Archive for 'photography'
Change is Possible
Posted on May 23, 2006, under general, meta, music, photography.
If you’re ever in Dundrum’s massive shopping centre, pay close attention as you pay for your parking (if you happen to have driven there). It doesn’t tell you that change is available, but rather the far more optimistic message, that change is possible.
It’s nice to see, it brought a smile ot my face, and clearly it’s intentional. Maybe it’s part of a car parks against conservatism movement, or maybe it’s religious subliminal messaging, or maybe just a fun meme to lighten the day but whatever it is, it’s good fun.
So, Nóirín helped me change this blog – to WordPress 2 – which is going very well so far. I’ve made it easier to post comments too, which was always a bit too hard for my liking (but I like comment spam even less).
On another note of change; on my travels I got a new Camera, which I’m having some fun with. My shots from San Francisco were taken with it, along with the two shots in this post (The papal cross in the Phoenix Park, and our good friend Conall O’Brien).
And yet again in the spirit of change, I went on my first successful geocaching expedition on Saturday, and it was great fun, I’d highly recommend to anyone. As it was my birthday over the weekend, we went to see two great Gigs in Airfield House. The first was Kevin Burke and Ged Foley and the second was Liz Carroll and John Doyle. Both were excellent, it was great to hear some master fiddlers playing and John Doyle’s guitar playing is truly amazing.
And I think the last note of change, is that yesterday, I finally got IP connectivity into the datacentre we’ve been building for the last few months, which means we are now officially in the migration phase. I might even have free time soon!
Solar Wind
Posted on May 23, 2006, under general, niagara, photography.
So, this time last week I was in San Francisco, courtesy of Sun, which was brilliant. Originally the plan was that I would be receiving a T2000 on-stage from Jonathan Schwartz during the JaveOne keynote. There were a lot of last-minute changes though, and in the end I managed to evade that, though I did get my access-all-areas badge for the general session – and managed to catch Jonathan Schwartz during the pre-keynote practice.
SUN’s Global Communications team did arrange for a few press interviews, to cover the try and buy program. It was a curious experience, although I’ve done more than a few media interviews at this point, it’s always been on political issues, never with “analysts”, who ask very different sorts of questions. Still it was very pressure free, I could do them or not, and there was no line to tow or anything like that, which was good.
I didn’t quite get to meat everyone on my trip, but I did bump into fellow Apache committer Wendy Smoak through pure coincidence, and Tim Bray, who I got to thank for helping me get the T2000, and who put me in his Video blog! Mark was also kind enough to give me a great walking tour of San Francisco.
By far the best thing from the conference, from my point of view at least, was Mark Shuttleworth appearing and giving us some news about Ubuntu. It looks like 6.06 (Dapper) is going to have Sparc as an official distro, which is excellent sign of Fabio‘s great work. Niagara is fully supported the kernel that ships, but alas the T1000 doesn’t quite work yet due to some issues with the Broadcom driver which are currently being blogged about.
Speaking of analysts, the discredited (at least if you follow GrokLaw) analyst Laura DiDio has weighed in on Ubuntu, so now I can confidently predict it will be a roaring success. Actually, over on ftp.heanet.ie, we’re getting ready for what could be an interesting week when 6.06 is actually released.
Yet more reviews of the T2000 boxes are appearing, including one which is on Linux aswell as Solaris, which gets some interesting results. It’s a bit worrying that only 24 CPUs showed up. There are probably still some T1 Linux kernel issues to be found.
The guys in SUN QA (based in Dublin) are doing some excellent profiling work too, and their Solaris numbers are surpassing mine at this point, so when I get the T1000 online (in a week or two hopefully) I’ll see if I can contribute any more useful feedback.
Photographer’s Rights
Posted on May 12, 2006, under general, photography.
Nóirín has put together an excellent guide for Irish photographers on what you can and can’t get away with. Well worth a read if you do any photography in Ireland, especially outdoor/public photography.
Photograph (full size) is of Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who proved Fermat’s last theorem, after his Royal Irish Academy lecture at Trinity College.
Busy, Busy, Busy
I didn’t blog at all during January, and I didn’t get to code as much on Apache stuff as I would have liked either, and it looks like it’s going to be like this for a while now, and I’m now finally at a stage why I can explain why I’m so busy!
We’re building a new data-centre, over a pretty short period of time (has to be occupyable – by servers – on May 1st) and believe me, this is no small amount of work. We’ve been running tender evaluations, designing cabinet layouts, working out budgets, negotiating SLA’s and contracts and lots more besides. As the build progresses I’ll try to blog about it, including photos and so on. We’re doing some things in a little bit of an unusual way and I’ll try and explain our reasoning along the way. Hopefully this will prove of use to others too.
But before that, I should cover a little of what I’ve been up to in the last 6 weeks.
3 weeks ago, I went over to visit Nóirín, and we went up Zugspitze where we had a great, if somewhat cold, time spending the night in an Igloo! You can read Nóirín’s write up on it here and there’s a bunch of photos too.
While in Munich, we also caught a Jacques Loussier gig, which I thought was a bit odd to be honest, but was good to have been at nonetheless.
On the Digital Rights Ireland front, we’ve been working hard to be in a position to accept donations as well as handling some behind-the-scenes legal work. This week, along with the TCD Dublin Legal Workshop, we’ll be hosting a talk from Suw Charman on Friday. This should be great, and if you can make it all, please do. The DRI invite and write up is here.
On the Apache front, one of the really annoying aspects of being so busy is that I havn’t been able to find the time to do much coding, I had to back out of the execd work I had started, but hopefully in a few months I’ll get a chance to get back to it. To mitigate my own sense of guilt over this, I volunteered to RM the latest httpd 2.0.x release, and I’m glad I did. It’s a lot of work, it took me at least 60 hours to get 2.0.x into a releasable state (we’re now waiting on some licensing issues to be clarified before a candidate is rolled) – but unlike coding, this work can be easily broken up. It’s possible to do 15 minutes or an hour here and there and have it all add up productively.
When I code, I need to do it in large uninterruped blocks or I lose my concentration and start being unproductive. If you’re involved in any Open Source projects, I’d say volunteering to RM is a great way of contributing when you don’t have the space to get a load of coding done, but want to help nonetheless. Though get very very familiar with how to manage code merges!
I’m considering proposing two talks for ApacheCon Europe, but before I do, it’d be useful to hear any feedback on what people would like to hear, my current ideas are:
- Scaling Apache httpd to 50,000 concurrent users
This talk would be an update of the talk I gave last year, only now with even bigger numbers. It would include the standard tuning/benchmarking basics but also new things like the pluggable schedulers in Linux, the siege utility, the event MPM in much more detail (and how it improves performance over worker), the new graceful-stop feature and how that helps, our experiences on the Itanium platform and Itanium-specific tunings and a bit on mod_ftp thrown in for good measure.
- IPv6 at the ASF
This talk would be a few things in one. A brief introduction to IPv6 from the point of view of a typical user of ASF software (mostly server software), the common platform bugs and how to avoid them, a survey and report of IPv6 support in all ASF software (I pretty much have this part done), and then some details on IPv6 from an ASF developer point of view, what’s needed and so on, using APR as an example (we have a load of bug-workarounds in the APR IPv6 code – it’s one of the best sources of platform bug documention).
If these interest you, or turn you off, or if you can think of anything else better, do tell!
Update:
A reader got in contact with me to ask how the trial of the latest Sun kit went. Like I blogged last December, Sun announced a free trial of their Niagara boxes for people to determine how good they are and to consider buying some. As far as I can tell, this trial is vapourware. We never heard back, despite filling in the form again and mailing just to be sure. A few other people we’ve talked too attested to a similar experience. I guess Sun still suck.
Update 2:
A look at Sun’s revised form for the trial, shows that Ireland isn’t on the list of selectable countries, which might explain why we never heard back. What a load of crap. Sun definitely suck.
The wilds of wicklow
Posted on September 29, 2005, under general, photography, Uncategorized.
The photos from Wicklow were all pooled today, I liked this one especially, it was taken pretty near the end of it all, when the sun finally started shining.
I found out this week that I’ll be speaking at HEAnet’s National Networking Conference, so I’ll be there once again. I’m looking forward to hearing from Karlin Lillington. I also think it’s pretty cool that there will be at least 6 RedBrick members (bboyle, bootie, colmmacc, davew, elvis, singer) speaking.
Weekend in Cork
Posted on August 1, 2005, under general, photography.
Noirin and I spent a pretty relaxing long weekend in Cork, the weather was o.k.-ish, but there was plenty to do anyway. We stayed at the Radisson SAS, Little Island, Cork. We’re slowly working our way through the Radisson hotels, since that’s where HEAnet conferences have been (and will be this year, in Athlone) and where I end up staying when on other company business, but since it only opened in June, this was our first time in the Cork hotel.
The room was very nice, and it’s also a spa-resort, which Noirin enjoyed, the pool was a good size and had lots of just for fun bubble-based features. It’s bar is pretty decent, better priced and better food than the Limerick Radission, but it has to be said the Restaurant is dire. Firstly, there rarely seemed to be more than about 10 people in it, when the room looked like it could serve at least 300 people. The vast cavernous emptiness and the retro 70′s decor on plush bench style seats arranged in a long row made it seem like probably the clostest thing to the Overlook hotel you can experience in Ireland.
Noirin got a great deal at short notice, which included 2 free treatments (she enjoyed both) and a free meal. We should have just skipped the meal. But otherwise, it’s an o.k. hotel, definitely good for business travel, but we’d probably not stay there again. Still well worth the weekend though.
Since it got mentioned in the Irish Times “What’s Hot” column that morning, we tried out the new Captain America’s in Cork City on the Saturday. One sentence review; it’s exactly the same menu and prices as in Dublin, only not as well prepared or tasty, try the accompanying Wagamamas instead.
On the Sunday, we got a train out to Fota Island and saw Daniel Libeskind‘s Eighteen Turns, a really weird but interesting mesh of architectural steel.
I’ve put a Picasa photo-gallery for it and two other things I forgot to upload online.
Hidden Dublin
Posted on July 13, 2005, under photography.
It’s hard to believe, but I took this photo right in the heart of suburban Dublin;
If I’d pointed the camera only a few degrees to the left there’d be a shot of the entire Westlink toll-bridge. It’s a wierd photo, but it’s one of my favourites. I took it in September 2003, and the colours of the trees really set off the red of the boarded-up parts of the house. The grey-ish sky against Farmleigh clock-tower is a bit disconcerting, so I always find it an interesting picture to look at.
There’s actually three sets of trees in the photo, some before the Liffey, some before St. Martin’s Road and then the trees in the distance are all in the Phoenix Park or on the Farmleigh estate. The Google maps satellite imagery shows pretty perfectly where I took the shot, the house in question is right at the centre of that link. If you scroll to the top right you can see the bands of trees (and the gaps between them) and the Farmleigh estate. Here’s my attempt at illustrating this using the Google Maps API;
You should be able to click on the markers for some information.
It’s hard to believe that such a beautiful area is only 5 minutes walk from Liffey Valley shopping centre. But it is, it’s behind Palmerstown Village, and it’s a good few acres of empty land, leading right down to the river. It has some great walkways, although you’ll have to deal with the odd few burnt-out car. If you’re in West Dublin, I definitely recommend a visit!
New York
Posted on July 12, 2005, under general, photography.
I havn’t blogged in a while, mainly because I’ve been in New York. Myself and Noirin kept a travelblog, which includes all of our photos as well. But here’s a sample of what kind of great shots the weather provided.
It was great fun! Had a brilliant time with Noirin, and took loads of good photos. Manhattan is excellent for that, point your lense almost anywhere and you have a good shot.