Is LLM Smarter than a 12 year old? Had a few people ask about the o1 models; at work we’ve requested preview access from Microsoft to get them added to our internal LLM Gateway, so we’ll just wait and see, but there’s been some interesting discourse on it so far.  …

Much hay has been made that LLM’s can be infinitely trained on infinite data to do infinite jobs, in an approach generally described as ‘LLM Maximalism’. This post is a bit of a braindump to explain my thought process in how to practically use LLMs in a safe way in production/client facing environments, with a little bit of a discussion as to where I see the current blockers to this in most organisations, and where organisations should be focusing investment to be able to meet these challenges without loosing their competitive edge/expertise. Black Boxes, Training, Fine Tuning, and the edge of computabilityWhile LLM’s like ChatGPT do a respectable job at a lot of disparate tasks, the reason why they do a decent job of these diverse but ‘toy’ problems can be overlooked; they’re trained on the whole internet and with each iteration, spend a whole pile of often un-documented time going through Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). These LLMs are nearly-perfect ‘do-anything and look realistic’ machines, because their ‘target function’, both in the pure training phase and in the RL phase, is to ‘look like a human responded’. Not an ‘expert’ or not someone that’s even ‘correct’, but just that the response doesn’t blow up the Turing Test. …

Today, I’m no longer the Treasurer of Farset Labs, and in the next few days, I’ll officially have left the board of trustees of the charity that I helped form over 13 years ago. Farset Labs started as a Google Group that I started in 2010. It took until 2012 to get our act together, along with some entertaining hackathons riding on the backs of our friends at Dragonslayers. …

This was a piece written as part of my work at Synopsys SIG and was published in a few places, but I liked it and wanted to keep it… At least until the lawyers chase me down. Since the release of ChatGPT, the technology industry has been scrambling to establish and operationalise the practical implications of these human-level conversational interfaces.Now, almost every major organisation is connecting their internal or product documentation to a large language model (LLM) to enable rapid question-answering, and some are starting to wade into the use of generative AI systems to aid in the design and creation of new technical solutions, be it in marketing content, web application code or chip design.But the hype has had its sharp edges as well; the word ‘hallucination’ is never far from the lips of anyone discussing chatbots, and the assumptions that people have around human-like language being equivalent to ‘common sense’ have been seriously challenged. Potential users of LLM derived systems would be wise to take an optimistic but pragmatic approach.The release of the first major public Large Language Model (LLM) set off successive waves of amazement, intrigue and often, fear, on the part of a public unprepared for the surprisingly ‘human’ behaviour of this ‘chatbot’. It appeared to communicate with intentionality, with consideration, and with a distinctively ‘natural human’ voice. Over successive chat-enquiries, it was able to ‘remember’ its own answers to previous questions, enabling users to build up coherent and seemingly complex conversations, and to attempt to answer surprisingly ‘deep’ questions.Yet, these systems should be treated as one would treat a child savant; it might know all the right words in the right order but may not really have the experience or critical thinking to evaluate its own view of the world; the outputs of these systems have not ‘earned’ our institutional trust, and care must be taken in leveraging these systems without significant oversight. …

This is another one of those “I kept googling the same thing over and over again” things that needed a post, except this time I made an issue to make a post and then started to repeatedly refer to that. TL;DRWhen you want to spin up an experimental environment and get it tied in to your Jupyter environment of choice (I actually quite like JupyterLab Desktop these days…), you need two steps. …

Messing around with Elections NI dataSources: Live Data (for 2023) 2022 Assembly ElectionsCreating your own Google Sheet and referencing the crowdsourced dataThe above linked spreadsheets are naturally not editable by everyone; this is great for reliable data but isn’t so great when you want to make pretty graphs. …

TL;DR I’m taking 2 weeks off my Synopsys work to work on all those side projects I promised I would, either to myself or to others. We’ve all got a box somewhere of either AliExpress / PiMoroni / PiHut boards and a number of repos and half started projects that you promised that you’d be able to work in playing with in evenings or weekends, but you keep finding yourself doing stupid things like “spending time with family/friends”, “working out”, “spending time with / trying to find your significant other”, or “eating” or “sleeping” or other ridiculous indulgences. …

Data Wrangling NI House Price Index DataThis is a ‘messy’ ‘blog post’ that’s just a braindump of a notebook to step through NI House Price Index datasets I was playing around with. It’s mostly code, so if you were here from some ‘insight’, feck aff. …

This talk was originally prepared for my 2021 Guest Lecture at UU Magee for the MSc Data Science course. And if it looks familiar, yes, the first bit is almost entirely lifted from A Stranger in a Strange Land from last year. IntroData Science is the current hotness. …

TL:DR “Don’t worry about being a procrastinator, just make sure that your procrastinations are worthwhile.” There’s an implicit irony in this post that I’ve been thinking / talking about writing it for at least 6 months, and it finally came down to a tweet to force me to do it. …

The guts of this document was originally created as part of my work at NTT Application Security stripped of its specificity and retained for my own reference. BackgroundEntities need to be identifiable, but the existence of entities should not be predictible, and it should not be easy for an external user/attacker to infer anything about the number of or presence of entities. …

This was going to be a really quick post yesterday, but I’ve spent the guts of a day (between actual work) just getting the simplest bit of this working. The intentI was silly enough to say this to someone recently in work: …

This is a condensed version of a twitter thread in response to @silverSpoon asking about how Farset Labs would comment on recent news of Dublins hackerspace (TOG) being uncerimoniously turfed out of their third home thanks to developers just wanting to flip sites Agreed, and it shouldn't be down to companies to fill up the gap. https://t.co/Np46Znn3xH …

The below was presented as part of the Belfast Linux Users Groups’ May Technical Meetup. I’m also maintaining this ‘short’ as part of my gradually accumulating ‘python_data_workshop’, so that may be the best place to see updates if you’re reading this any later than 2021. …

This post was originally published as part of my role at WhiteHat SecurityLinks have been added for context/comedy/my own entertainment, but no content has been modified Beneath the cynicism, hyperbole, market–making and FUD; the strategic importance of AI in Cybersecurity is only constrained by us ‘meatbags’. …

This talk was originally prepared for the 2020 Northern Ireland Developers Conference, held in lockdown and pre-recorded in the McKee Room in Farset Labs …

This talk was originally prepared for NI Raspberry Jam’s Kids Track, associated with the full Northern Ireland Developers Conference, held in lockdown and pre-recorded in the McKee Room in Farset Labs …

Realised it’d been a while, thought it was time for an update. I’m gonna try and make an effort to get closer to an ideal of something like #weeknotes as I’ve always been jealous of Adrian’s ability to put this thoughts down and get them out the door in a sensible way… Anyway, use the Table of Contents above to skip to bits you may care about. …

TL;DRI had reason to want to combine git repos into one big repo consisting of repos in their own folders, while ideally maintaining the histories of all those repos for archaeological purposes. There are many reasons why someone would want to do this, and my specific use case isn’t relevant. Good luck. …

This is a Rough Transcript from The Virtual Bash on Ethics IntroductionAround two thousand, two hundred and 20 years ago, Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world”. …

Originally posted in RTInsights Businesses should do their part to ensure products are designed judiciously to reflect core company values and provide audit trails of how AI is learned. …

Originally posted in Cybersecurity Insiders Back when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree in electronics and software engineering, I couldn’t imagine a path that would lead to me working with NATO on port protection and maritime defense, teaching smart submarines how to trust each other. But while I was working toward a Ph.D., that’s what happened. Instead of following the path into academia, a friend enticed me to work with him on biometrics. From there, I found an opportunity to apply my skills and knowledge to the cybersecurity industry – but that’s not something I could have predicted either. …

Super quick one this time; I’ve been experimenting with MQTT to act as a central messaging broker for “Farset In-Space Related Stuff” as part of the near continuous renovations and expansions. We previously had a well configured EMonPi set up with nice dashboards and things, but that died a death at some point during the move, who knows. …

Raspberry Pi’s are great, but often have a lot of baggage associated with them, and I keep forgetting all the clever things you can do to get them up and running without having a sea of cables attached… ResultsRaspberry Pi that can be sshd into from anywhere in the world* without poking any firewall rules or anything other than power connected to it, that works in a range of WiFi access points. …

I was asked to help out a friend who had an installation in an art gallery that stopped booting properly, and was reminded that I keep forgetting to actually write this post. Running a python script as a reliable, retryable service on a Raspberry Pi that waits for an ‘up’ network connection, because I’m an idiot who keeps changing his mind how to do it. …

Approximate Script from my #NIDevConf19 talk a few weeks ago IntroductionThe technology community is known for being strongly inward looking to the point of being miopic at times; we focus on techniques, products, languages, frameworks, and best practices and we consider success and failure based on concrete facts and evidence. …

Another year gone, thought it was time for some reflection. As @Sigma helpfully pointed out to me, 31 is officially the boundary of “30’s” not 30, so I’m gonna take this year as being my “friendly match” with my 30’s and hopefully take this year a bit more wisely. …

This is an approximate transcript from my July 2018 talk at Digital DNA’s AI NI Community Panel on wether the use of AI in defence and surveillence was inherently evil Yes, It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months because I completly forgot about it, sorrynotsorry …

I am a heavy user of Jupyter Notebook, both personally for wrapping my head around Open Data, professionally for analysis and reporting, and for education/presentations. So am very comfortable with just spinning up new notebooks all over the show. However, this ends up looking like this… …

IntroAs part of the fantastic Hackaday Dublin Unconference in the Project Arts Centre over this past weekend, I got to speak about a project I’ve been gently pushing for several weeks now; boxes of laptops for people and community groups to use rather than cap-ex-ing any more pointless under-scoped under-utilised computer labs for everywhere. Comments/Collaboration/Assistance more than welcome …

After last weeks return to posting, I thought it was time to do something vaguely useful (and actually talk about it) so I’m tidying up a few meetup sessions I’ve presented at into a series of Basic Data Science (with Python) posts. This is the first one and covers my Python environment, the Jupyter notebook environments I use for analysis, and some on the Plot.ly graphs and RISE / Reveal.js methods I use to turn those notebooks into presentations. This section will be “Light” on the data science, maths, politics and everything else outside of the setup of this wee environment. …

This is another short extract from the Thesis that I thought was particularly relevant given recent news coverage of the dangers of autonomy and AI, particularly in the field of “killer robots”. Legal Considerations in Design TrustIf there is one key feature of the application of robotics and autonomyto the defence field that separates it from applications in commercialand civil fields, it is the potential direct impact on life and safety. …

PrefaceIt’s nearly a year to the day since I passed my Ph.D Viva (And since I last updated the blog…), so I thoughtit’d be fun to very-gently tidy up one of my appendices that’s a bitrelevant to current stories about the end of the world and machinestaking over and such. It’s a piece of work that I enjoyed researching and had originally hadas a significant part of the main thesis, but it just didn’t fit inanywhere sensible, so it got stripped to it’s bare minimum and kicked to the end. …

Thesis submitted, Viva cleared (with minor corrections) but this post isn’t about all that… Simple one; how do you go from one monolithic project repository to multiple respositories without losing all that tasty tasty commit history? …

Hopefully a super quick one (while I’m procrastinating from procrastinating). Debian Jessie is a lovely operating system until you try and do anything with it. Lots of Package deprecations etc etc etc. …

It’s that time again where the big project that is Farset Labs is in need of another Director, and I thought this was as good a time as any to give my personal take on why I think it’s important to bring in more “Direction”, as well as a little “behind the scenes” perspective on how the position actually operates. My relationship with Farset is a long and close one, but this time I’m speaking not as the charity, just me. …

So today is my last official day in the University of Liverpool office. Time for a bit of reflection. This is a self indulgent “For the sake of history and my bad memory” post so feel free to skip it. …

This post is a little different from my usual fare; Basically, there was a tweet from MATRIX NI that caughtmy eye; the latest Office of National Statisticsreport on Internet Use in theUK. …

TL:DR: Setting up Observium to perform autodiscovery with dynamic DNS, and sample snmp configs to manage Linux servers This week I’ve taken a ‘break’ from the academics since I nearly killed myself sorting out some research for TrustCom (Fingers crossed), and I’ve been engrossed in redoing the network here in our University of Liverpool research lab. …

There’s several very valid tutorials and guides around about getting Ubuntu, Debian and Mint to automatically update and upgrade, but they don’t do much explaining/checking. This is a short post filling in the gaps I observed. …

After 20+ years with Ulster Bank (All hail Henry Hippo), and with countless computer, customer service, overdraft, and credit card problems, I’m jumping ship to Santander on the advice of my friends, colleagues and family. It hasn’t gone so well. Credit BackgroundI’ve been a good boy, when it comes to finance. …

IPython is an amazing tool, and in particular IPython Notebook, which is easily the best ‘python scratch-pad’ I’ve ever used. However, a while ago something strange happened to my set up and I’m not entirely sure when or how but either way, here’s how I ‘fixed’ it. …

<rant> There was a post on r/Belfast today from someone moving to Belfast looking to make a decision on where they wanted to live. …

Update: I got asked to do a simplified version of this post for the University of Liverpool, it lives here (Backup) I’m technically in a third year of a PhD, and most of the time, when someone asks me what it is I’m actually doing, I fluff it and say something about “autonomous submarines” or “collaborative autonomy” or “Emergent properties of communities” or something similarly vague. …

Quick and dirty one that tripped me up. Recently I’ve been doing lots of multiprocessing and joblib-based parallel processing, with loooong simulation times. …

Quick one more as a reminder to me than anything else. As part of my PhD work I’m building different behaviours for virtual submarines. I’ll be explaining some parts of my work in a separate post, but basically, I needed to random walk. Random walk in 2 dimensions is easy; pick two random numbers, go that way. Unfortunately doesn’t work that way on a spherical surface …

About 6 months ago now, I had the pleasure of getting Phil Herron to talk at the Farset Labs PyBelfast group about his work in GCC/Cython fron end optimisation work, which was simultaneously waaaaay over my head and really interesting. I’ve been a ‘Python Primary’ software engineer now for about 5 years, in web-dev, infrastructure monitoring, data analysis, and scientific computing, with some esoteric stuff involving small-vector linear algebra optimisation on GPU CUDA, Matlab bridging with Octave / Oct2Py, and distributed state systems. But somehow, I’ve managed to dodge hardcore Cython. …

My work has be flittering between Python and Matlab recently, and lets say I’m not a massive fan of Matlab at the best of time, and VM matlab isn’t the most performant thing in the world. So I was happy to hear that octave, an open source, Matlab compatible analysis framework have started testing their GUI. …

Ok so this was a weird one. I’ve been lurking on #jekyll for a while, trying to ‘give back’ with slightly-more-than-noob-knowledge. Mostly it’s simple mistakes or misunderstandings that I went through myself, so easy enough. …

Starting in May 2012 (a few weeks after we ‘opened’) I set up an eventcam in Farset Labs, and I don’t think I ever officially explained it… Well, first off we were using a Microsoft Lifecam that was kindly donated by Josh Holmes. This was wired up to an even-then-ancient Asus Eee 7001, wired with power and network, and left in the roof. That was about it. …

I’m always amazed by Canonical. Particularly their documentation. Ubuntu Touch is the grand movement to bring Ubuntu into the mobile domain, and it’s developing fast. …

So I did a TEDx Belfast, and had loads of fun (as you can probably see). Check out the rest of the playlist here, and I highly recommend fellow Dalriad, Leon McCarron’s talk on adventuring, Tony Gallagher’s discussion of the benefits and future of shared education, and definitely check out two talks that must have been spying on my preparations; Lisa McElherron talking about dissidents, and Charo Lanao-Madden on the power of changing perspectives. …

Turns out that November 1963 was a pretty stupendous month all in all, in particular the couple of days (20-24) we’re currently wading through. C.S Lewis (Good Belfast Man) who was not only the beloved childrens author, but also an accomplished scholar, and one of the pioneers of the Science Fiction form, popped his clogs due to long term illness on Friday 22nd at around 2pm GMT aged 64 …

See Part 1 for an introduction to this series. Response to Part 1Two things came out of my posting of Part 1; …

Introduction to my CritiqueLast month DETI announced a Consultation on their (i.e. Arlenes) Strategy to make Northern Ireland “into one of the most innovative regions with the UK”. I’m known to rant and rave about the use of the word “innovation” at the best of times, so I’ll just put that attitude on the shelf and highlight a few of what I think are the “ok” points and the decidedly questionable points in the strategy. First off as a general comment that I’d otherwise repeat over and over again going through the draft, other than the words “Northern Ireland”, and excluding some of the case-studies, this could be an innovation strategy for any region in the world. The stated “Barriers to innovation” read like they’re straight out of a Business Studies textbook, and in general, the (lengthy) exposition around this ideal of “innovation” is little more than a 34 page definition of what DETI considers innovation. (It’s a loaded word and everyone is entitled to have an opinion on what it means. I guess we know DETI’s now at least). Speaking of repeating, this does repeat itself over and over again, just take my word for it here and I won’t raise it individually… The Ministerial ForewordThe very first word I scribbled on my copy of this document was “No”. That “No” was in reference to the very first sentence in the document. …

Inspired by a pretty good write up by Cynofield as to his setup for getting a Raspberry Pi to “phone home”, I thought I’d set out how I do it. I have a machine that lives behind a ‘security’ infrastructure that makes my life a living hell. …

UPDATEI’ve long left QUB since this post was writted so as expected, IS have changed things again. If you’re hitting this, head over to Ryan McConville’s updated instructions QUB Information Services can be a bit of a mess, so in the interest of saving time, here is what works for me. …

I’m leaving Northern Ireland, and I’m moving to Liverpool. Via Portsmouth. I have spoken with a few people about the situation I find myself in, and a few more people about my decision, but I want to get it all down somewhere. …

I was digesting “The Design of Design” by Fred Brooks as a bit of holiday reading, which talks in great depth about the nature of technical and architectural design from a practical perspective, and it made me thinking about my own experience and the “future” of that experience. Blessing or curse, due to my inability to say no and (publically) boundless patience exploration of a range of areas, in technology, security, academia, business, and society; several people have made flippant, off the cuff comments about some form of predicted success, usually financial or technical. Reflecting on this, along with the narrative of DoD, I rested on a platitude that I’d used on many many occasions, mostly as a spear to lob haphazardly at teachers and educators for being ‘lesser’. …

Had an interesting if annoying problem recently that I assumed would just fix itself eventually. But when you’re sick of prodding a power button to force a machine to reboot, you gotta do something. TL;DR_ if you’re getting messages like “Restarting System” on an attempted reboot, try setting the reboot=pci kernel boot flag_ …

Finally decided to move my research work across to GitHub; seems the ‘in’ thing to do. Also I wanted to get more into the Git swing of things and using intermediary tools like hg-git seem a bit contrived for a 1 person project. I’ve enjoyed using Bitbucket but it’s just not quite as polished. That and GH has better integration to pretty much everything… Sorry. …

I was skimming through the Oral Statement from yesterday’s Assembly, with a specific interest in Dr Stephen Farry’s discussions on the NI Economic Activity Baseline Report (everyone loves Baseline reports these days, but very few ever seem to get followed up…) can came across a Question and Response between Sammy Douglas (E. Belfast) and Dr Farry. Mr Douglas: […]Will he outline what his Department is doing to ensure that we are educating our young people in the skills that the workforce needs? …

UPDATE 7/3/13 : See Bottom So I was ranting at @Translink_NI earlier and they helpfully responded with their service complaint submission system …

QUB Relevant: Mostly PGR or prospective PGR Just out of a great meeting with QUB Information Services regarding: …

Open on Industrial Stairwell, Camera pans, looking up into the darkness. A soft, diffuse, but intimidating light creeps over the top step. With an apprehensive cadence, the viewer lollups up the staircase, turning as ceiling gives way to floor to peer over the long, dark, hardwood that makes up the expanse of floor, (beaten worn by industrial revolution, then caked in dust, then scraped clean in sections by Aeron chairs, ping-pong tables and feature lightning, before being scraped back over again by the repo-men), towards five chairs, the mix of which look as if they belong in a time-travellers’ garage Inside the slices-of-design-time sit five near-faceless, shadows. Mostly suits interspersed with flashes of colour, usually from ties or socks but occasionally from blouses and vibrant lip glosses. …

So, what are they going to do with all those ‘NI 2012: Our Time Out Place’ things? Is it no longer our place? Are we joining up with the republic or the mainland or something? …

Came across a well known issue with QUB_SEC and Android, so I decided to fix it. Basically, Android was bailing on a particular part of the TTLS Authentication scheme that is used by millions of workplace and academic RADIUS / AD secured wireless networks, and QUB is one of them. …

So Everything Everywhere are holding a press conference tomorrow… Rumours abound about device selections and other bits of juicy gossip (given the state of the global handset market… I’m not surprised), so this seemed like a good opportunity to rant.In Late August, OfCom, the UK’s communications regulator, gave the go-ahead to bring the planned 4G spectrum allocations forward to this year. In short, 4G is go!This was music to the ears of Everything Everywhere, and that’s not hyperbole. Everything Everywhere is the optimistically named Joint Venture between Orange and T-Mobile, who entered into a mast-sharing agreement last year that vastly improved both companies comparatively lackluster coverage maps, when compared to the likes of O2 and Vodaphone. Together, they represent a customer base of 27 million people, and a weight of investment of over £15 billion since 2000, with additional plans for £1.5 billion between now and 2015.http://ukmobilecoverage.co.uk/best …

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. Born in 1953, he attended Harvard starting in 1970 and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts in physics. From September 1974 to June 1975 he was a graduate student in physics at MIT. …

[caption id=”attachment_826” align=”alignleft” width=”590”] I am a pirate.[/caption] I voyage across the root-zones  in search for content. Movies available months before local DVD release in a format that my media centre laps up (mostly), I watch once, and don’t take up shelf space for years; TV shows via RSS that I watch at my leisure; and, on the rare occasion that I want to ‘Game’ and not feel like an idiot, I torrent. …

I’ve been reading the fantastic ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance’, and it is simply fantastic on any level. This isn’t a sales pitch, but it got me thinking and what I have been trying to accomplish with a range of projects and attitudes over the years. I want to cultivate higher Quality people. I want to contribute to people’s development and growth. I want to do this for the pure and simple reason that, to me, individual change is the only path to long-term change and cultural improvement. …

_Never having to think about updates again _ is a good thing in my head, so here’s how to set up Unattended Upgrades under Ubuntu for fun and profit. $ sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades …

BiblioSorbi, Toni, Dio De Capua, Rossi TERA, Genova …

BiblioCarreras, Batlle, Ridao, and Roberts; An Overview on Behaviour based methods for AUV control, …

Hold on, what?I attended a Postgraduate Training event over the weekend, ‘Starting to Write in the First year of your PhD’, presented by the brilliantly wise and entertaining Daniel Soule. What I expected: …

PCap files are a pain; weird format, difficult to parse viserally even if you have the ‘right’ tools handy. Wouldn’t it be easier to be able to ‘see’ the network flow, like it is in all the textbooks? Well now you can!In playing with NS-3, I came across this problem, and googled for a solution. Now here’s an end-to-end ‘I have pcap files and want to make them pretty’ solution. …

IntroClick is a modular router library developed at UCLA, allowing Click-definied router networks to be ‘attached’ to an ns-3- nodes layer 3 functionality. It has very little relevance to my own research, but was interesting to play with. In a nutshell, Click is an extention to the linux kernel that provides a highly performant and configurable routing architecture. …

[caption id=”attachment_768” align=”alignright” width=”231” caption=”Big Red Button, Does what it says on the tin”][/caption] After a long time in the oven, Farset Labs is up and running. Unforanately we don’t have any of the crazy equipment yet, since we’re broke. …

IRC, Python, Ubuntu linux. Simples! Same as by Twitter post, but for IRC. …

Working on the Farset Labs Big Red Button for space occupancy, had to find a simple way to tweet a status. This is a post to remind myself and anyone else who has dived through hundreds of incorrect, out of date, or inapplicable examples of Oauth 2 with Twitter using a  pre-generated auth-token pair. import oauth2 as oauthimport urllibckey='$CONSUMER_KEY'csecret='$CONSUMER_SECRET'akey='$AUTH_TOKEN'asecret='$AUTH_SECRET'def post_twitter(status): try: consumer = oauth.Consumer(key=ckey, secret=csecret) token = oauth.Token(key=akey, secret=asecret) client = oauth.Client(consumer, token) resp, content = client.request( postapi, method='POST', body = urllib.urlencode({"status": status, "wrap_links": True}), #headers=http_headers, #force_auth_header=True ) except oauth.Error as err: print("Twitter Error:"+err) return resp, contentpost_twitter("Hello Twitterverse") …

This is my own self-indulgant reminder for how to do the things I like. I’ll keep adding to this as I think of them. Basic SetupInstall Ubuntu Latest (currently 11.10), With the third party libraries and a home partition leaving at least 20GB for ‘/’. …

2011 has been a great year for me; Graduated with a 1st MEng in Electronics & Software Engineering @QUB, …

Idiot proof setup for persistent reverse shells / port forwards (same thing) under a Ubuntu VM remote and my Dreamhost server, but should apply to nearly* all *nix’s First off, some terms to keep this easy. I want to be able to access my in-office VM, xavier from my server magneto (not my names, but they conveniently complement). xavier is not publicly accessible, but magneto is. I’ll be replacing all of the FQN’s with these terms so expand on your own. In generic terms, xavier is the remote machine (i.e the one behind some NAT firewall or such that you want to get access to) and magneto is the local machine. Its a bit confusing since all of the work is done on xavier, but it makes sense in the long run. Just trust me and get on with it. …

The Idiot Proof Guide for Windows-host, *-guest setup. (Ubuntu in my case, and should work for any host) Make sure you’re working with a VDI, not a VDMK (if not, File>Virtual Media Manager right-click, Copy) …

I use Mendeley for my reference and citation management. I use TexClipse for (most) of my $latex \LaTeX$ editing, ViM otherwise. …

Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas …

Problem: Had two citations with slightly different information appearing in library.bib, causing bibtex to shit itself, but only one citation appeared in the desktop / web interfacesCause: ‘Deleted’ Library items still appear in library.bib, so old (custom) version of citation still persisted after being ‘removed’Solution: Empty trash …

Ordered Groceries (Tesco Online), Ordered Case of Wine (Virgin Wines), …

Ubuntu doesn’t manage vim’s addons, so installing the vim-latexsuite package doesn’t actually put all the relevant hooks into your vim installation. To do that, (after installing the package) execute;sudo vim-addons -w install latex-suite …

Inspired by the drinking game ‘Kings’ Co-Authors:W.P.L. Cully, and L. Martin …

Pre-built packages not releasing 64 bit versions? No Problem. Debian/Ubuntu based:dpkg -i --force-architecture whatever.deb …

Nigella Talks Dirty wolf howl …

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”600” caption=”Sometimes I worry about the accuracy of webcomics…”][/caption] So today is the start of the rest of your life. Seems kind of appropriate today. Had a meeting with my PhD Supervisor to start to develop my project. Of course at this point it would help to explain what the project is, but I can’t right now, so shush. …

Michael Jackson Fail The Italian Man Who went to Malta. …

Northern Ireland, its history, and its current situation, are a guaranteed topic of conversation to any self-identifying Northern Irishman, especially one travelling around Europe. As I am neither a historian, a bigot, or particularly political, I don’t know a whole pile of detail, so my explanations become rambling personal perspectives which I generally suspect make things less-clear; otherwise I dumb it down so much that the point is kinda mixed, usually ending something like ‘its weird; its British, but we get to be Irish too, except without being quite so broke’.  On the site where I do most of my work, I came across an interesting thread that explains it better than I ever could. …

So as part of my IAESTE placement with PC Engines, I’m investigating the possibility of them making a new board based around the AMD Fusion series of APU’s  (CPU+(something else, usually GPU) on single die) and for that board to work with the Open Source Coreboot BIOS. This is my story. …

‘Star Wars: Episode I’ - Obi-wan & Qui-Gon vs Darth Maul - A capella Multitrack Wits with Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, and Gollum: “I Will Survive” …

As part of my placement in Zurich, I’ve been doing some BIOS level development around the Coreboot project, working with Flashrom and other tools, but with a particular AMD Fusion (MSI E350IA-E45) Mobo, there was no sensible way to flash the BIOS or to add a ‘vestigial’ BIOS. So, the solution arrived at was to ‘acquire’ a Galep-5 Universal Programmer (Not a cheap piece of kit, but apparently that’s the kind of stuff they have lying around in Zurich). Anyway, long story short, went to the Galep website, downloaded the .run file, installed, all perfect and happy days. Except it was in German. (Even though it says its ‘English only’) …

Unity Sucks, and I don’t like it. I prefer a combination of Avant Window Navigator, tilda, and Gnome-Do, to go from this [caption id=”attachment_633” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Unity, kinda, screen shots don’t really work for launchers”][/caption] …

Had an issue with Fedora 15 not liking my harddrives that used to be RAIDed. Noting for future reference. “Disk contains BIOS metadata, but is not part of any recognized BIOS RAID sets.” …

Social Network of Idiots II : Foamy The Squirrel Why Homosexuality Should Be Banned …

More a note for myself than anyone else. Stolen shamelessly from Marc Fletcher. In Settings, alt+e,alt+q, alt+q. …

I’ve discovered a strange undocumented* ‘feature’ of the Amazon Kindle document Delivery system. As it stands, if you send a document to [email protected] or @kindle.com, the document is sent onto your device at its convenience. Generally this is fine, but for most documents that people actually use (PDFs) this can be a pain as the service says it does not support PDF reflow, and on a smaller than A4/Letter screen, lovely documents end up looking like this… …

ANGRY BIRDS theme!!! covered by Pomplamoose (Cat’s crash test) Краштест (Жесть и нереально!!) …

Internetic (Technologic Remix) The Animals - House of the Rising Sun (1964) High Definition [HD] …

As part of any major project, it occasionally happens that you assume something is a ‘solved problem’ when its really not. In my case it was solving small linear systems, of the form Ax=B, where A is an nxn matrix, B is a n vector. This is a problem that’s been solved in libraries such as LAPACK, LINPACK, BLAS, etc etc. …

There’s a quirk of using older CUDA drivers is that  the latest NVIDIA SDK code examples are not backward compatible, i.e compiling the 3.0 SDK against the 2.3 toolkit (that I’ve spent the last day doing) is a fools errand (Thanks very much to @thebaron on #cuda on freenode and tkerwin on StackOverflow.) Basically, the 3.x drivers reclassify newer cards based on the; previously, the ‘compute’ value (a measure of OpenCL adherence) would max out at 1.3, but now the range is extended up to 2.0, but the 2.3 toolkit does not recognise this value, so craps out. …

I was sitting in Sinnamon on the Stranmillis Road, enjoying a coffee, a sausage roll, and my Kindle, reading the latest 2600. One article immediatly stood out to me, ‘A World Spinning’. The main focus of the article was the world-changing domino effect, toppling regimes across the middle east, all caused by one, little textfile. The textfile in question was a US Embassy cable highlighting the indemic corruption in the (ex) Tunisian Government. As most know, this leak was from WikiLeaks; a rag-tag loosely knit chaotic alliance of hackers across the globe, all with the the same general aim to allow open and plain discourse and stopping governments across the globe from hiding secrets from their citizenry; big secrets and small… Of course, as with most things to do with hackers, the aim isn’t that simple; having spoken to some of those involved, it was abundantly clear that some elements within Wikileaks purely want to screw with governments that (they feel have) wronged them, but others are simply motivated by the cat-and-mouse challenge of acquiring, validating, securing and releasing information in a hostile environment. Its this kind of spectrum that makes me wish that I could just fastforward a year or so (or much longer), to a point where Belfast Hackerspace is established, stable, self-funding, and growing. Innovation only comes from discourse, and the best innovations (in my opinion) come from differences. …

BB King & John Mayer Live - Part 2 …

Rebecca Pollock - stars and moon. (original) gang fight! knocked out! Best action scene ever. ever. ever. – Endhiran (Robot) We Humans Are Capable of Greatness Halo Reach Tribute …

Logging functions being called with just a variable and no comment as to what the hell it is …

Still Unemployed 13 Global Warming …

Inspired by Barry Haughey’s recent facebook post; Dear International Banking Conglomerates and other major employers, …

Lego Antikythera Mechanism Ascent - Commemorating Shuttle …

Today is the day I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Today, in the SU, about 30 electrical engineers, computer science students, professional software developers, photography geeks, penetration testers, system administrators and anyone else interested, will come together to hack. …

The Trashmen : Surfin’ Bird ( 1963 ) Skyline - Trailer 2 (2010) …

On Saturday the 23rd October, the Hackers invade The Space!In association with QUESTS, Dragonslayers, and IETNI, HackerspaceBelfast will be running a series of events over 24 hours of software, network, and hardware hackery goodness, as well as screening hacker movies, DIY repair, and maybe, just maybe, how to build a laser. Running parallel to Dragonslayers’ 24 hour gaming event, which will incorporate console, PC, and tabletop games, attendees will be able to both play and make games to their hearts content. …

Segway Olympics - prototype run Segway Olympics - prototype run …

Just under a month after ordering, with a shipping schedule fraught with manufacturing delays and pushed-back dispatch dates (Not complaining, I’m not the only one so everyone was shocked by the demand also) I recieved my new UK kindle 3g at 11 this morning. Immediately I loaded some math-loaded PDF’s which the free.amazon.com document converter handled with ease, then started going through my usual list of sites on the free 3G network, Twitter (largley fine but sluggish), Facebook (buggy with regards to javascript elements, occasionally freezing completely needing to be latched-off and on again) Google-Apps Mail(constantly refreshing and wouldn’t load stably), google reader (worked perfectly out of the box including keyboard shortcuts, which are awesome!) and my ToDo list of late, TeuxDeux (sluggish and slightly misaligned, but usable) …

[caption id=”attachment_515” align=”alignleft” width=”212” caption=”Proposed Hack Aid poster designed by David Kane”][/caption] So we’re only a few weeks into developing this idea, and first I’m going to give some credit where credit’s due; the people that I’m working with this have been brilliant, I want to give special thanks (in no particular order) to Ryan Grieve (@thegrieve), David Kane, Ben Harrison, Martin Gilchrist (@Gilchrist_LLP), Jonny Milliken, Dan Reid, and Chris Murray (@kris18890). …

Why PulseAudio? The Freesound Project Aggregates Creative Commons Licensed Sound Effects [Sound Effects] …

Remember that little economic apocalypse that happened a few years ago? You may remember it as the day your 401(k) dropped a digit or 3; those short sighted (w/b)ankers and middle management that essentially collectively said “You want some money? Sure, go ahead!” to the entire world and didn’t think about where it was coming from, while getting paid sums of money that would make Scrouge McDuck blush. Well, turns out they have been too greedy at home (no suprise). The world of High Frequency Trading really started in the 1970’s, and originated as a system of electronic ‘shortcuts’ within the trading cycle, but eventually, by an economic form of feature creep, ended up leaving a significant majority of US and EU financial market holdings controlled by a variety of competing computer systems, trading on the fraction of a percent over a fraction of a second often generating over $100,000 a day for controlling interests. (As of 2009,  73% of US market equity was traded by such systems) …

Ubuntu is one of those polarising technologies; Its really easy to use on a recreational basis, or as part of a institution/business wide rollout, but heartbreakingly awkward to use ‘alone’ within an entrenched business setting. One such setting is that of Queen’s University; the only form of secure remote access that is made (quietly) availiable is through a Citrix XenApp gateway. Great in theory; everyone can take a slice of a virtualized desktop, do whatever they need to do, and that processing power and memory can be easially reappropriated when they’re done. Unfortunately, in an effort to be ‘secure’, you HAVE to use Windows, and you HAVE to have Internet Explorer installed, and you HAVE to install the propitiatory XenApp client. …

Google Doc Mount Puts Your Google Docs in Nautilus for Editing [Downloads] Google PhD Fellowships go international Use Chrome like a pro Android Development 101 – Part 1:Hello World Rachel Maddow’s Blonde Yearbook Picture [Most Likely To Succeed] App Inventor for Android MultiBootISOs Boots Multiple Operating Systems from a USB Drive [Downloads] - Well, thats my monday afternoon sorted… I’ve been looking for just this sort of tool for weeks; drop in an ISO and it’ll work! Love it! MultiBootISOs Boots Multiple Operating Systems from a USB Drive [Downloads] …

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of a ‘hacker’ (or at least self described ones) has very little to do with coding and networking wizards pounding through systems and stealing valuable information or just destroying everything they touch. In fact, Google (and Princeton University’s) first definition of the word has more to do with Golf than security (try it by googling “define:hacker”). The so called ‘hacker subculture’ is usually taken as a group of not necessarily like minded, but creative individuals with or without technical or theoretical skill, including artists, musicians, carpenters, machinists, or extreme knitters, and can generally be shortened down to ‘tinker-ers’ or ‘messers’.Belfast is a growing hub of technology, software, and art of all forms within Europe; and with Londonderry being named the ‘City of Culture’ for 2013, it is clear the Northern Ireland is no longer (or never was?) the poor child of British (and Irish) creativity and excellence. …

I had an incident recently where the Windows 7 side of my laptop connected easily to an open AP, but the Ubuntu 10.04 (or 9.04, tried both) wouldn’t, with the Intel Iwlagn drivers reporting in syslog a deauth (reason=6), basically the card spoke too soon. I eventually found the solution. After several weeks of asking the same question everywhere I could think of (as well as emailing Intel…) I found the answer a lot closer to home, from a PhD student ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Graduate in my University over LinkedIn (Ironically enough, I’m actually working with him on my Final Year Project next year… Good stuff to come :D ) …

This is it; my first convention! Yes folks, I’m going to be attending (and volunteering) at TheNextHOPE (@thenexthope), 16-18 July. …

Learn to Prepare Tasty Five-Ingredient Meals in Under Ten Minutes [Cooking] Star Trek: Tik Tok [Video Mashup] …

Back Up Your Entire Android Phone to the Cloud [Backup] If/when i get around to getting a new phone, I’ll be doing this :D …

If anyone has any interest in CUDA, or GPU/Parallel programming in general, David B. Kirk and Wen-mei Hwu’s groundbreaking “Programming Massively Parallel Processors” is a must. [caption id=”attachment_441” align=”alignleft” width=”180” caption=”Cover”][/caption] …

ARTS: Ulster Museum shortlisted in Art Fund Prize …

Apple Blindsides More AppStore Developers Making me feel slightly better about not jumping on the AppStore bandwagon; I know that Android Market is the same animal, but you can be sure that this kind of creeping guidelines are going to seriously alienate alot of developers and edgy investors. Science …

I’ve been doing alot of messing around in Ubuntu recently and there are lots of tweaks I like to make. One of them being to show the contents of my home folder as my desktop; I don’t need any more pointless folders…. Dead easy, there is a .config directory under your $HOME dir, containing several files. The one we need is user-dirs.dirs , and it looks something like this. …

Sick of having dozens of old kernels sitting under your /boot/ dir? Want a simpler boot-life? Well we’ve got the solution for you. Just one course of cleankernel once an upgrade cycle will remove all previous kernel entries from your bootloader and /boot/ dir. …

IBM cheats on Cell with NVIDIA Tesla for servers I’m hoping to incorporate NVIDIA CUDA stuff into my final year project next year, so its good to see that I’m going in the right direction according to industry! …

EDIT - 2017 Updated broken links thanks to heads up from Paul @ Art of Blog Ok, its been a busy few weeks, and I’ve let the blog slip again, but coming up: …

Illustrated Guide Explains Your Mind’s Decision Biases [Mind Hacks] NIST Releases Updated Handbook of Math Functions …

Designing next steps Surprise! It’s a hung Parliament. …

Seven Tips for Your Design Job Interview Grid-Based Web Design, Simplified …

I had a bit of a surprise logging into my weekly stats-fest that is my Google Analytics account; 300% rise in Search Based traffic. My daily traffic is meagre to say the least but still, to see such a jump on the week-on-week numbers is always a good thing. [caption id=”attachment_415” align=”alignright” width=”300” caption=”Google Analytics - Traffic Sources Overview”][/caption] …

SEE, or, Stanford Engineering Everywhere, has turned out to be my favourite E-learning resource; I’ve dipped into it a few times over the past few years but in light of my recent investment into a CUDA enabled Graphics Card, I thought that it was coming high time to brush up on my C++ programming, which I’ve basically left stagnant for two years after advancing no further than function pointers, structures, and templates. So, in the spirit of openness that SEE tries to foster, I’ll be blogging my work through their CS106B course, Programming Abstractions, the second of three programming courses. (I passed on CS106A, Programming Methodology, since I’ve had enough Java shoved down my throat to last a lifetime…). …

Ludum Dare #17 - Islands Who judges your work? …

I cant for the life of me remember who it was who pointed this out on Twitter, either @cimota or @stuartgibson. Jesse Schell , Author, Educator, Game Developer, Ex-imagineer, Futurist, spendshalf of this video deliberating over the unexpected rise and rise of facebook. …

Twittering pub hanging Questions to Ask if You’re Thinking of Getting Involved in Open Source …

Everyone and their dog has a walkthrough of adding @anywhere hovercards to your blog. But the default has a small failing that irked me when I was re-doing my Blogroll (check them out, they’re all great! I promise!), and that was that if you take a tweep, like @god for example, it’ll happily wrap the hovercard around it, but if you have a link to this great status that @god posted, @anywhere won’t pick this @god up. Quick and dirty solution; add the following code-block inside your …

So, as you can see the blog is sporting a new, cleaner look. Nothing better than experimenting! One of the nicer aspects of the new setup is the shaded headers (ie. <h1>/<h2> tags). I started off my experimentation by going through WebDesignerWall’s walkthrough on the subject of text effects, but the limitation that I came across was that if you use their implimentation, any links (<a\>) in the header are lost ‘under’ the span. …

Ubuntu Server 9.04 Bacula Bweb GUI 8 useful code snippets to get started with WordPress 3.0 …

I am sick and tired of seeing ‘so and so joined SOMETHING COOL EVERYONE SHOULD SEE’ only to check out the group and see its behind a join-wall. so I’m starting my own library of pointless Facebook  joinwall groups along with alternate source material and a brief of what is behind the joinwall. Affectionately known as FGL. Check it out and let me know what groups you want exposed. …

“In this upcoming round of ACTA negotiations, the U.S. delegation will be working with other delegations to resolve some fundamental issues, such as the scope of the intellectual property rights that are the focus of this agreement.  Progress is necessary so that we can prepare to release a text that will provide meaningful information to the public and be a basis for productive dialogue.  We hope that enough progress is made in New Zealand in clearing brackets from the text so that participants can be in a position to reach a consensus on sharing a meaningful text with the public.” Source:US Trade Representative Website …

Its a problem that I’ve come across, and I’m not the only one, so heres what works for me to find those pesky files that start with a .ls -a | egrep -i "^\." This only works in the current working directory, which is the normal usage. …

Folks, we’re basically screwed; The Digital Economy Bill recieved Royal Accent on April 9th and is officially now Law. So after barely three days of parliamentary ‘debate’ where only 20-ish MP’s actually spoke on the subject (but somehow 189 MP’s decided it was a good idea anyway), our civil rights have been sacrificed infront of the alter of copyright. …

50 Top Engineering Blogs Memory Management Technique Speeds Apps By 20% …

Just incase you forget how to fix this the easy way: Enable mod_rewrite for URL voodoo; (Or any module replacing the rewrite) …

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhBoY6s-Fhw I came across this earlier this morning on XKCD and while there is very little information on the developers site at the minute, I’ll be coughing up for it regardless. …

The Gifford Children’s Choir performs “Still Alive” by Jonathan Coulton. I freaking love this song, and there’s something reassuring that in years to come kids will be singing songs from video games about science instead of nursery rhymes about war and disease, and violent chants. …

NumberQuotes Gives Perspective to Your Statistics, Is Great for Presentations [Statistics] The Menaissance: The Death of the Metrosexual and the Rise of the Retrosexual …

So, a while ago I started  personal logbook and wanted a way to keep those posts off the main blog (while still appearing in the RSS and twitter feeds). Long story short, Blog-in-blog gets a given category off the main blog, and with thinks to the wordpress.org support forum I was directed to the Page Links To plugin, which added the necessary navigational behaviour. …

I’ve been trying a dozen different configurations of my 2x500GB SATA drives over the past few days involving switching between ACHI/IDE/RAID in my bios (This was after trying different things to solve my problems with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx) ; After each attempt I’ve reset the bios option, booted into a live CD, deleting partitions and rewriting partition tables left on the drives. Now, however, I’ve been sitting with a /dev/mapper/nvidia_XXXXXXX1 that seems to be impossible to kill! …

**Updates(26/3/10): **Thought I’d give the liveCD another go (this time using the dailyx64 image and using unetbootin), thinking it must be something simple; so during boot i just kept pressing escape, before the splash screen came up. This got me around the splash screen issue and it seems as if everything is fine. Also, I found a matching bug report on launchpad, but no resolution as of yet. Guess we’ll have to wait and see. **Updates(25/3/10): **With the greatest thanks to the guys at serverfault, I’ve still not been able to fix this issue, and will be lodging a bug report to launchpad whenever I get a chance …

So in a continuing effort to be more productive, I’m segregating off a section of the blog for ‘My Diary’. I used to keep a diary, which has long since been lost in the ether, and I have been reticent to have too much personal or off-topic stuff on the main page, so why not put it here! …

How to Scan, Absorb and Process Information How To Easily Create Clouds In Photoshop …

My lil-NAS has plenty of space but is maddeningly underpowered. I came across a permissions issue where, depending on how the files in question got there, they would not be accessible to my windows boxes because they were owned by root (I have no doubt that its my fault!) …

3 Cool Wordpress Plugins To Make Blogging Life Easier Top 10 best practices for front-end web developers …

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”An Example of network simulation using NS”][/caption] NS-3 Appears to have a staggeringly steep learning curve so I hope these posts help out someone else (or me, when i forget all this in a month). …

I hadn’t used Mercurial before so I thought it might be a good idea to leave a reminder for me and anyone else who comes across it… For tidyness, I do all of my dev-stuff (Subversion, Mercurial, CVS, Git etc) under ~/src and only take root privileges when its needed; any good makefile should relocate the necessary files for you at the ‘make install’ or equivalent point. …

So, say you have a long list of instruction (like multiple apt-get install lines) and you want to eliminate common words? Easiest way to do it is (assuming you have all of the instrustions in “list.txt”) …

I had been looking at this years Google Summer Of Code google group and saw the list of  organisations that are getting involved. While i was alooking at it, I knew i didn’t want to even consider the big boys (I’m looking at you, Debian, Drupal, KDE, Apache, X.Org, etc), they’re too big to get my teeth into, and I’m currently in the throws of ‘WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO MY FINAL YEAR PROJECT ON!!! ‘ (For any Americans, that means ‘dissertation’). My university is big into networking etc, so I had a look at the NS-3 Network Simulator, which currently sits at slightly less that 2 million lines of code, and is vaguinly within my realm of interest so I’m going to see a) if i can get it to work and play with it for a bit and b) if i can contribute anything to the project and parlay that into a final year project, and I’ll be documenting whatever progress I get on this blog. …

So I have a piece of coursework for a CS module I’m taking at Queen’s University Belfast and one of the focal points of it is the recent RockYou! SQL-injection breach that released 32million passwords into the internet, and I thought I’d have a closer look at that list. I ‘acquired’ the password list from your regular neighbourhood tracker, and thought I could walk through the process of getting a probability-sorted password dictionary. …

Wireshark Remote Capturing Google Code University - New Content Added! …

Wireshark Remote Capturing Google Code University - New Content Added! …

While working on an IDS Solution for a client, I came across Untangle, and I loved it so much that I pulled out an old box and loaded it up as my office firewall. One thing that is lacking, from my perspective (at least in the ‘free’ edition) is the firewall interface; Untangle uses an IpTables based firewall, but doesn’t replicate the usual INPUT FOWARD OUTPUT rulebase. I think that in 90% of usecases for Untangle, this isnt a problem, but I found it a little bit alien to have portfowarding hidden in the Networking config pane, and firewall separatly. …

Recovering Data From Noise I’m definitly going to be lookin into this (and yes I’m prepared for the headache-inducing math it will accrue) cus I have an idea about an RF implementation… …

So, I was going to do a complete walkthrough for people interested in using Google Adwords for advertising, and its something I was really looking forward to writing. I would not normally have cared to do such a thing because I’m cheap, but Google sent me out a £75 voucher in January. …

Nice process, but what about the engineering bits? Wish I had this article in my QUB Software Engineering module Pattern matching with Bash (not grep) Brilliant article on Bash’s built in pattern matching. The next generation of ad serving for online publishers …

A Screw-In Coffin is Clever and Economical [Patents] Leaked Government report dismisses QUB’s calls for increasing student fees …

Super Happy Dev Castle – SHDC #0 This was a brilliant event, I just wish I had planned ahead to have a project to work on ! Install Multiple Linux Distributions Via PXE (The Easy Way) This is YAPIWD, yet another project i want to (or wont) do… Google Wave in Action: Real-World Use Case Studies [Use Cases] I never got into google wave that much but i think i may have to revisit it after reading this article! Internet Nominated For 2010 Nobel Peace Prize …

I am shamed. I’ve let this blog slip in the midst of coming back to the real world of Uni. A week without something useful going up! Terrible… stands in corner …

10 ways to make Internet Explorer act like a modern browser Until IE comes into the fold, I guess these methods for Open Web Standard shiving will have to do. Getting Freelance Work: The Hacker Technique Definatly going to be doing this, even just to keep my Design chops up to scratch Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills Great Collection of Sites that inevitably suck all the time out of my week! Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony [Dual Boot] I was just about to settle into writing yet-another-dual-boot-guide, but since this one coveres the topic so well, I thought there was no point continuing! inSSIDer: Open Source WiFi Network Scanner! I’ve used this dozens of times over the past couple of weeks troubleshooting friends and clients wifi issues, and while its not nearly as specific as the Wifi Spy, it does the job of checking checking for co-channel interference and signal effects over time. Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts Great little article on how to effectively use social-media without getting bogged down. 10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit Went All the way through this list thinking “Yup, done that before”…. All Web Designers should have this stapled to their eyelids! 5 Free Awesome Graphic Design Tutorial Sites You Should Check Out Great for people who are new to the Graphic Design world (like me) Strangers, Critics, Friends or Fans Great article by Seth Godin on differentiating your audience types Download Free PowerPoint Advanced PowerPoint Slides to Jazz Up Your Presentations [Powerpoint] I’ve been creating most presentations in InDesign, Flash, or Acrobat recently, but these just might draw me back to the fluffy bosom of Redmond’s Powerpoint …

10 ways to make Internet Explorer act like a modern browser Until IE comes into the fold, I guess these methods for Open Web Standard shiving will have to do. Getting Freelance Work: The Hacker Technique Definatly going to be doing this, even just to keep my Design chops up to scratch Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills Great Collection of Sites that inevitably suck all the time out of my week! Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony [Dual Boot] I was just about to settle into writing yet-another-dual-boot-guide, but since this one coveres the topic so well, I thought there was no point continuing! inSSIDer: Open Source WiFi Network Scanner! I’ve used this dozens of times over the past couple of weeks troubleshooting friends and clients wifi issues, and while its not nearly as specific as the Wifi Spy, it does the job of checking checking for co-channel interference and signal effects over time. Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts Great little article on how to effectively use social-media without getting bogged down. 10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit Went All the way through this list thinking “Yup, done that before”…. All Web Designers should have this stapled to their eyelids! 5 Free Awesome Graphic Design Tutorial Sites You Should Check Out Great for people who are new to the Graphic Design world (like me) Strangers, Critics, Friends or Fans Great article by Seth Godin on differentiating your audience types Download Free PowerPoint Advanced PowerPoint Slides to Jazz Up Your Presentations [Powerpoint] I’ve been creating most presentations in InDesign, Flash, or Acrobat recently, but these just might draw me back to the fluffy bosom of Redmond’s Powerpoint …

How To Set Up A Terminal Server In Linux Using Ubuntu 9.10 And FreeNX Defiantly going to be experimenting with this! 10 Free Joomla Extensions You Can’t Live Without Joomla, one of my two favourite CMS’s up there with Drupal, just makes it so easy to take off the shelf extensions like these listed and for the lay-man to roll it all together into a truely unique system. Will defiantly be noting this for later clients! 10 interesting projects from Google Code …

‘Social Media’ has been lauded as the be-all and end all of the future of marketing, advertising, society, and general human decency. There is no doubt that Social Media has taken over our connected lives. And while I don’t doubt this, I often feel that this is taken as a sign that we can abandon the so called ‘old-school’ of marketing and advertising (In this case ‘Old-School’ includes the Web 1.0 practise of advertising on Search and Comparison sites). …

Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions:/dev/sda1:Windows File System/dev/sda2:Linux File System/dev/sda3:Data Partition I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all. …

Freelance Freedom #139 This seems to be a central tenant of all creative processes, from programming, to graphic design, to web design, to finger painting. Theres a hell of alot of apparent ‘nothing’ to do before you do anything, and if you play your cards right, its chargeable nothing time :D Programming With Proportional Fonts? An interesting new look at a programming environment mainstay that I admit I just assumed was a best practice! 8 Top Twitter Track Tools to Organize the People You Follow …

Recent events in the cyber-security world have got me feeling paranoid. Between Estonia, Georgia, and the ever-increasing focus on Chinese cyber-political-warfare, geo-political entities are starting to realise that the whole ‘lets stockpile enough weapons to blow up the world enough times for the number to be rendered pointless’ may not have been the best plan. China has caught everyone off-guard with its recent, albeit ‘hush hush’, displays of force (while not entirely getting off scott-free), and we should probably be alot more afraid of a cyber war than of flaming pants or security-crossed lovers. …

ChromiumOS Zero Boots Faster, Offers Automatic Updates [Updates]11/01/2010 Make Your Mockup in Markup24/12/2009 …

8 Ebor Drive pt 202/07/2009 8 Ebor Drive pt 102/07/2009 …

As part of the whole New Years Resolutions plan, I’m gonna get started on the OSS development thing. The Gist: Cross Platform Mobile application to collect international data on cell reception. …

Post something at least once a day on either blog or web-album Stop sleeping in after 10am …

For a man who’s title is currently Baron Mandelson, _of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, _First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, educated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and is hotly tipped to become a major part of the Lisbon-Treaty-generated-unelected-cou-detat-european-super-parliment, you’d think the power-addicted, peace-process screwing, ‘shreud loaning’ rat would leave well enough alone. You’d be wrong. …

This blog is starting to turn into a Lenovo ad, but this time, there are no good factors to my recent experience. My X61 Tablet died, completly braindead, no power, no nothing. …

Currently, this is a major American congressional argument, and hasn’t really come up publicly in Europe (outside of Scandinavia , but Net Neutrality is going to be one of those issues that if people aren’t made aware of it, the legislation removing it will sweep over all of us. Imagine what would have happened if in 1998, ISP’s had throttled the traffic going to a little rack in Stanford University that would late take over the internet as the great distributor of information. Imagine if Google couldn’t pay the ‘top-tier access fee’ and had simply died. …

As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives. This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on. …

I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible. From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating. …

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ‘I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection. I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’ …

My attention span isnt really that great with projects, so the thought of doing the entire Project Euler in several different languages was never realistically getting off the ground.  (FYI Problems All On One Page ) So, modification and extension to the previous idea; Take one random number generator (java.util.random) and a list of languages I think I should have at least a cursory knowledge of. Each time I finish one problem, push a button and it tells me what language to use for the next one. …

Finished my approach to Euler Problem 1 last night and checked everything into github. If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. …

So, I love my lenovo tablet, so far through all the trails, tribulations, transcontinental visits, banging, bashing, bumping, swinging, twisting, scribbling, et al, its survived and become a near essential piece of my working and personal development. Famous…Last…Words. …

I must apologise for my lack of activity on the blog, but more is coming. I’ve begun working towards working with Ian Clarke on his Swarm project, that is if i can bring my Java and Scala chops up to scratch enough to give meaningful impact. …

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Last week or there abouts, there was a big buzz around the interwebs revisiting Dan Kaminski’s OzymanDNS tool, a perl based toolkit for tunnelling TCP traffic over DNS requests (technically its TCP over SSL over DNS but whos counting) That was originally released mid-2004. I never really found the true source of the new hype surrounding a “old” project (it may have been HAK5’s episode 504 that demonstrated the tool, mubix has put the write up in at room362) …

Ingredients: 2 eggs …

Yeah, i know, “What does a guy who hasnt even graduated yet and is in a placement job have to say about education and employability?”, and usually i would agree with the sentiment. But the times they are a-changing. The world, especially for current or incumbant students, is very uncertain. I was lucky, when i was in first year i already had the connections to secure a job close to my Uni. …

Check Email / Twitter / Facebook / et-al for 10 minutes every 3 hours (10/1/4) Focus on 1-3 activites / fixes / waypoint actions a day …

So, I’ve decided that each weekend i wanna have a fiddling project and document it for the blog. This week I’m gonna do a free bsd 7.1 install on the wreckage that is my old laptop. I’ll update when i get pictures ( Sorry, no VGA scanner, digital camera will have to do) …

So, I’ve made the plunge and am determined to catch up on everything I’ve left behind the past couple of years. I have embraced the new interconnections, …

So, I’ve been experimenting over the weekend with Backtrack 4. My… Lord…. Times have changed, it used to be that if you wanted to mess with WEP you have to go thru a dozen intermediate stages. wesside-ng makes life so much simpler.30 minutes, fully automated. …

Well, I’ve finally joined the washed masses in actually having my own domain. Lovely new years deal from DreamHost. 10 bucks for 2 years, brilliant. Thanks Lifehacker Anyway, hope it all goes well. …

The Fuel gauge on the front of my MBWE is fairly useless, noone cares, so why not repurpose it as a speedometer? first, stop it displaying the “fuel” Stolen from http://kyyhkynen.net/stuff/mybook/reduce_disk_usage.php …

Contents (what you get out of this)Weather, HDDtemp, UL/DL speed and cumulative meters, CPU load, Folding@Home status, Remote transmission download status (could be local, easy change), gmail status, RAM usage, Uptime, Date/Time, ToDo list These all automatically update dependant on the execi variable. …

I’ll keep this as informative.If your webcam works in ubuntu (I’m running the 8.10 RC atm, fantastic btw) under cheese but not with skype, I did a bit of digging and cheese uses v4l2 (the ‘new’ webcam api) which inherently screws up skype that uses v4l1. So, its easy enough since i came across this post and after chasing up my own system locations (this guy must be on 64bit, but i didnt ask) dead easy, instead of in the terminal going …

As Other Folks have been going in a GTD fashion, I’ll be throwing useful websites and links into this post so my sievelike menory can cope with the multitude of things that come to my attention. LectureFox Free Online Lecture DirectoryMyBook Hacking Easy Peasy List Of Tutorials For Screwing with the WD My Book WE II13 Of the Best Linux Tutorials and OpenCourseWare on the WebBest Passwordless SSH authentication tutorial I’ve seen (complex but simple)Google Courses Looks pretty goodSSH quick referenceThe Academy The Videos look quite goodEuler …

Thru my work I’m thrown into alot of technologies that i dont nearly know enough about and as with alot of tech related things, the education scene is basic basic basic..GURU with little or no gradiation, so what I’m going to do is post what i learn when i learn it and where i learn it from and hopefully it’ll be useful for someone else, and I’ll also take the opportunity to rehash stuff I’ve already done. ATM I’ll probably be doing Bash scripting, Perl Scripting, XML, and whatever UNIX stuff comes up whenever I’m writing, but for now and for a relativly simple start; X display fowarding… …

So, gonna do a quick write up on my current setup. Ok, from the top: …

Ok, got the 900, sorry this blog is very very late Pros:AMAZINGLY small, you wont believe how small it is until you use oneThe keyboard is just managablethe Webcam is amazing quality when it worksMore responsive than i imaginedThe Extra 16GB SSD really helpsWonderfully fast bootups (If you never plug it in to any accessories (other than charger) set the Boot Booster enabled under the BIOS, trims a second or two) …

Just got a call from home saying that my EEE was delivered today, now thats what i call super fast delivery, kudos to clove for being so speedy On another note my dad is cycling from ballymoney in northern ireland to montouliers in the south of france, he has an EEEpc 701 with him and hes been using it to make a blog here …

If anyone is interested in Erlang B Calculations, very relevent to any communications or engineering students, I’ve written a little quick piece of code to calculate them. There are several levels of functionality in the code.Erlang B itself only has 2 variables, System load in Erlangs, and the number of “trunks” (read: servers/call center operators/phone lines), and its output is a blocking probability from 0 to 1 …

Jeff Han, a researcher at NYU, surpassed himself again with the most georgous multitouch display interface I’ve ever seen (surface/iphone eat your heart out). I always love watching TED talks, and if anyone really wants to see a good reason why Powerpoint should be killed, I’d recomment Hans Roslings talk on global poverty here Please at least pretend to click my ads. I know they’re a joke, but still, it dont cost ya anything! …

Just off the phone with Clove saying that my shiny new black eee 900 is winging its way to my homestead, which unfortunatly is not wer i am, but at least i wont be losing any time for revision (read: have any other reasons not to study) I have to say I’m really disappointed with Asus’s attitude to they’re british customers regarding the battery issue and i really cant say any more about it except that were paying above the board globally, and not getting an equivalent product and an even less equivilant service. …

I’ve been folding for a while now, and I’d previously written a really very cobbled together way of parsing my unitinfo.txt files, but, searching for something to do other than revise, I’ve written a similarly cobbled together but much shorter way of parsing my folding progress and telling me (as in speech) how far its going. Required: Espeak, basic bash knowledge to adjust. …

Afternoon folks, I’m supposed to be studying but dont have the heart to, so I’m documenting a recent project from Uni. The remit was to be able to parse RS232 data coming in from a GPS unit and reformat it for a LCD display. I dont have the part numbers handy but I was programming on a 18F series PIC that supported C. …

Yeah, suprise suprise, I’m actually gonna try and keep this up. One of the major reasons for the delay since my last documented fiddle as been job hunting for a placement year next year, but I’ve wonderfully secured a position with Ericsson Ireland in their Athlone R&D centre. Pays good, experience is even better. …

Ok, its been a bit quiet in the old experimentalism, but im just taking in Bill Gates’ CES keynote, and there are a few things i wanted to comment on. I HAVE NOT SEEN ANYTHING THAT IS NOT ALREADY EXISTING …

So, to do most of this playing about, I need a virtualisation environment, and VMware is the easiest, simplest and, at the moment, cheapest. VMWare released their server virtualisation tool to “free”dom recently, and the newest version (2.0) is currently sitting in beta. …

So…. I’m Andrew, I’m a technical person, and I’m gonna use this blog to post out some of my technical musings and little experiments. Currently, I’m working off of three systems, Athena, Apollo and Hermes. …