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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2009-05-15

Published May 15, 2009

The Pay-No-Attention-To-Our-Tiny-Logo Party

Published May 15, 2009

In the current run-up to the local elections here in Ireland, it’s pretty obvious that Fianna Fail, the ruling party who’ve screwed the economy with mismanagement and rampant cronyism, are in line for a massive drubbing. So much so, in fact, that their own candidates are attempting to hide their party affiliations.

Check out this poster for candidate Kenneth O’Flynn (son of FF TD Noel O’Flynn):

what logo, you ask? Look closer:

Compare that to what FF posters used to look like, 2 years ago:

Meath FF councillor Nick Killian has removed the logo from his leaflet’s front page entirely, too.

Thanks to martinoc for the Bertie’s Team poster, and Ivor in the comments of this post at On The Record for the photos of Kenny’s posters. There’s gold in those comments…

Spoon’s Rhubodka Recipe

Published May 15, 2009

Today on Twitter, the perennial rhubarb topic — ie. what to do with all this rhubarb — came up. Here’s a recipe I picked up from a man called spoon which may help:

I’ve mentioned this before, but just in case…. Rhumember kids:

  • 1 empty 2 litre bottle
  • 4 or 5 sticks of pink rhubarb
  • 110g caster sugar
  • 1 litre of vodka

Cut the rhubarb into inch chunks and put them into the empty bottle until it is not empty any more and you have run out of rhubarb.

Add the sugar

Add the Vodka

Shake vigorously

Leave to stand in a dark corner for maybe 4 weeks or until you can’t wait any longer. You should certainly wait until all the sugar has gone. The longer you leave it the more Rhubarby goodness will be pulled out by the sugar.

Strain all the rhubarb out.

CONGRATULATION. YOU HAVE UNLOCKED RHUBODKA.

DRINK THE RHUBODKA

It sounds awful, but instead of being that, it is fucking awesome.

I have a bottle of this stewing away on top of my kitchen cabinet. It should be ready just in time to toast the arrival of child #2 ;)

PS: "rhubodka" is a googlewhack!

Links for 2009-05-13

Published May 13, 2009

Links for 2009-05-12

Published May 12, 2009

Links for 2009-05-11

Published May 11, 2009

Spirit of Ireland

Published May 11, 2009

Spirit of Ireland looks very nifty.

It’s extremely simple — a group of Irish ‘entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, architects and legal and financial experts’ are calling for Ireland to achieve energy independence and become a net exporter of green energy within five years, by building a number of wind farms on our western seaboard, buffering the generated energy in water reservoirs using pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

This kind of massive-scale public-works engineering project has a strong historical precedent in Ireland — Ardnacrusha, opened in 1929, was the largest hydroelectric station in the world for a time. Given that Turlough Hill is a pumped-storage facility, it can even be beautiful ;)

We can certainly do it, given sufficient government vision. I’d love to see it happen. Great stuff!

(image credit: CC-licensed image from Ganders on Flickr. thanks!)

Links for 2009-05-07

Published May 7, 2009

Links for 2009-05-06

Published May 6, 2009

Links for 2009-05-01

Published May 1, 2009

Irish Examiner innumeracy

Published May 1, 2009

Here’s a great example of numerical illiteracy spotted by my mate Tom:

some classic reporting in the Irish Examiner today…

“Department staff clocked up 20,000 sick days in the three years” is the headline. Closer examination of the article reveals there are 5,000 people in the department. Do the maths (which the paper doesn’t – I wonder why) and that’s a SHOCKING 1.3 sick days a year.

Even better is this quote: “Department of Agriculture staff clocked up 3,095 uncertified sick days last year – 653 of these on a Monday”

So that would be about a fifth of the sick days being taken on one of the five working days in the week. DISGRACE!

Let’s hear it for old media’s commitment to quality journalism!

Links for 2009-04-30

Published April 30, 2009

Links for 2009-04-29

Published April 29, 2009

Links for 2009-04-25

Published April 25, 2009

Links for 2009-04-24

Published April 24, 2009

Links for 2009-04-22

Published April 22, 2009

Links for 2009-04-21

Published April 21, 2009

Links for 2009-04-20

Published April 20, 2009

Links for 2009-04-17

Published April 17, 2009

Reminder: Irish computing history talk next Monday

Published April 17, 2009

Don’t forget — next Monday, the Heritage Society of Engineers Ireland, in association with The Irish Computer Society, and the ICT and Electronic and Electrical Divisions of Engineers Ireland, will be hosting an evening lecture entitled "Reminiscences of Early days of Computing in Ireland", by Gordon Clarke (M.A., CEng., F.B.C.S., C.I.T.P., F.I.C.S). Sounds like it’ll be great. More details.

Update: it starts at 8pm; useful info! Also, the event’s flyer can be found on this page, which notes:

For those new to using our webcast facility, please see www.engineersireland.ie/webcast for information on how to set-up and access our webcasts. To view the event, please log onto the url below: https://engineersireland.webex.com/engineersireland/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=841959965 The password: computer

Links for 2009-04-16

Published April 16, 2009

Linux per-process I/O performance: measuring the wrong thing

Published April 15, 2009

A while back, I linkblogged about "iotop", a very useful top-like UNIX utility to show which processes are initiating the most I/O bandwidth.

Teodor Milkov left a comment which is well worth noting, though:

Definitely iotop is a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately it’s still hard to tell who’s wasting most disk IO in too many situations.

Suppose you have two processes – dd and mysqld.

dd is doing massive linear IO and its throughput is 10MB/s. Let’s say dd reads from a slow USB drive and it’s limited to 10MB/s because of the slow reads from the USB.

At the same time MySQL is doing a lot of very small but random IO. A modern SATA 7200 rpm disk drive is only capable of about 90 IO operations per second (IOPS).

So ultimately most of the disk time would be occupied by the mysqld. Still iotop would show dd as the bigger IO user.

He goes into more detail on his blog. Fundamentally, iotop works based on what the Linux kernel offers for per-process I/O accounting, which is I/O bandwidth per second, not I/O operations per second. Most contemporary storage in desktops and low-end server equipment is IOPS-bound (‘A modern 7200 rpm SATA drive is only capable of about 90 IOPS’). Good point! Here’s hoping a future change to the Linux per-process I/O API allows measurement of IOPS as well…

Links for 2009-04-14

Published April 14, 2009

Big table desking

Published April 14, 2009

We have an extremely open-plan layout in work — no partitions, just long benches of keyboards and monitors. It looks a bit like this, but with less designer furniture and more Office Depot:

Aman pointed out that this is a new trend in workplace design, which <a href=’http://www.workalicious.org/big_table_desking/’>Workalicious calls "Big Table Desking":

I’m still not sure what to make of the frequent instances of Big Table Desking. While this kind of workstation arrangement is no doubt a new trend, the no-privacy work place is a throwback to the 1950s office pool, a line up of identical desks classroom style. Is it the peer to peer seating position that overcomes this? How would it? By building community? As opposed the pilot and passenger 747, catholic church model of everybody facing "forward". Does the Big Table Desk break down this heirarchy by facing people towards one another, sharing a big desk instead of staking out territory? Is the big table desk a microcosm, a representation of a healthy organizational structure?

No comment ;)

It seems to be popular with designers, presumably due to their collaborative working needs.

Mind you, it also looks a bit like a Taylorist workplace layout from 1904, of which Wired says:

American engineer Frederick Taylor was obsessed with efficiency and oversight and is credited as one of the first people to actually design an office space. Taylor crowded workers together in a completely open environment while bosses looked on from private offices, much like on a factory floor.

YouBloom plug

Published April 14, 2009

Last week I got a very nice mail looking to plug a new music site:

‘I’m not sure if this would interest you at all but wanted to pass on the link to a new website called YouBloom.

It’s a new social networking and e-commerce website set up with independent artists in mind – to help them to make make real money (unlike MySpace etc which just make money from the artists)! It was set up by Irish Musician Phil Harrington and is backed by Sir Bob Geldof.

Admittedly I am involved with the website. I have been helping bring artists on site for the last few months, since I was introduced to the concept by a friend, but would love for you to take a look at the site anyway – even if it turns out to be of no interest to you.’

I normally wouldn’t post these, but I’m a sucker for flattery ;) and the poster had taken the time to read my blog a little. It also looks like the site allows bands to offer free MP3 downloads of their tunes, which IMO is a key factor for bands trying to get promotion.

UPC.ie’s new Channel 4 frequency for MythTV

Published April 12, 2009

So, after spending an hour or two attempting to figure out where the hell UPC had moved Channel 4 to, I eventually found out that it was now being broadcast on 543 Mhz. I also found out that this wasn’t part of the standard list of A1 to A30 channels in the "pal-ireland" range. :(

Thankfully, I then found this Frequency to MythTV channel converter page; here’s the correct values to use on the MythWeb channels page:

  • Freqid = 30
  • Finetune = -4

Links for 2009-04-10

Published April 10, 2009