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I have decided 2006 March 31 23:04

Posted by diamond in : Random, Work , 2 comments

to (mostly) forgoe sentences to describe this week and instead go with some sort of word thing.

Serial port, panic, free lunch, os x, forgetting how to program in C, corrupt data for 18 hours, free lunch, composer, dancer, accelerometers, gyroscopes, wireless comms, motes, usbserial convertors, pp9 batteries, no lunch, bandwitdh, power regulators, discovering typo in documentation which caused 8bit data to become 5bit, free lunch, missing packets, dropped packets, timer mismatch, inexplicible buffering, bizarre delays, quail wings and rabbit, 7 course meal, port, free lunch, church, wooden floors, dodgy connectors, ubuntu laptop testing, the importance of performance when on stage, latency, polling, camper than a scout jamboree.

Pop-quiz 2006 March 23 23:36

Posted by diamond in : Skynet , 4 comments

Last year skynet ran a table quiz. I was given the task of writing the questions for a technical round (the rest being more general-knowledge-type rounds, to not scare everyone off). Dan told me to be a bastard. So i was. I just discovered a text file with the questions in my skynet account. So, for your amusement, here they are:

  1. What does PERL stand for?
  2. What year was linux 1.0 released in?
  3. What does CIDR stand for?
  4. Which company does Linus Torvalds work for?
  5. Which language does Alan Cox write his diary in?
  6. What does the 206 status code mean in http 1.1?
  7. What is the reverse dns zone for ul’s class-b ip allocation?
  8. What is the prefix of link-local in ipv6?
  9. What does MIME stand for?
  10. Name the most common metasyntactic variable
  11. Assuming no ls, how would you list the contents of the current directory in unix? Bonus points for any answer in a compiled language
  12. Bonus question: Best Text Editor: Vim or Emacs?

You should bear in mind that most of the people who attended the table quiz hadn’t heard of linux. In the end we awarded bonus points to those teams which cursed me particularly fluently on their answer sheet. Good times, good times. -)

Feel free to answer in comments. I’ll post my answers (from the same file) in a few days.

*Update*
Fixed typo – thanks niall -)

Heanet, network planning, guitar stands, linguists, gmail 2006 March 21 0:29

Posted by diamond in : Random, Skynet , add a comment

After 6 hours sleep last night, today encompassed a little over 8 hours and 270 miles of driving, at least 3 hours of which was in dublin traffic. On the bright side, i got to go on the skynet tour of heanet. For the record, here’s a quick rundown of the top 3 places in the world that i’d like to work for (in no particular order):

After the tour, i called into the main office area and chatted to davew and ann. Dave was furiously scribbling some network topology diagrams. I remarked that i’d seen a flash game on the net recently that looked very similar, but neither of them had seen it. A mail i sent them earlier:

Subject: important network planning tool we were discussing today
http://www.planarity.net/

Expect the productivity of heanet to take a slight nosedive (i wonder if that’ll show up in mrtg..).

I also had the opportunity to do some guitar-browsing in Music Maker. Noirin was with me, and when asked managed to suggest some truly awful guitars (though she will no doubt claim that they were just out of tune). At least she didn’t try to make me buy one of the bright pink flower-shaped ones. *shudder*. While there i decided to pick up a guitar stand. Having 3 guitars (2 in normal use) and one guitar stand isn’t a winning forumla. This is what i bought, the coolest guitar stand ever. You probably won’t appreciate it’s wonderfulness from that link, i’ve made a short video demonstrating it’s best feature.

I realised something about linguists today. I know three of them (that i can think of off the top of my head), and they’re 3 of my favourite people. I’m wondering is there some kind of correlation. Perhaps i should try and link a field-study on the subject into my masters…

I’ve been trying out gmail for the last few weeks (specifically, hosted gmail for nonado.net). I’m impressed at how well it’s coping with the amount of list mail i receive. From a quick check, i’ve gotten 1079 mails since march 6th, which is when i started using it. Once i set up the labels (17 currently) and filters (12 so far) i wanted, it’s been amazinly easy to keep up with all the mail. I’m really liking the way it does things, and it’s really hard to believe that it’s webmail a lot of the time because it’s faster than most email clients i’ve used. At this stage i’ve switched over to it for all my nonado mail. It’s a useful way to test it before i tackle the mammoth task that is taming my normal gmail account (which has had a copy of all my skynet mail for the last 2 years forwarded to it. that’d be 10932 so far).

And now this colourless green idea goes to bed to sleep furiously.

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously 2006 March 19 23:21

Posted by diamond in : Random, Work , 1 comment so far

It’s been a weird few days. I’ve spent the majority of the time hacking away on the shannon portal code. It was both surprisingly simple and surprisingly complex to do (yes, i was surprised). I did a small bit of benchmarking with the cgi version of the site vs the fastcgi one. I ran ‘wget -m’ against each one (which grabbed 122 files), it took ~57 seconds for the cgi version, and 9 seconds for the fastcgi. Kick ass.

Noirin was down for a chunk of week with her mother, and had the impertinence of staying at my house for one of the nights. You’d think she’d learn, but no. Well i, for one, have to admit i’m glad she doesn’t -) (title of this post is something she uttered during her stay. language students eh?)

Tomorrow i’m off up to dublin at the horrible hour of 8am to visit heanet (and possibly some minor college called ‘dcu’). I’m hoping that myself and atlas can work out some more of the details of the new protocol we’re developing.

Stay tuned for forks.

How To Avoid Huge Ships 2006 March 16 13:15

Posted by diamond in : Random , 2 comments

A book i just bought on amazon.