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. ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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

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

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

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

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

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