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). ...

Learn to Prepare Tasty Five-Ingredient Meals in Under Ten Minutes [Cooking] Star Trek: Tik Tok [Video Mashup] RedShift Makes Your Screen Easier on the Eyes at Night [Downloads] Google releases command line tool for accessing Web services Five Tactics For Getting Sleep On Long-Distance Flights [Travel] 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]

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 Back Up Your Entire Android Phone to the Cloud [Backup] VMLite - A new kid on the virtual block Kayak Explore Shows You Where You Can Fly for the Money in Your Budget (and More) [Travel] Want More Clients? Just Ask!

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. ...

ARTS: Ulster Museum shortlisted in Art Fund Prize

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

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 ...

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 .

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

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