bang for the buck to SSD bang for the buck, adjusted for inflation. There is very little new to report this year actually, hard drives are following their regression curve almost exactly, as are SSDs. The change in curve fit for hard drives +0.000113 and for SSDs -0.000045, so tiny - the future projection for SSDs in 2020 improved relative to hard drives by a small bit, but hard drive capacity growth still outpaces that for SSDs, and we all expect NAND flash density growth to go linear after 3D NAND well before hard drive areal densities run into hard Superparamagnetic limits. ...
Friday 12th June 2015: 12.11pm. As some may know, I've been working on the world's simplest C++ runtime monad these past two weeks, where most of that effort is being spent on getting it to STL quality with a full conformance and validation unit test suite. The hope is that this will become the official Boost monad, and thereafter the monad proposed for standardisation. Unlike any other C++ monad that I am aware of, this design focuses on:(i) Absolute minimum possible impact on build times and especially runtime overhead. ...
Friday 12th June 2015: 12.12pm. As some may know, I've been working on the world's simplest C++ runtime monad these past two weeks, where most of that effort is being spent on getting it to STL quality with a full conformance and validation unit test suite. The hope is that this will become the official Boost monad, and thereafter the monad proposed for standardisation. Unlike any other C++ monad that I am aware of, this design focuses on:(i) Absolute minimum possible impact on build times and especially runtime overhead. ...
Saturday 13th June 2015: 4.02am. Link shared: http://melpon.org/wandbox/permlink/M6Cn87YHamdymHWE As much as I only just said earlier today that my world's simplest C++ monad was going to be obsessive about keeping build times low and therefore avoiding all metaprogramming, there is one niche area where heavy metaprogramming makes a lot of sense: the monadic bind and map operations. Under the "you only pay for what you use" principle, if you are using those monadic programming operations it means you accept substantial build time costs over doing the same operations manually by hand. ...
Saturday 13th June 2015: 4.02am. Link shared: http://melpon.org/wandbox/permlink/M6Cn87YHamdymHWE As much as I only just said earlier today that my world's simplest C++ monad was going to be obsessive about keeping build times low and therefore avoiding all metaprogramming, there is one niche area where heavy metaprogramming makes a lot of sense: the monadic bind and map operations. Under the "you only pay for what you use" principle, if you are using those monadic programming operations it means you accept substantial build time costs over doing the same operations manually by hand. ...
Monday 15th June 2015: 2.07pm. Location: Dromahane. Fitted these anti cat spikes to help persuade the dozen or so local cats to stop using my garden as their toilet. Was rather annoyed to see they just walk on the spikes, albeit with what I'd best describe as a grimace if a cat can have such a thing. Anyway as you can see, I only bought one pack of spikes and it looks like I'll need another pack to increase the grimace factor for them. ...
Tuesday 16th June 2015: 8.29pm. Location: Dromahane. Clara's new standing tower so she can participate in things requiring more height like food preparation and painting. Assembled by my own fair hand from designs and materials sourced and measured by Megan. ...
Friday 19th June 2015: 11.31pm. Link shared: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/next-gen-futures-Lightweight-monad-ready-for-inspection-td4677322.html My lightweight very simple single purpose monad has been sent to boost-dev for community feedback http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/next-gen-futures-Lightweight-monad-ready-for-inspection-td4677322.html.This monad can hold a fixed variant list of empty, a type R, a lightweight error_type or a heavier exception_type at a space cost of max(20, sizeof(R)+4). Features: * Very lightweight on build times and run times up to the point of zero execution cost and just a four byte space overhead. ...
Friday 19th June 2015: 11.31pm. Link shared: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/next-gen-futures-Lightweight-monad-ready-for-inspection-td4677322.html My lightweight very simple single purpose monad has been sent to boost-dev for community feedback http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/next-gen-futures-Lightweight-monad-ready-for-inspection-td4677322.html.This monad can hold a fixed variant list of empty, a type R, a lightweight error_type or a heavier exception_type at a space cost of max(20, sizeof(R)+4). Features: * Very lightweight on build times and run times up to the point of zero execution cost and just a four byte space overhead. ...
Sunday 21st June 2015: 11.48pm. Might be getting a new word from Clara soon (her first used correctly in context was bye, the second was hi). She's spent a good chunk of today going "oh no" and other forms of no, so maybe she'll starting saying no correctly in context soon too (she already shakes her head to say no, and has done correctly in context for many weeks). ...
Saturday 27th June 2015: 5.08pm. Location: Dromahane. Glued and screwed two garden trellises together to make a "stop Clara running onto the road" barrier. Not bad for €10 especially as I'll be unemployed in a few weeks from now and we'll have to cut our family expenditure by about 30% to squeeze onto unemployment benefits. We've always kept our expenditures low, but it's interesting how it's crept up this past year, little things mount up. ...
Sunday 28th June 2015: 3.10am. Link shared: https://ci.nedprod.com/view/Boost%20Thread-Expected-Permit/job/Boost.Spinlock%20Test%20Linux%20GCC%204.8/doxygen/classboost_1_1spinlock_1_1lightweight__futures_1_1basic__future.html Some preliminary results from my lightweight non-allocating promise-futures which are heading towards Boost later this month as compared to STL promise-futures:All values are CPU cycles on a i7-3770K @ 3.9Ghz.## clang 3.7:### libstdc++ 4.9 future promise:Simple loop: 761Producer Consumer: 838 Creation and setting: 674 Getting from future: 160 Destruction of future: 4### lightweight future promise:Simple loop: 260Producer Consumer: 378 (2.22x faster) Creation and setting: 281 Getting from future: 51 Destruction of future: 46## GCC 5. ...
Tuesday 30th June 2015: 2.47pm. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/boost.spinlock/blob/master/Readme.md I have the first set of benchmarks for lightweight non-allocating monadic futures ready which are 98% compliant with the forthcoming ISO Concurrency TS for C++1z (essentially they are missing std::allocator support for obvious reasons). They aren't final, but they are representative of what to expect as compared to the STL future-promise. Note these futures are configured with a superset of the facilities of STL future-promise, so you have all your monadic programming goodness in there as a lightweight future inherits from basic_monad plus you can transport error_code as well as exception_ptr:clang 3. ...
Tuesday 7th July 2015: 12.17pm. Location: Dromahane. A third European clone of Soylent just arrived, this stuff is called Nutrilent who are price undercutting Joylent and Queal. I got 210 meals for a hundred and five euro including delivery to Ireland. Normally 90 meals would cost me 75 euro including delivery, so this is a big saving. My only slight worry is this stuff has even more fibre in it by a whole third, so either this is going to be a good thing or quite inconvenient. ...
Wednesday 8th July 2015: 12.42pm. As lightweight C++ futures have matured it became painfully obvious that a ground up refactor of its design was required. The code base until very recently employed lots of "safe" undefined behaviour to save me writing code to deal with future to shared_future conversion etc, and of course making use of undefined behaviour always produces faster code, so specifically speaking what I was doing was to use reinterpret_cast to have the compiler not concern itself with whether the future the promise was talking to was really a future or a shared_future state. ...
Friday 10th July 2015: 10.38am. Installed 64 bit Windows 10 onto my laptop yesterday with a full system wipe after the Windows 8.1 install on there had annoyed me sufficiently I couldn't cope any more. The previous install, which was an upgrade from a 32 bit Windows XP working fine since 2007 despite being on a totally different laptop, recently developed some problem with Windows Update whereby it would loop forever in the background an attempt to install updates, thrashing the disc drive and eating battery in the process. ...
Saturday 18th July 2015: 3.13pm. Link shared: http://winaero.com/blog/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-windows-7-in-windows-10 Windows 10 build 10240 auto update landed on my laptop just there, and so far stability is greatly improved. In particular, calc (the Windows Calculator) no longer crashes on load, and I use calc surprisingly frequently, partially for the company accounts, partially during programming.Unfortunately, the calc in Win10 is a Metro thing which requires you to be logged into Microsoft Store. I prefer local accounts so I am NOT permanently logged into Microsoft, and therefore calc won't work. ...
Monday 20th July 2015: 2.04am. Location: Dromahane. It's 3am the night before my C++ library proposed Boost.AFIO goes before peer review. This is the culmination of about 30 months of effort, with pretty consistent 60-70 hour weeks since February, and about 100 hours this week. Megan has been amazing to get me this far. Anyway, the final code base to be presented is finally done and right now the CI is testing it, I'm just going to go eat something and then tackle the documentation to be presented for review, hopefully will reach bed before 6am as I'll be minding Clara from 9am onwards all day tomorrow. ...
Tuesday 21st July 2015: 2.15am. Ever wondered what would happen if classical musicians played rock songs as rock artists, going nuts and jumping all over the place? Yes, I thought not ... anyway witness something I expect you've never seen before. ...
Thursday 30th July 2015: 12.54am. Just spent the past hour trying to turn my Windows 10 Insider Preview into a Genuine Windows 10 RTM without keylogger and Microsoft spyware sending everything you do to Microsoft. The Insider ISO was installed about a month ago as a full system wipe as my previous Win 8.1 was 32 bit, and I wanted 64 bit on this laptop. About a week ago I got the build 10240 which is supposedly RTM. ...
Saturday 1st August 2015: 3.22pm. A review of European powdered food substitutes I posted to Reddit earlier today (https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3fel1z/my_review_of_european_options_joylent_vs_queal_20/):Been meaning to write up a quick review of my experiences with the European powdered meal replacements Joylent, Queal and Nutrilent. Joylent is the non-oil flaxseed version, Queal was the 2.0 still with oil bottle version, Nutrilent well they just started, so it's their original version.Why turn to powdered meal replacements?After a high cholesterol warning found in blood testing for a sudden onset of RSI last year, I needed to replace the high saturated fat diet I was on (cheese sandwiches! ...
Monday 3rd August 2015: 3.06am. Haven't done more than the minimum email since May 22nd end of the C++ Now conference and since which I've been getting AFIO ready for review, so I currently have 3,228 unread emails waiting for me. Which is a new record :(
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Wednesday 5th August 2015: 4.51am. Just finished watching #sense8 season 1. It's definitely not my cup of tea, but I recognise a new sci-fi genre when I see one even though it took me till episode 10 out of 12 for the lightbulb to switch on: my best apposition for it would be "emotional sci-fi", like Battlestar Galactica (2004) with which it shares a very great deal, except not as crap and not as self-contradictory a load of rubbish as Galactica which was total crap after season 2. ...
Tuesday 11th August 2015: 10.03am. Location: Supermacs Ballacolla. Ran low on fuel earlier than expected driving home from Dublin airport after dropping off Megan and Clara and so pulled off the motorway just after the Cork turnoff near Abbeyleix where my grandfather was from. Lo and behold there is a full HGV fuel station with freshly built service station complete with Supermacs and Papa John's and espresso station from which I am now drinking a chai latte. ...
Friday 14th August 2015: 11.48am. I just crashed my dev workstation hard drive firmware when running the second tutorial program for proposed Boost.AFIO - as in, drive dropped out and was no longer recognised by the system until the next power off. This is rather worrying - SMART says everything is fine, though it's an old drive at 16,800 hours powered on. I think I might run a backup anyway tonight of all 400Gb, better safe than sorry. ...
Saturday 15th August 2015: 10.28pm. Link shared: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0 New York Times does a pretty scathing article about what how horrible it is to work in Amazon's white collar roles. Putting on my Management and Organisational Behaviour hat, I find it surprising that Amazon would repeat the Enron management style when all the Management literature is very clear that that led to the Enron loss of organisational culture ethics and eventual collapse, sending some of its leadership to prison. ...
Sunday 16th August 2015: 4.14pm. Got 97% percentile in this IKM online C++ 11 test I had to take for a job interview. I really didn't think much of the quality of the exam, and said so in the feedback form.I also rather like how poor I am at compiler optimisation heh ...#cplusplus #cpp #boostcpp ...
Monday 17th August 2015: 6.49pm. Location: The Marker Hotel Dublin. Currently at the Marker hotel in Dublin for my Google interview tomorrow. Definitely amongst the better hotels I've stayed at at corporate expense: particularly good pool, nice all stone and oak room and bathroom though sadly no rainfall shower. I'm not hugely fond of modern decor, but their fixtures and fittings are solid high quality stuff instead of the looks good but is cheap stuff common in Irish hotels before the crash. ...
Tuesday 18th August 2015: 3.39pm. I always seem to barely sleep the night before these five hour corporate interviews, and unsurprisingly find myself flagging for the last two hours after lunch. I do sometimes wish propofol were wise (or legal) for individual use, you could just knock yourself out and wake fresh as a daisy next morning. Nerves man, they seem to be getting worse with age :(
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Friday 21st August 2015: 5.40pm. Just sent proposed Boost.AFIO off for its final CI pass before it is submitted for Boost peer review starting later today and lasting until 31st August. The last few days have been stressful - the new workshop tutorial for AFIO is a step-by-step workshop on implementing an asynchronous key-value store, and that meant running many benchmarks which heavily stressed my mechanical hard drive, which began to hang itself until power cycle. ...
Friday 21st August 2015: 9.13pm. Location: Dromahane. And proposed Boost.AFIO is submitted for peer review (the one failing test is a test timeout and can be disregarded)!#boostcpp#cplusplus#boostafio ...
Saturday 22nd August 2015: 5.47pm. Just rebooted into my new hard drive after cloning the old one. Because it kept dropping out during the clone and needed to be restarted, I used robocopy instead of CloneZilla, and I thought well why do just NTFS => NTFS when robocopy could do NTFS => ReFS (which can be enabled on consumer Windows using a registry value). So I went ahead and did that, and now I am running on ReFS! ...
Sunday 23rd August 2015: 9.19pm. Yay just got a direct-from-mmap dense hash map implementation working, so this hash table works straight from a memory mapped file which means it can scale out to really huge hash tables - like billions of entries. On modification, it rehashes the entries into a new hash table which can also go straight into a mmap, though I suspect the linear complexity would make modifying billion entry hash tables rather slow. ...
Monday 7th September 2015: 2.50pm. Link shared: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/ Came back from a short holiday in Dingle on the Irish west coast to find yet another failed hard drive, this being the third failed drive this year! Thankfully, still no data loss thanks to ZFS, but losing three hard drives in a single year is definitely a record :(The failing drive this time is the second Western Digital Red 3Tb WD30EFRX to go this year, and the cause is the same: 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 189 189 140 Pre-fail Always - 323 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 197 197 000 Old_age Always - 486 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 077 077 000 Old_age Always - 17436At 17k hours powered on, this is the oldest drive in the array after the previous WD Red failed (which at the time was the oldest WD Red drive). ...
Friday 18th September 2015: 1.27pm. Link shared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTS_(sound_system) Just signed a 12 month remote working contract with Digital Theatre Systems for work on an audio C++ library I can't talk about which is to be used in an exciting consumer product range I can't mention. As much as I am loving the 60% pay increase over working on open source projects, I do find the secrecy unfortunate, though understandable given the very fast moving competitive nature of this particular market. ...
Saturday 19th September 2015: 12.22pm. Location: Heathrow Airport. On my way to CppCon in Seattle. Feeling very poorly, been very run down now for several weeks and the lack of sleep last night made it even worse this morning where I was very close to puking during the drive to Cork airport. Not looking forward to this very long flight, almost tempted to pay for an upgrade. If we weren't so poor right now I think I would. ...
Sunday 20th September 2015: 2.37am. Location: Hyatt Regency Bellevue on Seattle's Eastside. Arrived safely in Seattle for CppCon. I was just working out with the other Europeans on my flight also attending that it's about 4.30am our time now. Basically eat and sleep (hopefully). ...
Wednesday 23rd September 2015: 7.14am. Location: Hyatt Regency Bellevue on Seattle's Eastside. Just watched Trump on Colbert's Late Show (I'm still in Seattle). I think he did really well, actually looked presidential. My God could Trump actually be the candidate ... ?
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Friday 25th September 2015: 12.09am. The slides for the talk I just gave at CppCon 2015 on races on the file system. Video to follow in a few days time.#cppcon #cppcon2015 ...
Saturday 26th September 2015: 9.21am. Location: Hyatt Regency Bellevue on Seattle's Eastside. I know I'm a few months late. But if you're very knowledgeable of the recent developments in C++17 then you will find this both prescient and hilarious. ...
Saturday 26th September 2015: 8.24pm. Location: Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. That's my time in Seattle for CppCon over. Next stop Dallas Texas, then London Heathrow, then Cork Ireland. Yay :(#cppcon #cppcon2015
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Sunday 27th September 2015: 12.10pm. Location: Heathrow Airport. I see it's 15 hours after my last post in Seattle Tacoma airport! Currently waiting in Heathrow for my final leg to Cork. Very much want to sleep, I've been awake almost exactly 24 hours now and after food it's very difficult not to curl up somewhere. Next year definitely paying the extra for the direct flights, going via Dallas simply adds four hours for no good reason. ...
Monday 28th September 2015: 2.39am. Location: Dromahane. Woke up about 2am after getting home from Seattle. Came downstairs and thought there is something wrong outside ... It seems unusually dark ... And lo and behold the moon is essentially missing, it's a lunar eclipse! I tried taking a photo with my phone camera set to a ten second exposure but I got nothing - it is indeed very dark. Good view of the milky way though that is fairly normal here anyway, nevertheless unusual to properly see a lunar eclipse, it's usually obscured by cloud. ...
Friday 2nd October 2015: 10.12am. Apologies for breaking the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter forwarding. It was a one line bug in one of my PHP scripts which does the automated forwarding from Google Plus which caused XML validation to fail :(
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Sunday 11th October 2015: 3.36am. Location: Dromahane. Just installed the android 6.0 ota update. I really must say very little has changed from 5.1. They should have released this as 5.2, not as 6.0. Also note google already pushed updates for 5.1 which add most of the eye catching features in 6.0 e.g. the vertically scrolling app menu, so prepare to be very underwhelmed.#android-m
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Tuesday 13th October 2015: 1.46pm. Location: Specsavers Opticians Mallow. Another spectacular day here in mallow Ireland. Beautifully sunny, quite warm, far better than most of our summer which was wet and cold. I very much enjoyed the walk I just took around the town for 45 mins. I realised I haven't shown off my new office in mallow town yet, so below is a 3d photo sphere of it. Nothing much else to say, it's an office. ...
Wednesday 14th October 2015: 9.28am. The Irish Budget 2016 (announced yesterday) is very, very good for me and Megan - I reckon we'll be €2,300 richer in 2016 assuming the same annual income. The 2016 tax cuts are particularly friendly to self employed entrepreneurial families with children i.e. us, hence the disproportionate tax cut for us. Let me put this another way: our tax bill shrinks by 6% next year which will add a good 5% to our post-tax post-expenses income, I think we will notice such a difference. ...
Wednesday 14th October 2015: 10.52am. CppCon videos are up, and here is mine on Racing the File System which is a beginner's level workshop on race free filing system techniques leading up to proposed Boost.AFIO, an asynchronous file and race free filesystem library for C++. As much as it's "beginner's level", it's more really "from first principles", so it gets into more interesting stuff by the end including the transactional key-value store I'd like to be standardised into the C++ runtime based on AFIO. ...
Thursday 15th October 2015: 8.34am. My automatic "turn on the heater half an hour before I get into the office" solution finally worked this morning. It's still not exactly warm - 18.2C - but way better than before.
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Sunday 18th October 2015: 11.09pm. Location: Dromahane. Spent my Sunday today on part one of two Sundays repurposing my former home office into a classroom. What you see below took six hours! ...
Thursday 22nd October 2015: 12.33pm. Location: Specsavers Opticians Mallow. My solution to the "my head is too warm and my legs are freezing" problem typical of electrically heated poorly insulated offices. Now just need a draught excluder. ...
Saturday 24th October 2015: 10.36am. Location: Dromahane. Looking after this one alone and without a car for 24 hours. She keeps saying "mama" in a sad voice and looking sad (mama has gone to a hen night in Kilkenny). Thankfully looks to be a sunny if cold day, I think I'll take her to the pub in the village which is a nice walk away! She won't let me have more than a pint, but why not the pub, after all it's a long holiday weekend in Ireland and I've been working all week! ...
Sunday 25th October 2015: 9.42pm. Location: Peppers at The white Deer. Another Sunday another chunk of work on my former office. Still another Sunday to go before Megan's classroom is ready, the boxes on the left need filtering for stuff to throw out and repacked for most likely to need on top. Anyone know why there is that giant brown stain on the carpet in the middle? It can't be us, that part was under a thick plastic mat until recently. ...
Friday 30th October 2015: 9.12am. Location: Dromahane. Hopefully I'll make these into "Christmas tree" smell so the fake tree I bought smells real for our first family Christmas! ...
Monday 2nd November 2015: 10.07am. Was so tired last night after my third Sunday of office to classroom converting that I forgot to post this photo which is of the finished classroom ready for Megan to teach in tonight. One might think I'd be looking forward to a Sunday off, but next Sunday I drive to Northern Ireland for work and the Sunday after it's Thanksgiving which isn't the day off I'm looking for. ...
Friday 13th November 2015: 8.51am. Location: Culloden Estate and Spa. Last day of being onsite for my current client in Bangor Northern Ireland. Definitely feeling a little overloaded these past few days, too much happening with not enough time to adjust. This weekend is Thanksgiving's with various people flying in and of course Turkey! So it looks like it won't be over soon ... Still, can't fault a Turkey roast dinner. ...
Wednesday 25th November 2015: 1.28pm. Location: Specsavers Opticians Mallow. This morning our first income since July landed in my accounts (no thanks to the Social Welfare whom did not pay out a jot despite us having no income and me looking actively for work - which was disappointing of them, to put it mildly). Total income this month alone is slightly more than half our total annual expenditure as a family, so by the end of this year we can stay alive - without the Social Welfare - until June next year. ...
Sunday 29th November 2015: 7.19pm. Location: Dromahane. Not even two years old and already captivated by Ireland's annual The Late Late Toy Show: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Late_Toy_Show ...
Tuesday 1st December 2015: 11.31am. Location: Dromahane. Second night of night weaning Clara. Going better than expected, she seems to be accepting she doesn't get fed throughout the night anymore. Looking forward to an unbroken night's sleep though ... ...
Wednesday 2nd December 2015: 9.49pm. Location: Dromahane. Clara earlier today discovered our sofa can recline to better enable watching television. Also: my new phone takes some wizard photos in the dark, I can't find a trace of sensor noise and it was dark ... ...
Tuesday 8th December 2015: 5.11pm. Link shared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_6P Been using my new Nexus 6P for a week now, so time for some personal observations as someone who gets a new Nexus phone every two years just before the major firmware updates cease, so I'm coming from the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in 2011, to the LG Nexus 5 in 2013, to the Huawei Nexus 6P in 2015.First impressions: this is a very good phone indeed, in fact I cannot identify any design deficiency nor compromise at all except for its size (it's too big) and its price, which whilst not as expensive as the Galaxy Nexus was in its day (€800 or so in today's money), at €700 for the 64Gb edition it is not cheap either. ...
Friday 11th December 2015: 12.32am. So annual car insurance quote time, and my oh my is this year a nasty shock! Last year these were the results for our year 2000 Ford Focus 1.4L petrol for both me and Megan driving, fully comp, full NCD protect, can drive any car:FBD €569, Aviva €480, Liberty €444, AXA €429, RSA €401, AIG and Allianz €351We ended up going with Allianz as unlike AIG they don't require tracking apps installed onto your phone. ...
Friday 11th December 2015: 6.40pm. Location: Dromahane. Lots of things got in the way of a Christmas tree this year between the fancy fake one not being delivered (currently being PayPal disputed), terrible weather inhibiting buying a real one, wrong lights, then broken lights, then lack of hooks, but it all worked out in the end!(Note the below only looks right on an android phone. It should be slowly zooming and panning around the tree) ...
Saturday 12th December 2015: 2.09pm. Link shared: http://www.nedprod.com/errcmp.html One of the really great things about wip Boost.Outcome (https://github.com/ned14/boost.outcome) is the ability to write C++ that has the same hard control flow behaviour guarantees as C, but with all the productivity C++ 14 provides. This makes it much easier to write systems code which cannot surprise you, and it is what the being rewritten wip Boost.AFIO v2 (https://github.com/BoostGSoC13/boost.afio) uses.To that end, a simple table of POSIX errno codes is invaluable and there was a great one at http://www. ...
Monday 14th December 2015: 2.23pm. Link shared: https://www.sandisk.com/home/ssd/ssd-plus Last Black Friday Amazon UK showed me a timed deal for a 240Gb Sandisk SSD Plus for £39, and very unlike me I did an impulse purchase. Unlike any of the other Sandisk SSDs but like the other ultra-budget SSDs on the market, this one has very little information on the web about it, no benchmarks, no idea what controller or flash, nothing. ...
Thursday 17th December 2015: 7.04pm. Location: Dromahane. First of the Christmas booze turned up: this is a ten year old Sercial which is a dry and uncommon Madeira fortified wine. Like all Madeira, it is matured open to the air so it oxidises, and therefore becomes very stable to the bottle being open (which is why mariners used to buy heavily from the island of Madeira before doing the transatlantic crossing). ...
Wednesday 23rd December 2015: 8.49am. As part of writing the new storage profiles support for the Boost.AFIO v2 rewrite, I really need to get the NT kernel version for the profile so one knows what version of NTFS/ReFS/FAT the profile is valid for.Unfortunately, the Windows API GetVersionEx() lies to you from Win8.1 onwards, and I cannot find any obvious way of retrieving the actual genuine NT kernel version without hard encoding values based on probing for features which is not future proof. ...
Saturday 26th December 2015: 10.20pm. Location: Dublin Airport Manor. Taken driving at 75 mph up the motorway with only a full moon and the headlights for light. Note the high shutter speed, yet low noise. The camera on the Nexus 6P is quite impressive ... ...
Tuesday 29th December 2015: 3.23pm. Location: Imaginosity, Dublin Children's Museum. Fun play day at Dublin's Imaginosity three stories of play location. Expensive, but fun! ...
Tuesday 29th December 2015: 6.37pm. Location: McDonald's Restaurant. Driving home from Dublin to Mallow in middle of storm Frank is proving highly not fun :(
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Saturday 2nd January 2016: 9.45pm. Location: Dromahane. Another of the Christmas booze this year, this is an exceptionally dry oloroso sherry. Its dark brown color doesn't come from sweetening as is usual for dark sherries, no this color is from being in a barrel for a very long time. It tastes like a much more complex dry sherry and is so dry it feels like it is sucking the moisture from your mouth, so a definite astringent quality. ...
Saturday 2nd January 2016: 11.18pm. Location: Dromahane. This is the second driest sherry of this year's Christmas booze, a Palo Cortado. Not quite as dry as the Oloroso, it has a similar though lesser complexity and deep brown color, and isn't astringent. The one below was quite affordable compared to the Oloroso, and I'd choose it preferentially personally over the Oloroso but not over the Sercial I spoke about a week or so ago whose weird not dry not sweet vinegary-but-tasty profile has grown on me. ...
Sunday 3rd January 2016: 12.05am. Location: Dromahane. After the Oloroso, the Palo Cortado and the Sercial in increasing sweetness comes this Amontillado which Megan particularly likes. I bought this in a shop in Mallow, so it's quite sweet though nothing like as sweet as a typical sherry in Ireland. Compared to the previous three, this is a flat tasteless boring sherry which almost seems like it's been watered down with sugar water or something, but in truth it's not bad compared to Harvey's Bristol Cream which is one of the most popular in the British Isles. ...
Sunday 3rd January 2016: 9.52pm. Location: Drommahane. Second to last of this year's Christmas fortified wines, this is the sweetest of the booze this year, that staple of old grannies "A Winter's Tale" which is one of the big three most popular sherries in the British Isles. Despite claiming to be medium sweet, it's as sweet as a tawny port and definitely too sweet for me, but at least it does have some taste and structure to it, and it's better than the typical syrup sherry you'd find in a pub. ...
Monday 4th January 2016: 12.31am. Location: Dromahane. The final Christmas drink this year is not a sherry, but a port - specifically one of the many "Maynard's" ports Aldi sells where you always wonder how they can sell a forty year old tawney port for €50 which could not be awful? Fearing that and knowing my tolerance for port is dropping with advancing age, I had never risked the money - until now. ...
Friday 8th January 2016: 1.51pm. In December my dev workstation hard drive began showing pending unrecoverable sectors which was my third dev workstation hard drive failure in 2015, and so a third highly inconvenient total swap of data was going to be needed. It is my own fault though, two of the drives I "upgraded" to last year were ones which had earlier begun to fail in the cloud node's ZFS array, and I had been silently hoping that it was the vibration from all the other drives rather than actual death. ...
Saturday 16th January 2016: 9.36pm. Location: Longueville House. Another very fine, if a tad expensive, late 19th high dining style meal in North Cork which is a uniquely Irish pleasant experience. The below not sweet dessert wine is highly recommended by the way. ...
Sunday 7th February 2016: 12.12am. A recent acquisition of mine is this USB MPower Fireworm 56 CREE LED light in warm white colour which is the most powerful USB powered light I could find on eBay at a claimed 10w (which makes sense as a fast USB charger outputs 5v @ 2A). This is my homegrown solution to emergency lighting during power cuts, so the idea is that due to being USB powered, it can plug into laptops, USB power packs, even the 16Ah lithium car jump starter I bought recently which comes with USB ports. ...
Monday 8th February 2016: 12.30am. Link shared: https://github.com/BoostGSoC13/boost.afio/tree/master/fs_probe I reached a major milestone in the post peer review Boost.AFIO v2 rewrite today which has consumed most of my free time since November: it now has working Windows and POSIX AIO async file i/o backends with file open, close, clone, scatter-gather read/writes and truncate implemented, so a long, long way still from AFIO v1's comprehensive facilities but still an achievement. The POSIX AIO backend is 100% pure, and so therefore has awful performance because POSIX AIO has a terrible design, but it does work on FreeBSD and Linux without surprises and the storage profile probing yielded many interesting answers to long standing questions about concurrent file i/o atomicity which are now answering the many questions about this on Stackoverflow. ...
Saturday 27th February 2016: 1.20pm. Location: Dromahane. After a week of doing nothing but researching and writing out a server new configuration and migration plan, and then another week of practising it and throwing away the results, this weekend is D-day for my cloud server migration. The existing four year old rental expires on Tuesday, so all my running services must be relocated to the new server by end of day tomorrow so Monday can go on securely wiping the old server. ...
Monday 29th February 2016: 12.56am. Link shared: https://www.htbridge.com/ssl So that ends a marathon weekend of cloud server migration, and I am officially exhausted! Even with the two weeks of meticulous planning and performing two trial runs, a multitude of surprises and gotchas crept up which impeded rapid progress when doing it for real, and my thanks to Megan for taking on a lion's share of the Clara-minding this weekend so I could get this stuff done. ...
Friday 4th March 2016: 8.01am. Link shared: https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html This past year a lot of people have been locking down their SSH servers given that the Snowden files show the US is capable of reading many SSH sessions and has been building a database of private SSH keys (only a matter of time before it gets leaked), probably because most SSH servers use a default list of prime modulis. The linked article recommends a long list of things to tighten from the default including regenerating all your modulis by hand to new random ones. ...
Saturday 5th March 2016: 9.27am. Location: Dromahane. First time she's been away from her mother for two days. Seems happy so far, currently stuffing her magic wand down my back. Shortly we'll have brunch, then go for a long cycle in an actually nice day for once. ...
Sunday 6th March 2016: 1.45am. Some weeks ago I promised you a final part on my emergency lighting solution for handling storms etc. Last time round I had purchased a USB powered LED strip which had quite a few problems mainly centered around inaccurate claimed specs, but as I have two USB power packs one of 20Wh and the other 60Wh (it's actually my car's jump starter, it's basically a giant lithium ion battery delivering enormous current, but it also has a USB 2. ...
Tuesday 8th March 2016: 6.21am. It's 6am, and this morning I begin the final phase of my cloud server migration - swapping the SSD in the home node from the old system to the new completely rebuilt system. Deadline for completion is starting the day job later this morning!
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Tuesday 8th March 2016: 11.33pm. Cloud server migration is nearing its end after is it three weeks now? Anyway Friday I'm hoping it'll be done, just the triple off site redundant super important encrypted files store which houses all the critical stuff, local restful services like monitoring our electricity usage and network, idle power consumption tuning, and finally a great deal of cleanup seeing as I have temporary hard drives hanging off the box by esata, all tempting targets for Clara. ...
Wednesday 23rd March 2016: 1.01pm. Just bought my first bitcoin ever, and paid for something in it. Turned into a real quagmire, almost nobody accepts a paypal/credit/debit card to bitcoin without sending them photocopies of your passport etc. Once you actually have the bitcoin, it really is the payment system of the future, but there are very irritating barriers to leap in between normal money and bitcoin money.
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Friday 25th March 2016: 10.20am. Last day of work before eight days of vacation in Killarney and Galway. First vacation and time away from the grindstone in exactly one year, can't wait!
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Saturday 26th March 2016: 8.18pm. Location: 1 High Street. Turns out Clara is surprisingly competent with chopsticks. Picked up tofu chunks with proper pincer movement without stabbing them and everything! ...
Sunday 27th March 2016: 3.36pm. Location: The Heights Hotel Killarney. We ended up all sleeping for three hours during our nap and so missed all the Easter Sunday lunches in Killarney. Found this place on the outskirts via Google, they serve a carvery until 6pm, it was nothing special but it sure was good to eat something today, I accidentally stayed up late drinking a very unusual Irish whiskey by a startup which only started trading last year and so this morning didn't get round to food. ...
Wednesday 30th March 2016: 12.17pm. Location: (52.0076271, -9.5431361). Supposed nicest day of the week is in fact one of rain. Enjoying myself, despite the lack of fitness and being cold and wet and my hands are burning. ...
Wednesday 30th March 2016: 6.24pm. Location: 90-92 New St. I promised a photo of the Killarney Irish whiskey bar, here it is. Over 200 whiskeys to sample, many very rare Irish ones some costing 150 euro a shot and over. Drank the whiskey which won all the international whiskey awards last year the 21 year old Teeling which is as good as its reputation - sadly no longer possible to buy, but they have exactly one bottle at about 20 euro per shot which is worth it. ...
Thursday 31st March 2016: 6.39pm. Location: Dromhallheights. Today turned out to be the nicest day of the week in Killarney - not what the forecast predicted! Unfortunately four days and nights of rich food plus all that exercise yesterday proved too much for me, and I ended up spending most of today asleep rather than outside enjoying the sun. Given my poorly constitution, instead of eating out again cycled to tescos and bought something much lighter and smaller portion wise with actual fresh fruit pictured below. ...
Friday 1st April 2016: 7.22pm. Most of the top restaurants in Killarney are informal, places like the Bricin where one of the owners greets every customer and mines them for personal details which he then memorises forever such that you can return a year later and he'll remember everything. Tonight I thought I'd try a pretentious formal place instead where all the waiters are in suits and there is a fellow playing the piano, this being Cellar One pictured. ...
Friday 1st April 2016: 7.36pm. Back to the whiskey shop to finish working my way through Irish whiskey startup Teeling's range. Have had the small batch (rum finish), 15 year old, 21 year old, 23 year old and 26 year old. Which are: great for the budget price; good if a bit tasteless; spectacularly outstandingly superb as good as any whiskey I have ever drink; not bad, a better Abunach, but costing twice as much; very good, but overpriced for what it is. ...
Saturday 2nd April 2016: 3.56pm. Location: Raw - Sushi In The Sky. Here are my creations at the sushi master class in galway. To be honest, once you have the ingredients it's very easy to make sushi not dissimilar to how the professionals make it - well, by taste at least, not so much appearance! Thanks to Megan for organising this belated birthday gift! ...
Monday 4th April 2016: 12.31am. Link shared: https://ned14.github.io/boost.afio/annotated.html I've decided to go completely mad and present the extremely early alpha post peer review proposed Boost AFIO v2 at the ACCU conference in two weeks time in Bristol. I was going to present a filing systems algorithms from first principles workshop based on AFIO v1 and present the same based on v2 at CppCon in Seattle in September, but I think the v2 rewrite, though right now more than ropey and requiring no less C++ 14 than VS2015 Update 1 minimum, might just substitute despite being as alpha code quality, and not even having a test framework yet, as it is. ...
Monday 4th April 2016: 12.40pm. Location: Specsavers Opticians Mallow. Gorgeous day. Where were you last week when I was on holiday in a world UNESCO protected heritage site? ...
Saturday 9th April 2016: 7.33am. Link shared: http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2016/accu2016_sessions#Distributed_Mutual_Exclusion_using_Proposed_Boost.AFIO_(asynchronous_filesystem_and_file_io) The ACCU conference is only ten days away! Proposed Boost.AFIO v2, which I'll be presenting for the first time at ACCU, has the functionality I'm presenting written as of yesterday but it most definitely is not working - as the final part I added all required itself to work, I spent two weeks writing code, only checking to see if it compiles, not if it works until now so I have a raft of debugging to do this weekend. ...
Monday 11th April 2016: 1.03pm. Location: (52.1346352, -8.6422330). Made it to lidl by taking a high road. It's actually very pleasant next to the water, warm, sunny and serene. Shame I must go back to work, you'd be tempted to stop for a few beers and a smoke or something. ...
Friday 15th April 2016: 10.47pm. Employment is on pause from now until I present proposed Boost.AFIO v2 for the first time at the ACCU conference next week. I'm up in Bristol 2 room, Thursday at 11am! The distributed mutual exclusion file system algorithm I'm presenting is completed, the slides have proved to be a bit of a bear though, can't get the structure to where I'm happy with it.#boostafio #boostcpp #c++ #accu ...
Sunday 17th April 2016: 1.25am. For a star trek fan film directed, written, acted and scored by one person who also did all the special effects and sowed the costumes, not bad at all, and vastly better than most fan film. Obviously all the sets were done by CGI given the budget, and the acting, production and audio were a bit uneven. Script was a tad hollow, but better than average. ...
Monday 18th April 2016: 10.08pm. The final slide in my proposed Boost.AFIO v2 talk at the ACCU conference on Thursday showing the colour coded empirical benchmarks for three methods of mutual exclusion on the file system across the file systems NTFS, ReFS, FAT32 and exFAT. The top three are for contended locks, the bottom three for uncontended locks.#accu2015 @ACCUConf #boostafio #boostcpp ...
Thursday 21st April 2016: 2.10pm. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/boost.afio/tree/master/doc/presentations Slides for my ACCU talk on proposed Boost.AFIO are now online at https://github.com/ned14/boost.afio/tree/master/doc/presentations#ACCUConf #accu2016 #boostcpp #boostafio
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Friday 22nd April 2016: 9.06am. Location: Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre. Link shared: http://ACCU.org Unusual keynote at the ACCU conference this morning: it's on the psychology of software developers by an academic researcher. In recent years I already know much if not most of the content at these conferences, but this talk is new and useful. For example the academic presenting the empirical findings has found very little pair programming in top teams, but lots of pair debugging. ...
Friday 22nd April 2016: 12.12pm. I really didn't expect the talk on proposed Boost.AFIO to be as popular as it was at the ACCU conference: they put me into the "popular room" out of the five concurrent talk strands where they videotape and publish the talks pretty much immediately, so here is my workshop yesterday online already. I was a bit flustered at the beginning, I had less than five minutes to set up and the live demo I was supposed to demonstrate failed to compile due to me fixing a regression in Outcome in the bar the night before which broke AFIO. ...
Friday 22nd April 2016: 4.09pm. Location: Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre. Link shared: http://ACCU.org +ACCU.org #ACCUConf Just witnessed John Lakos and the presenter Charles Tolman tango dancing in a talk on software design! You think you've seen it all at tech conferences ...
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Saturday 23rd April 2016: 1.20am. Ever wondered what would happen if the Predator landed in medieval England and took on some Knights Templar? Well, fan made film has you covered, and this particular one has as good production values as I've seen in fan made films, albeit the story is a direct rip from the first Predator movie almost down to the sequence and timing. Fan made Star Trek tends to get the big crowd funding values like the million dollars that went to Axnar, but to be honest it's possible to do commercial grade production on tiny fractions of that. ...
Saturday 23rd April 2016: 10.49pm. Quite liked this Batman fan film short. Makeup is a bit budget, otherwise acting is much better than average and it's not far from the movies. ...
Sunday 24th April 2016: 12.22am. This fan short of the Punisher is a bit unfair. Firstly, they got the same actor as from the movie, then they roped in some professional actors you'll recognise, and the people who made it all do this for a living anyway, they just did this for free in their spare time for some reason. It's as slick and professional as you'd expect. ...
Sunday 24th April 2016: 1.10am. If Batman bumps into the Alien and Predator, what happens? Nice fan film this, only the Alien suit didn't work well. ...
Sunday 24th April 2016: 1.47am. Last one for tonight, as I seriously need to go to bed. This fan film short is a cinematic rendition of the game Left 4 Dead which was a really fun game. Let's just say a few other very famous game heroes turn up before the end ... ...
Sunday 24th April 2016: 3.17pm. Location: Son of a Bun. Only took us eight months to make it to Son of a Bun, a fancy all Irish produce gourmet burger place. My god does this place do some business, there is always a queue, it's always packed full. Not bad food either and reasonably priced. ...
Tuesday 26th April 2016: 7.06am. Just slept continuously for twelve hours, as did Clara too actually! Obviously was more tired after the ACCU conference than I realised. Last night took Clara for a walk in the evening sunshine, but she wanted to be carried earlier than usual and began to fall asleep on my shoulder on the way home, so I took her straight up to bed and we both fell asleep before 8pm. ...
Friday 29th April 2016: 11.58pm. Just watched Deadpool. It had a few laughs, but otherwise not great, and less entertainment than that mediocre Avengers movie a few summers back. Ryan Reynolds playing Will Ferrell didn't work at all for me, if you want a Will Ferrell then hire Will Ferrell. I will say Morena Baccarin looked amazing in this movie, she's older than I am with babies behind her and she not only looked like she's late twenties but also wasn't a forced character like Ryan's. ...
Sunday 1st May 2016: 9.56pm. Spent much of today filling in UK tax returns (plural). But I live in Ireland which is a sovereign nation, so one might reasonably ask why I am submitting UK tax returns? Good question. I did run a business in the UK from Ireland 2010-2014 as I was given no choice by the British government if I wanted to collect the Single Farm Payment for land I own in the UK. ...
Monday 2nd May 2016: 2.56pm. Location: Tir Na Si. Had no idea this paradise for small children existed till today, it's a farm with lots of different animals, outdoor AND indoor soft play areas, plus they cook fresh wood fired pizza and many other cakes and pastries. Very affordable compared to the alternatives too. It's half way between Cork and Fermoy. Who knew?
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Thursday 5th May 2016: 7.27am. Link shared: https://mailinabox.email/ It's taken ten days since the ACCU conference, but I finally cleared the nearly 10,000 emails which had backlogged since Dec 1st 2015. Next step is to replace my email server, the current one is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed in May 2012 and considering it is an entirely hand rolled installation, it has served me very well during the last four years, though it has begun to fall over increasingly in the last six months or so (I have hourly cron scripts which resurrect it automatically - most of the time). ...
Tuesday 10th May 2016: 7.43am. Link shared: http://www.nedproductions.biz/ Last weekend didn't see much sleep as I spent the early hours learning bleeding edge technology to create the replacement nedproductions.biz website which fronts my consulting business. I had taken down the previous site last March or so mainly because keeping the Plone CMS backing it up to date was becoming bothersome, so I was looking for an absolutely zero maintenance overhead website solution. ...
Thursday 12th May 2016: 7.03pm. Location: Dromahane. Niall's €15 solution to a worn out Ford T key. Sure beats the nearly €200 the Ford dealership wants, or the €75 for the chipped key. ...
Friday 13th May 2016: 6.20pm. Location: Dromahane. First day this year to have some actual heat in the sun after I finish work at 6pm. It's 7.20pm and it's absolutely lovely sitting in my front garden on my bench with a strong Belgian beer. Plus little chance of getting sun burnt at this late hour 😂 ...
Saturday 14th May 2016: 10.47am. It's the end of my four week break from programming outside of work hours which I normally take after presenting at conference. Next Monday starts the preparation for CppCon in Seattle next September. It's been a very productive four weeks though, an enormous number of chores and backlogged non programming todo items cleared. Just a few more to do this weekend, cutting the grass, defrosting the fridge, realigning the tv aerial, hoovering and mopping the entire house, hoover the car, and prepare for Northern Ireland. ...
Sunday 15th May 2016: 11.16am. Link shared: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3498820/ Watched Captain America Civil War last night. No idea how it is getting any better a score than 5.5 out of 10 (it's currently 8.4 out of 10 on IMDB), the movie is so boring I actually got distracted browsing the internet during watching it and lost any idea of what was going on. Far more importantly, I really didn't care in the slightest that I didn't know what was going on, the characters are neither interesting nor compelling. ...
Sunday 15th May 2016: 6.41pm. Location: Dromahane. New park bench for the front garden. Should be handy for catching the last of the sun after work during the summer, though sadly today I missed most of the sun due to Clara napping late. It's still a nice evening, even with jumpers on for the chill. ...
Monday 23rd May 2016: 9.58pm. Put myself on the scales last week for the first time in many months and was fairly appalled with the reading - I am heading back towards being as fat as I was by the end of Canada. Clearly having full time employment is not good for my waistline! Anyway, seeing as I bought Megan a fancy bike for Christmas, I've decided that from tomorrow morning onwards I'm going to cycle to and from work unless the weather is awful. ...
Tuesday 24th May 2016: 6.27pm. Location: Dromahane. Pretty glorious it has to be said. Yes that's a beer can after cycling home from work. Had to stop three times to texture, but I made it. ...
Thursday 26th May 2016: 8.20am. Link shared: http://melpon.org/wandbox/permlink/4rJCUypvBbGGFTqx I'm not a natural C++ metaprogrammer, so it took me two mornings before work to come up with this of which I am quite proud:```#include <stdio.h>#include <string>template <class... Args> struct Foo {};template <class T, class... Args> struct Foo<T, Args...> { T v; Foo<Args...> rest;};template <class T> struct Foo<T> { T v; };namespace detail {template <size_t N, class T, class... Args> struct getFoo { constexpr auto operator()(const Foo<T, Args. ...
Friday 27th May 2016: 10.31pm. Location: Dromahane. Put my back out this morning plus feeling pretty sore from a week of cycling, so treated myself to this. I'm not a huge fan of Bushmills usually, its cheapest ten year old is the least worst whiskey in the bottom range of price and it's usually what we get when we have flu, though it's actually not awful, just a bit bland and has an unpleasant aftertaste. ...
Tuesday 31st May 2016: 6.45pm. Location: Dromahane (Opp Russell Inn). The weather has been so nice these last few days, warm but fresh and not humid like in the Continent or America, nor any biting insects. It's heading towards 8pm and it's so nice to sit outside. The heat isn't as overpowering, and you burn in an hour instead of twenty minutes. Really can't complain about anything times like these. ...
Tuesday 31st May 2016: 10.52pm. As at every time this year for the 1st June, here is the latest trend graph for consumer hard drives vs SSDs per inflation adjusted dollar between 1980 and right now in 2016. Very little has changed since last year, everything is following their trend line. The SSDs trend curve has raised itself slightly but still shows no sign of ever intercepting the hard drive trend line. ...
Friday 24th June 2016: 6.31am. Very bad news from Britain this morning for Ireland. Taxes will have to rise, I'd expect the housing market here will slide, we will suffer disproportionately in the short term. The only place which will have it much worse again will be Northern Ireland, I can see an economic collapse up there now. Wonderful :( The only bright spot will be this will be very very good for Ireland medium to long term. ...
Sunday 26th June 2016: 10.11pm. Got back early enough from Dublin where we saw newly weds +Paul Kirth and his new wife Holly on their honeymoon to finish fitting the sunlight control measures I dropped €150 on at IKEA some weeks ago. I've added blackout blinds, but also a blackout inner layer of curtain which hangs on plastic hooks behind the original curtain so you can't see it. Many thanks to my father +Francis Douglas for sewing the bottom half of the curtains to the top in order to double their thickness and halve the light getting through. ...
Monday 27th June 2016: 10.58am. My CppCon talk "Memory mapped distributed mutual exclusion using Proposed Boost.AFIO (asynchronous filesystem and file i/o)" has been accepted for presentation at CppCon 2016 in Seattle this September. My thanks to the Programme Committee for taking a bit of a risk on this topic, because as you'll see from the proposed abstract it is not certain if the topic is even feasible (if it isn't, I'll present the results of my failure :) )" ...
Thursday 30th June 2016: 11.09pm. I am currently typing to you from a brand new install of Windows 10 bleeding edge Insider edition, installed solely in order to gain access to the new Linux Subsystem for Windows which comes with the very newest Windows 10s (my laptop's Windows 10 had been refusing to upgrade for some months now, so a reinstall was unavoidable). This new subsystem lets you run existing Linux binaries on Windows as if they were native applications, something which FreeBSD of course has been doing for years, but well it's enormously more useful on Windows than on BSD. ...
Sunday 3rd July 2016: 12.31pm. Well, rock on Microsoft for once. Bug fixes to the latest Linux Subsystem for Windows now makes flawless cmake and SSH servers, so yes you can actually fire up VS2015 with its remote Linux project plugin and compile and debug Linux programs natively on Windows 10. X11 apps also now mostly work, I very nearly can get all the way onto a 'startkde', it just fails at the very end. ...
Monday 18th July 2016: 8.34pm. Location: Dromahane. Like a lot of people with children, found that single USB chargers were taking up all our spare power sockets, especially given the large uk socket. So bought this multi port USB charger shown, this particular model I chose specifically for the amperage readout because I can tell (a) if a device is slow charging due to a bad cable and (b) when all the devices are charged using a single glance. ...
Monday 25th July 2016: 1.04am. Link shared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_(eighth_generation) Been thinking about a newer used car than our sixteen year old Focus as the time to make a decision is drawing nearer - basically, if DTS decide to renew my contract after September, I'll need to decide quick. Here is what I need in order:1. Needs to be July 2008 or later to get the dramatically lower Irish motor tax (Jan 2008 if importing from the UK) saving maybe €300/year. ...
Thursday 28th July 2016: 11.20pm. Location: Dromahane. Link shared: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt4189022/ Just watched the amazing first episode of Ash vs Evil Dead which contains the original actor, director and producer from the Evil Dead movies, except with thirty years added to all as that's how long it's been already folks. I was very surprised how well they pulled it off, it's actually higher quality than the original movies because well everyone is much more experienced, the cameras are much better and there is vastly more budget now, that said I haven't seen a single trace of CGI, it's all old fashioned special effects. ...
Monday 1st August 2016: 10.54pm. Location: Dromahane. Picked up this Glenfiddich today on the way home from Belgium at Brussels airport for an excellent price by Irish standards. The garish orange box aside, this is the same Caribbean rum finished 21 year old I first tasted at Megan's parents at some Christmas's ago and it hits its target much better than the Bushmills 21 did, being a far more consistent and stable whiskey. ...
Saturday 27th August 2016: 12.49pm. You've not seen much from me these past six weeks here, this is because I've been spending every spare hour preparing the material for CppCon 2016 which is just three weeks away now. As a quick summary of my outside-of-work programming time since the ACCU 2016 conference last April:* May-June: Writing a next generation code testing engine for C++ which is how code testing ought to always have be done. ...
Saturday 27th August 2016: 12.54pm. You've not seen much from me these past six weeks here, this is because I've been spending every spare hour preparing the material for CppCon 2016 which is just three weeks away now. As a quick summary of my outside-of-work programming time since the ACCU 2016 conference last April:* May-June: Writing a next generation code testing engine for C++ which is how code testing ought to always have be done. ...
Wednesday 7th September 2016: 7.27am. Link shared: https://cppcon2016.sched.org/event/7nKi/better-mutual-exclusion-on-the-filesystem-using-boostafio-asynchronous-file-and-filesystem Ten days exactly to go before I depart for CppCon 2016 in Seattle! I am very glad to report that the code I am presenting (link to talk is below) finally passed the last of its unit tests yesterday, so it is finally debugged and I have some performance benchmarks. As expected, this new filesystem locking algorithm is a full order of magnitude (10x-20x) faster than anything else in AFIO v2 that was presented at ACCU 2016 last April. ...
Tuesday 13th September 2016: 11.10am. Link shared: https://cppcon2016.sched.org/event/a36061492fca1e20d6521b6fbbc56e37 Finished writing the talk description of my CppCon workshop next week:"This is the third and likely final part of a "from first principles" series of beginner's workshops based on developing the v2 post-peer-review rewrite of proposed Boost.AFIO, a C++ library wrapping the advanced features of the filesystem intended for eventual ISO C++ standardisation. If you're the kind of library developer who likes building unusual low level concurrent algorithms using the very latest C++ 14-17 (proposed) features and testing them for time and space complexities, this is definitely your kind of talk. ...
Sunday 18th September 2016: 5.15pm. Location: Hyatt Regency. Here in Bellevue (Seattle) for #CppCon 2016 same hotel with a slightly nicer view than last year. Feeling unusually ropey the day after long distance travel than is usual for me, I have decided to try the gym and see if that enables a nap which might sort me out. ...
Thursday 22nd September 2016: 5.05pm. Location: Hyatt Regency. Getting ready for the last practice run of my #CppCon workshop which I'll be giving in a few hours time. This time I really do expect to be the smallest in this track and not get surprised by the attendance like at the @ACCUConf, but I expect the questions to be much harder because I presupplied my slides, so those who attend will likely be quite hardcore enthusiasts. ...
Monday 26th September 2016: 11.40pm. Just put myself on the scales after six months of not wanting to know, but noticing I only still fit into two and increasingly one of my pairs of trousers. Weighed in at 86.4 kg (13 stone 8 pounds) which is my heaviest ever. Sigh. Anyway, now I'm off the clock on outside of work conference prep until Christmas, I should lose one stone (14 pounds) before Christmas if past trends remain holding true, so I should drop to 80kg which is still fairly overweight (65-75kg is where I really ought to be, that awaits 2018! ...
Tuesday 27th September 2016: 2.48am. Just sat up till 4am watching the Clinton vs Trump debate (jetlag). Kinda found it fairly even to be honest, she was hugely undermined by smirking and looking smug when she was otherwise winning. He was, well, not at his best. I will say it was the best presidential debate I've seen since Bill Clinton's era, it had actual real differences in policy instead of the two candidates being barely distinguishable, and the candidates argued passionately instead of clearly going through the motions. ...
Friday 30th September 2016: 9.56pm. @ACCUConf @CppCon My CppCon 2016 workshop video is available! Not one of my better talks unfortunately. Firstly I droned on far too long at the beginning talking about why AFIO, how AFIO fits in with C++ 17/20 standardisation efforts, conversations with Bjarne and Gabi etc about Boost and C++ Modules etc - I ended up overshooting the pre-workshop time budget by about ten minutes. I then had prepared a workshop for a totally different audience than the one I had, I had been assuming only filesystem geeks would turn up, in fact most attendees were there out of curiosity and didn't know anything about the filesystem at all. ...
Saturday 1st October 2016: 4.27pm. Location: Dromahane. Just finished cutting the grass for the last time this year on what is probably one of the last warm sunny days of 2016. Quite pleasant sitting in the sun, a little chilly in the breeze, but the sun still has a bit of power to it. Glad to be on my three month break from programming, looking forward to starting the final part of my maths course when I finish raking up the grass. ...
Saturday 1st October 2016: 6.06pm. Location: Dromahane. Some amazing sights as myself and Clara walked up to the local off licence to buy beer. Clara was very impressed by the rainbow in particular! ...
Wednesday 5th October 2016: 5.44pm. Google has just announced its Pixel and Pixel XL phones to replace the Nexus series. Looks like they didn't learn from the way overpriced Nexus 6 fiasco where they couldn't shift any units until they lopped €250 off the price: €869 for the Pixel 128Gb and a whole €1009 for the Pixel XL 128Gb! Pardon the expletive, but they can fuck right off with that sort of pricing when a brand new 2015 Nexus 6P 64Gb is going for €450 and is barely lower specced to the Pixel XL, certainly in no way you'll ever notice. ...
Friday 28th October 2016: 11.05am. Been awaiting the MacBook Pro announcement last night for a long time seeing as my six year old ex-corporate self-refurbished Dell laptop is getting a little long in the tooth. Here's the rough price breakdown in Euros, all ex VAT as it'll be my business buying them, all systems have 16Gb of RAM and a 512Gb SSD:Late 2016 MBP 13 with touch bar 3.1Ghz i5 CPU: €2162Late 2016 MBP 13 without touch bar 2. ...
Sunday 6th November 2016: 2.03am. Just watched the new documentary from Adam Curtis "HyperNormalisation" which has proven to be a highly depressing study of the last thirty years of changes in world power dynamics leading to the current mass disenfranchisement with the status quo, thus leading to all sorts of acting out by the herd such as suicide bombings, hiding away in Facebook, electing Reagan and handing ever increasing real power to unaccountable automated surveillance and databases, the most obvious of which recently was the financial collapse which far worse clearly coming soon. ...
Sunday 6th November 2016: 12.06pm. Link shared: https://plus.google.com/+nialldouglas/posts/BYnxb6buUDr Readers may remember me musing about what newer car to get about four months ago at https://plus.google.com/+nialldouglas/posts/BYnxb6buUDr where due to living in Ireland I had some very odd selection criteria: 2008 or later to get the CO2 based motor tax, diesel because that's unusually cheap in Ireland, closer to €500 than a grand a year to insure, total budget €7k, and to avoid like the plague all early model DPF diesels which have expensive teething bugs both in the DPF and in their ECUs. ...
Wednesday 9th November 2016: 8.30am. So Trump has won. Just like with Brexit, the Western ruling elite better start waking up and putting realistic numbers of bankers from the 2009 crash in handcuffs and into prison for twenty years and recovering the money they systemically stole from retail users. The top 1% also need to start thinking about paying 2-5% of their total wealth over every year and bringing in 70% income tax rates to severely narrow the inequality gap between rich and poor. ...
Thursday 10th November 2016: 1.15pm. Right now the car auction is running in Scotland for our potential new car. I'm not bidding personally, rather an agent I contracted is doing so for me. Despite that it's no loss if we don't get it at our bid price (there are plenty more Ford Foci on auction every day), I am feeling a little nervous for some odd reason.
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Sunday 13th November 2016: 2.46am. Link shared: https://passivehouseplus.ie/magazine/new-build/west-cork-passive-house-raises-design-bar Went to visit the unusual passive house below today (lengthy article about it linked) which was a four hour round trip drive. An engineering triumph no doubt, floor to ceiling sliding windows almost entirely throughout and a non-cube and therefore hard to prevent air leaks layout, yet requires I think the architect said measured at just 8kWh/m2/year which is far below the upcoming EU Near Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) mandatory maximum of 45kWh/m2/year from 2021 onwards. ...
Saturday 19th November 2016: 6.01pm. Location: Dromahane. As the swelling goes down he's reminding me more and more of McGyver's boss. Same grumpy look too. He's awake and lucid surprisingly frequently for a newborn. Can go an easy hour of interaction too between feeds. A lot longer than Clara was as a newborn. ...
Friday 9th December 2016: 5.36pm. Link shared: http://www.nedprod.com/Niall_stuff/AuctionCar/index.html It took more hours than I would have wished, but I have finished dumping into the linked document all my recently acquired knowledge about buying a used car remotely off the internet never having physically seen the thing before. I know American readers will wonder what's the deal, but it's very rare in the UK or Ireland to buy a car without having physically seen it beforehand. ...
Thursday 15th December 2016: 4.22pm. We are now a two car family! Just finished up there converting our insurance from a single policy with Megan as a named driver since 2009 into two separate policies. My car is now the black year 2000 Focus and I'll be selling the new blue 2011 Focus to Megan for one euro, with her being insured on that car in her own name for the first time in Ireland. ...
Saturday 17th December 2016: 12.08am. Grrr I bought a just released MacBook Pro 13 some weeks ago and I've been having one hell of a time persuading it to run Windows. Firstly, you need to use and only use the Consumer Win10 ISO preferably in US only. Anything else tends to cause Bootcamp Installer to crash out randomly, or to bork the install such that the installed Windows won't boot. ...
Saturday 17th December 2016: 3.01am. Finished running some benchmarks comparing my new MacBook Pro 13 with Touchbar and my old Dell E6410. My 2016 MacBook has a 3.3 Ghz (turbo 3.5 Ghz) Skylake CPU with 16Gb of DDR3-2133 RAM. My 2010 Dell E6410 has a 2.53 Ghz (turbo 3.0 Ghz) Nehelem CPU with 4Gb of DDR3-1066 RAM. The former cost me nearly €3,000, the latter €550 as it was a retired ex-corporate laptop I bought from eBay US in 2014 for €160 and I bought it a new battery, charger, SSD etc as ex-corporates don't come with any of those. ...
Saturday 17th December 2016: 6.42pm. Location: Dromahane. Shortly about to look after Henry on my own for the first time. If it goes anything like when I looked after Clara for the first time alone, tonight is going to be awful 😖
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Monday 19th December 2016: 12.20am. Drove the old year 2000 Focus for the first time in a month today. It was driving weird, then went into limp home mode where there is no engine power to prevent damage which makes taking off at junctions at roundabouts no fun. So I plugged in my newly acquired ELM327 USB cable from eBay for a few quid that lets my laptop talk to the car's on-board computers. ...
Monday 19th December 2016: 6.33pm. This is my latest piece of art and crafts, and is one of those things which is amazingly obviously a great idea as soon as you've seen one. It's an open fire draught excluder, so by preventing all your hot air disappearing up the chimney it substantially reduces the heating you need when the fire isn't burning and reduces the cold draught from underneath doors etc to unnoticeable. ...
Tuesday 20th December 2016: 8.45pm. Location: Dromahane. Aldi currently have this 27 year old port on special offer for €20. For that price I would highly recommend it. ...
Thursday 22nd December 2016: 9.54am. Location: Dromahane. Saw a flock of about 15 of these small birds with red faces, black and white tails and yellow side feathers all feeding as a group in my garden this morning, systematically stripping it of food. Each is about half the size of a robin which was also grazing and appeared quite scared of such a large group. The below photo doesn't do the sight justice, in hindsight should have used the 4k video and started recording much sooner. ...
Wednesday 28th December 2016: 9.22pm. Location: Dromahane. You wouldn't think he is only a month old! Almost looks toddler sized already. Snoring away nicely, thankfully, he's been fairly cranky this Christmas. ...
Friday 30th December 2016: 4.16am. Link shared: https://gist.github.com/ned14/f261bfda5e376959ab3588242df0a1ef Every Christmas I try to get some essential technical infrastructure maintenance done, and most years it turns into something quite technically tricky which isn't easy to fix and usually involves writing a complex Python program in an area far from my normal expertise to solve. This is one such year. It's good training, and worth writing here about.For fifteen plus years now, my email client has been good old Win3. ...
Sunday 1st January 2017: 3.46pm. Location: Kerry Pike. The holidays are over! Sun is just setting now after our short walk and just about to leave grandpa's for home. I don't return to work full time until Tuesday, but from then onwards it's very much back to the sixty hour weeks until the ACCU conference in April where I'll be presenting again this year. I think I'll be taking a break from CppCon this year so no Seattle in September, I don't have the free time this year to prepare material for it. ...
Tuesday 3rd January 2017: 2.35pm. Did the lunchtime 20 mins on the exercise bike first time since Christmas hols and it's amazing how much fitness you can lose in just two weeks. Normal bpm is 130-135 during that routine, today it kept tapping into the 160s so I had to back off. Strangely enough I felt fine during and after, usually when you get above 150 bpm for any period I start to feel unpleasant. ...
Wednesday 4th January 2017: 8.48pm. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/boost-lite/blob/master/cmake/BoostLiteSetupProject.cmake#L9 Nailed this cunning piece of cmake hackery today, so I thought I would share it. It solves the problem of cmake annoyingly not supporting out of the box per-target setting of C++ exceptions on/off, C++ RTTI on/off and whether to use the static or dynamic C++ runtime. It also, very usefully, stops the warning MSVC makes about overriding the C++ exceptions enable that cmake enforces in the core compile flags on MSVC, this is amazingly useful when you turn on error on warnings and your C++ has exceptions disabled. ...
Monday 9th January 2017: 2.36pm. 2017 is starting badly. Contract didn't get renewed so I'm now unemployed, car insurance is being rejected because of a two month gap in named driver experience over seven years, my nice workstation monitor just lost the right half of its display which means now I need a new one - or rather, I can't use my workstation until I land a new contract. It's been a lot of bad news to all land in just a week :( ...
Monday 16th January 2017: 12.29am. Forgot to post this a few days ago ... look at the size of him! Two months old and we've had to remove the newborn wedge for his seat, his legs are already sticking off the end and he clearly is overflowing the newborn shroud thing. Anyway he's now in his four to six month old chair at age two months, and we're already thinking we will need to buy Clara a new car seat soon because this big fella is going to outgrow this seat very soon if he keeps adding weight at the current rate . ...
Monday 16th January 2017: 12.35am. Many thanks to everyone who joined me for my birthday celebrations earlier today. Here is a family photo in low infrared using my big birthday present which was the FLIR One low infrared camera. In fact, expect many low infrared pictures coming shortly ... ...
Monday 16th January 2017: 12.46am. One of the really surprising things about cheap double glazing is that the glass typically loses far less heat that everything surrounding the glass which, because it's cheap, tends to be completely uninsulated because consumers don't realise until they find their double glazing install still leads to cold draughts coming down off them and condensation and mould forming all over them. Here is proof: this is our back door earlier tonight on our rental which is a former council house which was upgraded with cheap double glazing. ...
Monday 16th January 2017: 1.50am. We've wondered for a long time why our hallway is so baltic cold all the time, and while we suspected something was up with our front door given you can feel the cold air falling off it, the below shows that something very weird is going on with the double glazing on the front door and window where the glass panes are markedly colder than the frames. ...
Monday 16th January 2017: 1.59am. Final little demo of my new thermal camera is looking at the ceiling of the front room many hours after the heating has turned off. The FLIR One's camera is, as you've no doubt noticed, very low resolution, about 160 x 120. It also has a frame update rate of no better than 15 fps even when using the unofficial (paid) Android app I'm using below which unlocks quite a few features imposed on the device by US military technology export restrictions (I'm in Europe, so those don't apply to me, but the manufacturer which is US based must comply. ...
Wednesday 18th January 2017: 8.54am. Today we as a family are off to Galway and Limerick as the final part of my birthday celebrations. We'll be going to see another passive house, but this one is made from a "system build" of prefabricated timber frame components a bit like a giant LEGO set where each block is 1.2m wide. That makes it affordable to people like me unlike most passive houses, but comes with the cost that your house is not going to have much variation in design (which suits me actually for the outside, I'm much more concerned about customising the inside which is the bit which in my mind actually matters most). ...
Thursday 19th January 2017: 10.21am. Some interesting thermal results from the Galway passive house yesterday. First is that a thermal camera is deceptive at telling you how well insulated a house is. Below is the system built timber passive house we saw in infra red and visible, the temperature range goes between 3.0 C and 10.4 C, the walls are clearly 8.3 C. The third picture is my house last night, temperature range is nearly the same 3. ...
Thursday 19th January 2017: 10.44am. Another thing very interesting about that passive house was that even with all that insulation, they still suffer from thermal bridging especially wherever there is a join or a corner. Below are three thermal images from inside, first was top floor where the roof windows are, second was in the kitchen and third was an office. Around the window frames there is clear bridging, though the false colour makes it look worse than it is, it's just a 5 C drop. ...
Thursday 19th January 2017: 10.52am. Finally here are some normal, non thermal pictures of the Galway passive house. The first shows the thickness of the walls, I make them about a foot and a half. Next two show the roof space as that's very much what I'm thinking of for storage and maybe a home office. For the next three the funny looking box on the couch is actually a segment of the external wall with the inside on the left and the outside facing the elements on the right, so you might pick out a thick plastic sheet just after the white left most layer and before the insulation layer. ...
Friday 17th February 2017: 3.44pm. Link shared: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pcpp I've been a little quiet on here of late since I came out of contract, and it's amazing how five weeks of unemployment have passed just like that. I had to relinquish my rented office inside town to conserve cash a little over two weeks ago, and since I've returned to being at home all day I've essentially become mostly a daycare worker. ...
Sunday 19th February 2017: 10.54am. Link shared: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pcpp I'm sure you all remember me mentioning my current unemployment side project, a C preprocessor written in Python, and that by far the hardest part in it is correct function macro expansion. Indeed, Microsoft's preprocessor has long gotten it wrong, and it's worth looking into some of the problems.Superficially a C preprocessor looks very, very straightforward. It originated in the 1970s as a simple string match and substitute preprocessor, so:#define FOO fooprintf(" ...
Monday 20th February 2017: 1.36pm. Location: Dublin Airport. Just about to depart for Paris to hopefully close a new work contract. Feeling very rough, barely slept a wink last night but not due to nerves, rather my tonsils have become infected, so I can't breathe! Which is weird as I was only talking to my sister about whether to remove tonsils and adenoids etc when young or not last night when she was giving me a haircut! ...
Monday 20th February 2017: 7.14pm. Fifteen years since my last time in Paris. Surprising how little has changed, driving here is still very stressful, the food is still very good if expensive. Paris is basically unchanged except that fifteen years ago you still struggled as an English speaker here. Now almost everyone speaks some English. Big change, but it's about the only one, there has been remarkably little change here otherwise. ...
Wednesday 22nd February 2017: 10.48am. I feel waking this morning like I came off a transatlantic flight yesterday, pounding headache, disorientated, feel rough as hell. Yet only came from France! Now don't get me wrong, yesterday was a long day and you need to perform if you're going to bring home a contract, plus I'd not felt nor slept well the two nights before and I was on a fair quantity of pharmaceuticals so I looked much healthier than I was, and coming off those necessarily invokes a good bit of debt payback so you'd expect to feel a bit worse for wear. ...
Friday 24th February 2017: 10.56am. Link shared: http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/ Still feeling poorly, aches, sweats and no appetite, and little energy. You have to fight yourself to do anything. Been like this for quite a few days now, and I'm looking forward to it lifting because it's highly non-helpful for productivity with the ACCU conference just a few weeks away now.Speaking of productivity, I am still (slowly) banging away on my Python C preprocessor during Clara naptimes. ...
Monday 27th February 2017: 3.34pm. As long time readers likely know and/or have observed here, when we moved to Canada back in 2012 I puffed up a lot weight wise, hitting 180 lb (81.6kg) pretty quickly, and I have found it hard to shift despite trying multiple strategies. Unfortunately with me my blood pressure is very sensitive to my weight, and I was tipping past 135/85 resting last September as my weight reached an all time high of 86. ...
Tuesday 7th March 2017: 4.40pm. Marvel at my latest acquisition, the "squatty potty" available from Amazon UK for about £20 delivered. Allows one to comfortably assume the squatting position during use of Western toilets, thus allowing one to experience the daily ritual as if one were on an Eastern toilet!I was drawn to buying this because in the house I intend to build some day, I was going to install squat toilets rather than sitting ones except probably in Megan's toilet. ...
Saturday 11th March 2017: 12.41am. I appreciate that this is going to be lost on pretty much everyone reading this, including the techies. So apologies in advance. However, marvel and stare in awe and wonder at this apparently simple-ish API reference page for Outcome's expected<T, E> as generated by doxygen. What makes it a wonder is that the damn thing is finally accurate and complete. And it has only taken me slightly over a month to achieve, requiring me to write a brand new C preprocessor in Python (https://github. ...
Monday 13th March 2017: 6.11pm. Link shared: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/5z5r5i/boostoutcome_is_finished_boost_review_manager/?ref=share&ref_source=link One of those big ol personally momentus days today. In the wee small hours last night shivering in Clara's bedroom as I'd stayed there working on the laptop after putting her to bed and it got cold, I finally delivered my Outcome library to Boost peer review. That library has taken me two years of my free time to write, and a never ending long tail of incredibly boring minute detail over the past four months or so to actually deliver the thing. ...
Tuesday 21st March 2017: 4.14pm. Link shared: https://www.quanthouse.com/ Many thanks to QuantHouse for contracting me via my consulting company ned Productions Ltd to help them with getting their world class market data latency even lower. The business is much appreciated!
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Friday 24th March 2017: 6.06pm. Link shared: https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/ Just booked Disney world in Florida for Christmas and New Year. Not cheap, especially for a whole family coming from Europe, but should be fun!
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Wednesday 5th April 2017: 7.28am. Dropped below 78 kg, which is half way between where I began (86 kg) and where I intend to reach (70 kg). Took me six months to lose 8 kg (18 lbs). Following out the trend line, I should reach 70 kg, my St. Andrews weight, in a bit over ten months if nothing else changed, but cycling seasons begins very soon now once it gets just a little bit warmer. ...
Saturday 8th April 2017: 11.49pm. Link shared: http://my.cdash.org/index.php?project=Boost.AFIO Proposed Boost.AFIO v2 is resurrected, and now passes all its unit tests for the first time since Oct 17th. All the work done to proposed Boost.Outcome to get it ready for peer review (which will happen mid-May!) had caused AFIO to suffer hefty code rot given how dependent it is on Outcome, but none of the derotting fixes were hard, just time consuming. ...
Wednesday 19th April 2017: 11.19am. Noticed something initially odd with my cycling to work times so far this year - I'm regularly coming in at 18 minutes and a few seconds without much effort with an average of > 13 mph. This was surprising as last summer if I made it under 20 minutes, I felt it a great time which I didn't always make, and I was usually panting and sweating heavily. ...
Friday 21st April 2017: 8.05pm. Location: Convention Centre. Congratulations to +Megan Bean on becoming an Irish and European citizen in Dublin earlier today. As much as everyone here thinks immigrants just walk into full Irish citizenship dead easy, it actually takes many years meeting exact deadlines, standing in queues annually and a lot of money spent on visas, mandatory health insurance and other substantial costs. She now gets all the rights and privileges of being a European citizen including the all important EU passport - no more waiting in long queues when she travels around Europe! ...
Saturday 22nd April 2017: 10.24am. Location: Dromahane. Dishwasher hose did this after just three years. Lucky we spotted it before it blew, otherwise would have been very expensive. In the second picture you'll see the very expensive braided metal replacement hose made in Germany, cost me thirty euro but i am hoping will not suffer from the same problem. Water hoses are funny things, some last just a few years before getting aneurisms like this one did, for most it's the washers which go and it's a slow but safe leak. ...
Monday 24th April 2017: 12.54pm. Location: Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre. Arrived at the ACCU conference with family after a very hectic morning during which none of us ate food yet. So famished, got started with a liquid lunch obviously until the food arrived. Kids have been amazing given the lack of food. Hope they have as much fun as they did last year.#accuconf ...
Tuesday 2nd May 2017: 2.47pm. My latest conference video, this one being on the lightweight monadic transport expected<T, E> proposed for C++. This is my first conventional "knowledge transfer" talk where I simply pour knowledge out of my brain into the jug that is the audience as is traditional pedagogy, up until now I had argued a case or had done workshops, knowing that conference organisers always feel a lack of the latter and therefore tend to accept workshops quicker. ...
Thursday 4th May 2017: 5.23pm. Location: Dromahane. Last clothes horse just collapsed when I put clothes on it. Metal was far too thin, it just bent under the weight, I was not impressed as I was leaving for Bristol early the next day. My solution is this clothes horse which is the "Rolls Royce of clothes horses" by Brabantia. You don't want to know what it cost, but I will say I am very confident it could support my weight let alone lots of wet towels. ...
Thursday 11th May 2017: 4.42pm. Location: Dromahane. Just sent off my Outcome library for Boost peer review, so it is now frozen for the next few weeks while people study it and find many, many problems in it, and decide if it should be accepted or not. It's taken three years to get to now, my thanks to everyone who helped make it happen. I am having a beer (pictured) now this intense sprint of work to get it ready for review is over at last, though I note Henry looks highly keen on nabbing the beer from me! ...
Wednesday 17th May 2017: 7.47am. Location: The Dark Hedges. Finally got up early enough when staying here to walk the dark hedges before breakfast. Lovely morning. ...
Sunday 21st May 2017: 7.51pm. The fourth and final piece of coursework for M337 Complex Analysis just went in. It is three weeks late, but they gave me an extension, the month of April is my busiest every year and I just couldn't also do the maths coursework. I got stuck on a proof where I needed to finish with an equation one part of which contained a -3 and I only could get a -2. ...
Thursday 25th May 2017: 12.44am. Just watched Ghost in the Shell the movie with Scarlett Johansson. Not great, they tried to replicate the original Japanese animation faithfully but it kinda fell flat. That said, watching the original it looks very dated nowadays, the whole notion of part human and part machine in super human form yet totally hackable is so widely understood to be technically infeasible it eliminates any plausibility, and the original (or this edition) loses so much of the meaning and relevance it had back in the mid nineties back when fundamental limits weren't so obvious. ...
Friday 26th May 2017: 12.37pm. Link shared: http://cppcast.com/ My recent radio interview on the Google Summer of Code programme at Boost and my proposed Boost.Outcome library currently undergoing peer review.
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Wednesday 31st May 2017: 8.08pm. As I do this time every year, here is my time series graph of spinning rust storage per inflation adjusted dollar as against flash storage, updated with data for 2017. As you will note, flash storage actually is more expensive this year than last by 5-10% probably due to the global flash memory shortage, and I also see that Intel's NVMe SSDs are as competitive as their non-NVMe SSDs for the first time, so I used the NVMe products. ...
Thursday 1st June 2017: 6.24pm. I'm now below 76 kg and was getting curious when I might reach my goal of 70 kg, so I dusted off my linear regression training from my Economics degree and did up the graph below showing Log regression (this has the best fit), Power regression (too pessimistic I hope!) and Linear regression of my recent weight only under the assumption that last few months of being out of contract would be a structural break. ...
Saturday 3rd June 2017: 9.45pm. The peer review of my proposed Boost.Outcome library ended yesterday after being extended to two weeks to allow more discussion. Some 732 emails were sent on the topic, one of the most vigorous debates on boost-dev in many years, and a very highly productive one I think despite that we did not find consensus.#boostcpp #c++ #boost-outcome
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Monday 5th June 2017: 3.22pm. Location: Kerry Pike. Been doing past papers for my final maths exam in complex analysis this Friday. Two thirds of the marks are for eight small problems, but my difficulty is it takes me approx half an hour to do each which is a problem given it's a three hour exam. At absolute best after lots of practice I might achieve twenty minutes each. Even then, that's two hours forty minutes. ...
Wednesday 7th June 2017: 8.24am. Link shared: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/review-Outcome-Review-Report-tt4695267.html My proposed Boost.Outcome library's review report: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/review-Outcome-Review-Report-tt4695267.html. It was rejected after one of the lengthiest reviews in many years. Lots of good feedback on how it ought to look. #boostcpp #c++ #boost-outcome
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Friday 9th June 2017: 4.33pm. This morning I took my hopefully final exam in my Open University Pure Maths qualification, it was the hardest anyone can think of in any exam in at least a decade, my best estimation of my result is approx 42%. Could possibly be a resit, we shall see, but a deeply unfair exam, the mandatory section was littered with little twists and math quirks which is absolutely fine except for the enormous time pressure, three hours gives you no time to think about anything tricky. ...
Tuesday 13th June 2017: 4.15pm. Just came back from my first ever visit to Mallow Town Recycling Amenity where I dumped a full-to-the-brim carload of cardboard boxes, broken electronics, spent batteries, blown energy saving lightbulbs etc. I was more than impressed with the place, every conceivable thing from cooking oil to old pesticide containers can be recycled there. My only annoyance, and this is a general thing aimed at all waste services in Ireland, is the €3 entry charge. ...
Wednesday 14th June 2017: 10.48am. Link shared: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/6h6oqn/introducing_static_views_aka_compiletime_ranges_ts/?ref=share&ref_source=link https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/6h6oqn/introducing_static_views_aka_compiletime_ranges_ts/?ref=share&ref_source=link ...
Saturday 17th June 2017: 1.40pm. Second ever only time looked after both without mum for any length of time. It's much easier when it's not raining! ...
Sunday 18th June 2017: 6.57pm. Many thanks to my father for taking us to my mother's grave earlier today. Appalling as I'm sure it will be to many, I failed to find it on my own. Modern graveyards are huge and densely packed. Very easy to get disorientated. Anyway the photo below contains the exact GPS coordinates which are 51° 53' 24.99496" N 8° 33' 50.79475" W and yes, I am using this blog post to make sure I can find that location again anytime in the future. ...
Sunday 18th June 2017: 7.15pm. Location: Dromahane. I've said it here before, but there is little better I've experienced in my life to date than late in a hot sunny day in Ireland. What makes Irish summer evenings so amazing is their rarity which makes them special, the freshness and lack of oppressive humidity, and that no insects pester you like in other countries. Warm but not skin burning, not too humid and with a pleasant breeze, this evening is every bit as good as those summer evenings last year and the year before. ...
Sunday 25th June 2017: 12.21pm. Some photos from yesterday at Spike Island, now a very popular tourist attraction after being an island prison and military garrison and fort from about 1800 until 2004. It is rare to find such a continually used and maintained 18th century fortification. That is due to its strategic position guarding entry to Cork harbour which gained particular importance after the American Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic wars with the attempted French naval landings 1796-1798, hence the British being willing to invest in such a huge fortification as Cork harbour was a superb staging port for huge fleets of ships, so had it been lost it would have been very serious. ...
Friday 30th June 2017: 11.32pm. Just watching the new Transformers movie, which is unbelievably bad yet again. That new Fast and Furious 8 movie is Oscar winning material in comparison to this absolute drivel, even The Mechanic 3: Resurrection is superb compared to this utter shite. Yet people keep going to watch them, so they keep spending another $200m to make another one. Boggles the mind :(
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Friday 7th July 2017: 3.30pm. My ZFS-on-Linux public facing server managed 289 days of trouble free uptime before today exhibiting massive i/o delay (see below) making it unusable without rebooting. That's the best it's ever achieved to date. Really shows how ZFS-on-Linux is becoming actually viable for reliable service provision, and as bug fixes land it's getting increasingly ever better.```top - 16:26:58 up 289 days, 23:27, 1 user, load average: 3. ...
Tuesday 18th July 2017: 4.54pm. Passed my Complex Analysis course with the Open University, got a full 57% which is much better than my estimated 43%. That has me clear for graduating with my Higher Cert in Pure Maths woohoo, no more academic studies!!!
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Friday 21st July 2017: 1.22pm. Finally got my weight below 75kg! Progress was very slow these past two months, summer weather means cold beers in the sun and ice cream, plus being out of employment has meant less leaving the house. Hitting my target 70kg is no longer statistically possible as you can see below with the current rate of weight loss :( as the power model is clearly the one I'm currently following. ...
Friday 21st July 2017: 1.31pm. We took those who had flown in from foreign countries for Henry's Christening last weekend to Longueville House, a nearby Irish country house hotel, for a meal as a way of thanking them for the considerable expense and inconvenience in getting here. Longueville placed us in their "Chinese Room" which as you can see from the pictures looks a treat. Unfortunately both myself and Megan had to take Henry for a walk a bit too frequently to properly enjoy ourselves, but we think everybody else had a ball which is all we hoped for. ...
Wednesday 26th July 2017: 8.55pm. Earlier today looking for fairy doors at Dromkeen Forest. Henry is getting old enough he didn't get bored at any stage. Which is great. ...
Monday 7th August 2017: 8.40am. Location: The Dark Hedges. Unexpectedly currently in Northern Ireland. Weather has been awful and will be awful later today, but at 8am this morning there was a window of sunshine perfect for my morning stroll through the hedges. Lovely walk if it's sunny. Reminded me of Autumn, except the sun was hotter and the fields were not fallow. But similar cold and very damp, torrential rain driving up yesterday. ...
Monday 28th August 2017: 6.45pm. Location: Dromahane. Was just heading downstairs there leaving Henry upstairs and he says "bye bye da da". Thinking I must have heard wrong, went back upstairs to say goodbye to him again and he does the same thing and waved bye bye! So maybe that's his first sentence! His only words till now have been mama, dada, baba and maybe night night. Didn't know he could construct context appropriate sentences yet! ...
Tuesday 29th August 2017: 2.28am. After only sixteen, yes sixteen, hours of Twin Peaks season 3, I have to admit my heart sprung a joy when the zombie Agent Cooper - who was admittedly very entertaining - finally became fully restored after electrocuting himself as the Agent Cooper in this week's episode. Sure, exchanging your soul to save Heather Graham from BOB and then returning from the afterlife in the red room is rather impactful on oneself, but the zombie thing was beginning to drag on a bit. ...
Friday 1st September 2017: 4.12am. Link shared: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0830361/ If you're into sci fi and haven't seen "The Lost Room", a Canadian mini series from 2006, then you really should. Very clever. And packed full of famous actors you never realised are Canadian! My only caveat is that at end the of the six hour mini series, you'll really wonder why some stuff like the Blacklist or Blindspot gets constantly renewed whilst stuff like this or Limitless, which was similarly really well written and clever, does not 😠 ...
Sunday 10th September 2017: 11.00pm. Now under 74kg, it took me nearly two months to lose 1kg. Entirely understandable as without a job and awful weather, the opportunity to exercise vigorously was very limited, and we can't really go anywhere as that costs money. The log regression model is back to exactly as it was in June when I first took a regression which suggests it's the most accurate predictor, so according to it I will continue to lose 1kg every two months reaching 72kg in February 2018. ...
Tuesday 12th September 2017: 1.16am. Been making great use of my time without employment working on AFIO, my proposed low latency file i/o library for standardisation. I wrote a toy transactional key-value store with AFIO permitting up to 48 concurrent writers, and here is how it performs for 128 bit keys and 1Kb values with 1 thread:1Kb values Windows with NTFS, no integrity, no durability, mmaps: Inserting 1M key-value pairs . ...
Tuesday 19th September 2017: 11.58am. Location: Dromahane. Link shared: http://indeed.ie The contract market in C++ is so bad in Ireland right now that not one single contract in C++ is on indeed.ie (a jobs site aggregator) in the "new roles" section! I haven't seen it this bad since the depths of the financial crash :( Where are all the finance roles coming out of London through Brexit induced relocation? Or is it that Brexit uncertainty is sinking all boats? ...
Wednesday 20th September 2017: 10.29pm. Location: Dromahane. Been unable to shift an unpleasant smell upstairs especially in Megan and Clara's rooms. Also have been coughing up a lot of flem without being sick last few weeks, I had been assuming it was from lack of activity due to lack of employment. But massive mould growth all over Megan's room was the sign, I put a humidity meter top of our stairs and it claims 80% RH which is not good. ...
Friday 22nd September 2017: 1.56pm. Location: Dromahane. New dehumidifier has been going flat out for five hours and the best it can reach is 67% relative humidity. Tank is filling rapidly, so it's working well. It's just very very humid, outside is warm and very moist. No wonder we get mould! ...
Sunday 8th October 2017: 12.43am. Link shared: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyzXrNrtPhLzFJmBcWSTO3A So okay, this is a children's animation originally made for the French market by Japanese animators with a terrible English audio conversion. But I challenge you to watch the first five episodes and not become hooked!This is in fact a simplified children's adaptation of the very long running Laureline and Valerian French graphic novels which were justly very influential on all sci-fi, especially the look and feel of Star Wars and Bladerunner and Farscape. ...
Wednesday 11th October 2017: 5.33pm. Aldi unusually have fancy sherries in stock as a special purchase. This very dry one and a cream. Aldi's normal very cheap sherry is good value for what it is, but this quality usually is North of twenty euro a bottle, and Aldi is selling these half litre bottles for 8 euro. These are no ten year old Sercial, one of my (and anybody who tries it) favourites. ...
Friday 13th October 2017: 5.34pm. Location: Dromahane. So yeah after weeks of him refusing to even be led walking by holding his hands, today he just suddenly stands up and starts walking, and now apparently that's the new normal. As the video below shows. His sister was the same, zero walking one day, spontaneous self initiated walking the next day. ...
Sunday 15th October 2017: 10.18pm. The worst hurricane since 1961 lands tomorrow. I have battery power for lighting and phones for approx 20 hours, water for five days with backup filtration for infinite days, cold food for a day. So we'll survive okay whatever happens, and my investment last year into disaster preparedness has definitely paid off. I do kinda wish I had bought that gas camping stove I meant to though, hot coffee would be great. ...
Tuesday 17th October 2017: 12.14pm. It would be an honours degree in maths (my third undergraduate degree!) had I paid for the conversion of previous learning into the first and second year modules. It's a shame nothing mentions the fact that almost all the modules were third year, but still it's yet another bit of paper, and my studies started in 2011 are finally over. This is probably the last qualification for me until the children are much older, it's Megan's turn next few years. ...
Tuesday 24th October 2017: 5.59am. Link shared: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p0762r0.pdf My first new sort-of-academic paper written in some years: "P0762R0: Concerns about expected<T, E> from the Boost.Outcome peer review" which is a paper submitted to ISO WG21, the international standards body for C++.
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Tuesday 24th October 2017: 6.00am. Link shared: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p0779r0.pdf And my second sort-of-academic paper, "P0779R0: Proposing operator try() (with added native C++ macro functions!)" sent to WG21, the international standards body for C++.
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Tuesday 24th October 2017: 8.18am. Location: Ballylahiff. On the train to Dublin for a contract interview with Verizon, only the second employment opportunity for me this entire year. Just finishing the cooked breakfast which was surprisingly good for a train. Admittedly there is not a huge choice on the breakfast menu in first class, but everything I've ever had I've been pleasantly surprised with so far. ...
Thursday 26th October 2017: 5.59pm. Looks like I'll be having to do a 12 month onsite stint in Dublin as there is zero remote work going in C++ all this year, and with Brexit and Trump the lack of remote work in C++ may persist for a long time. I had to take a 20% discount in day rate as well, there are almost zero contracts in C++ anywhere in Ireland this year, so rates are well depressed. ...
Thursday 26th October 2017: 11.13pm. Location: Dromahane. As I'll be going to be sleeping in some cheap room without refrigeration nor cooking for twelve months, picked up this mini fridge today at Aldi for seventy euro. It's a thermoelectric cooler rather than compressor, and I had been expecting correspondingly lousy cooling. But as you can see below, reaches 4C which is more than enough to keep food. I guess modern fridge insulation is so much better than it used to be as the cooling power of the peltier effect is quite limited. ...
Sunday 29th October 2017: 1.35pm. Location: Dromahane. Unbelievable weather for almost November. Though very humid, sunny, warm, very pleasant and without the plague of insects we had since mid August onwards which made sitting outside uncomfortable. Right now I am outside enjoying my last few days of freedom before paying work begins. It's going to be a long, long twelve months. ...
Tuesday 7th November 2017: 12.25pm. Location: Dublin Airport. #meetingcpp Just waiting for the flight to Berlin for the Meeting C++ conference. Due to the rail strikes today, traveled up to Dublin last night and stayed in a hotel. I forget how badly I sleep first night in a hotel! Thus feeling pretty ropey, and looking forward to napping on the plane. And I'll surely sleep well tonight at least. ...
Tuesday 7th November 2017: 7.57pm. Location: Restaurant Mavericks. #meetingcpp Just learned that the Michelin starred restaurant here is booked solid for four weeks :(. Sitting downstairs awaiting my second burger for today, unyay :(. Tomorrow intending to walk to sushi restaurant, eat properly, not constant burgers. This is Europe goddamit, not America! :(
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Tuesday 7th November 2017: 9.18pm. Location: Skybar. #meetingcpp This picture below doesn't do it at all justice, but the bar for this C++ conference is by far the best of the global C++ conferences. We are about as high as any building in Berlin, and it's a great view to have drinks to. Bar also has by far the best selection of booze of any of the conferences too, they have a many page menu and though the most expensive apart from Aspen, I can see some good discussions happening here next few nights. ...
Wednesday 8th November 2017: 4.49pm. Location: Sakura. #meetingcpp Skipped lunch so I could try to finish my talk. So hungry, but awaiting sushi and sake right now ...
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Wednesday 8th November 2017: 8.55pm. Location: Vienna House Andel’s Berlin. #meetingcpp I finally have an end to my talk! It isn't great, but it'll do. It's the problem of running ahead in your talk from where the state of the art is, so final point is too vague because neither I nor anybody knows yet. I may run short on time anyway and thus skip over it in any case, if so it won't even get mentioned and it won't matter. ...
Thursday 9th November 2017: 9.26pm. Location: Vienna House Andel’s Berlin. #meetingcpp Bailed out of the conference at 8.30pm to go say goodnight to kids, then hit the gym and took an actual real bath for my aching muscles - my first one in years! The conference quiz will be over now and the free bar will be on, but to be honest I'm pretty zonked again, my talk is tomorrow anyway. ...
Saturday 11th November 2017: 10.44am. Location: Vienna House Andel’s Berlin. #meetingcpp All packed up and ready to check out, though I'll probably take lunch with the conference before heading to the airport. It's been a good conference, a little too short, but so slickly run you wouldn't think its youth. I'd even rank it second best after the ACCU conference, and ahead of CppCon despite the latter's prestige. The availability of 90 minute slots is a huge winner, plus all meals provided and a free bar each night is unique. ...
Monday 13th November 2017: 11.26pm. Location: Mulgrave Lodge Dun Laoghaire. Just watched the final #startrekcontinues. Very nice ending to the series, segways nicely into the movies. Was the whole half series worth the $140 I invested in their Kickstarters? Probably not, but also probably so. A DVD box set would cost much less. Equally had I not spent the money, maybe they'd never have been made. And they really did land on the mark in terms of matching the feel of the original series which I always much preferred over the newer stuff, including that new Star Trek Discovery which is just meh. ...
Tuesday 14th November 2017: 12.22pm. Location: End of East Pier. Entirely made of granite and concrete, the East pier here at Dun Laoghaire was once a major hub of commerce for nearly 150 years. Made obsolete by container ships and fishing quotas, it is now empty apart from many walkers and tourists. Surprisingly peaceful though, great view of Dublin bay and the Irish sea as shown below. ...
Thursday 16th November 2017: 2.10pm. Location: End of West pier. Given the sunny but cold day, I thought I'd make the extra effort and walk the west pier in Dun Laoghaire as well. This is actually the superior pier, despite the tourists all going to the east pier. It's longer, fatter, better constructed than the east pier. It must have allowed for some fortune of shipping back in its day, you could fit three lorries down in it parallel in some parts. ...
Saturday 18th November 2017: 10.16pm. Aldi are selling this stuff for forty euro right now. You should make a beeline for your nearest store and buy it before it's gone, it's easily better than the hundred dollar bottles we drank in Canada. For forty euro it's a steal. If you like Bourbon. ...
Sunday 19th November 2017: 9.47pm. Location: St. Patrick's College. Staying this week and next in a Catholic seminary outside Dublin called St Patrick's Maynooth. Due to much fewer training priests, they rent the spare rooms out to people like me who work the weekdays in Dublin for a very low price, sufficiently low I can see I'll be here from now on as little else comes close price wise: €650/month. ...
Monday 20th November 2017: 11.22am. Location: St. Patrick's College. Some pictures of the Catholic seminary where I am staying this week in daylight. There is currently a funeral for priest on, so lots and lots of priests and monks milling around, just like here would have been fifty or two hundred years ago. ...
Monday 27th November 2017: 12.28pm. Just ate for the first time downstairs in the Seminary's main dining room which is an impressive affair. I really ought to visit the chapel too before I return to work after this seafood poisoning lifts. Living here is growing on me, I think I will stay here for the next twelve months, pretend to be an old fashioned academic living on site for a year to concentrate on my studies. ...
Tuesday 28th November 2017: 7.01pm. My first full day at Verizon completed. First of many hundred until the contract expires in a year from now. My work day is precisely 11 hours 20 minutes long including commute and working an extra half hour as the trains are hourly. I am hoping to use those extra half hours to leave 90 mins early on Friday, try to get out of Dublin before the Friday rush clogs everything up and get home before the kids go to sleep. ...
Monday 11th December 2017: 10.01am. Location: Maynooth Train Station. This morning on my way to work the canal was frozen almost solid. The swans found a very small hole in the middle, the other birds had to make do walking around on the ice! ...
Tuesday 12th December 2017: 9.05am. Location: 53°22'42.8"N 6°35'23.3"W. Canal is still frozen over, but the swans are quite good as ice breakers. They basically charge the ice and flex it up and down until it breaks. All the alcohol bottles frozen in the water are from last night, when I came home from work Maynooth was heaving with very drunk students which in combination with the ice was causing many falls which I suppose they won't notice till this morning. ...
Sunday 17th December 2017: 3.49pm. Location: Disney's All-Star Movies Resort. Made it. This is the pool at the budget hotel. The kids will have fun! ...
Tuesday 19th December 2017: 2.39am. Location: Disney's All-Star Movies Resort. Some low light night time pictures of the hotel we are staying at. Fairly cool Toy Story eh? ...
Thursday 21st December 2017: 2.52am. Location: Epcot. Breakfast at Epcot this morning with some of the Disney princesses. You would be flabbergasted at how much it cost me. Still, both my women look very pleased, so I guess it's worth it. ...
Thursday 21st December 2017: 3.00am. Location: Epcot. One advantage of being into Epcot so horribly early is being first in line for lots of other characters. So as much as it cost me for that breakfast, all these below came as a bonus for being there before the gates opened for the hoi paloy (paid breakfast gets you in far before anyone else, so ten minute instead of an hour waiting times). ...
Thursday 21st December 2017: 11.51pm. Location: Disney's Typhoon Lagoon Water Park. Link shared: http://www.trbimg.com/img-5388afe3/turbine/orl-disney-tips-typhoon-lagoon-006 Spent today at Disney's Typhoon Lagoon water park (phone was in locker, hence no photos). Definitely by far the most fun we've had out of the Magic Kingdom, Epcot or Hollywood Studios which we've visited so far. Kids absolutely loved it here, whereas the theme parks involve a lot of walking and not much play. Opposite was the case here. ...
Sunday 24th December 2017: 12.33am. Location: Cinderella Castle. Yesterday was a foggy day. It might have made for bad photos, but the park was relatively uncrowded for once and we didn't have to worry about sunburn. We actually got onto some rides! ...
Sunday 24th December 2017: 12.52am. Location: Magic Kingdom Park. This morning on the other hand was clear as a bell, and unfortunately correspondingly crowded, though not as awful as on Monday when it wasn't really enjoyable given the sheer number of people. Christmas Day is the worst day all year, they close the doors to entrants around 10am because they're at the fire limit. So we're staying away, we'll be at Colorado Springs Resort with Megan's parents which is much nicer than our resort. ...
Sunday 24th December 2017: 11.33pm. Location: France. Currently in Epcot French quarter, photo looks out on Japan, Italy, Germany, China, Morocco, United Kingdom and a few others. It's quite pleasant here, warm and sunny, busy but not awful, real French beer and crêpes and if we dared to spend the money, a proper French restaurant. The children are currently having their portraits done, then home and sleep. It's Christmas tomorrow! ...
Monday 25th December 2017: 12.00am. Location: Spaceship Earth. Whole of Epcot lights up at night! Pavements and all shimmer with pulsing patterns! Wish our kids were older ... ...
Monday 25th December 2017: 12.42am. Location: Leave a Legacy. There is a very long queue to take this photo. Grabbed it real quick before anyone noticed on the way out ...
Monday 25th December 2017: 6.05pm. Location: Disney's Coronado Springs Resort. So this is where we'll be for Christmas Day and dinner. This is actually only a tier above the Disney resort we're staying at, there are far fancier hotels again, ones with monorail trains to the parks and so on. Still, pretty nice, and much less gaudy than ours. Plus they have a water slide in their pool! ...
Monday 25th December 2017: 10.17pm. Location: Disney's Coronado Springs Resort. Opening Christmas presents now the sun is setting and pool is done. As we are so close to the equator it'll be pitch black in almost no time compared to home. Yeah we're sitting in the middle of fake Mayan ruins which is also a large children's playground ...
Monday 25th December 2017: 11.59pm. Location: 28°21'46.8"N 81°34'20.9"W. The main foyer and Christmas tree of Colorado Springs. Before you ask, yeah it's an artificial tree, unlike the ones in the parks. ...
Wednesday 27th December 2017: 4.07am. Location: Disney's Animal Kingdom Theme Park. Went to Animal Kingdom today for the first time in our trip here, kinda odd been here ten days already and six to go and hadn't made it here yet. It's fairly routine "natural zoo" stuff like Fota in Cork, so everything is very spaced out for the benefit of the animals. Unlike Fota where you must walk, at Disney you get driven in a themed Safari Jeep transport, otherwise very similar. ...
Thursday 28th December 2017: 2.10am. Location: Disney's All-Star Movies Resort. Second visit to Hollywood Studios today, got another three Fast pass rides which normally have ridiculous wait times. Advantages of booking all those when we first arrived a week ago! Twice visiting there is about enough, unlike the Magic Kingdom or especially Epcot, you wouldn't really hang around there without a reason, especially with the crowds like today. Well maybe if you're a Star Wars nut you might, they were hammering that IP all day today. ...
Friday 29th December 2017: 4.28am. Location: Magic Kingdom Park. Cinderella's castle lit up up close. Best I could get, all of Main Street was cordoned off for the 9pm fireworks show ...
Saturday 30th December 2017: 3.33am. Location: Cinderella Castle. Our last visit to the Magic Kingdom today. Caught Cinderella's castle looking particularly fine just at the end of the 7pm fireworks which is the child's edition, not as fancy as the 9pm edition last night which had a flying Tinkerbell at the end. ...
Saturday 30th December 2017: 4.32pm. Location: Pandora - The World of Avatar. These floating rocks in the Pandora section are easily in the top three most visually stunning places in all of Disney world, with Cinderella's castle (especially at night) the obvious number one. They must have spent a fortune on this place. Shame we won't see it at night, apparently it "bioluminescences" ...
Sunday 31st December 2017: 6.15pm. Location: Disney's All-Star Movies Resort. Final day of our 14 day all parks access today, and like Christmas Day it's the busiest all year. We therefore couldn't be bothered hauling buggies around, it's been bad enough this week anyway let alone today. I'm thus flying solo, more adult rollercoasters. So far my favourites by far have been Splash Mountain, Everest and Space Mountain. Other memorable experiences were the Navi River journey for its prettiness and very realistic animatronic Navi, It's a Small World for its creepiness, Toy Story Mania which was so much fun, the Frozen ride for very impressive animatronics, It's a Bug's Life which is the best of the 3D theatre shows, and Festival of the Lion King which is a Circ de Sole circus type rendition of the show which is visually and sonically impressive. ...
Monday 1st January 2018: 3.23pm. Location: Disney's All-Star Movies Resort. Last day in Florida today. I deliberately made it a seventeen night stay with a night and a day of padding on arrival and a day of padding on departure around the fourteen day holiday. Both turn out to have been highly wise, today it'll be chores and doing little to rest for the 24 hours of horror tomorrow. Tomorrow we get kicked out of our room at 11am and we'll head to Disney Springs to buy Christmas presents. ...
Monday 8th January 2018: 2.04am. Location: St. Patrick's College. Despite being home four days, the entire family is still on US time. That means a Henry who won't go to sleep until midnight, and for me I'm just not tired until about 2am i.e. now. Unfortunately I return to my contract tomorrow, I rise in just five hours time. I suspect tomorrow I'll be quite tired. I really hate returning from the US, it always punches me in the gut for about a week after returning. ...
Monday 8th January 2018: 8.56am. Location: Maynooth Train Station. Canal is all frozen up again. Strangely it does not feel particularly cold. Maybe I'm too tired to notice. What I will say is great is that the bridge to the train station is open again, it's where I took the photo from. Takes off a very annoying walk round, big gain. ...
Tuesday 9th January 2018: 8.49am. Location: Maynooth Train Station. The bird life in the canal is very clearly delighted that the ice has melted. Lots of happy chirps and furious swimming around that the below image captures none of. ...
Sunday 14th January 2018: 4.02am. My father was telling me at my 40th birthday party tonight how he always felt a sense of foreboding at Maynooth Seminary where I currently live Sunday to Friday. I personally have found no such thing, it seems to me a good old fashioned academic atmosphere reminiscent of academia before it became targets driven. I rather like the ambience actually, it reminds me of a less hectic St. ...
Thursday 18th January 2018: 9.40pm. Link shared: https://github.com/ned14/outcome/releases/tag/v2.0-boost-peer-review My third Boost peer review begins tomorrow, and lasts ten days. Let's hope that this time I succeed, only been at this since 2012, and the proposed C++ library only since 2014!#boost-outcome #boostcpp #cpp
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Monday 22nd January 2018: 8.28am. Location: St. Patrick's College. This week's room has me at the back of the seminary. Not much used this anymore I think, there is moss growing all over the footpaths ...
Saturday 3rd February 2018: 1.24am. Link shared: http://www.welfare.ie/en/pressoffice/Pages/pr230118.aspx Under the new Irish state pension they just announced last week, everybody retiring after 2020 needs to have worked 2,080 weeks (40 years) to receive a full state pension, with it pro rata reduced accordingly. Big change over the old system where the last ten years before retirement was what mattered. Me, I've worked a total 253 weeks in Ireland in my life to date. ...
Monday 5th February 2018: 9.52am. Link shared: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/review-Boost-Outcome-v2-Review-Report-td4701728.html #boostoutcome#boost-outcome#boostcppOutcome is accepted into Boost, and http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/review-Boost-Outcome-v2-Review-Report-td4701728.html links to the review manager's report (be warned, it is lengthy). Here is what I wrote in acknowledgement:I'd like to thank Charley for writing such a lengthy and detailed review report, in addition to performing duties in one of the hardest review managements I think I've seen this decade.I'd like to thank the reviewers for their feedback, and all those who have written me emails and sent me their notes and pull requests. ...
Friday 9th February 2018: 8.25am. Location: St. Patrick's College. Only twenty past eight and the sun is as high as it was at half eight only a few weeks ago. Cold though when it's cloudless. Driving to Northern Ireland tonight, so rather hoping it's not freezing, else it'll be a long slow drive. ...
Sunday 11th February 2018: 4.10am. Link shared: http://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/htc-10 My Nexus 6P - bought October or November 2015 - was a great phone, despite me cracking its screen in its first two weeks (my fault). Long battery life, excellent stereo speakers, superb AMOLED display, and kept exploit and virus free by timely Android updates from Google. Camera could be excellent, really its only major downside was that it's too big, five inches is as big as any phone ought to be given the size of my hands. ...
Thursday 15th February 2018: 7.45pm. My Nexus 6P died on the train today with 35% battery remaining :(. It was dying at 25% only a month ago. It's definitely on the way out as a daily driver. Luckily I finally figured out - after many nights of trying - the magic combination of configurations to get the fingerprint sensor working with LineageOS 14 on my new HTC 10. Just waiting for a big sdcard and case for it to arrive in the post, then I'll move over. ...
Saturday 17th February 2018: 2.39am. My Nexus 6P decided today when I was just leaving Maynooth to not connect to the internet despite multiple reboots! I was getting really annoyed, because usually traffic is awful out of Dublin on Friday evenings, and Google needs to direct me down the fastest route. Anyway I finally got a route out of it, but that phone is really sliding down the hill fast now . ...
Saturday 24th February 2018: 7.52pm. Extra fourth birthday party for my daughter as I was away in Dublin on contract during the week. Complete with fox themed birthday cake! ...
Wednesday 28th February 2018: 7.58pm. Location: 53.379417419433594,-6.597467422485352. First real test of my new phone's camera. The camera app with Lineage OS insists on panoramas being you swinging the phone around continuously. As you can see, that makes for blurry panoramas, though I admit it's dark and it's snowing. The last photo is a still shot, comes out very well I think, detailed despite the dark and snow flying down. ...
Thursday 1st March 2018: 8.43am. Location: 53.37818145751953,-6.600403785705566. Thankfully the Great Dining Hall at the Seminary is open this morning. Continental breakfast only, but it appears to be free, so can't complain. I intend to depart for Cork at around 11am after they've had a chance to clear the roads of snow. Should make it back before 4pm when apparently it's going to get real bad, maybe a foot or two of snow. ...
Saturday 3rd March 2018: 2.13am. Was fairly amazed to recently see "Ash vs the Evil Dead" begin its third season, a show I've raved about here before. Sure, both seasons were amazing, but I really didn't think that (a) it would get renewed and (b) they could maintain the amazingness and (c) well they kinda vanquished evil last season, obviously demonstrating that the script writers also thought there was zero chance of a renewal. ...
Saturday 3rd March 2018: 6.17pm. The Samsung 830 SSD in my always-on server finally experienced its first failure to erase a block at almost exactly 25 Tb written over 2.56 years of operation (27 Gb/day)! That's a bit poor in fact, only 728 of the erase cycles have been used so far, and the 830 is one of those old MLC drives with 3,000 erase cycles, so that's a bit early to see a failure. ...
Sunday 4th March 2018: 4.47am. Link shared: 1441637419.html Back in September 2015 (1441637419.html), I was lamenting how three drives had failed that year, all of which were replaced by Western Digital under warranty as it was inside three years since purchase. Back then I replaced one of the failing WD Red 3Tb drives with the then mentioned Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB drives, but due to the mirror pairing only 3Tb of it was used. ...
Wednesday 7th March 2018: 2.08pm. Location: Cork University Hospital. Appears likely to make a full recovery after shattering her elbow. We had been worried about long term damage, but so far all seems good. ...
Sunday 18th March 2018: 12.02pm. Location: Newland Avenue Alexandra Road. Twenty years ago we were all students in Hull. We've not aged badly compared to many I know considering. ...
Tuesday 20th March 2018: 1.30am. My car rental for the Hull trip was a 2017 Seat Ibiza. Quite a fancy car, high levels of blingy trim though same tinny construction like my sister's Ibiza. But horrible engine, raspy, underpowered, complains annoyingly when pushed, it had all of the irritating behaviors of a turbo diesel yet without any power, and it was also not a turbo petrol neither, it was a straight one litre petrol I looked up its reg. ...
Sunday 25th March 2018: 10.02am. Location: 52.105262756347656,-8.69078540802002. Testing my new camping stove for when the power next goes out. Phenomenal heat off such a small thing, 3.5kW the Chinese manufacturer claims. Less than a tenner too. ...
Sunday 25th March 2018: 10.42pm. Glad to see my blood pressure is down to 115 over 75. All this daily exercise in Maynooth, plus dropping from 86 kg to 73 kg, is paying off, and it's unusual for my blood pressure to drop during a contract, I find slave waging unpleasant and stressful. A good question is whether my kidneys are back to normal or not. I really need to get around to getting in for a blood test and urine check, kinda hard being stuck in Dublin though. ...
Friday 20th April 2018: 9.40pm. Location: 52.10533905029297,-8.690645217895508. Every Noctua fan I've bought has had a wow factor when you open the packaging. No mean feat for a fan, they aren't exciting things usually. They also come with a detailed instruction manual in excellent English with pictures, and oodles of extra cables, adapters, noise suppressors etc. They are a bit pricey for a fan, but they're install and forget. Unlike the cheap fan this will replace. ...
Wednesday 25th April 2018: 5.39pm. Location: 53.3499870300293,-6.251482009887695. Just outside Pearse station on my way home on the train. Looks much better in person! ...
Thursday 26th April 2018: 8.36pm. As I do this time every year, this is my graph of inflation adjusted storage capacity per dollar for magnetic and solid state drives. A new addition this year is XPoint memory, this is expected to eventually replace Flash memory which has done all the running for fast storage until now. Only Intel currently make XPoint memory and it is very new, but as you can see it is closing quickly on the price point of Flash memory. ...
Saturday 28th April 2018: 1.20am. Logged into Facebook for the first time in like a month, and got hit with the GDPR questionnaire as all Europeans receive. I see they have removed the nasty warnings they show after you tell them they can't do anything with my data :) that Megan was telling me about earlier tonight. I also, just for a laugh, downloaded all my data and found it now only goes back to 2009, plus almost all of the sections contain no data. ...
Saturday 28th April 2018: 1.33am. And speaking of GDPR and Facebook, don't forget GDPR and Google! They've somehow managed PR far better than Facebook, and so you don't realise they too have created a privacy reconfiguration page for your Google account in which you can disable a worryingly large amount of category-specific data collection which Google performs upon you. I just told Google to no longer collect every search I do and website I visit, every location my Android phone goes to, every phone call and message my Android phone sends, every video I view or search for or hover over, every picture I take, and a long list of quite worrying other categories. ...
Saturday 12th May 2018: 2.06am. Link shared: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/ The WG21 C++ proposal papers that I spent the last two months of my free time writing have been published at http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/:P1026R0 A call for a Data Persistence (iostream v2) study group Niall Douglas http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p1026r0.pdfP1028R0 SG14 status_code and standard error object for P0709 Zero-overhead deterministic exceptions http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p1028r0.pdfP1029R0 SG14 [[move_relocates]] http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p1029r0.pdfP1030R0 std::filesystem::path_view http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p1030r0.pdfP1031R0 Low level file i/o library http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p1031r0.pdfYou might notice that P1027 is missing, which was due to illness last week. ...
Sunday 13th May 2018: 11.25pm. Link shared: https://oneprovider.com/dedicated-servers/paris-france So, it's coming up to that time again, time to rent and configure a new server on the internet to handle my email and other such needs. The current one, dedi4, is in bad shape in any case, there is something wrong with its hard drive such that it runs like a dog. Plus the edition of Debian installed onto it will EOL in June. ...
Wednesday 16th May 2018: 7.55am. Location: 53.37846374511719,-6.588694095611572. Gorgeous morning at Maynooth canal harbour. You may not be able to see them, but the two swans have had six or seven babies I think. Four were with one parent, three with the other. And of course the usual large number of ducks are around. ...
Thursday 17th May 2018: 7.54am. Location: 53.37846374511719,-6.588694095611572. I was graced with a swim by this morning. Only sad thing is that there are now six cygnets rather than seven. ...
Saturday 19th May 2018: 9.38am. Location: 53.385406494140625,-6.601294994354248. Picking stuff up from my car before we head to the children's museum in Dublin ...
Saturday 19th May 2018: 12.39pm. Location: 53.288902282714844,-6.212724685668945. Children shopping and making coffee and driving trains @ Imaginosity Dublin ...
Monday 21st May 2018: 4.27pm. For some reason I'm always surprised at how nice taking the train in Ireland first class is. Much nicer than other European countries, and relatively affordable too. I just ate a waiter served curry with free coffee, and once again was surprised how nice and relatively cheap it was. Contrast this with the generally awful penny pinching and excessively expensive experience that is travelling in Britain in recent years. ...
Friday 25th May 2018: 7.54am. Location: 53.38142013549805,-6.589587211608887. The seventh cygnet has turned back up. Also, there are now ducklings! They seemed a bit confused, not really sure which duck to follow. ...
Saturday 2nd June 2018: 11.34am. Location: 53.388729095458984,-6.569046974182129. Needed to burn some time in Maynooth before the restaurants open for lunch, so went the length of Carlton walk. This would be super for tiring out children, they can't go anywhere dangerous, yet can roam freely. Only thing in this sticky weather is they'd get very wet, everything is covered in dew. ...
Sunday 3rd June 2018: 6.32am. Location: 53.37544631958008,-6.61480712890625. Gorgeous morning here at Maynooth as I depart for Switzerland for the C++ standards meeting this week. ...
Tuesday 5th June 2018: 7.00am. Lake Zurich at the C++ standards meeting. As lovely as it might look, we finished last night after 11pm and started this morning at 8.30am. At best, seven hours of sleep. ...
Saturday 9th June 2018: 8.05am. Location: 47.21887969970703,8.80850887298584. Due to the iron man taking out all the hotel rooms Friday night, had to relocate to the next town along which is a walk over a long bridge spanning half of Lake Zurich. The weather was not good last night, as can be seen in the first photo. But this morning it was spectacular walking back again, see second photo. Today is the last day of the C++ standards committee meeting, it's currently in plenary where everybody revisits the debates of the week's discussions. ...
Sunday 17th June 2018: 3.37am. I totally appreciate that you need to be towards the top of the tech industry to fully get it, but Silicon Valley is one of those few TV shows where I actually have to pause playback because I'm laughing so hard until I can regain control of myself. Fairly amazingly they've kept up the quality level despite it being a third season. I just watched this billionaire autistic CEO comparing notes with another tech CEO, where the latter asked the former how he legendarily had hurt himself during a coding sprint, as the latter had just been hospitalised due to walking through a sheet of glass due to exhaustion from a four day coding sprint. ...
Monday 18th June 2018: 7.48am. Location: 53.37907409667969,-6.596064567565918. It's amazing how quickly cygnets grow. I can't explain that seventh cygnet, nowhere to be seen this morning, yet was there last week. Seems to come and go as it pleases. Very unusual for a baby animal. There are also a ton of ducklings, they seem to disperse, one per adult, rather than stick as a group. ...
Thursday 21st June 2018: 7.51am. Location: 53.37907409667969,-6.596064567565918. The quantity of plant life under the water of the canal surprises me. It's sufficiently dense near the harbour that the ducks struggle to swim, and end up having to flap jump over particularly dense bits of the underwater foliage. Today is a gorgeous day incidentally, sunny with a fresh breeze. Not that I'll see nor experience any of it. ...
Sunday 24th June 2018: 3.16am. Link shared: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5691552/ Ever wished the original 1960's Star Trek were back on the telly? We had a nice extra half season with Star Trek Continues, the fan made homage to the original. But what if somebody actually properly rebooted 1960's Star Trek, modernised but same? Well, now they have: The Orville, linked. Invented, written by, and starring as lead Seth MacFarlane, the guy behind Family Guy, American Dad etc. ...
Thursday 28th June 2018: 7.51am. Location: 53.37910079956055,-6.596069812774658. I haven't been able to identify these underwater plants yet. But they're obviously seeding right now after having had lots of yellow flowers poking above the water a few weeks ago. They're not on the list of invasive plant species anyway, though they seem very thick and dense ...
Saturday 30th June 2018: 12.04pm. Location: 53.47770690917969,-9.91126823425293. A nearly perfect panorama of where Marconi ran his transatlantic radio station ...
Thursday 5th July 2018: 7.52am. Location: 53.37846374511719,-6.588694095611572. Feeling increasingly exhausted by the warm weather I must admit. It's not the sunshine, I love that. Rather it's having to keep window + blind wide open all night to have any chance of sleeping due to the heat. Last night I was being constantly pestered by a fly who kept walking on me, so I did not sleep well. And even all week, a good night of sleep has been elusive, there are loud students outside until midnight, then birds chorus around 5. ...
Wednesday 11th July 2018: 7.53am. Location: 53.37910079956055,-6.594130992889404. All six cygnets alive it would seem, and going white on their fronts. I vaguely remember an ugly stage when they're half grey half white for a bit, then I guess they'll need to go elsewhere as swans definitely have an exclusive territory per breeding pair. Summer is about half way through now. I've got a little over four months remaining on this contract before unemployment beckons once again. ...
Saturday 14th July 2018: 8.23pm. Location: 52.104129791259766,-8.690828323364258. Lidl are currently selling this Greek 7% wheat beer done with a Belgian double fermentation process. Highly recommended. ...
Saturday 14th July 2018: 11.42pm. Link shared: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/ Decided to fire the starting pistol on the next round of hard drive upgrades for my ZFS array, I've got 800Gb still free which won't be filled for over a year yet, but it takes me at least three months to buy drives as I need to stagger their purchase over a long time to ensure I never buy two drives from the same production batch, plus there is a non-trivial soak testing period after arrival to ensure the postman didn't drop them too hard. ...
Wednesday 18th July 2018: 7.49am. Location: 53.37910079956055,-6.594130992889404. Looks like one of the cygnets didn't make it. I am fairly surprised five have made it this far actually, usually only three make it to adulthood. ...
Thursday 26th July 2018: 7.53am. Location: 53.37846374511719,-6.588694095611572. I did something to my knee two weeks ago and it's being very slow to heal. Other knee is getting sore now too. I suspect it's that 3kg I gained a month or two ago during conference and standards committee time. With all the daily walking I now do, and being older, an extra 4% of weight wreaks disproportionate havoc. This sucks because now I must lose 3kg, which means starving myself next month or so. ...
Saturday 11th August 2018: 12.06pm. Location: 53.30643081665039,-6.765468120574951. Successfully made it through the maze! Second picture we are on top of the castle in the middle. ...
Sunday 12th August 2018: 9.56pm. Location: 53.37302780151367,-6.599637031555176. I wonder if all tech contractors living far from home out of a car eventually end up with two dozen cans of beer in their boot? ...
Tuesday 14th August 2018: 7.07am. Location: 53.37685012817383,-6.5962910652160645. Been trying this oat derived milk alternative after I read about it in the Economist. I can't stand the soya or almond based stuff, undrinkable. This stuff, however, is acceptable, even in coffee as well as cereal. Real milk is still better, and about a quarter the cost, but this stuff is okay. ...
Wednesday 15th August 2018: 7.51am. Location: 53.37847900390625,-6.5808258056640625. Cygnets still going strong. There are also now an awful lot of ducks. I never really saw the ducklings become ducks. Just one day there was ducks and no ducklings. ...
Sunday 26th August 2018: 12.44pm. I've been very slowly, bit by bit, doing a little bit of work when home each weekend to replace the main house server, whose install of Debian EOLed last June.Right now my ZFS pool is kept within a VM running FreeNAS, as back when I set this up I didn't trust ZFS on Linux (for good reason). Now I do, so I've set up a mirrored ZFS pair of those cheap shingled SMR 8Tb Seagate drives, and I set the old pool rsyncing to the new pool last night. ...
Monday 27th August 2018: 9.36am. Location: Custom House Ward (pre1849). Tescos had some speciality melons this week costing a fortune. Going to try them this week, take a risk. Right most melon is a standard European Galia melon for comparison. ...
Wednesday 29th August 2018: 6.45pm. Location: 53.3795280456543,-6.597754001617432. Tesco Mobile Ireland just flipped on 4G for me free of charge, which was nice of them. Speed difference:3G: 6.4 mbit down, 2.8 mbit up, 24 ms ping4G: 28.7 Mbit down, 21 Mbit up, 30 ms pingSo, about fourfold faster down and eight fold faster up. Nice!
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Friday 31st August 2018: 9.22pm. Link shared: 1535287474.html Remember in 1535287474.html when I estimated that the 8Tb shingled drive copy would take 7.52 days to complete? Well, it's been running 5.8 days now, and has completed 79%. On that basis it should complete after 7.34 days, not 7.52. Still, that's just over a week. Boy are these shingled drives slow for writes!
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Sunday 2nd September 2018: 1.14am. Location: 52.122535705566406,-8.693056106567383. Rereading the Lensman series of SciFi books, they are the progenitor of all modern SciFi. In the second book our hero has just mastered mind control as he explores his Jedi Lens powers, used it to infiltrate an enemy base, and convert half its people from the dark to the light side. No, Star Wars didn't invent that. It borrowed it from the Lensman books written before the second world war. ...
Tuesday 4th September 2018: 7.58am. Location: 53.37636947631836,-6.598275184631348. Gorgeous if cold morning. You can see how low the sun is getting, long shadows in the mornings now, won't be long before autumn. I wonder when cygnets turn into swans? Apparently they must learn to fly before winter, else they get abandoned by their parents. Which is harsh. ...
Wednesday 5th September 2018: 8.50am. Link shared: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2289.pdf The linked paper which has been submitted to the C and C++ standards committees, which I spent four months doing stakeholder dialogue to arrive at in its proposed form, if accepted, could utterly transform how failure handling is implemented for all computing systems in the world. Yes, I either go big or go home. If it actually happens though ... wow, I actually would have changed the world in perpetuity! ...
Sunday 9th September 2018: 4.04pm. For the last four weekends, been ever so slowly building a new house server inside a VM running on the old house server. Got so close this weekend to switching it over, but just fell short. I've set up a rsync cronjob to keep old server mirrored to new server, so as soon as I get home next weekend, hopefully I can finally migrate as the old server is increasingly crashing out while I am away which means everything stops until I get home to raise it from the dead again. ...
Monday 10th September 2018: 7.29pm. I know I've said it here many times before, but I'll say it again that somebody really needs to make the Lensman series of books into a TV series or something. It's the great grand daddy of most contemporary sci fi. Witness this:Galactic Patrol (1937): Big space battle with defensive shields, beam weapons, maulers, torpedoes, tractor beams, escape pods. Hero uses his cunning and Jedi Lens powers to repeatedly evade capture by utterly evil multi-galaxy empire across multiple planets, each with its own unique species, governments and terrain. ...
Wednesday 12th September 2018: 7.00am. Location: 53.382789611816406,-6.643579006195068. Cold this morning. But pretty. I do wish they'd turn on the heat in the seminary ... ...
Thursday 13th September 2018: 6.17pm. Link shared: https://www.meetup.com/cppdug/events/254149655/ I'll be speaking at the C++ users group Dublin this coming Monday 17th September. Entire evening will be just me, 90 minutes, no other speakers. I just finished the slides for the talk just there, it shouldn't be too boring for folk hopefully. And it's the only talk I'll give in all of 2018, usually I speak twice a year at conferences, but this year has been unusually quiet for me. ...
Monday 8th October 2018: 7.54am. Location: 53.3779296875,-6.5883917808532715. It's rare to get all five cygnets in the same physical location as their parents nowadays. They tend to prefer being off on their own somewhere nearby. But this morning they were all napping until I disturbed them for this photo. If it's any consolation, I was quick, they were back to napping half a minute later. ...
Thursday 11th October 2018: 7.39am. Location: 53.37913131713867,-6.599460124969482. Isn't the sun getting so very low in the mornings now? It'll be dark when I leave for work soon. But just over a month to go on this contract anyway, then back to freedom and penury! ...
Sunday 14th October 2018: 2.03am. Was up till 4.15am last night dealing with UK and Irish tax returns. Found grievous error in last night's calculations requiring reprint of everything tonight. Hoping to be in bed by 4am, with a bit of luck. I hate doing tax returns!But to explain a little, I sold property in the UK for a loss in 2017. The UK and Irish tax systems don't have the same tax year, and have completely different rules on calculating tax. ...
Friday 19th October 2018: 11.35pm. Location: 52.10805892944336,-8.689790725708008. Picked up these from a distillery just down the road in Cork recently. They're very cheap, and for the price they're pretty good compared to the competition of the same price range. Except for the fellow on the left. He's straight from the barrel, no finishing, no maturation, no dilution, no caramel, no filtering. Raw untouched whiskey in Bourbon casks, two thirds grain, one third malt. ...
Sunday 11th November 2018: 9.55am. Location: Green Glens Arena. For once today I'm not doing something child care or work related. I'm at a self build expo. I hope it's good!
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Wednesday 21st November 2018: 9.11pm. Link shared: https://the-federation.info/ Second last day of this 12 month contract, so Friday I am going home!. No more nasty low paid high cost onsite work for me, hopefully. I've started to think about the stuff I need to go do now I'll have free time, first thing obviously to get Outcome into Boost, which means lots of writing docs yay so looking forward to that not. ...
Sunday 16th December 2018: 11.37pm. Link shared: https://www.fire.com/services/ Received a letter today from Ulster Bank informing me that my business account's maintenance fee is to be trebled next year. Fuckers. I hand them over a hundred euro a year in fees as it is. That's going to rise by a fair bit next year now. And what do I get for my hundred euro a year? Certainly not value for money. ...
Tuesday 18th December 2018: 12.13am. Location: 53.452598571777344,-6.262866973876953. Despite being nearly Christmas and the night before flying Dublin to San Francisco for two weeks of family vacation, the last few hours have been unusually busy with finding new work. I had an interview at 9pm which I had to do entirely by phone due to vacation ban on bringing computers, then stackoverflow jobs randomly showed two 100% remote roles in my skill area, so I had to awkwardly submit my interest using my phone which is much inferior to a proper keyboard. ...
Friday 21st December 2018: 2.35am. Location: 37.481109619140625,-119.9609603881836. Outside our hotel in Mariposa before we departed this morning. It's a pretty part of the world no doubt. ...
Saturday 22nd December 2018: 2.52am. Location: 37.74243927001953,-119.55815887451172. Yosemite is certainly bigger in scale than anything I've been in before. The pictures don't do it justice at all, the mountains are much taller and much closer to you, sheer rock surrounding you with waterfalls cascading down them. Smell of pine from the trees all around. Very nice. Hope to choose a ceremony location tomorrow, we'll be touring all of them on bicycle. ...
Sunday 23rd December 2018: 4.24am. Location: 37.743927001953125,-119.64523315429688. Some highlight images from today in Yosemite. No more Yosemite for us actually, tomorrow we're in Fresno, day after it snows which will make it very hard to reach the park, so we probably won't try. We may attempt Wawona via Oakhurst, we are planning to have our Christmas dinner there on the 25th. We'll see if the weather permits us. We depart on the 26th for San Simeon, which is much further south and on the beach. ...
Friday 28th December 2018: 1.17am. Big Trees Lodge, where we had Christmas dinner on Christmas day. Great meal, but cost me two hundred dollars :( The following day we left Yosemite and drove south to the coast and the beach. ...
Friday 28th December 2018: 1.21am. Location: 35.613861083984375,-121.14361572265625. Elephant seals. Lots and lots of them. Gorgeous day as well, not a cloud in the sky. ...
Friday 28th December 2018: 1.22am. Location: 35.64356994628906,-121.18547058105469. End of Hearst castle pier looking up at Hearst castle, which we will not be seeing due to our incompetence at not prebooking tickets before we arrived, sigh. ...
Sunday 30th December 2018: 4.32am. Decided yesterday to forego the beach and the coast, and head back up route 42 to Paso Robles, which turned out to be a very wealthy town. Visited a farm and a winery. A very easy day, relatively speaking. Once again nothing but cloudless blue skies, but cold as soon as you leave the sun. ...
Sunday 30th December 2018: 4.42am. Location: Best Western Coyote Point. Today headed up the coast back to San Francisco along the world famous Route 1 which is a very scenic drive indeed. Very twisty, poor Henry puked, so had to drive the rest of it with the aircon on max and him screaming with hunger. Yay. Stopped off at Nepenthe, that's the view before, spent 70 dollars buying brunch which took an hour to arrive. ...
Monday 31st December 2018: 5.46am. Location: Fort Baker. Here is the money shot itself, the view from the Bay Area Discovery Centre, basically a giant under 4's play area. Spent six exhausting hours there today, in the sun at least. Tomorrow will be the Californian Academy of Sciences. ...
Monday 31st December 2018: 10.31pm. Location: California Academy of Sciences. Woke at 6am to get into the California Academy of Sciences as soon as it opened in order to snag the first come first served tickets for the planetarium. Here also has a large aquarium, a rainforest (pictured), an icerink and a penguin colony. We've been here five hours now and probably have seen only about half of it, but we are very tired and will shortly leave. ...
Wednesday 2nd January 2019: 3.36am. After an hour in a queue for the cable cars, took this fellow to Chinatown. That's the last thing we are doing in San Francisco, tomorrow we fly back to Ireland. ...
Friday 4th January 2019: 11.38am. Location: 52.10490417480469,-8.690735816955566. Back in Ireland from our two weeks away in California. Feeling quite rough from jet lag, it'll take a few days to recover properly. Total cost was almost exactly six grand in euro, which was slightly disappointing given my budget was five grand. I underestimated the cost I think of food, restaurants and takeaways were Irish prices in California rather than Indiana prices. ...
Friday 11th January 2019: 1.19am. Link shared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best Just finished What Remains of Edith Finch, which was on my bucket list for inter-employment R&R gaming. It's basically a slightly interactive series of short stories, the kind of thing Megan would really love. And yes, even with my thick skin of cynicism, I have to admit I enjoyed the three hours or so of "reading" the stories. It did even tug a bit at the emotional heart strings, though I found the ending a bit natch. ...
Saturday 19th January 2019: 6.54pm. Link shared: http://www.nedprod.com/ As preparation for Google Plus coming to an end soon, I improved the Python scripting which mirrors this stream of posts onto http://www.nedprod.com/ to also extract post locations and images and videos. Indeed, http://www.nedprod.com/ is now 100% served from my own servers, and no longer uses Google for anything at all. So Google Plus can now vanish tomorrow, and all my post data - seven years of it now - is safe. ...
Tuesday 22nd January 2019: 1.34pm. Link shared: https://conference.accu.org/2019/sessions.html#XElsewhereMemory ACCU 2019 schedule just went up. My final C++ conference talk for the foreseeable future is linked, after this there will be no more attending conferences for me. It is on Elsewhere Memory, and will be the most speculative conference talk I have ever given, musing on the possible future of all computing everywhere. I'll be taking the ideas presented here to the C and C++ standards committee later this year. ...
Friday 1st February 2019: 3.24pm. Link shared: http://www.fsij.org/doc-gnuk/ After three hours carved out to "get it done already", finally got my cheap USB gnuk OpenPGP dongles purchased last August (!) to implement ed25519 on-device crypto for GnuPG and Putty SSH on Windows. That means that (a) I cycled all my encryption keys, which was becoming pressing since I last did so in 2016 (b) even I have no idea what my new encryption keys are, nor can I nor anybody else ever know, because all my encryption is now done 100% on the USB dongle (c) even a nation state actor could now take over my desktop PC, and they still couldn't get into any of my other computers from that PC. ...
Friday 8th February 2019: 9.56pm. Link shared: https://openwrt.org/ Last night I completely replaced the proprietary firmware on the house wifi router (the excellent value 3x3 11ac Archer C7 that just about everybody techie uses for their home wifi) with https://openwrt.org/. Why? The proprietary firmware was actually not awful, but my phone kept losing signal when I'm on the toilet, and it began to bug me that I can't do things like increase the transmit power, or use all of the 5Ghz frequencies available. ...
Tuesday 12th February 2019: 4.09pm. Link shared: http://maystreet.com/ I am pleased to announce that earlier today, I joined Maystreet Inc, a Fintech next generation capital markets platform delivering low-latency connectivity & high-precision data to banks, brokers, etc. This will be a long term gig for me, I expect to be with them for some years building out some very cutting edge technologies which deliver significant competitive advantage. I am extremely glad to not have to return to working in Dublin onsite, a year of that was more than enough. ...
Monday 18th February 2019: 10.02pm. Picked up an old Netgear R6220 2x2 11ac router with nasty cheap Mediatek chipset off eBay for €30 including postage. OpenWRT went onto it surprisingly easy, and now it's a second Wifi AP in my house solving the wifi blackspot in my bedroom, and more importantly, the toilet.OpenWRT has come so very far in the last few years. Easy to install, easy to configure with a lovely GUI, performance doesn't suck like it used to either. ...
Wednesday 27th February 2019: 9.21pm. Link shared: https://scrapy.org/ Been making good progress on other todo task like items other than wifi routers :). I've been slowly writing https://scrapy.org/ plugins to scrape http://www.nedprod.com's content into a https://gohugo.io/ generated website. Scrapy is a great tool, highly recommended. Once I've converted all that Microsoft FrontPage 1998-era HTML, I can then finish my migration away from Google+ and all megacorp social media who resell my information onto 100% wholly owned and maintained by me social networking based on ActivityPub. ...
Wednesday 6th March 2019: 9.01pm. Just pulled the trigger on the guts of a new workstation to replace my six year old Ivy Bridge workstation:- Four core Intel i7-3770K @ 3.9Ghz ("overclocked" to turbo always on).- 16Gb of DDR3-1600 RAM @ 21Gb/sec.... with this instead:- Sixteen core AMD Threadripper 2950x @ 3.5Ghz, turbo 4.5Ghz.- 32Gb of DDR4-3200 RAM @ 64Gb/sec.So four times the CPU cores and three times the memory bandwidth. ...
Tuesday 19th March 2019: 4.36pm. You may remember that I pulled the trigger on a new workstation to replace my six year old Ivy Bridge one:
- Sixteen core AMD Threadripper 2950x @ 3.5Ghz, turbo 4.5Ghz.
- 32Gb of DDR4-3200 RAM @ 64Gb/sec 75Gb/sec.
- 512Gb Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD @ 3.1Gb/sec
I spent no less than thirteen - yes, thirteen - hours yesterday during the public holiday pulling out the old system, and putting in the new. ...
Wednesday 20th March 2019: 8.35pm. So I was complaining last day about how my new Threadripper workstation didn't seem much faster. Today I compiled the entire work codebase. What took over two hours on the Ivy Bridge workstation now takes fifteen minutes! Which is pretty impressive, really.
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Contact the webmaster: Niall Douglas @ webmaster2<at symbol>nedprod.com
(Last updated: 2019-03-20 20:35:06 +0000 UTC)