Commentary

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 ...

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? Are we all getting deported?! I DON’T WANT TO BE DEPORTED! Who am I Kidding, yes, I do, this place sucks sometimes between flegs and riots and expenses and planning permission and investment funds and floods. Thanks to those who made 2012 suck less, especially everyone who has contributed to Farset and all that jazz, it really has been a dream come true. ...

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. ...

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. ...

2011 has been a great year for me; Graduated with a 1st MEng in Electronics & Software Engineering @QUB, Got Job offer to a major financial house, which I turned down, Got Job offer to a C|EH company in England, which I turned down, Got DELNI Funded PhD offer (x4) from CSIT/ECIT, which I turned down, Got selected to be one of the two UK projects within a Joint UK/FR Defence PhD Programme, which I accepted, ...

Ordered Groceries (Tesco Online), Ordered Case of Wine (Virgin Wines), Planned PhD and Literature Review writing (StackExchange) Read more papers (Mendeley) Managed some Investments (Zopa) As I was walking back from our kitchen in the office, I realised that that ’lift coffee cup, walk to kitchen, make coffee cup, return to desk’ was the most inefficient part of my working day; I can even justify writing this post as vaguely productive as I’m waiting for a download to complete… ...

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. ...

Logging functions being called with just a variable and no comment as to what the hell it is logging has functions more than logging.info, use them! Debug = useful information if something breaks but isn’t interesting during normal operation info = useful and generally interesting information warn = something went wrong, indicating something should probably be refactored / fixed,_ but the system could recover from it._ error = oh dear jesus fuck the entire site evaporated into a swarm of zombie locusts, I better put something in the error log. ...

Inspired by Barry Haughey’s recent facebook post; Dear International Banking Conglomerates and other major employers, I just spent 3 hours of my life writing custom cover letters, answering pointless assessment questions, and entering my ‘skillsets’ on 4 different occasions for an application for one job… Just gimme the bloody job already; you’re big enough and ugly enough to have been able to pick up all that infomation from either a) My extensive and detailed resume, b) my attached university transcript. ...

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. Today, we’re going to find out if it actually works; there is nothing planned, nothing prepared, and nothing expected. All we have is a FB group, FB event, Hackerspaces.org Wiki, and a few IRC conversations. ...