Of Penguins and Coffee

Bolstering Claude Code: A Personal Development Environment Configuration Guide

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:21:00 +0000

A comprehensive guide to configuring Claude Code with Model Context Protocols (MCPs) for enhanced AI-assisted development workflows

GPS III: Where Are We? And Where Are We Going? [Archive]

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 03:16:00 -0400

Archival Note: This post preserves an article I originally wrote for MakeUseOf way back in August 2014 while I was at The University of Liverpool doing my PhD. The original published version is at MakeUseOf: GPS III: Where Are We? And Where Are We Going?. They probably still own everything but this is from my original ‘manuscript’.

Fifteen years ago, the first GPS-enabled cellphone went on the market. It flopped, but the form factor it pioneered, combining near-military grade communications equipment with a consumer device has stayed with us.

Notes from "Will GenAI Revolutionise our Lives for the Good?"

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:25:00 +0100

I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a debate raising money for Farset Labs, a cause obviously close to my cold cynical heart.

Will GenAI Revolutionise Our Lives For The Good In The Next 5 Years is top tier troll-bait from Garth and Art, and I’m very grateful to have shared the stage with the 5 other speakers. Even the lanky english one. I was particularly impressed by my teammates in their very human-led approach to this question (although everyone was great!)

Being a DORC in the age of Generative AI

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 14:16:00 +0100

Lots of people have written about the impact of generative AI on the world of software engineering, and while I write this I’m fighting with CoPilot to stop filling out the rest of the sentence. Gimme a second…

…

That’s better. Anyway. This is just a blurb/brain-dump of a shower-thought. Don’t come to me for deep insightful stuff about the productivity gains about Generative AI in Software Development, or whether it will be the end of ‘Juniors’ in software engineering, or how we’re going to grow juniors in future.

On Deepseek

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 13:02:00 +0000

Note: The continuing adventures of ‘a dozen people asked what I thought about a new AI model in work so I put them together and republished it a few months later when I got a quiet weekend’…

So, Deepseek stripped billions from the market on Monday. Do we care?

My 2c is that this is a fantastic series of innovations on the core design of LLMs, and based on those innovations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the training costs quoted as being in the mid-to-high-single-digit-millions-of-dollars are around the right order of magnitude for this (assuming you already had the team expertise of a PhD fueled quant-hedge fund in house and didn’t pay them SV salaries).

AIOps Maturity Model

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 13:54:00 +0000

Introduction

This document outlines an AIOps Maturity Model to help organizations assess and improve their Machine Learning Operations capabilities. It came from my own frustration that there weren’t any models that fit the real experience of end-to-end data science and operations relationships that covered both ‘conventional’ ML, and practically discussing LLM based systems and how completly differently you have to think about them.

This was originally published internally around May ‘24 and then presented at NIDC as an ‘Eye Test Model’, and I promised that I’d eventualy publish it; this is it, dusted off and tidied up for public consumption.

On OpenAI o1

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 09:31:00 +0000

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.

My 2c is that this is OpenAI trying to take the chain-of-thought (aka ’talking to yourself’) in house rather than people doing the intermediate steps themselves. (That means, instead of just running the token prediction, it’s a repeated conversation with itself, with OpenAI providing the ‘inner monologe’ and just magically popping out the answer). This is fine in principal, and is how we do multi-shot RAG among other things, but the two(three) critical parts of this for me are

"Context all the way down": Primer on methods of Experience injection for LLMs

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 20:58:00 +0000

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.

Farewell Farset

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 11:38:00 +0000

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.

Over the past decade-and-a-bit, I’d easily say that Farset Labs has been the keystone of my life and my career, and I’m pretty sure that (before the renovations in 2019) you’d find my blood, sweat, and definitely tears staining various parts of the building.

Generative AI: Impact on Software Development and Security

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:54:00 +0000

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.

Jupyter Environment Management for Dummies

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 13:50:00 +0000

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;DR

When 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.

Pulling Election Count data out of Google Sheets for fun and democracy

Thu, 18 May 2023 14:43:00 +0100

Messing around with Elections NI data

Sources:

Creating your own Google Sheet and referencing the crowdsourced data

The 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.

Google Sheets supports the live referencing of external sheets in your own sheets, so you can ‘import’ the data from the read-only sheets as they evolve over the count, and then reference those data in your own visualisations.

StayCation2023

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 19:00:00 +0000

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.

Wrangling NI House Price Index Data

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 19:49:00 +0000

Data Wrangling NI House Price Index Data

This 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.

There is no analysis here, this is just data wrangling.

TLDR As always, Government Open Data has over the years gone from ’non-existent’ to ‘garbeled’ to ‘inconsistent’ and I feel is now in the stage of ‘consistently inconsistent’, which is progress in my eyes.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Data Science

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 18:49:00 +0000

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.

Intro

Data Science is the current hotness.

While those of us in these virtual rooms may make fun of the likes of Dominic Cummings for extolling a ‘Data Driven Approach’ to policy, the reality is that Data Science as a buzzword bingo term has survived and indeed thrived in a climate where ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is increasingly derided as being something that’s written more in PowerPoint than Python, ‘Machine Learning’ still gives people images of liquid metal exoskeletons crushing powdery puny human skulls, and those in management with long memories remember what kind of mess “Quantitative Analysis” got us into in 2008…

Generative Adversarial Procrastination

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 15:07:00 +0000

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.

Fun fact, in the time it took for me to write this procrastination post, the twitter poll changed, so I guess I gotta delete it all and play Satisfactory now?

UUIDs and You

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 18:00:00 +0000

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.

Background

Entities 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.

Conventional auto-increment integer ID’s were historically de-rigeur for (now largely spurious) database performance optimisation reasons, however, they are succeptible to both presence estimation, and scale estimation.

Counting Tabs and Background Tasks: Taunting Goodharts Demon

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:58:00 +0000

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 intent

I was silly enough to say this to someone recently in work:

It’s a good day when I end up with fewer firefox tabs open than when I started

And a plan was hatched;

Find API to query Firefox for current number of open Tabs across all window instances
Send that value to my internal MQTT node (that has telegraf, influx, home assistant and grafana integrations too)
Repeat

Spoiler alert, number 3 was the bastard

Response to TOG's Third Eviction

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 13:18:00 +0100

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
— Andrea (@silverSpoon) June 8, 2021

I wonder if @FarsetLabs has comments on how that works on NI?
— Andrea (@silverSpoon) June 8, 2021

It’s similar up here, but that’s more challenging (and lines up with @jeffrey_roe’s comments in the piece) that hackerspaces fall between a crack in local development support between ’entrepeneurship/startups support’ (aka subsidised professional services and office space), the classical arts sector individual and studio support (which has its own significant issues, often a lot more bureaucracy than it’s worth, and stifling community revenue generation by arcane entertainments licensing that I’m sure if you start @adamtucks he’ll chip in) and last, the classical community centre/sports groups (such as the GAA clubs discussed in the original article).

Apache Arrow in 5-10 Mins

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 11:54:00 +0100

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.

Conditions

Theme: ‘Universal Screwdrivers’
Event: BLUG
Time: ‘5-10mins’ (take the 10)

Slides

Transcript

Evening folks, and I’m happy to be appearing in what we hope is the last virtual BLUG! We’ve all spent a long time toiling in our own little worlds in relative isolation over the course of this sequence of lockdowns, and its appropriate that now as we begin coming back together, that we’re talking about projects that operate and complement across ecosystems.

Dr StrangeBot: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust Machine Learning

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 06:06:00 +0000

This post was originally published as part of my role at WhiteHat Security Links 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’.

Being a data science practitioner in the cybersecurity space has been a double–edged sword for several years. On the one hand, with the proliferation of automated security testing, network IDS advances, the sheer growth in traffic and the threat surface of our increasingly complex, interconnected application development practices, these roiling oceans of flotsam and datum are everything our data hungry little hearts desire. Related innovations in data engineering in the past decade mean that questions that had previously only lived in the craven dreams of executive officers and deranged analysts are now the kind of tasks that we hand off to interns to make sure they have correctly set up their workstations.

A Stranger in a Strange Land: Data Science Onboarding In Practice

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 11:03:00 +0100

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

Intro

Data Science is the current hotness.

Tell me about your Programmer - Robopsychologist and other careers that don't exist (yet)

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 11:34:00 +0100

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

In Issac Asimov’s stories, the technical, social and personal impacts of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence are explored. One creation in his books was the career of “Robopsychologist”, a combination of mathematician, programmer, and psychologist, that diagnosed and treated misbehaving AI. In this talk we’ll discuss how on earth you can prepare for careers in Robopsychology and other careers that don’t exist (yet).

Back to reality

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 16:22:00 +0100

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.

Farset Updates

So, this was the actual reason for this update but it started a weird thought process that led to this blog.

Merging Git Repos for Archival Purposes

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:32:00 +0100

TL;DR

I 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.

Why so complicated?

‘Hidden’ files (dotfiles) suck
Shell Wildcards suck
Wildcards with selective exclusions (i.e. .git) suck
File names with spaces suck
Trailing Slashes suck
Rewriting History sucks

Raw version because I don’t trust GIST and embeds and such….

#!/bin/bash

usage() {
 cat << EOF
This script imports a git repo (accessible from https://\$origin/\$user/\$repo) and all its history as subdirectory of a destination (available locally at \$dest)
It is designed for non-production, archival processes and may destroy everything you've ever loved because you looked at it funny. You have been warned.
The structure of the destination will end up something like this:
~/src
- \$dest
 - origins
 - \$origin
 - \$user
 - \$repo
Required Arguments:
 -u|--user: The user that owns the repo to be imported
 -r|--repo: The name of the repository to be imported
 -d|--dest: The local name of the destination repository (assumed to be under ~/src)
 -o|--origin: The git server that is the origin of the repo to be imported
EOF
}
if [ $# -le 6 ]; then
 usage
 exit 1
fi

while [[ "$#" -gt 0 ]]; do
 case $1 in
 -u|--user) user="$2"; shift ;;
 -r|--repo) repo="$2"; shift ;;
 -d|--dest) dest="$2"; shift ;;
 -o|--origin) origin="$2"; shift ;;
 *) echo "Unknown parameter passed: $1"; usage; exit 1 ;;
 esac
 shift
done

tmp="/tmp/_${dest}_tmp"

echo "Importing $origin/$user/$repo into $dest"

rm -rf ~/src/$repo
cd ~/src
git clone https://$origin/$user/$repo
cd $repo
git filter-branch \
 --tree-filter "mkdir -p $tmp/origin; git ls-files | cpio -pdumB $tmp/origin; git ls-files | xargs -d '\n' rm -r; find . -type d -empty -delete; mkdir -p origins/$origin/$user; mv $tmp/origin origins/$origin/$user/$repo/"\
 --tag-name-filter cat --prune-empty -- --all
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
 ## WAIT PATIENTLY
 cd ../$dest
 git remote add $repo ../$repo
 git fetch $repo --tags
 git merge --allow-unrelated-histories $repo/master #Youre on your own if you want a different / multiple branch(es)...
 git remote remove $repo
else
 echo failed for $user/$repo
fi

Pragmatic Data Science; When Unstoppable Math meets Immovable Ethics

Fri, 22 May 2020 14:35:00 +0100

This is a Rough Transcript from The Virtual Bash on Ethics

Introduction

Around two thousand, two hundred and 20 years ago, Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world”.

Archimedes has come to be (rightly) associated with many fundamental innovations in mathematics and engineering, and while I’m sure we’re all sick and tired of screws and levers and jumping out of bathtubs, I’d like to start off with a discussion on one of his more mundane creations, the compound pulley.

Is Your AI Ethical?

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 21:16:00 +0100

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.

As we examine an increasing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, it’s being revealed that AI can have a built-in bias, whether intentional or not.

In late 2019, Apple and Goldman Sachs faced allegations that the Apple Card used an algorithm that discriminated against women in credit-scoring evaluation – after Apple’s own co-founder Steve Wozniak and entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson received credit limits of 10-20 times higher than their wives.

The Importance of Active Learning in Data Science and Engineering

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 11:10:00 +0000

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.

Mosquitto (MQTT) Emon Pi (Open Energy Monitor) Forwarding Bridge

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 16:40:00 +0000

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.

Anyway, EmonPi has a built in mosquitto broker, which it uses to keep ‘state’ across several parts of the emonpi ecosystem.

Headless Pi Configuration with Multi-Wifi Remote Access

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 15:28:00 +0000

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…

Results

Raspberry 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.

Python Script as a Reliable Service

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 14:09:00 +0000

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.

Fail gracefully and with informative error messages:

try: ... except:... is your friend

Data Art: Creative Collisions and Getting out of your comfort zone

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 16:57:00 +0100

Approximate Script from my #NIDevConf19 talk a few weeks ago

Introduction

The 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.

And Now I Am 31

Fri, 17 May 2019 08:42:00 +0100

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.

What follows is a vaguely structured stream of consciousness, more for my benefit than anyone else’s. If you want a wee window to see what’s behind the beard, read on. If you’re expecting anything revolutionary, disruptive or surprising, you’re gonna be disappointed…

Unfeeling Fire

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Hello folks, I’m Andrew Bolster, most everyone calls me Bolster. And nobody calls me Doctor.

I’m a Data Scientist at Alert Logic, a cyber security firm based Texas but with a research office in Weavers Court where we monitor, analyse and identify malicious and suspicious internet activity, protecting thousands of companies with advanced sequence and pattern matching sensors deployed across the world.

Daily Dated Untitled Jupyter Notebooks

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 12:29:00 +0100

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…

Less than informative and impossible to work out WTF I was doing.

Helpfully, there’s a way to change it.

In your jupyter_notebook_config.py file (Normally in ~/.jupyter), add the following somewhere sensible

Hackaday Unconf Dublin Talk: Socially Accessible Computing

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

As 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

Money even more welcome.

Video

Presentation

Transcript

This is the first time I’ve used a Mac for longer than 30 seconds in… ever so; plugging dongles and things in and the screen not exploding and creating loads of extended desktops all over the place is very very strange.

My Basic (Python) Data Science Setup

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Legal Considerations for Trusted Defence Autonomy

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 18:02:12 +0100

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 Trust

If there is one key feature of the application of robotics and autonomy to the defence field that separates it from applications in commercial and civil fields, it is the potential direct impact on life and safety.

Human Factors related to Trusted Operation of Autonomous Systems

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 19:05:52 +0100

Preface

It’s nearly a year to the day since I passed my Ph.D Viva (And since I last updated the blog…), so I thought it’d be fun to very-gently tidy up one of my appendices that’s a bit relevant to current stories about the end of the world and machines taking over and such.

It’s a piece of work that I enjoyed researching and had originally had as a significant part of the main thesis, but it just didn’t fit in anywhere sensible, so it got stripped to it’s bare minimum and kicked to the end.

Git Split Repository With Commit History

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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?

#! /bin/zsh
#
# git_split.sh Current_Repo username new_repo {list of files/folders you want to keep}
# Copyright (C) 2016 bolster <bolster@bolster.online>
#
# Distributed under terms of the MIT license.
#



BASEDIR=$1
INITDIR=`pwd`
NEWREPO="git@github.com:$2/$3.git"
shift 3
FILTER_ARGS=$@
TMPDIR=`mktemp -d -t ${BASEDIR}_XXXXXXXXX`
echo $BASEDIR $TMPDIR $FILTER_ARGS

cp -ra $BASEDIR/. $TMPDIR
cd $TMPDIR
git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm --cached -qr --ignore-unmatch -- . && git reset -q \$GIT_COMMIT -- $FILTER_ARGS" --prune-empty -- --all && git repack -a -d -f --depth=250 --window=250 && git remote set-url origin $NEWREPO && git gc && git push -u origin master
ls -latrh
cd $INITDIR
rm -rf $TMPDIR

YMMV, IANAGG, No refunds, Safety not guaranteed

FIX: CUDA on Debian Jessie

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Anyway, I’ve got a history with GPU stuff and I’ve been playing with integrating it into some of my research, but in a bout of insanity I decided while I’m over in Liverpool (for another 4 hours) to wipe my old workstation and bring it over from Ubuntu 15.04 to Jessie (which I’ve been using on my main laptop for a while now).

One Direction: Why I'm still a director at Farset Labs

Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Return of the Beard

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

It’s just over two years since I left Belfast, and in those two years, life got weird(er).

TL;DR for my own benefit in years to come:

Worked for DSTL for a while on autonomous maritime systems
Went to the Bournemouth Airshow
Studied FPGA programming at Cambridge
Coordinated a Raspberry Pi Outreach programme between Farset Labs, W5, and Digital Circle (along with the inimitable other Andrew; Mulholland)
Spoke at TEDxBelfast and the All Island Innovation Conference
Built a green field network research lab from scratch (it’s still not finished)
Joined the Liverbeards
Contributed to a joint project using atomic clocks for submarine location
Went to GDC in San Francisco as part of an InvestNI organised Trade Mission
Visited the Microsoft and Google campuses in SF
Visited Noisebridge (and didn’t get involved in any drama…)
Presented some research at Stanford
Played with the Intel Galileo
Went to Prague
Got my first paper rejection
Met the Queen, Prince Phillip, the Duke of York and a load of interesting entrepreneurs at Buckingham Palace
Participated in VC negotiations and biz dev for a small tech firm
Spoke at Ignite Liverpool (The video doesn’t do the animations justice…#cringe)
Drank my way around Manchester with a load of beards
Secured funding for a Farset Labs Raspberry Jam outreach programme
Saw Dylan Moran Live
Presented at a defence conference
Attended a death metal gig in a suit
Lost my passport and poster on the way to present at another defence conference…
Took part in the Worlds Biggest Catwalk
Presented at TrustCom in Helsinki
Played glow-in-the-dark-haunted-house-mini-golf as part of what goes down in history as the most random night of my life…
Was named Liverbeard “Beard of the Month” (well, I was leaving, they had to give me it sometime… :p )
Participated in a mayoral discussion on smart cities
Got the most unheard of submission extension
Finally got rid of a collection of “joke” twitter accounts I’d wired up to IFTTT ages ago and forgotten about… (Sorry QUB…)
Got a trim from barber-to-the-stars, Cutthroat Pete
Entered and won my first “food challenge”; a hot-wings challenge (and didn’t cry about it afterwards), also earning my second consecutive Liverbeard-of-the-month-status.
Discovered far too many awesome bars in Liverpool
Made some amazing friends I won’t be able to get rid of for the rest of my days
Managed too many Undergrad, MSc and MEng projects

That’ll do.

Data Wrangling for UK Internet Usage

Sat, 23 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a little different from my usual fare;

Basically, there was a tweet from MATRIX NI that caught my eye; the latest Office of National Statistics report on Internet Use in the UK.

@MATRIX_NI @ONS And the tables show Northern Ireland being around 7% behind the Avg and 2% behind the next-worst-region...
— Andrew Bolster (@Bolster) May 22, 2015

Basically, NI “lost”. So I thought it was a good opportunity to play around with the data a little bit instead of my usual stuff.

SNMP Monitoring and Configuration for Networks and Linux Host Monitoring

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Good network and system monitoring tools are hard to come by, especially for free and with decent OSS tendencies.

Unattended Updates in Linux Mint

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Get the package

sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades -y

Enable the package scheduler

File Being Messed With:

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades

Log File Being Watched:

/var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log

I’ve got no idea why this isn’t automatic; possibly that in other environments, you only want security level upgrades to core system components rather than updating all regular applications. (Not doing this left me scratching my head for a while wondering why the logs kept saying No packages found that can be upgraded unattended when apt was telling me something completely different. Anyway, put the following into a new file named above.

I do not understand credit markets

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 Background

I’ve been a good boy, when it comes to finance.

No loans other than Student
No Car
No Mortgage
No Dependants
Reasonable ‘Disposable income’ (even if that income is usually ‘disposed’ in either bars and restaurants or gadgets)
Been employed in one form or another since I was 15
A few slip ups on the credit card but always paid back within the next month
A few slips over the overdrafts an undergrad, but who didn’t?
Currently well out of my overdraft

So I called in last week, asked what paperwork I’d need to move my account, was given great assistance and told ‘We’ve got you an appointment next week and we can sort it all out’

IPython Websocket Failure on Chrome

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Problem

TL;DR Can’t execute anything at all using Chrome, works fine in other browsers.

WebSocket connection failed

A WebSocket connection could not be established. You will NOT be able to run code. Check your network connection or notebook server configuration

Translink, it's things like this that remind me why you suck so hard

Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

<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.

As any sane person would (who doesn’t drive), they wanted to find somewhere close to public transport routes, or to decide to go further out of the city for cheaper but still be able to get into work/school/uni/college/etc.

I’m moving to Belfast and trying to find somewhere to live. I don’t drive so I’m looking for places close to public transport, but I can’t seem to find any proper maps with the routes laid out. Translink’s site has some route maps which look similar to a tube map (http://www.translink.co.uk/Documents/Services/metro/Metro_schematic2.pdf[1] ), but without knowing the streets or surrounding ares I’m struggling to piece the routes together from names alone. For Dublin I can use something like http://hittheroad.ie/[2] to see the routes mapped out properly, but i can’t seem to find anything similar for Belfast. Does such a thing exist?

So, what is it you do again?

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In the spirit of setting the record straight in a less-academic way, I thought it’d be worth while to edit a presentation I recently made to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence last month in Stanford and make it a little more digestible.

Multiprocessing Niceness in Python

Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In an effort to make sure that my machine was still useable during these runs, I changed the ’niceness’ value of the spawned processes… or so I thought.

import os
...
def thread_mask(args):
 # Properly Parallel RNG
 #http://stackoverflow.com/questions/444591/convert-a-string-of-bytes-into-an-int-python
 myid=current_process()._identity[0]
 np.random.seed(myid^struct.unpack("<L",os.urandom(4))[0])

 os.nice(5)

 return long_simulation(args)

First part is a handy way to make sure that your subprocess simulations actually use different random numbers…. which for Monte Carlo style simulation is pretty damned important…

Generating a unit 3 vector in Python (Uniform Spherical Projection)

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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

So to make things easier, I stole this StackOverflow answer from dmckee and tidied it up a bit for my purposes. (Assuming everyone else is like me and does import numpy as np)

Review: Learning Cython Programming

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Octave 3.8 on Mint (or Ubuntu)

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Package Requirements

sudo aptitude -y build-deps octave
sudo aptitude -y install gfortran libgfortran3-dbg-arm64-cross liblapack-dev libblas-dev libarpack2-dev llvm-dev libfltk1.3-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfreetype6-dev libqt4-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfftw3-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-designer texlive

Download

I used /dev/shm as the build directory as it’s effectivly a RAM disk, but YMMV.

Unicode Madness in Jekyll

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Then there was kaffeebohne and the infernal BOM.

To make a long story short (And to index the Googles), the symptoms were that this source file in German (i.e. lots of tasty unicode ü’s etc) was garbling the unicode, not activating the template layouts, and basically not doing anything, while Jekyll was perfectly happy with no errors what so ever.

The Making of a Timelapse

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Linux motion utility was used to drive the camera and after fiddling with motion’s many many options, I settled on this config file to strike a balance between dropping boring frames when nothing was happening but to also maintain ‘day night’ cycle more or less realistically.

Installing Ubuntu Touch on the Nexus 7

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Can’t say the same about the documentation; too long and doesn’t really make sense. And for what is actually a fantastically simple process, it deserves better. The phablet-flash folks have done an amazing job.

So without further ado, the assumption: If you’re thinking of putting Ubuntu on your device, I’d say it’s reasonable to assume that:

TEDx: How it went and how it could have gone

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Thanks go to Davy and everyone else involved in running this great event!

Remember Remember ... November 1963?

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 13:50:22 +0000

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
Aldous Huxley, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century and author of one of my favourite books (Brave New World) spun off his mortal coil at the age of 69 taking one more tab of LSD to lighten his passage at 5pm the same day

Response to the Draft Innovation Strategy for Northern Ireland - Part 2 - Knowledge Generation

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 18:20:21 +0000

See Part 1 for an introduction to this series.

Response to Part 1

Two things came out of my posting of Part 1;

I was “strongly encouraged” to have a look at the evidence pack as well as the initial strategy document (unfortunately changing what was intended to be a 3-part break down into more like a 8 part). So I’ll plod on through the rest of the strategy as read and then go through the evidence pack and see what got lost in the wash.

Response to the Draft Innovation Strategy for Northern Ireland - Part 1

Wed, 23 Oct 2013 20:37:45 +0000

Introduction to my Critique

Last 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…

SSH Persistence Redux: Multiple sites and Crontab Laziness

Sat, 06 Jul 2013 09:56:58 +0000

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.

As a result, I set up automatic persistent reverse shells going back to other machines I use, so if I connect to those machines, I can get into the secure environment, without anything nasty being able to get in with me.

QUB Email Settings that Actually Work

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 11:17:16 +0000

UPDATE I’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.

In the below, the asterisks* mean that the value may be called something different depending on your mail client.

Let me know in the comments if you find anything different and I’ll try and keep this reasonably up to date.

So long and thanks for all the fish

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 06:07:13 +0000

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.

Where did this come from?

The short answer is that a series of unexpected events mean that it makes sense to move my research.

Recently, my PhD supervisor, Prof Alan Marshall, was offered a research Chairship at the University of Liverpool, which he gladly accepted. It’s a great move for him (Another Russell Group, one of the original ‘redbrick’ universities, etc etc), but that’s his life not mine so all it does is provide an option. (Disclosure: I also work with Alan on his spinout Wireless Security company, TOM Ltd)

Those who can...

Tue, 28 May 2013 12:08:23 +0000

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.

Fix: Dell Laptops and workstations not rebooting ("Restarting System")

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:14:50 +0000

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_**

To do this, at the grub boot menu, press e to edit the current boot parameters. Find the line starting with “linux” (this is the line that actually kicks off the linux kernel) and at the end of that line, put “reboot=pci”.

Mercurial to Git transfer; problems, and pitfalls.

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:26:17 +0000

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.

Went through the process described here but it’s not really explained very well, so I’m adding my touch of idiot-proof magic.

Abracadabra - NI Assembly's Plans to have 60% more PhD Researchers

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:20:58 +0000

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?

Bus Services, a simple change for @Translink_NI, a big help for @NISP_Connect and @ECIT_QUB

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:00:09 +0000

UPDATE 7/3/13 : See Bottom

So I was ranting at @Translink_NI earlier and they helpfully responded with their service complaint submission system

This was my hopefully helpful response

Why does the #26 service stop so rarely at the NISP when compared to the stops just 2 minutes down the road at the BMC?

While this is a 2 minute bus journey (ok 5 if you could there, back and turning time…), it’s a 10 min walk.

IT @ QUB are moving forward

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:04:43 +0000

QUB Relevant: Mostly PGR or prospective PGR

Just out of a great meeting with QUB Information Services regarding:

Researcher/ Student webspace
Email
Wifi
and VPN

Web Space

For a while now, this has been a bee in my bonnet; many other institutions provide User-Dirs or Public Facing Pages that, while being slightly monitored, are in the control of individual researchers and students. These draw attention to the bleeding edge of an institutions academic research while maintaining ownership of the content.

"The Pitch"

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:24:19 +0000

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

Happy New Year

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 23:59:22 +0000

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.

Idiots Guide to Updating Nexus 7 to Latest ROM

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:24:11 +0000

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.

This Comment on the issue indicated that the problem had been fixed in the newly released 4.1.2 builds, and that we’d probably be waiting a while for the OTA updates… So I guess I’ll have to do it myself!

4G and 'The Northern Ireland Problem'

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:56:21 +0000

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.

RMS is coming to town

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 11:10:13 +0000

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.

Disclaimer, I had very little to do with the organisation of this event, I’m just a PR guy in this case

The Inimatible, parrot fancing, founder of the Free Software Foundation, and the originator of the GNU operating system is coming to Belfast on Monday the 17th September.

Deus Ex, or How I learned to stop Torrenting and Love Digital Distribution

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 11:01:16 +0000

I am a pirate.

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.

Today was such a day; I’d had my old memories of Deus Ex (Otherwise known as ‘THE GREATEST GAME IN THE WORLD [Where the lead character can actually talk]) floating around for a week or so, and had locked off a Lazy Sunday to get back into it. Sunday rolls on, and I fire off a friendly torrent.

The concept of Quality and my 'mission'

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 08:10:41 +0000

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.

Unattended upgrades in Ubuntu

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:13:56 +0000

_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

$sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

Uncomment the line // "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-updates";

$ sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic

Make it look like this

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1"; APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1"; APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7"; APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

LitReview: Communication in a behaviour-based approach to target detection and tracking with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 11:10:16 +0000

Biblio

Sorbi, Toni, Dio De Capua, Rossi

TERA, Genova

Grade

What is this work about?

Collaborative target tracking behaviours

What are the main findings of this work?

No surprise; two AUVs with a comms link are better at tracking, and that tracking is easier when the targets are stupid/random.

What gap in our understanding does this work fill?

Highlights MLO tracking operations, and provides insight into globally aware control systems

LitReview: An Overview on Behaviour based methods for AUV Control

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:32:15 +0000

Biblio

Carreras, Batlle, Ridao, and Roberts;

An Overview on Behaviour based methods for AUV control,

Girona, Spain

What is this work about?

A review and analysis of four AUV behaviour based reactionary control architectures, presenting four control architectures; Scheme, Subsumption, PDL, and Action Selection Dynamics, i.e. cooperative (schema, PDL) and competitive (Sub, ASD)

What are the main findings of this work?

Competitive models are often easier to design as only one behaviour is resident at a time, however this leads to ’jaunty’ and often sub-optimal results, as in this case where authors say the resultant pats for both competitive models are non-optimal

An exercise in academic writing

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:14:38 +0000

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:

How to start writing your thesis in the first year of your PhD

What I got:

Start writing in the first year of your PhD, for your own sanity and academic security

Now, depending on your academic background, these may sound exactly the same. They’re not. This post summarises the ‘best bits’ of the very very good course.

Turning Pcap dumps into Message Sequence Charts

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:37:36 +0000

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.

NS-3 Click integration

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:07:44 +0000

Intro

Click 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.

Requirements

Already installed ns-3
git
~/src directory

Get ’er dun

cd ~/src; git clone git://read.cs.ucla.edu/git/click ; cd click sudo ./configure --enable-nsclick --enable-userlevel; sudo make; sudo make install

K8055 USB + Python + Twitter + IRC: Space Indicator as a OS Service

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:52:11 +0000

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.

As my first ‘official’ Farset Labs project, I’ve installed a ‘Big Red Button’ to notify the @FarsetLabs twitter feed and #FarsetLabs on Freenode to the status of the space.

Basically, first person pushes the BRB down in the morning, then one of the directors key-unlocks the space to ‘close’ it.

Python + irclib for IRC Status Updates

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:08:44 +0000

IRC, Python, Ubuntu linux. Simples!

Same as by Twitter post, but for IRC.

Biggest problem with this one was working out that the IRC server needs to be kept alive with the irclib.IRC.process_once() command. This is wrapped in the while loop that assumes that there is other stuff going on for which you are waiting on a condition to be satisfied, but could easily be ignored if one is just sending out one message. Also, the PRIVMSG command can be used to broadcast to a channel, as is used here, or, as the name suggests, to communicate with a specific user.

Python + Oauth2 for Twitter Status Updates

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:46:08 +0000

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 oauth
import urllib
ckey='$CONSUMER_KEY'
csecret='$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, content
post_twitter("Hello Twitterverse")

My Guide To My Own Favourite Ubuntu Setup

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:29:31 +0000

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 Setup

Install Ubuntu Latest (currently 11.10), With the third party libraries and a home partition leaving at least 20GB for ‘/’.

Then Update everything, during which time you can plod along to download the relevant packages for Chrome Beta, Dropbox, etc

Once the update is done (I’d restart in most cases), additional packages I like to add are;

Ringing in the New Year by seeing out the old

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:15:38 +0000

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,

Guide to Persistent Reverse SSH Shells and Port Forwards

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:41:41 +0000

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.

Guide to Expanding Oracle Virtualbox Drives

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:01:43 +0000

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)
Drop into a command line (on windows, press Win+R, type ‘cmd’) and navigate to the Virtualbox directory (won’t need to do this on *nix)
Execute VBoxManage _path_to_your.vdi_ --resize _new_size_in_MB_
Download UBCD and mount it as a DVD to your VM

Unicode Characters in Mendeley Bibliography Breaking Latex?

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:45:59 +0000

I use Mendeley for my reference and citation management.

I use TexClipse for (most) of my $latex \LaTeX$ editing, ViM otherwise.

I use Xelatex / pdflatex for project building.

These don’t always work so well together.

One issue I came across was that Mendeley can insert some weird Unicode whitespace characters that ‘disappear’ in TexClipse / Vim, but break xelatex/pdflatex.

Easy solution: set the project encoding in TexClipse to ignore these characters upon pasting.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 2011/10/23

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:01:01 +0000

Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas

Mendeley Repeated Citations in BibTeX Library

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:58:30 +0000

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 interfaces Cause: ‘Deleted’ Library items still appear in library.bib, so old (custom) version of citation still persisted after being ‘removed’ Solution: Empty trash

Today's Accomplishments: The 2.0 Generation

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:42:01 +0000

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…

Vim Latex Suite Install on Ubuntu

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:43:50 +0000

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

Through The Drinking Glass

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:48:37 +0000

Inspired by the drinking game ‘Kings’

Co-Authors:W.P.L. Cully, and L. Martin

Requirements:

1 standard deck of cards
1 jug/tankard/chalice/large vessel
1 top hat (or suitably ‘posh’ headgear)
at least 4 people

Card Assignments:

A: Drink Me (Drink your own drink)
2: Tweedledee Tweedledum (Two person waterfall, card drawers choice of partner, second person can only stop drinking after the card drawer)
3: Time for Tea (Group Waterfall, to stop drinking, person to your right must stop first)
4: Door Mouse (Last person to put their forehead on the table takes a drink)
5: Skive (Get out of jail free card to be used at any time until the next 5 is pulled from the deck)
6: Mad March Hare (card drawer can make up an arbitrary rule that lasts until another 6 is drawn)
7: Caterpillar (aka Questionmaster, if anyone answers a question posed by the cardholder, that person has to drink, this continues until another 7 is drawn)
8: Cheshire Cat (the drawer must grin until another 8 is drawn)
9: Rhymes (card drawer picks a word, and each subsequent person around the table must say a non-repeated word that rhymes with the previous word. When someone fails, they drink)
10: Do it again (if the previous card was NOT a face card, repeat the action)
J: All Change (this drawer receives the hat, granting the power to randomly shout [loudly] ‘ALL CHANGE’, at which point everyone passes their drink (and the hat, passing on the power) to the person on their left. There is no limit to how long this goes on for, but when another J is drawn, the hat is given to that person)
Q: Queen’s Cup* (Pour your entire drink into the central cup/jug/whatever. If Q♥ appeared before the last Q, down the remains of the cup. See also K)
Q♥: Off with his head! (Down the cup, if this card appears before any other Q’s, down your own drink)
K: Kings and Queens (Each respective suit-couples (K♥/Q♥) are paired such that for the rest of the game, when the Queen drinks, the relevant King must also drink. In the case of the cup being drank, it can be shared, but this involves two people drinking out of the same vessel so can get messy, otherwise take turns and the Q goes first. If the K is pulled with no corresponding Q, there is no initial penalty)

If anyone is caught breaking/forgetting any of these rules and penalties, they must drink.

Force 32 bit installs on 64 bit systems (Deb/RPM)

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:52:23 +0000

Pre-built packages not releasing 64 bit versions? No Problem.

Debian/Ubuntu based: dpkg -i --force-architecture whatever.deb

RH/Fedora based:

rpm -i --ignorearch whatever.rpm

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/09/2011

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:05:48 +0000

Nigella Talks Dirty

PhD Diary: An Introduction and A Little Light Reading

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:31:10 +0000

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.

What was innocuous about the meeting was the relatively small pile of papers that I was handed; that was until I flicked through and saw that the actual material he wanted researched had been highlighted in the bibloigraphies. In fact, it would have been more efficient to highlight the ones NOT to read.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/08/2011

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:00:44 +0000

Michael Jackson Fail

Best Description of Northern Ireland I've heard yet

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:00:15 +0000

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’.

The Road to Coreboot, Part the First: Introduction

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:22:56 +0000

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.

Disclaimer

I am not a hardware guy, and have never done any pre-OS x86 hardware programming. This will bore the pants of anyone who is an x86 expert, but hopefully some will find it useful and will contribute to the Coreboot project.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/07/2011

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:02:42 +0000

‘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”
- Neil Gaiman, Author supports an #OnionPulitzer

GalepX Language settings in Linux

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 09:25:18 +0000

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’)

Replace Unity with AWN and Gnome-Do

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:27:20 +0000

Unity Sucks, and I don’t like it. I prefer a combination of Avant Window Navigator, tilda, and Gnome-Do, to go from this

to this **

Now, I haven’t kept track of all of the changes I’ve made to my configuration files, so YMMV, but gnome-do and Avant have remarkably good GUI configuration tools, so customise to your hearts content!

Get rid of Unity

sudo apt-get remove unity unity-asset-pool unity-place-applications unity-place-applications

Removing BIOS RAID Metadata

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 11:58:31 +0000

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."

Solution: dmraid -r -E /dev/????

Stolen from Kezhong

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/06/2011

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:03:56 +0000

Social Network of Idiots II : Foamy The Squirrel

Change Kindle Network Provider

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:57:00 +0000

More a note for myself than anyone else. Stolen shamelessly from Marc Fletcher.

In Settings, alt+e,alt+q, alt+q.

Accidentally Proper Kindle PDF Document Conversion

Mon, 23 May 2011 13:25:13 +0000

I’ve discovered a strange undocumented* ‘feature’ of the Amazon Kindle document Delivery system. As it stands, if you send a document to username@free.kindle.com 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…

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/05/2011

Mon, 23 May 2011 09:01:33 +0000

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

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/04/2011

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 09:01:18 +0000

Internetic (Technologic Remix)

LU Decomposition in C (and under CUDA)

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:00:23 +0000

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.

The issue appears when you’re trying to do this stuff within a specific hardware environment (CUDA), and you cannot call host functions from the device, and the cuBLAS libraries cater only to large matrices processed in parallel

CUDA Compute 20 Error and other issues

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:48:01 +0000

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.

Why Belfast Needs a Hackerspace

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:24:08 +0000

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.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/03/2011

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:29:04 +0000

BB King & John Mayer Live - Part 2

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/02/2011

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:00:53 +0000

Rebecca Pollock - stars and moon. (original)

Bolsters Code-Related Rants (An ongoing collection)

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 18:21:53 +0000

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.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/01/2011

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 09:08:04 +0000

Still Unemployed 13

Rant: Job Applications

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:44:03 +0000

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.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/12/2010

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 09:11:25 +0000

Lego Antikythera Mechanism

What the Hack?

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 09:16:06 +0000

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.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/10/2010

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 09:02:26 +0000

The Trashmen : Surfin’ Bird ( 1963 )

Hackathon

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:50:07 +0000

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.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/09/2010

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 09:12:12 +0000

Segway Olympics - prototype run

Kindle 3G 3.0.2 Experience

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:30:24 +0000

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)

News from the Belfast Hackerspace

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:02:31 +0000

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).

Anywhere, where are we now?

Currently we’re trying to secure storage space from QUBSU, as well as negotiating using The Space as an exhibition area, working with Digital Circle to come to some partnership agreement, with two major event ideas;

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/08/2010

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:04:08 +0000

Why PulseAudio?
- The Freesound Project Aggregates Creative Commons Licensed Sound Effects [Sound Effects]
- ONE LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA
- Venting Frustration Will Only Make Your Anger Worse [Mindhacks]
- U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don’t Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff - Bloomberg -_ “So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.”

High-Frequency Trading Revolt, and Why its a good idea!!

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:22:24 +0000

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).

Citrix Web Client with Ubuntu

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 16:55:38 +0000

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.

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/07/2010

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:04:43 +0000

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!

Belfast Hackerspace Anyone?

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:42:11 +0000

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.

Intel 4965: Poor wireless performance under Ubuntu

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:53:40 +0000

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 )

Great HOPEs

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:26:17 +0000

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

I’m really looking forward to my first real foray into a tech/hacker community, but don’t really know what to expect. But I’m going to jump in anyway. The tickets are only $85, or $100 at the door, but if you register on-line, you get an awesome hackable RFID tracking badge.

Unfortunatly my partner (non-techie) has very little interest in going but I’m sure she’ll enjoy the fashion district on her own (or with the girls).

Shared Items - 23/06/2010

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:05:41 +0000

Learn to Prepare Tasty Five-Ingredient Meals in Under Ten Minutes [Cooking]

Every couple of months, when I’m planning another puddle jump, I say ’this time I’ll plan to sleep on the plane’. Every couple of months, I don’t sleep on the plane. Hopefully this will help… Or maybe just few more whiskeys.
- Five Tactics For Getting Sleep On Long-Distance Flights [Travel]

Shared Items - 16/06/2010

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:12:26 +0000

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

Ongoing CUDA work, aka, I love this book.

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:46:33 +0000

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.

The sub-title of the book is “A Hands on Approach” and I didn’t get it until a third of the way through the book, that that’s exactly what it is. The pairing of Kirk, a NVIDIA Fellow, outgoing NVIDIA Chief Scientist and generally world-weary technologist and all round ‘hardware guru’ with Hwu, a well-heeled educator and researcher at the University of Illinois provide a practical but in-depth look at not just the pure ‘programming’ to deal with massivly parallel processing, but instead assumes that the reader can work out for instance how to do Matrix Multiplication the ‘basic’ way from looking at the NVIDIA CUDA API’s, and looks at how to take advantage of the hardware to give sometimes incredible speed increases.

Shared Items - 09/06/2010

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:08:20 +0000

ARTS: Ulster Museum shortlisted in Art Fund Prize

Shared Items - 02/06/2010

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 05:00:10 +0000

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
- Senasational Claims By Matt Simmons About The BP Leak
Disregarding the possible conspiracy theories* you could create on this topic, this might be the final nail in oil’s coffin - at least in the US.

Customised User Directories in Ubuntu

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:31:11 +0000

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.

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

And this is what I changed mine to

Automagic Kernel Cleaning under Ubuntu

Mon, 31 May 2010 14:29:03 +0000

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.

Basically, it lists what kernels you currently have in your /boot/ and removes them using apt .

Shared Items - 26/05/2010

Wed, 26 May 2010 05:02:55 +0000

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!
- Why you should never present more than one mockup to a client

Coming Soon!

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:21:37 +0000

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:

Implementing Google Webfonts
Ubuntu Dot-File Dropbox Synchronisation
Drupal 6 Installation of Ubuntu 10.04
My Revision Scheduling/Tracking System
Summer Plans including VPN work for Dr David Laverty and CUDA research with Alastair Mckinley and Dr Alan Marshall

Shared Items - 19/05/2010

Wed, 19 May 2010 05:03:27 +0000

Illustrated Guide Explains Your Mind’s Decision Biases [Mind Hacks]
- NIST Releases Updated Handbook of Math Functions
- Matplotlib For Python Developers

Shared Items - 12/05/2010

Wed, 12 May 2010 05:03:26 +0000

Designing next steps

Shared Items - 05/05/2010

Wed, 05 May 2010 05:03:33 +0000

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

Ubuntu Boosting Blog Hits

Tue, 04 May 2010 11:26:13 +0000

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.

But I, like alot of people in this field, like knowing why! My first thought was that Google had recently sent out a press release governing updated search characteristics, and while I didn’t see anything relevant to my site in particular, its possible that general algorithmic tweaks could have slid me up the rankings.

SEE, Programming Abstractions, Assignment 1

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:37:30 +0000

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…).

Shared Items - 28/04/2010

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:02:30 +0000

Ludum Dare #17 - Islands

Ads Outside the Box?

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:16:51 +0000

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.

The last half is what I found really interesting; Jesse eulogises on his image of points-based future, in line with Lee Sheldon’s High School XP Grade replacements. If any of these predictions come true, I expect it’s going to be a very interesting decade for advertisers.

Shared Items - 21/04/2010

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:04:17 +0000

Twittering pub hanging

Add a Twitter @anywhere hovercard to links containing tweeps

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:13:04 +0000

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.

Shaded Headers in Thematic

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:25:46 +0000

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.

Shared Items - 14/04/2010

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:22:12 +0000

Ubuntu Server 9.04 Bacula Bweb GUI

Facebook Group Library

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:17:09 +0000

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.

US confirm status as ACTA transparancy stopping block

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:38:45 +0000

“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.”

Listing just dot-files

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:58:31 +0000

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.

FYI the reason that this is problematic is that the ‘.’ symbol is a single character wildcard; most people are familiar with the asterisk ‘*’ indicating ‘anything, however long’, whereas the ‘.’ means ‘any single character’.

The DE Bill, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tor

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:11:35 +0000

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.

Many sites have a much more indepth tretise on the subject than I could do so I’ll keep this short.

Shared Items - 07/04/2010

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:09:35 +0000

50 Top Engineering Blogs

Mod_Rewrite in Apache2

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:51:01 +0000

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

rewrite

)

$sudo a2enmod rewrite
$sudo service apache2 restart

Remember to fiddle with

/etc/apache2/sites-available.*< \pre> and change "AllowOverride none" to "all" in any places that you're having trouble with rewritten URL's

4 Dimensional Game promises to be a mind-frak

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:47:46 +0000

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.

Kids Sing Portal "Still Alive"

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:37:20 +0000

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.

Shared Items - 31/03/2010

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 05:02:31 +0000

NumberQuotes Gives Perspective to Your Statistics, Is Great for Presentations [Statistics]

Wordpress category page

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:55:37 +0000

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.

Job Done!

What to do when Ubuntu Device-mapper seems to be invincible!

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:48:35 +0000

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!

My Experience with Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:39:16 +0000

**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.

Entry 0

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:35:22 +0000

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!

Well, we’ll see how it goes.

Shared Items - 24/03/2010

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 06:02:47 +0000

How to Scan, Absorb and Process Information

Chmod on lots of files

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:42:20 +0000

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!)

So, first attempt was nice and easy.

$chown -R smbusr:smbusr *

But this was taking a horrific amount of time, so I thought “There must be a better way”.

Shared Items - 17/03/2010

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:03:05 +0000

3 Cool Wordpress Plugins To Make Blogging Life Easier

Installing and Configuring NS-3 on a Ubuntu System

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:39:09 +0000

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).

Running off a virtualised Ubuntu 9.10 system, the prerequisites I installed were all the ones listed here. (And i removed some out of date packages)

sudo apt-get install bison bzr dia doxygen flex g++ gcc gdb graphviz imagemagick libgoocanvas-dev libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-dev libsqlite3-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev mercurial python python-dev python-kiwi python-pygoocanvas python-pygraphviz sqlite sqlite3 tcpdump texi2html texinfo texlive texlive-extra-utils valgrind

Mercurial Quick Start Cheatsheet

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:24:47 +0000

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.

**Update:**This article was picked up by the guys at DevCheatSheet.com and I’m really honoured to be included in a site that I’ve been dipping into over the years, so if you need any kind of cheat sheet or quick reference, I highly recommend checking them out. Anyway…

Line Parsing Reminder (Duplicate removal)

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:37:50 +0000

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”)

[FYI the ‘' character indicates a continuation of a single line ]

cat list.txt\

| tr ’ ’ ‘\n’ \ #Expands all space characters to new lines

| sort | uniq \ #sorts each line, and then eliminates duplicates

GSOC or Having a go at Network Simulator

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:03:03 +0000

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’).

So what can you do with 32 Million Passwords...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:49:40 +0000

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.

Shared Items - 10/03/2010

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:07:47 +0000

Wireshark Remote Capturing

Shared Items - 10/03/2010

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:07:46 +0000

Wireshark Remote Capturing

Any Port in a Storm

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:19:10 +0000

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.

Shared Items - 03/03/2010

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:11:29 +0000

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…
- A New Wi-Fi Exploit, Limited But Clever
- Design Your Own Wordpress Theme Easily With Constructor

(Would have been) An introduction to Google Adwords

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:23:45 +0000

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.

(As Always) there was an issue; Google’s coupons are rendered useless if you have ever accessed Adwords before (longer than 14 days ago).

Shared Items - 24/02/2010

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:09:49 +0000

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.
As my partner Beth says; “I’m ahead of the curve”

Shared Items - 17/02/2010

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:06:25 +0000

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

Wow, they were actually pushing this?! Finally something good ’the government’ has done.
- Treat Your Presentation like a Performance to Nail Timing and Delivery [Presentations]
- Installing Kernel Security Updates Without Reboot With Ksplice Uptrack On Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop

Shared Items - 10/02/2010

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:30:12 +0000

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!

Shamed

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:53:26 +0000

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

Fact is I’ve been experimenting with so many different things that nothing cogent has come out of it yet.

Some of the things I’ve been working on:

Virtual Lab- Walk through of the setup and playing with of a virtual computer lab using VirtualBox including Windows, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, and Debian servers/clients

Shared Items - 03/02/2010

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:12:28 +0000

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!

Shared Items - 03/02/2010

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:12:28 +0000

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!

Shared Items - 27/01/2010

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:33:22 +0000

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!

Online Media Marketing

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:08:39 +0000

‘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).

Ubuntu / Windows Sharing a Dropbox folder on NTFS

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:25:40 +0000

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.

Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point.

Shared Items - 20/01/2010

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:56:44 +0000

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!

Are we on the brink of War?

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:04:40 +0000

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.

Shared Items - 13/01/2010

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:00:17 +0000

ChromiumOS Zero Boots Faster, Offers Automatic Updates [Updates]

11/01/2010

Make Your Mockup in Markup

24/12/2009

10 Innovative Ways To Use Twitter For Business

09/01/2010

6 Digital Photography Websites With Free Tutorials

08/01/2010

Use Better Tools to Be a Better Student in 2010 [Students]

06/01/2010

Doing It Wrong

02/01/2010

Terrorball

04/01/2010

Shared Items - 06/01/2010

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:57:37 +0000

8 Ebor Drive pt 2

02/07/2009

8 Ebor Drive pt 1

02/07/2009

Application Idea: What do you think?

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:18:55 +0000

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.

The Gimmick: While services that do this exist, they assume even circular propagation of the signal. Granular reception maps that tell you where to head to to get more bars.

The Detail: Low level should be relatively simple; the Android, Blackberry and Iphone API stacks allow easy reading of the current cell ID, RSSI, and GPS Co-ords. Upload those three values over XML (or Something), Web service plugs that into a MySQL server, which is then aggregated, and displayed on the Web, and can be queried by the mobile app. The Potential: While its unlikely that its going to ‘blow up’ since there is relatively little incentive for the end user, since the Applications are going to be free, there will be some that will install it for the sake of it. There is the opportunity to license the data gained service providers but the aggregated data will be made available online in open formats.

New Years Resolutions

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 21:38:17 +0000

Post something at least once a day on either blog or web-album
- Stop sleeping in after 10am
- Drop some savings into the stock market, only take profits out, don’t add anything more
- Write an actual blog article once a week
- Find and contribute to an open source project
- Pull together a real portfolio of work
- Find more clients for my freelance work
- Set a timetable and stick to it

Well, its a plan at least.

Peter Mandelson... TV Producer, Spin-doctor, Politician, Tosser

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:06:32 +0000

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.

Lenovo, not so rocking anymore

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:34:56 +0000

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.

Unfortunatly I left it a bit longer than was nessary due to home moving, going back to university, restarting and old job and starting a new one, aswell as becoming Design Editor for my university’s independent newspaper.

Eventually, I made the call to Lenovo, and they were great as always with dealing with my query. After posting off the laptop (the week of the 18th of October), minus hard drive and battery (call it paranoia), I waited. And two weeks-ish later, the laptop arrived (4th October), and all was well after a motherboard replacement.

Save The Internet

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:33:24 +0000

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.

Delayed Post: How I Installed Windows 7 From USB HDD

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:49:40 +0000

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.

Delayed Post: LENOVO ROCKS

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:29:20 +0000

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.

About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100” I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily.

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:53:35 +0000

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’

Change Of Plans.....

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:39:20 +0000

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.

Scala-Euler Problem1

Wed, 27 May 2009 13:44:10 +0000

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.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Was not happy with limiting the specific factors of 3 and 5, and limit of 1000 so i implemented a generalised solution.

Lenovo x61 Tablet Hard Drive (Near) Disaster

Fri, 22 May 2009 11:42:11 +0000

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.

Appear back at the house last night after a fwe bevvies with the guys and loe and behold,

“Error 2100 - Hard drive initialization error”

The BIOS cant see the harddrive. But wait, lenovo built in that seemingly pointless blue button to do recover right? Recovery off the hard drive… That it cant see.

Staggering Unproductivity

Wed, 13 May 2009 01:01:46 +0000

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.

Beyond that I’m heading to NJ this week to be with my partner for her graduation and have my 21st birthday while im over there (21 means absolutly squat in Ireland, so I’m expecting a repeat of my 18th…)

Linux foundation Video

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:01:03 +0000

Work Thought Of The Day

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:31:57 +0000

Set up and running of DNS tunnelling on MBWE

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:14:32 +0000

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)

The Omleritto

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:01:02 +0000

Ingredients:

2 eggs

Dash of milk

1 tortilla

Cheese

assorted herbs and spices

Eggs, Dash of milk, and Herbs etc into a bowl and whisk until uniform colour and consistency,
pour into an appropriately sized (eg tortilla size) frying pan, pre-oiled (Extra Virgin Olive oil does the best)
Turn the heat up to about half, and let the egg slowly cook
When the bottom of the eggs are hard but the top is still liquid, grate the cheese over it so it melts into the eg, and then cover in the tortilla.

On Education and Employability

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:46:14 +0000

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.

New Productivity Mantra

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:43:19 +0000

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

Keep a Log of those actions

Obviously this only applies to my working life :D

Original

Testing The Gnome Blog Panel Thingy

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:24:32 +0000

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)

Convergence

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:08:38 +0000

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,

Twitter,LinkedIn, Facebook,

Facebook is personal, LinkedIn will be exclusivly business, And as wel all know twitter is a free for all.

Hacking Weekend

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:05:33 +0000

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.

What i had done previously was manual airodump-ng, aireplay-ng with arp attacks, and then shifting the caps onto my big box to crack inside of 10 seconds, pity is the packet capture on a quiet network can take a day.

Big Move

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:34:36 +0000

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.

Also, merry christmas and a happy new year to all. I got an XBox 360, and will eventually do a little write up on making it talk to my My Book World Edition

MBWE Fuel Gauge -> Speedometer conversion

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:20:00 +0000

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

Disable the service that displays the disk usage with the leds in the front panel of your MBWE. Admit it, the feature is pretty much useless and because the service has to check the amount of free space on the disk(s), it is causing disk access.

My conkyrc

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:15:00 +0000

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.

Preface (What you need to get this all working) Linux OS (Ubuntu?) Conky (obv, see someone elses guide for how to get that HINT synaptic is ur friend) Transmission download manager (local or remote) Folding at home installed with origami (could be local or remote using the same logic as the Transmission manager) Passwordless SSH authentication (if your using this with any remote hosts) A todo list on the desktop called todo (strange that…)

Getting Skype to work with weird webcams.

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:45:00 +0000

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

Links

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:40:00 +0000

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 Directory MyBook Hacking Easy Peasy List Of Tutorials For Screwing with the WD My Book WE II 13 Of the Best Linux Tutorials and OpenCourseWare on the Web Best Passwordless SSH authentication tutorial I’ve seen (complex but simple) Google Courses Looks pretty good SSH quick reference The Academy The Videos look quite good Euler

Primers Coming Up

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:25:00 +0000

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.

Long Extended Break: Hardware Update

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:13:00 +0000

So, gonna do a quick write up on my current setup.

Ok, from the top:

Linksys WRT54GL DD-WRT v24 std firmware (also running on the bottom right screen)

Generic Wireless headphones (not used since i heard someone else on the channel :P )

top screens : Windows server 2008 AMD Athlon X2 64 6000+ on an Nvidia MCP 65 based motherboard carrying 6GB, with the dangerous RAID 0 arrangement of two 500GB sata drives and an IDE 320GB for essential backups. (this system is hidden, lol)

EEEpc note

Sat, 24 May 2008 12:06:00 +0000

Ok, got the 900, sorry this blog is very very late

Pros: AMAZINGLY small, you wont believe how small it is until you use one The keyboard is just managable the Webcam is amazing quality when it works More responsive than i imagined The Extra 16GB SSD really helps Wonderfully 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)

EEE Update etc

Tue, 13 May 2008 21:57:00 +0000

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

Please at least pretend to click my ads. I know they’re a joke, but still, it dont cost ya anything!

Another Uni Project

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:47:00 +0000

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

All three of these variables or none atall can be defined at runtime;

I want

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:33:00 +0000

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!

Asus EEEpc

Mon, 12 May 2008 20:00:00 +0000

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.

Folding Code

Mon, 12 May 2008 19:51:00 +0000

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.

note: the espeak adjustments are just personal preference, so change them at will.

Embedded C GPS Project

Mon, 12 May 2008 13:10:00 +0000

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.

Most of the ancillary code is more platform dependant, such as working with the PIC interrupts etc, so for the purposes of this code snippit, assumme that a NMEA sentence (I used RMC and some RMB, but never really finished that bit) stored as a character buffer, and a structure, as defined, to store relevent data in.

Update

Sun, 11 May 2008 01:12:00 +0000

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.

Beyond that a few other things have been making things hectic, not least of which is the impending Examination period so about the only techy thing I’ve been able to come up with has been a wipe and reinstall to upgrade to Hardy Heron (8.04) (I didnt update because i dont trust dist-upgrade’s ability to do things my way, also meant i could blow out the cobwebs in my filesystem.)

CES 2008

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:29:00 +0000

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

Calendars with multiple events and shared events : GCal

Calendar integration with events: GCal + Facebook

Video Search: Gootube

Uploading Videos from cellphones: Depends on provider, but combination of twitter and a mobile email

Installation of VMWare Server (Windows)

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:50:00 +0000

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.

I have tried it out before but it didnt feel as solid as the older versions so I’m sticking with the oldskool 1.0.3

The Setup itself is just a simple “next, next, finish” with a free registration key provided. I recommend also downloading and installing the client console package; this is handy both for administring and viewing the VM’s in situ, but also to administer remote installations.

Introduction

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:34:00 +0000

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.

Athena:Headless Ubuntu Server 7.10, 2.6 Kernel AMD Semperon 3200+, 512MB RAM, 3 Hard Drives Totalling Just Under 1TB (mostly storage and backup archives)

Apollo:WinXP AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ (3GHz), 4GB RAM (32bit xp only sees 3.5 tho.) GeForce 7600 GS (512MB) and a 500GB SATA drive (My Workhorse for classes and heavy experiments eg VMWare)

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Driving data to make AI work.

Leading enterprise AI platform operations at Black Duck Software serving 500+ internal R&D users, with platforms scaling to 30+ billion tokens monthly and £600k resource responsibility spanning team operations and AI infrastructure. Regular strategic collaboration with CEO/CIO/CISO on data governance policy development that directly impacts product contract terms and organizational AI adoption frameworks.

Previously a Data Scientist/Academic working in the fields of Affective Computing, Wearable Technologies, Trust and Reputation, Autonomous Systems and Cyber Security. Now focused on the practical reality of productionising AI in cybersecurity - doing the hard boring plumbing, so the sexy innovation is easy.

Ideas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Last updated: February 2, 2026

Convert this blog to Hugo
Write more blogs about epaper
Finish homeassistant
Plan for a mortgage
Buy Apartment
Build out my own ‘data lake’ of personal stuff along with a home airflow instance

Inspired by aboutideasnow

Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Last updated: February 2, 2026

Senior R&D Manager @ Black Duck Software, driving data to make AI work.

Wants

Inspired by aboutideasnow