Archive for August, 2006
Going away photos
Posted on August 24, 2006, under general.
Photos from last night in Messr Maguires are now online on flickr.
Thanks to everyone who came, it was good fun, and great to see so many people I havn’t touched base with in ages. And thanks also to Noirin, who took most of the excellent pictures!
New lens; Sigma 30mm f1.4
Posted on August 13, 2006, under general, photography.
Browsing in the biggest Saturn in Munich, I finally found a shop that stocked the Sigma 30mm f1.4. I’ve seen it on-line, but not with any stockists I’d trust, so had held off buying one until I could get one in person.
It’s much larger, and weightier, than I expected; the huge lump of light-collecting glass on the front really makes an impression (especially as it makes the shutter action very visible), but it does its job very, very well. I haven’t played with it much yet, but it’s performing excellently in low-light conditions, which is what I bought it for. I already own a Canon 50mm f1.8, which can take shots like this in candlelight-like conditions, but as Colin observed, the framing is quite tight with 50mm.
The 30mm does an even better job of taking very good shots in very dark places, ideal for parties. Below are some shots from the Hard Rock Cafe in Munich, with a sample of the same exposure using my Canon 18-55mm f4 zoom lens (ISO 1600, 1/50s, full aperture).
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The photos from the Sigma are actually a good deal brighter than the room seemed to the eye. Having such a wide aperture means that the lens has an incredibly short depth of field, but it’s got a very nice blur to it, and it’s producing excellently seperated colours for me, without the need for any filters.
It reminds me of the effects produced by film cameras in 1940s. The lens comes with a nice bag and good, big, lens-hood for getting rid of stray light-rays. So far, I’m very happy with it.
Are Eircom spamming?
There are almost no words. I’m plenty used to Eircom being one of the least pleasant, least competent and most monopolist excuses for a service provider I’ve ever had to deal with much, but now they’ve gone and taken the biscuit, and have started a spamming operation. (In this case, I’m defining spam as unsolicited commercial e-mail).
Harry Duncan wrote to the SAGE-IE list to pass on a link to to Eircom’s new e-mail marketer product, explicitly designed to help you easily send thousands of e-mails and hundreds of text messages, all from Microsoft Outlook.
I can find no mention of personal data protection or any introduction to the complex legalities of the area. As if that wasn’t despicable enough, two further things stick out to me from Eircom’s brochure. It talks about targeting “potential customers”. Not existing customers, or repeat customers, but potential ones. That’s not compatible with the directions of the Data Protection Commissioner. Companies are only allowed to send mass-mails to personal e-mail addresses if the individuals have explicitly opted-in to receive them or if they are someone with whom the company has an existing business relationship. Even then, people must be given the opportunity to opt-out, something this product makes no mention of whatsoever. And Eircom’s example templates do not include any opt-out option. Either they are misleading their own customers, or simply ignoring the requirement.
The second thing which sticks out is “All emails sent with eircom Email Marketer are fully trackable, with real-time reporting and full campaign management.” What does this mean? If they are trying to generate delivery reports using image requests and so on, they may very well be in breach of the Data Protection Act themselves. Some people consider that kind of thing personal information.
From the point of view of potential customers of this service, where are the assurances that Eircom won’t abuse your list of addresses? There may be a serious liability if this is compromised, and Eircom once had its own subscriber database compromised. Though the fact that this was ever made public is actually something they should be congratulated for.
But all together, this looks like a very, very dodgy product and a potential minefield. I’ll be bringing it to the attention of the Data Protection Commissioner on Monday. Oh, and if I were the Springfield Hotel, I’d be jumping up and down trying to get my “Customer Success Story” unlinked from that page. The implication that one engages in spamming can be pretty disastrous for business, and based on their story, they’re merely an innocent Eircom Wireless Broadband customer.
New office, Old office, New country, Old country
Two weeks ago, HEAnet moved into a gorgeous new office. Our new address is 5 George’s Dock, and we’re in the heart of the IFSC (Dublin’s financial district). It’s got nearly twice as much office-space as our old premises, lots more light, much better environmental controls, many more meeting spaces (still with 9 foot whiteboards for planning sessions!), and the surrounding area has an unbelievably broad and good offering of places to get lunch (including a weekly outdoor market). We’ve got more spacious desk areas, a bigger testlab, a new staging area and a gigantic boardroom big enough to host larger tutorials and talks.
But, after 4 years and 8 months working for HEAnet, I’ll only have 3 more weeks in the office. I’m moving to a new, very exciting, job in Leiden in the Netherlands. I’ll be working with a gaggle of other open source folk, doing some very challenging and very interesting work indeed. But more of that at a later date.
In a few short hours, I’ll be setting off on my second trip to Leiden, and in just three weeks I’ll have moved there. Of course, it really sucks that I’ll be heading off just as Noirin comes back from a year in Munich, but thankfully the distance is not too great and Noirin will be coming with me for a while to help me settle in.
There are a lot of things to organise, but I’ll be having a going-away party in two weeks or so. Needless to say, if I owe you money, please don’t come. But otherwise, the more the merrier!
In the meantime, if I have something to do for you at HEAnet before I leave, now is the time to tell me!
Niagara boxes deployed!
So, earlier this week, we deployed murphy.redbrick.dcu.ie, the T2000 Sun donated as the new main login server for RedBrick.
It’s been named Murphy after RedBrick founder David Murphy, who died tragically early this year. It’s both fitting that a main RedBrick machine be named after him, but also that it is a Sun server. Before being one of Google’s earliest employees in Ireland, David had a successful career at Sun Ireland.
It’s running Ubuntu, and so far the usual problems of a migration have been minimal. There was, as ever, a large number of programs for which users didn’t use the 2 month pre-migration period to tell us were missing, as well as a few binaries in user directories which needed to be recompiled. We’re also having a problem with nscd. But apart from those relatively minor issues (compared to the other migrations in the past!), it’s gone very well indeed, and it’s nice to have 16 Gigabytes of RAM to play with!
Seperately from that, after playing with some different installations on it, I’ve installed the T1000 and plan to deploy that in the next week or two. It’s also performing very well for us, and should make an amazing replacement for the Celeron with 256M of RAM it’s replacing! It will be used as a development host for some Apache work, a web host for some high-traffic sites (including this one) and a few other things. We havn’t decided where to colocate it just yet, but have a few options.