Ordo Ab Chao

Fame

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:01:29 +0000

I'm struggling under the weight of my new found fame courtesy of the reg. Yes the witty person (sarcastic git) who responded to the reg's poll to find America's CTO was me. My email is reproduced below.

"As you don't provide Al Gore as a candidate to reinvent the internet, Siegfried and Roy are the only sensible option. Another alternative is a virtual CTO representing a hive mind of random editors. If only the IETF made RFCs available as anonymous wikis! They SHOULD do this. Or a reality TV show where each of the candidates has to respond to various IT challenges like formatting a table correctly in Word or improving BGP. It's a serious position so the selection process should be rigorous"

As an email subscriber to numerous IETF mailing lists I think my suggestion may not improve the efficiency of the organisation but it might give implementors who DELIBERATELY misinterpret the specifications for commercial advantage an excuse. They could simply claim "MUST" used to be "MAYBE". Which leads me to mememoir.org which seeks to remove unattributable modifications which pollute the wikisphere. Neat idea. There's an uneasy tension between preserving anonymity to protect well meaning truth promoters from pressure groups (for legal reasons I can't think of any off hand) and protecting commercial puppets who use a public encyclopaedia as a platform for spreading rumours & FUD. (again for legal reasons, examples escape me) Anyway, I'm off to sign autographs.

Chrome is delicious - well not bad

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:09:58 +0000

When Google launched their Chrome browser all those days ago I was wondering when plugins were going to start appearing. Jonathan will testify that I'm plugin obsessed with plugins for delicious, source code inspection, continuous build management and pretty much anything that might be useful. I really wanted Chrome to have delicious support like firefox but then I remembered it supports webkit. You can go to the delicious bookmarklets page and add the delicious link to the chrome bookmarks bar. It's not as nice as the firefox search interface but, hey, it's a start. I quite like chrome. It's minimalist and even with the process/tab overhead it performs quite well.

from the horses mouth

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:51:29 +0000

I feel very bad for olympic medal hope, Dennis Lynch, after he was disqualified from the games when his horse failed a dope test. From this article it seems that an over-the-counter remedy may have been to blame. Still, I'd love to see the statistics that demonstrate that the chilli-pepper derivative found during the horses drug test provides a serious boost in performance. It would be nice to see some conclusive proof that the Equi-Block rub which was used on the horse actually led to the positive drug test. It seems inconceivable that another Irish olympian would run the risk of their horse being tested positive after the embarassment in Athens. I just don't believe Dennis Lynch would have jeopardised his medal hopes so stupidly, riding what is one of the top ranked horses in the world. Without wanting to be conspiratorial, it stinks...

z4 for sale

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:52:53 +0000

I've been talking about it for a while but I've finally put my BMW z4 on the market. I'll really miss it but I'd like a change. Also, I rarely drove the thing as R & I use our nissan jeep to collect and deliver art around the country. Apart from being driven a few miles to work and back, it's been unused. I'd often look at it parked outside the house and think it would be an awful shame to damage it. So that translated into R never feeling comfortable driving it and me washing it and polishing a lot. I remember jbwan expressing similar feelings about his BMW z3.

It's on carzone.ie at the moment and you can see the ad here.

I've been mostly listening to

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 18:40:16 +0000

Fionn Regan's "The End of History". This singer-songwriter from Wicklow constantly reminds me of Nick Drake. I'd like to think history will bestow him a similar status but none of the tragedy. I remember reading an article by Bob Dylan a few years ago where he described accomplished singer songwriters who don't get the recognition their talent deserves as "secret heroes" The album is lyrically sophisticated, elegiac and uplifting in equal measure. Humorous, poignant and musically nuanced. It's also "catchy" :) Perfect thing for a lazy Saturday straining under the weight of all those damn adjectives!

Gardai - deux points

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:55:07 +0000

The title refers to R receiving a speeding ticket from a Garda yesterday. It occured on the recently finished (then refinishined, then refinished...) outer ring road in Waterford. I was with her at the time and I was bloody annoyed at the attitude of the Gardai. The speed limit on the Road is 60km/h. So anyone not from Waterford is thinking it must be in an urban area. Well, actually, it's not. It's one of the best road surfaces in Waterford which mostly travels through semi-rural areas with the ocassional shopping centre, business park or housing estate. It also happens to be a dual carriageway with roundabouts every few kilometers, enabling a relatively fast journey around Waterford. So why give it a speed limit of 60 km/h which after all is after all under 40 miles an hour? This is not much faster than built-up and genuinely dangerous urban areas. The official reason from the local authority and the NRA seems to be the assertion that it's used by cyclists and pedestrians. Well there are 80 km/h and 100km/h regional and national roads with cyclists. Many of these have worse surfaces and are not dual carriageways. Equally, the road in question has wide walkways and cycle lanes for much of it. You only have to drive around for a few hours to realise that the driving norm is exceeding this bizarre speed limit. The RSA like to tell us that SPEED KILLS. I've writ it in bold capitals so it's easier to understand. The standard RSA message involves bludgeoning you into submission rather than careful consideration of facts, causes, effects or anything so educated. When driving from Waterford to Cork/Dublin/Limerick it's relatively easy to spot what really kills. Unfortunately, the RSA haven't found a snappy message but here goes .

Idiots who engage in blind overtaking, due to corners or hills. If you do this you are an idiot. There's no way around it. You're an accident waiting to happen.
Professional Lorry and HGV drivers who speed. There are many of these and when they're involved in an accident the potential for multiple deaths is high.
Kids with modified cars who think they're on a race track
Those who drive while intoxicated
Those who speed in wet or slippery conditions
Motorcyclists who are apparently exempt from speed regulations

R was caught doing a MASSIVE 84 km/h. Let's convert that into a real speed.. so that's just over 52 mph on a FRIGGIN DUAL CARRIAGEWAY. There were 2 members of the traffic corps. blocking the road with their cute little guns, like a schoolyard game of cowboys and indians. Despite the fact that we were overtaken by 2 other cars our large black SUV was pulled over, for some reason. We shared this distinction with a BMW 3 series coupe. R was given her 2 points and asked to "slow down!" Yep, we got the message alright. She's going to drive much slower in future as you never know when some chancer is going to hop out in front of you with a gun and give you a fine for driving 52 mph on a dual carriageway. The message is clear that others in less expensive automobiles will be waved on. Is this a stealth method to reduce the budget deficit? Yet, it seems like there's a serious road accident involving multiple deaths every week, mainly caused by the bad habits outlined above. Like gardai hanging around driving test centres, the doling out of financial penalties for minor offenses to law abiding citizens only emphasises the public perception of a group who'd prefer to shoot fish in a barrel than effectively tackle the incidents of serious crime and violence we see on our streets. This perception may be inaccurate but it lingers (as illustrated by this article in a local paper). The root of lawlessness is in seemingly arbitrary laws applied in an arbitrary manner. Or as Calvin Coolidge so eloquently explained to the Massachusetts State Senate...

"Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law."

I've heard senior gardai questioned about a penchant for picking on easy traffic offenses on good stretches of road on several radio shows, including the popular Ray Darcy show and also on Newstalk. They always deny the claim, yet the question persists suggesting that the public simply don't believe them. For the past few weeks, local newspapers have contained reports of extreme violence involving guns, knives, petrol bombs and other instruments of terror as part of a feud in a particular section of our community. A mostly unarmed police force appears ill-equipped to deal with such reckless attitudes to human life. I sympathise with the gardai in such situations as they're endangered while trying to uphold peace and justice. They're largely a mechanism here of an executive which has failed to protect them through legislative reform. A recent survey revealed that more than half of the serving gardai want to carry firearms for personal protection. However, the view that an unarmed police force will aim for the softest of targets in one that is widely held.

Batman v Mulder

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:17:08 +0000

The alternative title for this blog post is "Why Cosmo Landesman's reviews in the Sunday Times are a complete waste of time.". This is not the first time this has occured to me. He writes well but his views are often uninformative. There have been many instances when Mr. Landesman made a dramatic attempt to show his artfulness and artiness with a willfully bad review of a good if populist movie. However, his review of the latest Batman movie is excrement. R & I saw it last week and we both thought it was marvellous for the most part. Indeed, R never liked comic book adaptations but was surprised at how good a movie it was, transcending its pulp genre with stunning camerawork, great acting, some neat plot twists and good dialogue. Let's not forget that the movie has to overcome the premise that a grown man wants to dress up as a bat, yet it does so convincingly. Heath Ledger's joker is almost as good as advertised and contrasted nicely with Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview in "There will be blood" which we also saw last weekend. Indeed, The Dark Knight may be as good a movie as Paul Anderson's oscar winner. This is due in part to the former exceeding and transcending expectations while the latter being overhyped. Mr. Landesman would have you believe that the Dark Knight is spoiled by politically correct yet implausible vexing on the part of the hero about whether he is blameworthy for the deaths of innocents at the hands of his nemesis. This ignores a large and plausible part of the plot whereby the joker calls on our bat obsessed hero to publicly unmask himself. The review appeared dismissive, glib and ultimately unworthy of the spectacle provided by the Nolan brothers. On the other hand his review of the X Files gives it the same 2 star rating. To say that these movies were on a par is about as sensible as suggesting the moon is made of a refined extra -mature cheddar. It's clearly edam. The X Files is a woefully mediocre movie. It's not terrible but its flaws are so large they stick in your craw, upsetting digestion for hours after the movie is finished. On first inspection you'd think Billy Connolly would be a terrible choice as a paedophile priest "blessed" with some kind of sixth sense. Actually he's rather good in this slightly hammy role. Nor is the problem "a lack of ideas" as attributed by Cosmo Landesman. The basic premise which drives the plot is actually fine. The problem is that the movie has no idea what its about. There's a smattering of love story but it feels phoney. Why, after the series ended, do two lovers who've been living together for over a year still refer to themselves by their surnames? This conceit of the earlier episodes of the show is gone by the feature length denoument. Why is there so much time spent on the sick kid? He's a shallow plot device. It doesn't work. Why do we learn so little about the techniques and motivations of the limb transplanting bad guys. They're definitely cartoon baddies as we're afforded nothing in the way of character development and there's little clue as to why they're practicing their abominations. (always liked that word :-)) There are interminable scenes of implausible emotional angst between the two leads, where Scully decides she might have to leave Mulder because of all this "darkness". This comes across as more high-grade crapola. Appaling and silly character development for the leads. Having watched the TV serious which was so brilliantly scripted and directed by Carter, Wong and Morgan, I can't believe 10-13 productions couldn't do so much better. "I want to believe" feels like it was directed and most particularly editted by a committee, without a single autocratic vision to guide them. Even the wrong vision would have been better than the mish-mash that unfolds. However, this isn't an awful movie. The acting is good, most of the dialogue is fine and there are some witty moments. Also, the series has been on tv recently so anyone dismising this as the review of someone who has halcyon romanticised recollections of the series is mistaken. Many episodes of the series really were that good. Genre-defining and defying in the way that only the Nolan brothers and Guilermo del Toro have achieved in recent memory. With a clearer focus this could have been a very good movie. All the ingredients for a first rate omelete are there :) As it is we've been left with a disappointment which is leading to some even more caustic reviews at rotten tomatoes.

Changes at manifesto.ie

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:41:22 +0000

Finally getting around to doing some more SEO work on manifesto.ie. The domain cloak wasn't cutting it for SEO purposes and we also wanted a dotCom. So we've settled on www.manifestogallery.com. We'll be using both in future publicity material and our main email addresses are still @manifesto.ie.

Blind leading the...

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:50:20 +0000

The idea that Microsoft organised a so-called "blind taste test" of Vista under the pretence it was for an experimental new OS called Mojave is laughable. HotHardware carries the story here. The idea that a "10 minute live demo" of Vista compared against other OSes indicates that Vista is somehow underrated and misperceived is a bit, well, silly. Vista isn't terrible but it is flawed in its memory demands, security features, performance of its UI, application compatibility, and a few other aspects. There are no perfect OSes and I doubt a Vista upgrade is a terminal condition :-) However, the Mojave experiment is a marketing gimmick rather than a serious attempt to resolve Vista issues. We've seen quite a few of these gimmicks from Microsoft in recent months. These include the Live Search cashback deal and the use of Apple's iPod range as prizes in another LiveSearch promotion in Australia. It's attention grabbing but I'd like to see innovation, engineering and design in the spotlight. It's noticeable that Ballmer is happy to rubbish competitors products (e.g. the MacBook Air) in a way that Bill Gates rarely did. Gates talked up his own products whereas Ballmer is happy to take potshots at others. It's a personality difference but it's not like they're selling beans here. OSes and Search Engines are complex products where the user is buying compatability, usability, performance, functionality, reliability, sophistication etc. These goals rest on great engineering & design, accepting that great marketing helps in spreading the message.

The Euro project

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:34:36 +0000

I stumbled across this article on David McWilliams blog in relation to exting the Euro. It's sparked a lot of intense debate and got me thinking. There will always be as many arguments against as for leaving the Euro. It's essentially one of those arguments of perspective and potential that's irreconcilable until a decision is reached and history unfolds. It's funny but I don't remember much debate about the negative effects of joining the Euro when we made the decision. This is probably more poor recollection on my part but I'm sure someone here remembers :) Are we economically more sophisticated now or is it a small pocket of people sharing their thoughts over the net? I'd like to think that, based on the results of the lisbon treaty referendum, the Irish are looking more critically at the advice from our politicos than in the past. (accepting political trust is a cyclical thing). On some of the specifics of this debate. I'm not against the idea, in principle, of Tobin Tax or similar levies on national currency speculation. I quite liked the Sterling Stamp Duty idea, however, it's likely that this damages liquidity unless implemented as a "braking function" on speculation through application on higher volumes of speculation alone. i.e. financial regulations should be utilitarian and when they don't work it's possible to fix them! I'd reject comparisons between an unpegged and reconsituted Irish punt and Sterling. Given our well publicised economic woes and small scale it appears unlikely a new Irish currency would, initially, be in sufficient demand to trade so strongly against the dollar. There's the question of the dollar's weakness. Some analysts will suggest this is inevitable as the result of a balance of power shift from the West to the East. A long and expensive war isn't helping either. This is not the first time an eclipse of the US has been suggested and arises from an unhealthy IMHO obsession with trade balances. Many felt Japan would eclipse the US during the 80s and for a short period of time it worked. What are the Chinese accepting as payment for their goods? Billions of dollars, many of which are being invested in US companies, real estate etc. The strategy of beating a country into economic submission by accepting all the fiat currency they can print for your manufactured goods tends not to work. In a way, the gold standard continues in the minds of anyone who associates economic prestige with a particular country. What was the gold standard about but perceived security? The US is the prime example and as long as its economic competitors continue to accept payment in dollars and commit their profits to dollar investments then the US economy looks secure for the long term. As secure as anyone else's anyway. So a pegged currency against the dollar or even the euro isn't necessarily an awful idea in the short term. The HK dollar is pegged and the rate has been judiciously adjusted several times. Arguably more important than the currency debate is the corporate and personal tax debate that incentivises people and organisations to bring their wealth to Ireland. For our small size we can arguably make ourselves even more attractive.

Now look what they've Dunne

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:05:38 +0000

So, Ben Dunne suggested he'd run as an anti-Lisbon candidate in the forthcoming European elections on liveline today. Personally, I think he's exactly the kind of plain-speaking yet shrewd businessman we could do with to represent our interests in the EU parliament. Throughout his career Mr Dunne has proven that he couldn't give a fiddlers what anyone thinks of him which diameterically opposes him with many of the ingratiating "politicians" (in the perjorative sense of course) that we have right now. He'd have no allegiance to any party as he's happily given donations to almost all of them and criticised them all in equal measure. Sure, he's a maverick but in the best sense. Whether the government foists the treaty upon us again or not, Ben Dunne should strongly consider this as a great way to serve the country he regularly proclaims that he loves.

Connecting the dots

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:48:44 +0000

Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, the largest independent shareholder in Disney and one of the most influential technologists for around 30 years. He's also a brilliant public speaker which is probably why he was chosen to give Stanford's 2005 graduation address. Stanford hold all copyrights on the clip and have made it available on YouTube. In the context of 4 simple stories about his life Jobs provides some key insights into what motivated his success and the resilience required to get to and stay at "the top". The most important advice he gives is that anything worth doing is hard so "you've gotta love what you do". You must keep searching for it and "don't settle". This seems to be the key to a life less ordinary.

Dinosaur comics

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:41:57 +0000

Are clearly not a waste of time. Thanks to my brother Conor for the link to qwantz.com

stack based languages

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:34:55 +0000

The May issue of Dr Dobbs had a neat article on the cat stack based language. Pity that I'm only getting around to reading it now but I've been busy :) In many ways, stack based languages are very elegant and remind those learning to program of the processing underlying higher level languages such as Java, which is actually implemented as stack based instructions in an abstract VM. The cat language is essentially a statically typed version of Joy which is a reasonbly well known lambda-less functional language. Joy is useful in that you can write useful applications with it having the functionality of ISO C. It's also straightforward to understand once you free yourself of some of the conventions of imperative languages. This is helped by homomorphism or as the Joy wikipedia page suggests:

"That is, the syntactic relation of concatenation of symbols maps directly onto the semantic relation of composition of functions"

As Joy defines functional compositions without typing their parameters it has the potential for unpredictability in its results. Whereas, every function in Cat will always produce the same number and type of results, given the same number and type of arguments. E.g. consider an implementation of the fibonacci function in cat


define fib { dup 1 <=  []  [dup 1 - fib swap 2 - fib +]  if }

dup just pushes a copy of the top element (duplicates) to the stack. swap interchanges the top two elements. So calculating the fibonacci number for e.g. 5 can be thought of in terms of pushing 5 to the stack, then pushing fib which operates on 5, does the necessary comparisong and sets up the expected recursive addition defining Fib(N) = Fib(N-1) + FIb(N-2) through swapping the top two of the stack. We then push the if to the stack which operates on the 3 elements which are boolean and the true/false values. Neat, tidy and fantastically terse if you remove the unnecessary formatting. The bracketting is obviously important however as it is used to define the variables being pushed to the stack. Cat is neat by Joy is, ironically enough, more fun!

Hallelujah for Leonard

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:09:04 +0000

Those who think Leonard Cohen is depressing know little of his wry humour. During the septagenarian's recent gig in the Manchester Opera house he apologised for his long absense by saying he was last there when he was "just a 60-year-old kid with a crazy dream" Brilliant!