braz

A quiet day and some statistical fun

2010-12-24T20:46:00.005Z

I recently enjoyed the slides from Peter Aldhous on "Data-Driven Journalism", he is the San Francisco bureau chief for the New Scientist magazine and knows a thing or three about this topic. It follows similar comments from Tim Berners-Lee on the topic. It is becoming increasingly more popular to use tools like R to explore these datasets, take this Mexican mortality example for instance.

On the Irish side, we are slowly getting places. It is more thanks to efforts by individuals such as Gavin Sheridan of TheStory.IE that Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are being made to explore the dark areas of the public sector that could do with a little more clarity given the times we are now in.

This spurred me to put together a short little R example (Source code on GitHub) exploring just a fraction of this data for the Mid-West region.

On the flip side of this post, I'll raise my hand and say that my new job has been keeping me very busy indeed. However, if this kind of thing is something you would like to see or hear more about for a commercial opportunity then my team and I at the Irish Center for High End Computing can help. Take a look at the kinds of data analytic services we offer and you can see I've spent even more time in R in the last year!

R for Global Wind Wave / Wave Swell Forecasting

2009-12-28T00:40:00.005Z

As a follow up to using freely available existing climate datasets, here's one that might be of interest to those surfers and sailors out there. It is similar approach to that used for the temperature forecasting so go read that post first, it will help.

The free information from the U.S. NOAA/National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction, in particular its Environmental Modeling Center and its WaveWatch dataset. It is stored as a GRIB2 files and this needs to be pre-processed using wgrib2 (available on MacPorts) to the netcdf format. This stage is similar to the previous post.

There were a few little glitches with this dataset that are immediately visible and the fact there is a big white patch in the Atlantic is due to the maximum height being stored as 9.999e+20. This normally won't be a problem but unfortunately the data also stores dry land with this value. A workaround would be to know or compute longitudes and latitude such that we could tell if a given position was over land or over sea prior to processing it. Unfortunately as this is a bit of a quick and dirty hack, I didn't have the time so here is the basic approach warts and all.

# See http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/wave/nww3.t00z.grib.grib2.shtml
# Data was from ftp ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov dir: /pub/data/nccf/com/wave/prod/wave.20091227
# wgrib2 was installed using macports
# /opt/local/bin/wgrib2 -s nww3.t00z.grib.grib2 | grep "HTSGW:surface:an" | /opt/local/bin/wgrib2 -i nww3.t00z.grib.grib2 -netcdf WAVE.nc

library(ncdf)
waveFrac <- open.ncdf("WAVE.nc")
wave <- get.var.ncdf(waveFrac, "HTSGW_surface")
# Dirty hack to fix input model, look for another better solution
wave[wave>9.99999]<- -1
x <- get.var.ncdf(waveFrac, "longitude")
y <- get.var.ncdf(waveFrac, "latitude")
library(fields)
rgb.palette <- colorRampPalette(c("snow1","snow2","snow3","seagreen","orange","firebrick"), space = "rgb")
image.plot(x,y,wave,col=rgb.palette(255),axes=F,main=as.expression(paste("Significant Height of Combined Wind Waves and Swell in Meters 2009-12-27", sep="")),legend.lab="Meters")
# Add a rough outline for islands, countries, and continents
contour(x,y,wave,add=TRUE,lwd=0.25,levels=0.2,drawlabels=FALSE,col="grey30")
# Add the source of the file and ftp location
text(130,-75,"Data source ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov pub/data/nccf/com/wave/prod/wave.20091227")

R for Global Climate forecasting

2009-12-22T01:19:00.004Z

Joe has a great post on using R for exploiting existing climate datasets to create some really nice weather maps. Using the free information from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS), he shows how R can be used to interpret GRIB2 files after they are pre-processed using wgrib2 (available on MacPorts) to the netcdf format.

I've slightly modified the code from Joe but its pretty much as he wrote it.

# ftp.ncep.noaa.gov pub/data/nccf/com/gfs/prod/gfs.2009121700
# See http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/gfs/gfs.t00z.sfluxgrbf00.grib2.shtml
# eoin-brazils-macbook-pro:~ eoinbrazil$ cp gfs.t00z.sfluxgrbf03.grib2 temp2.grb
# wgrib2 was installed using macports
# /opt/local/bin/wgrib2 -s temp2.grb | grep ":LAND:" | /opt/local/bin/wgrib2 -i temp2.grb -netcdf LAND2.nc
# /opt/local/bin/wgrib2 -s temp2.grb | grep ":TMP:2" | /opt/local/bin/wgrib2 -i temp2.grb -netcdf TEMP2.nc

library(ncdf)
landFrac2 <- open.ncdf("LAND2.nc")
land2 <- get.var.ncdf(landFrac2, "LAND_surface")
x <- get.var.ncdf(landFrac2, "longitude")
y <- get.var.ncdf(landFrac2, "latitude")
library(fields)
rgb.palette <- colorRampPalette(c("snow1","snow2","snow3","seagreen","orange","firebrick"), space = "rgb")
tempFrac2 <- open.ncdf("TEMP2.nc")
temp2 <- get.var.ncdf(tempFrac2, "TMP_2maboveground")
newtemp2 <- temp2-273.15 # Convert the kelvin records to celsius
image.plot(x,y,newtemp2,col=rgb.palette(200),axes=F,main=as.expression(paste("GFS 24hr Average 2M Temperature 2009-12-21 00 UTC",sep="")),legend.lab="o C")
contour(x,y,land2,add=TRUE,lwd=1,levels=0.99,drawlabels=FALSE,col="grey30") #add land outline
text(120,-85,"Data source ftp.ncep.noaa.gov pub/data/nccf/com/gfs/prod/gfs.2009121700")

The image continues to show cold conditions in Europe, and the continuing heatwave in Australia.

Following recent Infomaps with R trend - Visualizing Irish unemployment rates with a choropleth map

2009-11-19T23:18:00.005Z

Following on the recent trend of InfoMaps from Flowing Data and a call to R users to attempt their own examples. I saw this lovely German visualization with R and decided it was time to do Ireland.

Looking at these images, I'm reminded of the lyrics of the song "What a Difference A Day Made", the one that goes like

What a difference a day made,
Twenty-four little hours,
Brought the sun and the flowers,
Where there used to be rain...

Playing with R to animate SBP / RedC polling data

2009-10-04T23:55:00.003+01:00

Another quiet afternoon so I had a look at the excellent site, "From Data to Graphics" and came up with this little animation showing the last three years of Sunday Business Post polls results with the last general election results.

Visualising Lisbon 2009 and 2008 by constituency

2009-10-03T17:34:00.001+01:00

The results are in. Lisbon 2 has been passed by Ireland. Voting results are available Irish Election, from RTE, and the IT. I've added a couple of visualisations using dot plots to help show where it all changed from last year.

The 2009 Lisbon Referendum Ireland voting results by region and constituency.

Here are the 2008 results for comparison.

Lisbon Red C Polling 2009 Dot Plots

2009-09-27T18:13:00.005+01:00

I've been playing around with R and dot plots. Today's SBP poll from RedC was a prefect excuse to have some fun.

LisbonRedCPolling2009-IncludingDontKnows
Originally uploaded by bluepelican

LisbonRedCPolling2009-ExcludingDontKnows
Originally uploaded by bluepelican

Lisbon 2 Round up

2009-09-21T15:14:00.003+01:00

It's almost time for Lisbon 2 so to I've brushed up my readings to take the new changes into account and decided to post a few of the more interesting pieces I've found online.

Elvis making his case against the treaty:

A very nice summary of the social side of the treaty, slightly pro but I guess it depends on how you view it.

Jim Corr and the New World Order.... oh and how it relates to the Lisbon treaty

Michael O'Leary - 5 Reasons to Vote Yes

The Forum for Europe has collected a number of debate transcripts that they held and printed them online.
Defense, Foreign Policy and Neutrality Yes: Pat Cox No: Joe Noonan
Ireland and Social Europe Yes: Ruari Quinn No: Joe Higgins
Institutional Arrangements Yes: David Byrne No: Susan George
Economic Implications Yes: Peter Sutherland No: Mary-Lou McDonald.

Neutral Sites with Information:
Citizen's Information Service - Guide to Lisbon Treaty
Referendum Commission

Guides to support the arguments
YES: The Improved Spoofers Guide to the Lisbon Treaty
NO: Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) (including UKIP) Guide to the Lisbon Treaty

I've listened again to many false arguments and blatant lies so I'm voting YES. The times are different now and it is even more critical to be part of the wider European community for so many reasons. Whilst I'd love to give the Government a bloody nose by voting No, it is sheer stupidity to think that way as a referendum is not a general election and won't cause any change to the government. I do believe Ireland needs a change of direction and government, voting YES is the first step in that process.

Limerick City Election Results since 90 including 09 first count

2009-06-06T17:40:00.004+01:00

Courtesy of John Browne

These figures show a scary trend for FF and for the now deceased PDs. These figures are based on the tallies for the 2009 LE results and are subject to revision but the trend itself is quite interesting for a major urban centre. The second point is the sheer personal vote of Willie O'Dea if these figures reflect a `party' vote.

** UPDATE 21:41 - New chart reflecting actual first count figures rather than tallies. **

Votewatch.eu or What did MEP X, Y, or Z do ?

2009-05-11T17:24:00.002+01:00

It's that time again with the European election nominations just closed that you might actually be interested in what your MEP has been up to for the last term. Want to check how they voted or how often they were in Brussel ? Thanks to http://votewatch.eu you can.

The project has been sponsored by the European Policy Centre with the aim of assisting the monitoring of MEPs. It provides details on the voting, attendance, party allegiances of MEPs. The search functionality of the site allows users to query an MEP's record based on their EU party / grouping, nationality, and particular national political party.

So on to the sport as they say!

In the `Motions for resolutions' category, which deals with motions put forward for voting on by the parliament. The top three are Brian Crowley (101), Eoin Ryan (91), and Colm Burke (45). The bottom three are Jim Higgins (1), Mairead McGuinness (5), and Marian Harkin (5).

In the `Parliamentary questions' category, which details the questions asked by MEPs to the European Commission or to the Council of the European Union. The top three are Proinsias de Rossa (1067!), Jim Higgins (324), and Kathy Sinnott (213). The bottom three are Colm Bourke (41), Sean O Neachtain (104), and Eoin Ryan (105).

Good to know who is working but lets get to the main event or the attendance figures. The top three are Brian Crowley (94.3%), Sean O Neachtain (93.29%), and Kathy Sinnott (92.98%). The bottom three in visiting the parliament are Eoin Ryan (83.22%), Mairead McGuinness (84.56%), and Proinsias de Rossa (85.32%).

I'm sure that next weekend's papers will see a nice break down by the political correspondents looking in detail at the attendance and motions / questions categories.

Arduino Mega and Prototype Shield Assembly

2009-04-20T01:14:00.003+01:00

I've had some Sunday afternoon fun and games with the assembly of a prototyping shield. It is the design from e-lioness and is for the new Arduino Mega board. The new Arduino Mega board is designed to wow, with 128 KB of Flash or program memory, 8KB of RAM, and 4 KB of EEPROM. The board has a massive 54 digital pins (14 of these offer PWM output), 16 analog io pins, 4 hardware serial ports, and I2C. It is compatible with most of the earlier shields designed for the standard Arduino. The firmware includes the now standard, auto-reset on upload, a pre-burned bootloader, and automatic power selection. It does need you to update your Arduino to at least Arduino version 0015 or later. Here is a little table comparing the latest hardware from the Arduino and a close mid capacity derivative from the RepRap project, the Sanguino.

The Arduino Mega is a very sweet option for installations and sensor heavy projects.

Here's the starting picture:

Here's how it ended up:

The process is visually documented in my Flickr images and doesn't really need any more documentation. I would possibly check around to see if other prototyping shields have a better track layout for the digital pins as this turned out to be a little messy.

An example of the fun you can have with the Arduino Mega is shown by Tom Igoe's post on ``8×8 LED matrix control on an Arduino Mega''. He has a great example using it to play Pong.

Sun, Sea, Sounds, and Arduino at SMC 2009

2009-03-31T16:51:00.005+01:00

If you're interested in learning about the sounds of Porto and physical computing then consider participating in the upcoming SMC Summer School on Interactions with Environmental Sounds. It is going to be held in Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal from July 18-21. There is funding available from the COST Action ICO601 on Sonic Interaction Design, for third level students interested but the application deadline is approaching (24th of April). There is a whole range of interesting project proposals already online. Guest lecturers will be given by Marcelo Wanderley of McGill, Joel Chadabe of NYU (and EMF), and Xavier Serra from the Music Technology group in Barcelona. Tutors include Jean-Julien Aucouturier, Stephan Baumann, Bram de Jong, Luis Gustavo Martins, Rui Penha, Stefania Serafin, Federico Fontana and myself.

Check out the Summer School website for details and application forms.

CS4062 - Fourth Arduino Lecture

2009-03-18T17:46:00.001Z

CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - Fourth Arduino Lecture - March 18th 2009 - University of Limerick. This lecture presents a short review and introduction to programming concepts relevant to Arduino. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Arduino Lecture 4 - Interactive Media CS4062 Semester 2 2009

View more presentations from eoinbrazil.

CS4062 - First Arduino Tutorial - Talking to PureData and to Flash

2009-03-18T17:34:00.001Z

CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - Tutorial Example 1 Arduino and PureData - March 18th 2009 - This is a simple worksheet example for a class tutorial on getting PureData and an Arduino to communicate. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Tutorial Example 1 Arduino and PureData Tutorial Example 1 Arduino and PureData eoinbrazil CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - Tutorial Example 1 Arduino and PureData - March 18th 2009 - This is a simple worksheet example for a class tutorial on getting PureData and an Arduino to communicate. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Notes Academic Work interactive media puredata

CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - Tutorial Example 2 Arduino and Flash - March 18th 2009 - This is a simple worksheet example for a class tutorial on getting Flash and an Arduino to communicate. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Tutorial Example 2 Arduino and Flash Tutorial Example 2 Arduino and Flash eoinbrazil CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - Tutorial Example 2 Arduino and Flash - March 18th 2009 - This is a simple worksheet example for a class tutorial on getting Flash and an Arduino to communicate. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Notes Academic Work interactive media digital media

CS4062 - Third Arduino Lecture

2009-03-16T10:54:00.003Z

CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - Third Arduino Lecture - March 11th 2009 - University of Limerick. This lecture presents an introduction to motors, LEDs and Arduino with examples. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Arduino Lecture 3 - Interactive Media CS4062 Semester 2 2009

View more presentations from eoinbrazil.

The slides with notes are available here.

CS4062 - Second Arduino Lecture

2009-03-06T14:07:00.004Z

CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - Second Arduino Lecture - March 6th 2009 - University of Limerick. This lecture presents an introduction to communications and Arduino with examples. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Arduino Lecture 2 - Interactive Media CS4062 Semester 2 2009

View more presentations from eoinbrazil. (tags: avr prototyping)

The slides with notes are available here.

CS4062 - First Arduino Lecture

2009-03-05T11:25:00.004Z

CS4062 Masters in Interactive Media - First Arduino Lecture - March 4th 2009 - University of Limerick. This lecture presents an introduction to the Arduino with examples. This was aimed at a digital media / music technology masters student audience.

Arduino Lecture 1 - Introducing the Arduino

View more presentations from eoinbrazil. (tags: avr physical computing)

The slides with notes are available here.

Germans wise up to e-voting

2009-03-03T21:10:00.004Z

Germany has gone back to the paper ballot today with a decision by the German Federal Constitutional Court to immediately cease the use of electronic voting machines, in particular the Nedap ESD1 and ESD2. The Court said its decision was based on the evidence that the current technology had defects and was difficult to control. The devices were felt to contradict the principle of public elections with vote transparency as their defects make it possible to lose secrecy and control over the counting of the votes. The case was brought based on the 2005 Bundestag election in Karlsruhe, however the court ruled on this aspect stating that they were no hints of errors and left the results of this election stand.

The case was brought forward by a father and son team. Joachim Wiesner, a retired policital scientist and his son, Ulrich Wiesner, a software developer. An expert witness against e-voting was Professor Wolfgang Lawer from Bonn. He spoke to the court and stated his concerns about a ``a vacuum of control after the act of voting'' and the misplaced ``blind faith'' that the electorate had for these machines. He felt this threatened free and open elections where counts could be seem by all and were less easily manipulated.

Germany first used electronic voting in 1999 with differing acceptance by states. The last election using this technology was held in a local election for Brandenburg in September 2008. There are currently 39 of 299 election districts using this type of technology, in particular the states of Brandenburg, Hesse, Nordrhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Pfalz and Saxony-Anhalt.

Experts pointed out that whilst software modification could be discovered afterwards, hardware modifications to the actual device were much more difficult to trace. This type of hardware manipulation was demonstrated by the Chaos Computer Club who modified the innards of an Nedap machine in approximately one minute.

This ruling has not completely banned e-voting. Andreas Voaykule, vice president for the Federal Constitutional Court clarified the ruling stating that ``the tenor of the decision could lead people to the conclusion that the court was hostile towards the technology and had misgivings about the challenges and opportunities of the digital age''. The use of other voting machines is possible and he also pointed out that the court has not banned the possibilities of internet voting. The presiding judge, Justice Rudolf Mellinghoff, did ask about the option of a vote verified trail using a printed ballot. This resulted in an agreement between Nedap and the parliament (Bundestag), in principle to offer this option as one mechanism with a parallel computer and paper count for elections. This may be one possibility for the re-introduction of modified Nedap machines in the future. Professor Wolfgang Lower remarked on the paper option, ``We must ask where is the advantage of the computer as part of the election in this case?'' referred to the idea of having separate and parallel paper and computer counts. (Editing Note: My German is not bad so I think this is a fairly accurate translation, however I do stand open to corrections).

iPhone Developer University Program

2009-02-20T19:35:00.001Z

iPhone Developer University Program
Originally uploaded by bluepelican

The Computer Science department, thanks to Mikael's efforts has officially joined the iPhone Developer University program. It is a free program designed for third level education institutions who are introducing development courses for iPhone or iPod touch applications. It will allow up to 200 students, provide group management, and allow publication of the applications to the AppStore. This has also been done in collaboration with the Technology Transfer Office in UL so thanks are also due to Paul D for his help.

As they say, keep watching - there is more in the pipeline but you'll have to wait and see.

Random Paris Pictures

2009-02-05T15:50:00.002Z

Mixed weather here in Paris but here are a couple of photos I took earlier, more to follow.

Backup and Failure

2009-01-04T18:01:00.005Z

JournalSpace closed down a couple of days ago over a serious oversight with regard to their backup policy (read more here). The story seems to resolve around their use of a RAID array as their only backup. It failed completely and overwrote six years of bloggers data. They did keep backups of the code for the system but bizarrely overlooked the database content which was the images, comments, and posts that made up user's blogs. It prompted me to made a backup of my blog here, I doubt Google are going away today or tomorrow but who knows. I've always tried to keep update with my backups using SuperDuper (with an external HDD) and JungleDisk (it uses remote disk space on Amazon's S3). I remember reading "Disaster Recovery Planning" a few years ago and really seeing how serious you need to be about these things when in business, if after that storm, disgruntled employee, or other unforeseen event you have got be able to start from scratch. It doesn't cost alot to keep backups, reading "Backup and Recovery" shows the numerous open source options out there. I pay a little extra for simplicity and ease of use but the lesson from JournalSpace is at the very least, keep regular backups on different servers or media, preferably off-site and simulate an disaster with actual recovery phase.

Looking around at the end of the year

2008-12-24T12:59:00.003Z

Well its a funny old Christmas this year with ups and downs in the economy. For a laugh or cynical look at the current situation, you could listen to Joseph O'Connor and his radio diary from yesterday's Drivetime on RTE Radio One, it goes nicely with Frank Nally's column in the IT today.

On brighter news, 50% service has been returned to the Shannon-Heathrow route so maybe there are some minor Christmas presents. We'll ignore the loss of revenue to the region of the last number of months and the fact its only a partial return of the service and take it, however I'm sure the local Government politicans will do better in the New Year as its full service return or they're not fighting the case in my book.
Hat tip to John and Nev for the SOS photos.
Hat tip to Nev for the photo.

On a more worrying note it looks increasingly more likely that Dell will be phased down in a fashion to minimise the company's repayment of Government grants. This isn't particularly great news and it looks like this abandoned factory in Raheen may soon have more company.
Hat tip to slinky2000 for the photo.

It looks like the private sector will feel the pain in the New Year and one wonders with the ERSI report will that happen in the public sector, it should (as I've said before) but the lack of authority shown by the current Government doesn't inspire much hope in this area. All I can hope is that maybe some of the sagely advice given by more optimistic people such as Elaine will be taken and perhaps we'll have a brighter 2009.

Rte fun and games - who runs that bank?

2008-11-28T23:46:00.002Z

rtefunandgames
Originally uploaded by bluepelican

Rte were obviously having fun with names today as they messed up the names for the Six One news and then inverted them for the Nine news. I'm wondering if this is yet another sign of the declining standards of our national broadcaster, given the sad sad piece of TV that was Prime Time last night and the very slanted rumour mongering about Declan Ganley (Dan has this in more detail), one has got to wonder what exactly is our license money paying for ?

Votes lost - no its not America rather Finland

2008-11-05T23:58:00.003Z

Just an update on the current Finnish e-voting farce where 232 votes were lost due to `usability' issues with the voting machines, this Finnish EFF (see their statement). This might seem pretty small but this was only a pilot in three small areas and actually accounted for 2% of the electoral register. The problem happened when after a voter had inserted their smart card to verify their identity, selected their candidate by typing his/her number and pressing okay, then a verification screen was shown and some voters did not press the okay on this screen but removed their smart cards which caused the ballots to be lost. The instructions on the machine said that the only way to cancel a vote was by clicking the cancel button and then removing their smart card, this of course didn't help matters. So a hit tip to the both the EFFi in Finland and to the EDRI for pointing this out. If you're interested in digital civil rights in Europe, I'd recommend subscribing to the EDRI-gram newsletter and checking out its archive.

Obama's speech

2008-11-05T11:41:00.002Z

In case you had to work today or just fell asleep on the counch in the early morning hours, here's a link to President-Elect Obama's acceptance speech. I'm really happy to see the change in the US, it'll still be a bit of a battle for him to get all his policies past the Senate given the current results leave open the potential for many fillibusters but it is definitely a new dawn for America. Who'd have thought that they'd elect a black man to sit in the Oval office, it is really a day that shows the American dream is possible for one and all. Ireland will have to wait a few more months to see if the taxing of overseas American companies (FDI) will be taxed according to his earlier plans but today its a happy day for the world as America has shown democracy in action.

Civil service performance scheme - pay rises for all

2008-10-26T13:42:00.004Z

Where is the radical reform in the civil service ? Sunday Times figures show that almost every civil servant in the country has received a pay increase. The Government seemed happy to let the civil servants write the budget and now we find that the oversight process for employees in the civil service, the Performance Management and Development System (PMDS) has standards so low that in essence the civil servants are writing their own pay rises. According to the Department of Finance, the pay bill for 2008 will be €2.1 billion up 6.7% from 2007 (€1.9 billion). This sparks the questions about pay freezes, reform, and job security of civil servants. Its worse in the wider public sector where the average wage increase is around 8.9% or so and adds €1.5 billion to the wage bill per year.

Mark Tighe in the Sunday Times (26/10/2008) had reported a number of shock findings in the PMDS scheme for performance rating of civil servants. It seems that if you turn up to work and sleep at your desk for the day, you'll still get your raise while you work in the Irish civil service. It seems that those who word hard in the civil service are being hampered and the top quality of these hard workers are not being rewarded in relation to their colleagues. Whether it is a failing of training or for management needs to be discovered because this kind of carry on would last less than five minutes in any Multinational in this country so why should it be allowed to fester in our civil service ?

Tighe got the view of Union leader's such as Tom Geraghty who claim the scheme has improved performance but does not his surprise that were not more people in the poor performance categories as ``Everyone things they are a swan but there are bound to be a few ducks''. He further conceded that management had to motivate people and that ``telling them that they are useless isn't a great way of doing that''.

The figures released to Tighe show the soft reality of the civil service. These are especially harsh when compared with the civil service-wide PMDS evaluation (PDF) by Mercer Human Resource Consulting which was completed in May 2004. The suggested figures for percentages in levels are vastly different, perhaps Mercer was thinking along the lines of the private sector where only true performance and merit is rewarded. The consultants report further noted that the PMDS system itself was weak at distinguishing between the different performance levels, in highlighting which staff performed well and in handling those ``few ducks'' who underperformed. The figures shown below highlight how the civil service is over egging the pot (on the left) by being top heavy in the 3, 4, and 5 categories. The consultants report (on the right) showed a more private sector view with correspondingly lower numbers in the higher categories and a vast increase in comparison to the underachieving categories.

The most telling problem with this system is that the consultants found that it was not linked to decisions on promotions, pay increases, or career development. Senator Alan Kelly of Labour has recently (8th October, 2008) voiced further concerns about PMDS as it currently only being applied to the lower grades of the civil service and that its implementation in the senior manager grades has left a lot to be desired.

Even a bad scheme like PMDS is better than no scheme. Local Authority workers (~35,000) and Health Service Executive staff (~111,000) are not yet in such a ranked/rated scheme. In the case of the Local Authority, they are considering it and in the HSE they have one but it doesn't use any kind of ranking or rating. It really is no surprise that the HSE has a bad record for its management not knowing who is currently employed but without ranking for staff, one wonders how the staff get assessed with any due consideration.

Mark Tighe has a second Sunday Times article point out that 74.2% of all public-sector workers earned more than €40,000, further break downs show that even in the higher pay categories the public sector employees are still ahead of the average private sector counterpart. Two examples, between €50,000 to €100,000 its 29.1% of public sector workers to just 13.1% of private sector worker and above €100,000 its 2.5% public sector to 1.9% private sector. These figures are basic figures and do not include any additional loading for job security or the guarantee of a pension for public sector employees.

Tighe spoke to Jim Power, chief economist with Friends First who pointed out the reality that ``in the private sector thousands of workers are being let go and salaries are being cut by 10% to 20% in some companies. It is clear the public-sector unions believe the adjustment in the economy must be borne entirely by the private sector''. Brian Lenihan has stated a reform of this area will be ``messy and unpleasant'' so instead he's waiting for a task force to deal with the problem instead. I think I'd prefer the approach of Richard Bruton to sorting out the mess because regardless of politics, he at least seems to understand the problems (overview of reform approach, Reform through Recovery response to Budget).

An annual increase of €1.5 billion in the national public sector pay bill or €100 million for the over 70's medical card, hhmmm I think I know which problem I'd be tackling if I was in government. There was an elephant in the room for this budget, it was and still is public sector reform. Tackling this one issue would provide all the funds to provide universality for health care and education and they'd still be cash for capital development. If only there was some leadership and grasp of reality in the current Government we might cushion the impending hard landing as it stands this is an avalanche gathering speed which will plunge us into a Japanese style recession without prompt and hard calls by the Government.

Inflation versus Innovation - Budget 2009

2008-10-15T11:24:00.002+01:00

A great hullabaloo was given to the announcement in yesterday's budget that €300m was being earmarked for the continued implementation of the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation.

Science Foundation Ireland is up €7m from last year to €179m
Enterprise Ireland is up a little over €3m from last year to €127m

I'd like to point something to the Minister - inflation is running at 4.3% according to the CSO so that means that both SFI and EI are actually running behind inflation, so no new schemes or extra changes here. This will probably mean that there will probably be more contracting of existing schemes rather than a directed push for more innovation, research or commercialisation. The meagre 5% rise in R&D tax credits to 25% isn't worth anything to the figures I've done based on my own tech transfer experiences. The final insult is the lack of any effort to provide a broadband infrastructure to deal with the third world or worse state of this critical technological engine of change.

This adds onto my disgust at the treatment of OAPs and marginalised sectors of society. Well done, Minister - no reform, no strategy. At least Ray `the knive' MacSharry could claim some reform in the public sector but this is a joke of a budget with the private sector, the old, and the marginalised left to suffer the pain.

Lights out for fourth level research due to HSE style budget cuts in Universities

2008-09-13T17:01:00.002+01:00

I'd like to share a rumour / latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds regarding fourth level funding. I'm not sure if its true but it needs to be answered and quashed ASAP by the Government, the Department of Education, and the founding bodies such as Science Foundation Ireland or Enterprise Ireland. This was spurred on by John's post.

Rumours are painting a scary picture which is emerging from a number of universities across the state. The universities, it seems are willing to throw the baby out with the bath water in order to make the 3% to 5% salary budget cut imposed on them by the Government. The fourth level research sector is undergoing a purge reminiscent of Kristallnacht where many young researchers and their project proposals are being silently dropped from universities to fulfil these cuts. It seems that in the typical wisdom of the Government and as seen previously in the HSE, a salary budget for an institution is a single figure. This is one composite figure regardless of whether it comes from funded research projects or from the Department of Education. Like the HSE, its a figure that does not distinguish between front line services or managerial / secretarial levels. In the case of universities, the distinction can be seen between central admin, departmental staff, and contracted researchers / lecturers.

A major goal of the knowledge economy in Ireland is to promote new areas of research to encourage the development of new technologies and to enable new discoveries in the sciences. This process will create a new generation of researchers and open new possibilities for business through the commercial exploitation of these advances which should stimulate and grow the economy. Unfortunately, the core and critical people who will achieve this aim are the junior researchers in the third level sector. These are the very targets of this type of purge. The purge fits quite well within the lens of university upper echelons and their thinking as the junior researchers are among the most silent in a university population as they typically have no union representation or other form of effective representation.

This type of purge is achieved by simply refusing to accept new research projects. You might ask how this benefits a budget reduction when a project is never started. Once a research proposal is accepted by the founding authority such as Science Foundation Ireland or Enterprise Ireland, the salary budget from that project is actually assigned to a university's central salary pool. Back to the single figure, so by then refusing the project and sending back the money the university can actually state that it has made a budget cut, which is true in a perverse sense. This approach is further assisted by not taking on any new research projects so that the central salary pool figure is not added to. Many universities seem to be stalling contract or junior researchers with various excuses or delays regarding the processing of new project proposals. This lack of clarity and response has lead to this conspiracy theory doing the rounds at various coffee tables around many universities. If one remembers the likes of President Septimius Severus Krupp in ``The Big U'' and his style of modern University management, there is a certain possibility of this type of scenario being true.

This may be the latest conspiracy theory or it may just be gross incompetence in the administration levels of the universities. It would be nice to know which. If the Government is committed to a knowledge economy, the means of achieving it are the very researchers affected by this bizarre situation. It is past time for budget cuts by memo to be dropped. A scalpel rather than an axe approach for budget adjustments is needed. This means targeted cuts in non essential areas or services which will not negatively affect the future engines of growth such as fourth level research.

eflow.ie broken and lacking any IA or HCI design

2008-09-12T19:59:00.003+01:00

[Begin RANT]

Well I could already repeat everything that Gar has said about the new eflow M50 tolling system but I won't as he's dead right. It's a complete crock. I haven't been around Dublin but my Mum asked me to pay for her trip through the M50 so I had my first encounter with the eflow system and it ended rather abruptly. It simply doesn't work for Safari, now one would think that the earlier revamp of the BOI 365 online internet portal (and debacle over the forgetting of Safari users) would have reminded developers that some people do use Apple's and OS X.

Now fortunately I do have and also use Firefox so I was able to actually sort my Mum's trip out but when I open the actual page, I was directed by the incredibly poorly designed site to register rather than to pay as you go, now I realise that the intent of the designers is obviously aimed at getting registered users to prove that they meet the tick box quota that has been set on them but lads .. users first, foremost, and always. Simple HCI and IA is nowhere in evidence in the site and if one of our students was to produce it, I'd send them back to the drawing board. I can't believe that the NRA paid, and I'm sure they paid royally for the site and ended up with such a crock. On a final note, I was half way through the registration when the crippled AJAX (please lads read JJ Garret or any host of other design books, that is not how you use AJAX.) before I got feed up and accidentally discovered I could pay in the section labelled "Unpaid Toll" rather than something more akin to "Pay Unpaid Toll".

[End RANT]

Update 1: Seems that John has had both payment errors by eFlow and a crash out from .Net on a Windows box. So its not just narky Apple user's who get the short end of the stick with the system.

Bits including a new book by Doctorow and a report on broken Finnish e-voting

2008-09-10T22:08:00.004+01:00

Here are a couple of interesting bits and pieces.

Cory Doctorow, technologist and author has released a new book called "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future". Its twenty eight (28) essays on a wide spectrum of topics with titles including "The DRM Sausage Factory", "It’s the Information Economy, Stupid", "How Copyright Broke", "In Praise of Fanfic", "The Future of Ignoring Things". These essays range on topics from DRM to mobile phones and touch the singularity, privacy issues, and the semantic web along the way. In his true spirit, he has again release both a print book for sale and a free-to-download CC BY-NC-SA licensed PDF. I'm looking forward to digging down to this gem from one of my favourite authors. The best way to whet the appetite is to take a part of the introduction written by John Perry Barlow, who helped found the EFF and may be better know as the guy who wrote "The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace".

" ... information is simultaneously a relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn’t is a noun. Information is not a thing. It isn’t an object. It isn’t something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn’t have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I’m presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it’s been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web."

- Introduction by John Perry Barlow.

On other news, there is more broken e-voting news as the Finnish branch of the EFF has published a report, "Incompatibility of the Finnish e-voting system with the Council of Europe e-voting recommendations" which shows another fatally flawed e-voting system. The Finns were much more through in testing and evaluating the system but it seems that the government still didn't get it right there.

A couple of short bits, Dell has sponsored the Digital Nomads site, connect a playstation controller to your Arduino, or just make music with it. A nice new site is the Wisconsin Online site for learning electronics. If you've read Gibson's "Spook Country", you'll love the BBC's idea of The Box and a related post from Worldchanging on "Mapping a connected world".

One final note is to keep October 4th open for a trip to Dublin. Organise, Activate, Influence: Social Activism Online in Ireland is a short one day conference (see the schedule) in Dublin on October 4th discussing various blogging and social media issues. It's being held, organised, and sponsored by the European Commission Representation and the European Parliament Office in Ireland with an address by the EU Commission Vice President, Margot Wallström. It's free and you can register online.

Mass Media and Politics crossing over BSG style

2008-09-03T10:28:00.005+01:00

I'd seen the site, Tigh & Roslin before and its a pretty good take but this poster takes it all. It's a nice twist that the character Colonel Saul Tigh in BSG was both a ex-fighter jock and also a former POW. It was really only with the addition of Sarah Palin to the McCain ticket that this really resonates. A nice little showcase by Christopher Ambler of Ambler Media and of his rapidly built custom Joomla site.

Politics, fund-raising, and XKCD - who'd have believed it

2008-07-29T18:13:00.004+01:00

Well the story of the US campaign season, how a cartoon managed to raise $95,000 in days for a new aspiring politician in Kansas.

It's not often I see a really smart link to popular culture but I've got to tip my hat to Sean Tevis, who's taken a nice leaf from one of the Internet's leading web comics, xkcd. Sean's idea started after two weeks of canvassing and twenty five dollars to show (its the US money talks...). He figured that as an IA (Information Architect) with web programming skills he could find some other way to fund his political campaign rather than continuing the door to door which wasn't working. 40 or 50 hours later he had the campaign poster below done in xkcd style.

More details on the actual funding appeal/poster and a WSJ article with some more details and an interview of Mr Tevis.

switchAbit glitch

2008-07-16T17:03:00.002+01:00

Sorry for that last post but I didn't create it. I had signed up with switchAbit to try out their automatic cross-posting tool (e.g. Flickr to Blogger, Facebook, etc or Blogger to Flicker or any such 1 - 1 or 1 - M combination). However I've been a busy bee working on my thesis so haven't had anytime to post anything lately which means the robots are trying to take control of my blog! The joys of beta software, so things have been turned off and hopefully normal service should be restored.

Telas y bordados - México 2008 5976

2008-07-16T14:47:00.001+01:00

Two Places Hanging Gardens installation review in CIRCA Art Magazine

2008-07-04T17:32:00.003+01:00

The installation, Hanging Gardens that Jurgen Simpson and I created for the Two Places exhibition have gotten some great reviews in CIRCA (Issue 124, Summer 2008). This exhibition ran concurrently in two locations, hence two places, in the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast and in the University of Limerick.

The Belfast aspect of the piece was reviewed by Niall de Buitlear who said

Jurgen Simpson and Eoin Brazil have collaboratively produced Hanging garden. The piece, more than any other in the show, creates an environment in which the audience is immersed; it is a simulation of garden in which sixteen speakers represent insects or other small animals which react to each other and to the movements of the audience. The piece responds directly to the architecture of the gallery, in this case the overhead metal grid which is the most distinctive feature of the mezzanine space at OBG.

Overall the exhibition is varied in terms of the quality of the works on show and their engagement with the context of the exhibition. It is at its most rewarding, as in SHRDLU/BELFAST and Hanging garden, when the work responds to the architectural space while engaging the viewer with a range of abstract, suggestive possibilities.

The Limerick aspect of the piece was reviewed by Karen Normoyle-Haugh who said

Perhaps the most successful work in this exhibition is Hanging Gardens by Jurgen Simpson and Eoin Brazil. Occupying the hallway upon entering a campus building, it provides ample space for the viewer to sit and listen to the sounds. Hanging gardens consists of sixteen speakers, each one generating its own sound in response to the sounds around it. Sensors pick up movement within the space and this affects the level and rate of the sound both in Limerick and Belfast through the use of an internet connection. The eerie tinkling and croaking sounds are interspersed with sounds reminiscent of chirping crickets.

Again the work had to compete with a noisy environment. Undoubtedly the idea behind using the campus was that students would, unawares, happily stumble upon the sound artworks. It would unsettle them, disturb them, give them an experience of sound art. However noble the idea, the reality was far from ideal.

I will have to admit to being over the moon at getting such great press and while there were a few wrinkles in the UL end, it was a great experience. Sonic art works well in gallery spaces but in busy campus environments it has got to be notched up but doing so in collaboration with the denizens of a space is not always as easy as it seems. I'm really glad to have had the opportunity to have worked with Jurgen and we're already thinking about a couple of other ideas for future work.

In case you missed it, here's a clip from Limerick of the piece.

IOTC 2008 Arduino Talk

2008-06-21T17:37:00.002+01:00

As promised here are my slides and notes from yesterday's Irish Open Technology Conference (details).

| View | Upload your own

IOTC08 The Arduino Platform - Upload a Document to Scribd

Major changes in Limerick City layout for forthcoming local elections

2008-06-18T14:13:00.004+01:00

NewLimerickCityWardBoundaries
Originally uploaded by bluepelican

The report from the Electoral Area commission is in (and online). They're still using the incorrect census data from the night of the previous ERC trip to Cardiff so I'm taking these figures with a pinch of salt. Limerick city has grow by a mere 500 people or 0.96% to approximately 52,539. They're stating population decreases in Wards 1 and 3 (yeah and who's living in all those new houses ....) and growth in Wards 2 and 4. They've also had to factor in the addition of Moyross to the city.

Net result - Ward 1 gets an extra seat due to Moyross. Wards 3 and 4 are merged and loose a seat to become a seven seater. No change in Ward 2. They also decided to rename the new arrangement.
Ward 1 - Limerick City North
Ward 2 - Limerick City East
Wards 3 & 4 - Limerick City South

If this isn't gerrymandering, I don't know what is. Its clear that the Greens have gotten their say to increase the sizes of wards which will favour the smaller parties. In Limerick's case, the rearrangement also suits Fianna Fail due to collapse of the party in the last local elections as the new boundaries guarantee them some hope of recovery. I really hope this turns into a serious case of Tullymandering for the government.

Voting Yes Tomorrow

2008-06-11T11:18:00.003+01:00

Well for a long time I wasn't fully convinced for why I should vote Yes tomorrow. I had waded through parts of the treaty but ended up scratching my head. The papers and general media were pretty poor and the referendum commission materials were freeze dried. However, over the weekend finally a couple of factual articles in plain English helped separate the lies from the actuality of the treaty. What really surprised me was watching Prime Time last night and actually watching RTE put a report together that made it clean why (if you're sensible) that Yes is how you should be voting.

Embedded from RTE.IE

The discussion and arguments were even better and I have to admit that Pat Cox is some speaker. I can see why he was president in the European Parliament.

Embedded from RTE.IE

Maybe the arguments here will convince some people to vote no and point others to vote yes but the important thing tomorrow is to vote. I don't know how many voter registration campaigns I've helped out in and I can't say it more vehemently but get out and vote, regardless of which way. Not using your vote is in my mind a sin when you think about how many people in this country fought to ensure we had one and when so many in other countries would and do die to get a vote. Democracy only works if people participate so vote tomorrow! If you're not sure, my two cents is vote yes.

Irish Open Source Technology Conference 2008 Speaker

2008-05-28T23:21:00.003+01:00

So got my confirmation and bio sorted out with Barry Alistair for the IOTC conference which will be held in Dublin from June 18 to 20 in the Dublin CineWorld Complex (the old Virgin cinema on Parnell street or the IMAX for those really old heads). The press release for the talk is online. So if you're interested in learning a little about the Arduino and what whacky things you can do with it, I'll endeavour to give you a good foundation.

Here's the badge:

Thanks to Gabriela and to James for their hard work in organising a great 3DCamp in Limerick last week. My notes and slides are coming but I just haven't had the time to organise them properly yet! I really enjoyed it and learnt a lot as well as meeting some really friendly and interesting people. Lots of very interesting things happening in that space in Ireland which was really great to see.

Soldering and Prototyping Tutorial

2008-04-17T12:15:00.002+01:00

This is somewhat of a test to see how iPaper works. I've posted a useful little tutorial I've given for those new to Arduino and to soldering and a handy little planning sheet for laying out your perfboard components. If you're interested in learning some more about the Arduino, Physical Computing, and or just about Interactive Media in general, I'll hopefully be presenting a talk at Irish Open Source Technology conference.

Original PDF.

Politics.ie (pro Libertas?) site in alleged indirect government censorship attempt

2008-03-31T00:12:00.000+01:00

There seems to be some rather interesting happens at Politics.ie as elaborated upon by JC Skinner.

Useful stripboarding template

2008-03-30T21:32:00.003+01:00

In addition to the existing strip-boarding templates from Tim Surtell, I've put up a single page pdf template (here) which is slightly bigger and only has the strip-board lines on it.

In other news - check out Ahern's solicitors try to silence online debate regarding the whole Politics.ie takedown, move to the States and various rumours around the whole thing.

Arduino Lectures and Tutorial Roundup

2008-03-28T13:29:00.004Z

Here's the collection of slides and notes from the set of lectures I've given on Physical Computing and the Arduino platform.

Lecture 1: Introduction (PDF with notes)

| View | Upload your own

Lecture 2: Electronics, LEDs, Communications, and Datasheets (PDF with notes)

| View | Upload your own

Lecture 3: Motors and AVR programming (PDF with notes)

| View | Upload your own

Here's the link for Tutorial 1 - Soldering: An introduction to stripboarding and to making a shield for an Arduino - PDF handout. This just keeps everything in one nice handy post.

Random Friday Lunch Linkage

2008-03-28T13:18:00.002Z

The most useful article I've come across on the internet in ages is ``How to refill a disposable Brita brand water pitcher filter with activated carbon'' as I use a Brita and the filters are damn expensive.

Two of my favourite authors, Ken Macleod and Greg Egan who have Hugh nominated stories this year have put them online for free. "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" by Ken Macleod and "Glory" by Greg Egan.

Worldchanging has two nice articles on "RFID and art" and on the Billboard Liberation Front.

Closer to home Elaine wrote a fantastic opinion piece for yesterday's Irish Times, why to go! It's titled "Unwavering loyalty admired and rewarded in politics" (Subscription required). I think it was very pointed and hit the spot exactly with fresh calls from the cabinet about Mr Ahern's finances to be clarified.

A closer runner up for best article this week was from Dan who provides a great deal of clarity on that particular issue that some people in the Irish blog world will find of great interest. It's called "28 days later" and it clearly spells out the happenings and facts for all to read in clear, precise English.

CS4026 - Arduino Intro Lecture and Soldering Notes

2008-03-17T17:25:00.001Z

Here are the links to the lecture and tutorial notes for last week's `Introduction to the Arduino' lecture and for the workshop on soldering. There are no lectures next week as it is not a teaching week but there may be another chance for all those who missed the soldering workshop to catch up.

Lecture 1 - Introducing the Arduino - PDF Slides

Tutorial 1 - Soldering: An introduction to stripboarding and to making a shield for an Arduino - PDF handout

Happy St. Patrick's Day - Muppet Style

2008-03-17T14:08:00.003Z

With thanks to Mikael passing along the link!

Witches, Warlocks, and Sci-fi

2008-03-01T16:22:00.003Z

Its the Burning time. I'm no fan of witch hunts or its various stages but it is rather sad to see mobs are still the rule rather than the exception for the blog sphere. If only the good examples of the like of the Tribunals such as the Mahon was taken to heart by people. Tribunals use documents or evidence of relevance to base their decisions. Maybe its time to sit back and ask is it in the spirit of a tribunal or of a mob that matters are addressed.

On a lighter note, I must say that io9 keeps getting better and better in my book. Especially when they start to include sci-fi sound design, cool artwork, and highlight impressive new architecture.

Journalistic Bloggers - opinionated potpourri or vigourous public debaters

2008-01-02T13:45:00.000Z

I don't often start a flame war but today a couple of blog posts came across my rss feed and forced me to ask the question are Irish Bloggers offering simply opinionated potpourri or has it lead to a vigour debate and conversation. The unfortunate truth is that potpourri is edging up those who would participate in debate and a growing herd mentality by a small influential group of bloggers is having leading to a net negative effect for Irish bloggers.

The posts that sparked this opinion from me are due to a spat between Dan Sullivan and Damien Mulley, who were arguing over the use of low english words in blog posts. As my blog is somewhat professional oriented blog and also holds material that I direct students to, it means that I have to maintain a swear free blog if possible. This incident has started me thinking about journalists in general and those bloggers who are aiming low rather than high in their use of the English langauge as well as the whole immediate gang-ish nature of Irish bloggers who seem to run to defend any blogger who is questioned about anything. Whilst defending victims is a noble endeavour, simply flocking to the defence at the drop of the hat without a considered reaction to the situation is the worse type of behaviour. The Irish blogosphere seems to be retreating rather than advancing as the `old guard' bloggers / nouveau commentariat are intent on retaining their opinions without opening conversations or constructive dialogues. Those who air considered alternative opinions are barracked, one only needs to refer to one post in this category by Karlin Lillington to see the typical behaviour of the commentariat mob. The end result is that active contributors are only valued until they rock the boat at which point they're ostracised to the furthest corners of the ether. This behaviour and the inherent attitudes of bloggers with this mentality is having a negative net effect for Irish bloggers, who unless incredibly thick skinned often simply let their blogs go fallow rather than have the horde raze their homestead on the Internet again.

The best arguments in the wider websphere on this topic come from two opposing articles, `All the noise that fits' and `The journalism that bloggers actually do'. An important from an excellent article on `Okay, Ready? My Coordinates for a Successful News Site' is that a news site should allow readers to connect and converse with each other. It is high time that Irish bloggers remember their roots and allow the conversation to continue so that we end up with vigourous debate rather than the opinionated potpourri it has begun creeping towards.

The third decade - here I come!

2007-12-12T14:42:00.000Z

Well I'm older, maybe wiser - then again maybe not but as they say the thirties are new twenties. Thanks to Mark and Conal for a lovely lunch and surprise in the Wild Onion today. Now if I can only survive the slagging for the rest of the day ....

Monday and a local focus

2007-12-03T13:54:00.000Z

Well seems somebody reads my ramblings and rants as I've made it onto the Limerick Leader's in their local blogs section. I reckon there must be one or two readers of IrishElection.com that made the connection or else from the LimerickBlogs.com page, either way its great and thanks to all the nice people at the Limerick Leader for throwing my blog in the section. As always and ever, I'm proud and happy to be a Limerick man. Hat tip to Dan for pointing this out to me.

Mad weekend but some craic

2007-12-02T20:11:00.000Z

Just had a short weekender in Dublin and got to meet up with some of the lads. We did the whole shopping thing and even the nice dinner too! I'd have to recommend the City Bar and Grill on Kildare St as a very nice spot.

Not much else to report at the moment, work on IMS Arcs is progressing with the next fortnight seeing some real usability testing beginning on some of service ideas. There'll be some kind of paper probably coming out of this early next year. I'd given a lecture last week to the IMedia Masters on Flash and Streaming but had forgotten to put up the link (here it is!).

A few bits and pieces that have caught my eye were a pre-print draft circulated from the Auditory List on ``The potential of the Internet for music perception research'', hacking a Chumby, the bunnie studio blog - in particular this note on SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen, how the Linux Kernel actually works, the EnergyJoule for tracking your electricity usage, Worldchaning also has a nice summary article on ``Computers As Green Tools''. I've mentioned Concrete Crickets before, the full code has been made available by Michael Dory (Thanks Mike!) and he's also got a great post on hacking MP3 players.

Upcoming talks

2007-11-13T23:27:00.000Z

Three for your diary in the next week or so.

Firstly we have David McWilliams, commentator and economist, who will deliver a lecture on the outlook for the economy or a sales pitch for his new book ``The Generation Game'', depending on your perspective. It is on in the University Concert Hall on Thursday November 15th from 14:30 to 15:30 and if you're a mad fan, there'll be a book signing afterwards in the Foundation. I'm going to be off at Stephen's wedding but I'd love to hear what this most insightful gentleman has to say.

Next up is a talk on Friday morning a talk by the Crash Ensemble from 10:00 to 11:00 in the CS (I think) which will be followed that evening by a concert by the Crash Ensemble at 19:30 in the Performing Arts Centre in the Foundation Building (more details).

Lastly and most definitely not the least, we have two great characters, John Bowers and Sten-Olof Hellström who are presenting the PTBYBO 3 workshop. This workshop will cover circuit bending and live coding (where, respectively, hardware and software are hacked before your very eyes and ears) to explore live sound/image relations in an improvised performance.

The workshop will feature the Irish debuts of Ohm-My-God (an environment in which random electronic circuits are constructed) and My Little Dreamachine (a miniaturization of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s hallucinogenic Dreamachine, the behaviour of which is variously sonified and visually transformed and projected). Generally, lights will flash and circuits will blip with an uncommon intensity as Hellström and Bowers work feverishly to transport all our bodies, minds and souls from the beginning of the end. A Performance To Blow Your Brains Out, surely.

A seminar discussing the techniques in PTBYBO 3 and relating them to larger issues in interaction design and the construction of new instruments for musical expression will be given by Hellström and Bowers in Kilmurry Hall, University of Limerick, the 21st of November 14:00-17:00. I've previously had the pleasure of working with these characters whilst on SOB and they are really really smart guys who also know how to have fun. I expect this workshop to be the best of the year.

Web Links:

Whether and what, some thoughts and links

2007-11-11T18:11:00.000Z

As ever its been a hectic week, with a visit to the TSSG for a catchup on IMS ARCS and some planning. I also had a quick demo and visit to Catch.fm. The TSSG is always a great place to visit, it really is a hive of activity. I'm a little behind on thesis progress as I've found it difficult to schedule people for listening tests this week, hopefully it'll be better next week.

There have been a few bits of interest like how the lovely FG lady of DSE, Lucinda Creighton got hacked. There is a flurry of activity from Google's OpenSocial project which has produced a set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites (see also the project's blog). Unfortunately a sharp commentary by Tim O'Reilly pointed out that the two critical points of a new 2.0 web app are 1) the data and 2) small parts which are loosely connected (think mashups) have been missed in this new set of APIs. Whatever the case there is a nice starting point for Ruby on Rails people on the Bamboo Blog. Speaking of Ruby and Rails, there is a nice plugin for RESTful OpenID Authentication, a new gem for using Amazon's flexible payments, and a nice presentation on Rspec from James Deville. On another note for us techno-nomadic people, Gar has a great post and suggestion for setting up your own mailserver - cheers Gar!

If you want to waste some time and find what the latest buzz picturewise is on the web, checkout Picurls. Another useful article is how to stop using crutch words for public speaking. Keep track of noel hidalgo's journey which is documenting free culture, social innovators and global change across the world.

Useful OS X tools links:

SoundSource, really control the audio input / output on your Mac.

JungleDisk, take the plunge and get your backups under control by supplementing local backups with remote backups and Amazon's S3.

Doodim, black out your background for presentations, etc.

zfone, keep your Skype and other VOIP conversations secure.

SEO specialists in Ireland - Cead Mile Caimiléireacht

2007-11-04T18:00:00.000Z

Well I was very amused today when I took a break and caught up on some of the latest happenings on the web. I've always belived that SEO's and companies offering only these services were just a step above Dell boy and Co. Its the kind of service that your web development team or company should throw in for your business website. I've read quotes from these cowboys before for websites and for friends looking for advice on their services, thankfully I hope I saved at least some of them, both money and grief. The story of the month has to be the Ace Internet Marketing antics with regard to Damien Mulley. Bock has a lovely piece on Ace's evident plagiarism of content. There is also coverage over at PoetBloggs.net and at Daithi's blog. This kind of carry on is just what the web development / web design sector in Ireland needs to show that, yes it is still full of untrained chancers who are willing to masquede content as their own. It leads to the question, if they couldn't manage the rather simple context, ``Could they manage the necessary and rather more advanced skills they were trying to peddle ?''

Catch up on a bit

2007-10-29T20:39:00.000Z

Its been a hectic couple of weeks. I was over in Paris for COST SID for a meeting which was very productive both at the MC level and in my working group which is concentrating on sonification. Here's a nice short example of a simple sonification of global earthquake data using Csound and Python.

You can see my full set or take a look at Frauke's set.

There are bits and pieces of news with Dan talking about the provisional driver debacle and his petition. I've going to be collaborating with Jurgen on a piece for the Two Places exhibition in the Ormeau Baths, Belfast and in UL. More to follow on this concurrent sonic installation later.

On the wider front there is a piece on MTV's ``Darfur Is Dying'' campaign, take a read. Use solar power to ensure a self sufficient arduino. The latest R News Volume 7/2, October 2007 is out. There's a nice article on the problems and limitations of using server logs for usability analysis. If you insist on logs, this article offers some advice on handling them.

O'Reilly have a nice article on ``DIY Surround Sound DVDs'', so its not the recording studio in the CSIS building but it might help! Scott Wilson has some nice software online including some gems like interleaving mono audio files into a multichannel file and SuperCollider VBAP classes.

A reminder to all that from 31st October you can register your own personal .ie domain (more details), forenamesurname.ie or similar, without any of the silly numbers or crap that the IEDR used to insist upon. I'd recommend Blacknight but I'm biased towards high levels of competency with competitive pricing. I suppose supporting UL Alumni isn't bad either.

Bits and Pieces of Interesting

2007-10-09T00:23:00.000+01:00

A project and a blog I have been following for the last couple of weeks is Michael Dory's ITP blog which is documentating some of the interesting pieces he's doing for the ITP program in NYU. In particular, I've been keeping an eye to his Concrete Crickets (NPR radio interview details) as I'd like to do something similiar. I've been mulling around doing a similiar guerillia installation with some of Mikael's new Thermin boards, a couple of arduinos or just AVRs and the new Living bridge at UL. This has left me off and reading the likes of ''Rough Notes on Programming AVR Microcontrollers in C'' and ''Anatomy of a C program for AVR''. Fellow mac users are directed to ``Programming AVR with a MacBook'' (see this tutorial also) and the OSX-AVR toolchain installer.

To keep track of some of the happenings at ITP, take a look at their Blog Blender.

Another couple of items caught my attention, firstly it was FeedJournal which takes RSS feeds, PDFs them put its angle is that it'll give you something like a newspaper broadsheet format to read them in. I've been using xfruits.com for RSS 2 PDF on my blog for ages and I actually prefer their cleaner and simpler format, plus its free! I can think of another alternative company which is doing equally innovative things in the sphere of dynamic publishing. Alternatively, you may want a simple digest email and you could try RssFwd.

A mad week, SID WG 4 Paper and Betting Exchanges in Ireland

2007-10-06T15:49:00.000+01:00

After a mad week that somehow saw things done, we've gotten in our paper on ``Sonification for Sonic Interaction Design'' for the Sonic Interaction Design: Sound, Information and Experience workshop which runs as part of CHI 2008, the paper was authored by Thomas Hermann, John Williamson, Yon Visell, myself and Roderick Murray-Smith. It actually took a fair bit to get some of it into shape but we've got a couple nice ideas including one that Yon and I worked at a bit which was the idea of a Sonic Interaction Atlas for designers. More on this to follow at a later date.

I was busy too on the IMS Arcs front as we're trying to discover the exact legal situation for Betting Exchanges. With a good deal of help from Richard Bruton (Mega Thanks are due to him), I got him to ask a question in the Dail last week which was as follows:

DÁIL QUESTION NO 167

To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance his plans to regulate or license betting exchanges to ensure that users are being treated fairly and that operators are suitable persons to operate in the market place; and if he will make a statement on the matter.

It was marked as a written answer on Tuesday, 2nd October, 2007 and it got the following reply from the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance ( Mr Cowen ) :

Under current betting legislation, betting exchanges are not deemed bookmakers. They differ from bookmakers in that they facilitate the matching of bets between outside parties unlike a bookmaker who takes the bet and the associated risk involved. Consequently betting exchanges are treated, for tax purposes, as normal companies, and as such are subject to corporation tax on their profits, which in the case of betting exchanges, comes from commissions charged on transactions. The question of regulating the services of such companies does not arise in tax law.

Above and Beyond, the Right Stuff

2007-09-29T17:31:00.001+01:00

It's not often that I genuinely get to sing someone's praises and today I received an email that absolutely deserved it.

I've been know to dabble in the production of conference or workshop proceedings and I've even given some guidelines on how to do it. This is simply paled in comparison to the latest work of Vincent Verfaille who has simply gone above and beyond this by producing a fantastic LaTeX package for proceeding editors.

The confproc package is a new LaTeX document-class for conference proceedings. It derives form LaTeX scripts written for the DAFx-06 conference proceedings, mainly based on the pdfpages package for including the proceedings papers and the hyperref package for creating proper table of contents, bookmarks and general bibliography back-references. It also uses many other packages for fine tuning of table of contents, bibliography and index of authors. The added value of this class resides in its time-saving aspects when designing conference proceedings.

He has written a short technical report on his experiences for DAFx06 and on using LaTeX to produce proceedings. Congratulations and thanks to Vincent for this most excellent resource.

UPDATE 1: I was emailing Vincent and congratulating him as well as suggesting he should submit to the PracTex Journal, he'd already beaten me to the punch and it looks like there will be a nice article in the PracTeX Journal for the November 15th issue.

Flu and down time

2007-09-27T23:46:00.000+01:00

Seems I couldn't avoid it any longer and I've been down with a bit of a Flu. Still trying between sneezes to get some writing done.

I'll admit to having gone off on a binge to cheer myself up and I've ordered Triple Axis Accelerometer Breakout and some super bright LEDS as well as some shiny triple RGB LEDS. I know I'm going to be doing some workshops next semester on Physical Computing using AVRs and Arduinos and I was reading a nice paper ``Fabric PCBs, electronic sequins, and socket buttons: techniques for e-textile craft'' so I decided it might be nice to have a little show and tell.

Dealing with ``too many unprocessed floats'' LaTeX errors

2007-09-23T20:46:00.000+01:00

After scratching my head for a few minutes and attempting a number of solutions to the problem of ``too many unprocessed floats'' which was cropping up in my LaTeX generation process. I googled and came across this little gem from Marc Mengel.

The gist is that I've been throwing a goodly number of figures at LaTeX and it has throw a wobbler as it has simply run out of buffer space to deal with them. In the context of what I'm writing, my thesis in this case, I need the figures to hand so I can't simply space them out. The answer is to use either the \clearpage or the \cleardoublepage commands, which neatly sorted the problem.

Presence Display Mark II

2007-09-20T10:22:00.000+01:00

I've been re-designing and re-implementing my arduino - ruby - skype - growl auditory display (see ICAD 2007 paper) and I've ended up starting almost from scratch on a lot of it. However, I've just about gotten a Rails-Skype display working as some form of RESTful Read-Only Resource service but I spent ages having serious fun with BackgrounDRb (see this intro) but it just wouldn't do what I wanted so I've ended up with a looping ruby program with some funny headers. This runs in tandem with a standard Rails app which is the more Restful bit.

require 'rubygems'
require 'rb-skypemac'
require 'rexml/document'
require 'active_record'
require 'YAML'
require 'appscript'
include Appscript

I never thought I'd been starting and querying Skype based on configuration data and then also using this to update a database! The code is still being debugged and cleaned up so once its finished I'll stick it online but at the moment, even after yesterday's head banging, Rails and Ruby are still the best full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications that I've come across and has saved ages in development time. I used use vanilla PHP with some PEAR extensions but they are not half as sweet as Rails.

The first iteration of the second version looks a bit like this.

Meez

2007-09-15T23:14:00.000+01:00

meez.com

Northern Rock crashing and where will the ripples stop?

2007-09-14T17:34:00.000+01:00

Does this news story - "Northern Rock shares plunge 32%" and its share price

indicate a new depression looming, will we see another Black Tuesday given that we already have a property bubble here. As Northern Rock is one of the UK's biggest mortgage lenders, one wonders....

Hat tip to Dan for point this out.

A Summer's Day in Kilkee, Co. Clare

2007-08-27T14:59:00.000+01:00

Contrary to the rumours, Ireland did have a summer this year. It happened on Sunday 26th August in Kilkee, Co. Clare.

Flat out, crash, burn

2007-08-19T23:38:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since my last post due to the workload I'm under at the moment. Things have stepped up a couple of gears on the IMS Arcs project as the scenarios we've generated are getting their first usability assessment and there are a lot of scenarios!

Apart from a couple lunches in the Wild Onion, things have been very stressful.

But at least you're bound to meet someone there you know.

I found a nice article on ``Controlling multiple Macs, locally and remotely" and one on mind mapping. Here is a nice review of the latest Amazon Web Services with a bit of historical context. Here's a nice shortcut page from Jan Chipchase with a collection of his most excellent presentations.

I've been re-framing some old work for my PhD which has gotten me back to doing even more R and LaTeX of the obscure and intermediate varieties. I even found a nice useful SurveyGizmo to help out on some of the other experiments I'm currently running. Add a couple of students who are in the final hectic moments of their taught master programmes and that gives the current mix of my work load. Now if I could some how fit in some time for a break into the schedule (no, not a holiday that'd be asking way too much!) before I do really crash and burn....

Installing / Upgrading R thru a http proxy on OS X

2007-07-25T15:21:00.000+01:00

Having upgraded my version of R to 2.5.1, I was intent on not having to go home and upgrade my packages but I have always had some troubles getting the http_proxy to work on OS X for R in UL. After following a few fruitless suggestions from the web, I finally stumbed upon the correct way that works for UL.

1) Open Terminal and do the following:
export http_proxy=http://staff-proxy.ul.ie:8080
export HTTP_PROXY=http://staff-proxy.ul.ie:8080

2) Run R and do the following:
Sys.setenv(http_proxy="http://staff-proxy.ul.ie:8080")
double-check this with:
Sys.getenv("http_proxy")

It should work happily now, I think the major problem is you need to export the items in Terminal before running R.

Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0

2007-07-22T16:19:00.000+01:00

The information architects consultancy in Japan, have a really cool update on their 200 most successful websites in the form of this rather sweet Tokyo style train map.

It's available in various versions including A3 pdf and as online clickable page.

Mashable has a nice list of group collaboration tools. I'll be adding Dan Lockton's blog to my list of interesting reads. If you are interested in design, take a look at Stanford's Michael Shanks and his class Ten Things 2007. Wired has a nice piece on citizen cartographers.

The Seanad election is all done bar the counting and luckily for Kevin, he didn't find any takers for his votes. I'm looking forward to seeing who is in and who is out.

As for the Deathly Hallows, even after reading it I'm undecided, but I suppose all series eventually run out of steam.

eBay preserving democracy, well belatedly at any rate

2007-07-19T21:13:00.000+01:00

Seems that the eBay bots have closed off the Seanad Election vote auction, no feedback barring the auto-emailer response so one has to wonder if there is a human involved in the process or if its merely an immediate suspension whilst the item is investigated. Just in case anyone missed the actual page, I've preserved a screendump for posterity and potential future prosecutions.

Speaking of legalise, the P.ie crowd, in particular Rebelman, who posted that yes it is illegal to sell your vote and that the person can be prosecuted under 1992 Electoral Act. The particular paragraph of reference is:

Section 25 (2) In addition and without prejudice to the provisions of the foregoing subsection of this section, every statutory provision for the time being in force relating to bribery, personation or other offences at elections of members of Dáil Éireann shall apply to elections in university constituencies as if these elections were elections of members.

According to Rebelman, "the crime would actually be personation by the third party involved and the sale would have directly facilitated this".

This leads back to a piece on Sunday's Tribune where Kevin Rafter offered his vote for sale, I'm very sure that reading the comments on his blog in reaction to his article that Kevin will take the correct action and immediately withdraw his vote from sale and print an apology in his next piece as otherwise one wonders if he may face a similar prosecution under the 1992 Electoral Act.

UPDATE: This story is now on today's (Friday's) front page of the Irish Times.

Election Fraud - Votes For Sale on eBay.ie

2007-07-18T21:12:00.000+01:00

Seems that in addition to offering tickets well above and beyond their face value, eBay.ie have gotten into where the real money is, Politics!

eBay is now allowing sellers to offer votes for sale, as shown here (screendump of page). For the princely sum of €1.62 at the current bid, you can get yourself a vote for the NUI Seanad panel.

eBay had better get their act together as even their online complaint service doesn't offer this category of item yet and as others have noted, you need to be a registered eBay user to actually complain about any items for auction. The pundits are going mad over at p.ie and I'd be forced to join the growing calls to get this dealt with by eBay, ASAP.

If they though that material from certain German political parties or non-shipment of goods was a troublesome issue, wait until they see the politicans realise that either you can have old style R. J. Daly Chicago politics or New York style Tammany Hall Boss Tweed approaches to vote management. I'm sure that most of the politicans I know or support would of course take the view this is highly illegal, that it should be prosecuted and that it should be prevented in any future elections. However, the fact that this is an FF government with some mudguards begs the question, which would they be happier in choosing...

Back from Travels - woes, woes and more woes

2007-07-04T14:01:00.000+01:00

Had a great time in Canada at ICAD in Montreal - cheers to Mark and Sinead for being great hosts! Unfortunately, once I got back it seems like everything went wrong as a day later nobody can tell me where my luggage is. I'm still a bit stressed and there is the usual amount of crap and politics happening at the same time so life is definitely not good this week.

*UPDATE Wednesday evening* - Still no sign of my bag but fortune smiled for Mel who'd been on the same flight coming back from a Canadian Linux conference and who managed to get his bag earlier this evening, many thanks for the offer to collect mine and reminding me to double check they've actually gotten the correct details down for me!

No CCNA just yet !

2007-06-18T17:06:00.000+01:00

Well managed to just miss the ICND, 78 % when 85 % was needed so was nearly but not quite there. Managing to duff the simulator question and my timing as a result probably didn't help the rest of the exam. Looks like it'll be mid July before I'll go again given conference and work deadlines but having done it once, it'll have to get easier!

A mix of things from across the wire

2007-06-10T20:34:00.000+01:00

Alex Steffan has a nice post "The Empire of Crime" which raises some interesting questions for the current world and our future directions.

For all the horrors that might await us, there exist an equal number of shimmering possibilities. We live at the twilight of the Industrial Era, and at the dawn of another. What sort of an era this will be depends, in many ways, on how well we dance what inspector Lohmann in Fritz Lang's film calls "the fine line between genius and madness" and how many of us choose, in the end, to put the powers we are gaining to the service of all. - Alex Steffan

So many cool household ideas! Tesla's work continues as MIT demos wireless power transfer based on his theories.

These are the kind of blogs I'd like to see for thesis project blogs, particularly its nice to see example entries like this (RFID 2 Bluetooth) or nice resources pages. Yes, its that time of year again where the latest batch of Interactive Media students get to showcase their talents and produce their thesis project.

Joe's Laptop - A Warning

2007-06-08T20:36:00.001+01:00

08062007
Originally uploaded by grizi

Seems security is gone even further to the dogs in the Foundation, as even using a security chain can now be circumvented by sheer brute force when it comes to the Laptop thieves that are prowling UL.

As Mike already asked the question, how long before UL refuses to spend project monies on laptops due to the increasing number of thefts from around the campus. It'd be nice if they added proper locks and security access to the areas in question first, but sure its UL and they'll probably take the wrong course again without consulting any of the locals.

Thankfully for my friend Joe, his laptop was recovered due to the quick witted nature of another colleague and Campus Security was alerted but this case is definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Fine Gael 2002 versus 2007 Seat %

2007-05-26T21:13:00.000+01:00

Fine Gael has had an incredible performance in this election, the above images show the percent proportion of seats per constituency based upon the number of seats available for each particular constituency. I’ve created this graphic as I felt today’s Irish Times graphics with first perference votes were misleading to a degree given that it is a PR-STV system we live in and that it really is how the seats end up that is the actual result when transfers are included. To borrow an often used phrase, “A lot done, more to do“. At this point, with the Seanad elections now looming and many of the upcoming Fine Gael candidates successful we can expect to see a good crop of new Fine Gael Senators in the next Dail. Fine Gael may require a two election strategy to return to power but the results of this election will provide a very solid foundation upon which to build.

It's a boy! Congratulations to Bruce and Luisa on the birth of Daniel

2007-05-24T22:46:00.001+01:00

Congratulations to Bruce and Luisa on the birth of their first child, baby Daniel, he's a strapping 8 pounds and 12 ounces. He was born today in Limerick at 17:53.

You've been canvassed!

2007-05-21T20:49:00.000+01:00

It was a bit like the old tango ad - you know when you've been canvassed. I'm not often canvassed during elections because I'm always home closer to eight or later and sure who's ever about over the weekends so it was with a bit of a suprise that I got my first doorstep experience with a canvasser.

Roll up, Mr Canvasser for Peter Power, who did all the introductions that I assume are the norm and then said sure "You'll think of Peter, won't you ?" (minus marks from the start but hey!) to which I replied "I work in IT and I haven't seen any major IT companies coming to Limerick in the last 5 years and in fact a number of my friends have lost their jobs in the mean while and gone to Dublin for work...." (Opening here for Mr Canvasser) to which he replied "But things have been good", I then said "So what about Dell and contingency plans ?" to which he said he had family working (I really doubt it but maybe) there who said it was fine, I countered his argument as I've heard from real people who work there that its questionable and he then said "Sure if Dell go, sure we'll find something else...". At this point, I realised I was talking to a complete muppet and I told him I couldn't vote for his candidate and said goodnight.

The whole conversation showed me the complete and utter disregard that FF have for voters, I asked reasonable questions which effect my future and the future of my city and it was like "Sure things are grand..." type responses. The whole incident might be a little unfair as I have canvassed before and will ask the hard questions but I kinda like Peter Power so I figured I'd let him off easy but even he couldn't give a good glib answer like "Sure there's a new data warehouse going up in Raheen, there'll be a few jobs there" (I would have in his place!).

Its true I wasn't going to vote for FF but to be fair one always needs to hear both sides of the argument and well the arrogance and hollowness I got from that FF canvasser just proves that foot soldiers of Destiny are empty vessels pretty much like the rest of their party.

Hillary vs Obama and Newstalk's Fake Candidate - Political YouTube Laughs

2007-05-19T12:11:00.000+01:00

For a laugh.

or this piss take from Newstalk

Silly online Geek test....

2007-05-19T11:57:00.000+01:00

Well - keeping with the trend,

Your Score: Pure Nerd

78 % Nerd, 21% Geek, 4% Dork

For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Take the test yourself

A few things to provide respite from the election

2007-05-15T22:32:00.000+01:00

If you haven't already done you're daily duty go and support Limerick for the new Monopoly, okay so its voting but its for Limerick!

Cory Doctorow has a nice article on fighting trolls - what works and what doesn't. Its a great article for even people just managing their own blog and most definitely worth a read. Here's a little teaser:

"Trolls can infect a small group, but they really shine in big forums. Discussion groups are like uranium: a little pile gives off a nice, warm glow, but if the pile gets bigger, it hits critical mass and starts a deadly meltdown. There are only three ways to prevent this: Make the pile smaller again, spread the rods apart, or twiddle them to keep the heat convecting through them."

It points out a great technique, disemvoweling which uses the removal of vowels as a mechanism for dealing with trolling or unwanted posting. I wish some Irish fora would take a leaf.

The Register has a nice interview on the guys who wrote the attack which breaks WEP encryption in under 2 minutes. There is another attempt to crack down on the possibility of money laundering in the virtual world. Experts are afraid that it will be come a type of virtual Hawala system which is a honor type money transfer system where the transfers are informal and are not regulated by governments.

The Economist has a nice article on how mobile phone penetration correlates positively with economic growth. Hat tip to WorldChanging. I've read earlier related work and its quite an interesting read. A follow up on the earlier related work has shown one amazing statistic which states that by adding 10 mobile phones per 100 people a country can see a 0.6% increase in GDP per capita annually. Another link, which is always worth checking out is Jan Chipchase's blog (RSS), at least for those interested in mobile design.

Checkout Ten Steps towards a greener life and Yahoo's new site, Yahoo Green. The SHPEGS project is aiming at producing an open design in a not-for-profit manner with the aim of designing and prototyping a renewable electrical generation system for use in moderate climates such as Ireland.

Coalition for Change moving ahead in all polls

2007-05-14T20:49:00.000+01:00

Looks like this is a first but it seems that tomorrow's IMS poll will show the Coalition for Change, i.e. FG/Lab on 39% putting it just ahead of the current Government, i.e. FF/PD on 38%.

It's a first as this is the first time that all the major polling companies have FG/Lab outpolling the current FF/PD Government. This close race could easily be influenced by the debates on RTE on Wednesday (Pat Rabbitte, Michael McDowell, Trevor Sargent and Gerry Adams) and on Thursday (Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Taoiseach-hopeful Enda Kenny).

Random bits of linkage

2007-05-14T01:16:00.000+01:00

James Patrick Kelly's novella Burn won the Nebula Award, it is the first Creative Commons licensed work and the first podcast to win an Nebula. - BoingBoing

Don't forget to slay those pesky office vampires.

Charlie Stross has a nice post / speech he gave on technology and the future.

From Pasta And Vinegar some solid basic advice on designing and conducting research:

Firstly ask these questions-
1. Which research question are to be asked
2. Which data will answer those questions
3. Where, and from whom, those data can be obtained
4. In what form the data will be collected
5. Who will be responsible for collecting, analyzing, and writing up the data
6. When each stage of data collection, analysis and report writing will begin and end
7. How, by whom, and to whom results will be disseminated“

Make two tables-
Table 1:
What do I need to know?
Why do I need to know this?
What kind of data will answer the question?
Where can I find the data?
Whom do I contact for access?
Timelines for acquisition

Table 2:
Research Questions / Process Data and Outcome Measures / Sources of Data

An astute lady and two thoughts on BertieGate

2007-05-14T00:50:00.000+01:00

As you are aware, my judicial separation proceedings concluded around November/December 1993. The issues which I have been explaining to the tribunal.

- Bertie Ahern, on his past financial issues.

However Elizabeth made a comment at GUBU. She asked the question

Why would a judicial separation be a reason for anyone not “operating a bank account for a number of years”?

And she offers two possible explanations:
1 -

The husband’s sworn affidavit of means was not a true reflection of his actual means or his ability to pay maintenance. If the court knew the true extent of the husband’s means, it would order higher maintenance payments to the wife and children. If the wife suspected this, she could apply to the court for a discovery order of any bank accounts and, therefore, the husband closed his accounts and operated on a cash only basis or through bank accounts nominally controlled by others.

2 -

As above, but the wife was aware the affidavit of means grossly understated the husband’s means. She was aware that certain amounts could not be declared in the affidavit because they had not been declared to the revenue. She colluded in this in return for, for example, a large lump sum or 100% of the house.

She ends with "So it seems the only possible explanation for not having a bank account is that he was either cheating his wife and children of maintenance or he was evading tax or, of course, a combination of the two. Or am I missing something? I know these are in camera matters, but what other explanation could there possibly be?"

I had thought the story dead but this is a very different angle on the affair which may be the straw breaking the camel's back or not.

Sarkozy is in

2007-05-06T21:57:00.000+01:00

Well France has had it second round of elections and congratulations to the new president, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy. I think he is probably the best person to shake up the system and give France's economy a kick start.

To tell the truth, I had helped James Lawless put together his video and podcasts so I think it's only fair to leave the last word to him on what should be the beginnings of a good Franco-Irish relationship.

Golden Compass Daemon

2007-05-03T23:01:00.000+01:00

Taking a leaf from Dan

Am I who I think I am ? Click thru and answer the Q&A about me and it will alter the daemon to suit.

One of my biggest pet peeves answered!

2007-04-30T22:09:00.000+01:00

Take a look at the cityscape below:

And take a look at this streetscene:

How is this possible ? It can be done using Lunar-Resonant Streetlights, the design of a San Francisco-based design collective called Civil Twilight who have won the grand prize from Metropolis Magazine competition for emerging designers.

The Lunar-Resonant Streetlights can "sense and respond to ambient moonlight, dimming and brightening each month as the moon cycles through its phases." The bulbs used in the lights would also be replaced and instead it would use LEDs and photosensors which dynamically determine the current ambient light levels and vary its illumation accordingly. One of my personal peeves is that of light pollution as I can no longer enjoy the night's sky in its full glory. This solution reduces light pollution by working with the current moonlight rather than trying to overpower it. The possibilities are wonderful as this product is an outstanding high-tech design which can easily help in bringing back the stars to a urban neighbour skyspace near you.

Mega hat tip to the WorldChanging article about these streetlights.

Interactive Media Workshop - Arduino

2007-04-30T12:29:00.000+01:00

My presentation to the Interactive Media Master's class is available here as a pdf.

Topics covered included:

An introduction to the Arduino - programming, capabilities, etc

Digital / Analog

Sensors and Actuators

A couple of simple Arduino sketches

Linking to Flash and to PD

Examples of Interactive Objects / Displays including a Spooky Skull by Tod E. Kurt, the e-textile construction kit by Leah Buechley, Wanderlust by Hector Ouilhet and my work on creating an Ambient Auditory Group Presence Display.

Election Musings

2007-04-29T18:23:00.000+01:00

"And Caesar's spirit ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war; That this foul deed shall smell above the earth, With carrion men groaning for buriel."
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

"This is something different, you'll like how this feels. No time for asking questions, no time for wondering. We've had enough of you now, we've heard everything.

We're gonna play a new game, you put on this blindfold you do what we tell you, You do as you're told used to be the leader, but now come the time to serve maybe we'll show some mercy, maybe you get what you deserve.

Come down to the end, gonna make it go faster why the frown, my friend? This is your disaster countdown to the end, only make it go faster come on down, my friend, it's time to meet your master.

You've left quite a mess here under your stewardship. You thought you figured it out but you'll find your place in this. You think it's so convincing, don't you see the truth?"
Meet Your Master by The Nine Inch Nails

If you haven't sorted out your Postal Vote, do it before Tuesday or you'll be out of luck. The campaign for weekend voting is dead for this election but its arguments will live on and mark my words , they will be show in the polls come May 24th.

But for now, its down to the biggest media blitz this country will have seen, Game On!

Human-Computer Interaction in Ireland Workshop

2007-04-27T00:28:00.000+01:00

Here is a little bit on next week's workshop.

The University of Limerick's Interaction Design Centre is hosting a 1-Day Workshop on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction in Ireland (iHCI07) on May 2nd, 2007. The purpose of this Workshop, which we hope will become an annual event, is to promote networking and collaboration among academics and practitioners is the broad area of people interacting with technology. This is a wide area with topics ranging from areas including but not limited to, usability studies, interface design and evaluation, accessibility issues, cognitive ergonomics, human factors in computer systems, computer supported cooperative work, human computer interaction, multimedia and interaction design. As an interdisciplinary topic with many disciplines such as, software engineering, psychology, sociology, art and design, communication studies, information science, engineering, we hope to attract a wide number of researchers to what will be a very interesting and productive workshop.

The intent of this Workshop is to bring together researchers, practitioners and teachers interested in the field, to document past and current activities, and to setup a database of information in this area on an all-Ireland basis. The Human-Computer Interaction community in Ireland is still quite small and as such the focus of the workshop is aimed at increasing the awareness of the range and depth of issues being studied in Ireland, rather than on the presentation of research papers.

The result of this Workshop aims to provide a better profile for individuals and groups involved in the HCI area in Ireland, as currently, despite the size of our software industry, Ireland has not yet developed as significant international leader in this important area in the software field. This is something, that through collaboration and networking we can work towards changing. Liam will give a talk on the IDC itself and Mikael has a few bits and pieces including a short bit on our involvement in the new COST action on Sonic Interaction Design.

Visual Confusion or Deliberate Design?

2007-04-26T16:06:00.000+01:00

It seems in FF's hurry to get some vague campaign website up and running that they've missed out on hiring some competent designer for their new "Next Steps" campaign site. The resulting image is shown here:

The site, as it now stands, has a confusing visual effect occuring on the main page which does not seem to serve any design rationale. I would love to understand why such a distracting effect was added or if it was just a typical blunder by the party of blunders. This website has more information on the Hermann-grid illusion.

Tips for Biz

2007-04-21T23:22:00.000+01:00

A suggestion I've recommended to a number of clients and colleagues is to look at using VOIP foreign phone numbers to help 'internationalise' your business presence. A nice Rails cart for products is Shopify (review). Trying to organise a seating plan, look no further than SimpleSeating.com. From Lifehacker, check out the article on "How to assign a domain name to your home web server". To finish, a really nice review of some tasty selections of web 2.0 tools / sites / services available for web developers. Don't forget to also check out swf Image Replacement.

And for a bit of a laugh, make your own "Hi, I’m a web2.0 designr" card.

Finally, take a look at the Airbag Department of Security and its Blog Advisory System.

Sorting, Writing and Hacking

2007-04-17T16:58:00.000+01:00

Bit of a mixed week with bits and pieces up in the air as I'm trying to get some listening tests done, which as ever means things are a bit crazy given deadlines and the fact I'm off with Mikael for a COST meeting to Brussels next week.

A couple of nice Ruby articles worth a read are SVD recommendation system in Ruby and Decision Tree Learning in Ruby.

There are a couple of interesting political posts on PDF, "Le Internet campaign" and "YouTube: Who Gets It?". The people and parties who do understand the Internet will be easy to spot and to be fair we are already prepared to showcase them and to offer awards so I'd expect to see some parties making the effort for the forthcoming election.

Worldchanging throws up the usual interesting mix from commerical Rooftop Wind Turbines to some Earth Day Voices commentaries by

William McDonough (Cradle2Grave - "To move from improvement to revolutionary transformation, we need 5% of the human population committed to cradle to cradle flows—clean healthy materials in closed cycles seen as nutrients, clean energy, clean water, and social fairness.")

and by

John Thackara (Doors of Perception - "The problem is that our collective knowledge footprint is still tiny in a global context, and is growing far too slowly relative to the time available for us to to turn things around. This is why we have to crack the distribution question: How do we ensure that knowledge about sustainable practices is available where and when it needed? As scavenger-innovators, our first response to the question should be to ask another: who has cracked a similar distribution question in the past? How might we learn from, or piggyback on, their success?").

Random bits

2007-04-15T16:03:00.000+01:00

Had a great week starting with a trip to Dublin. Got a chance to see Bare Naked Ladies in concert ! Yes, they were brillant, actually ended up in nearly the same spot as three years ago too! Meet Steve for lunch in the Hive / Plex that is Google and was truly impressed. If only the ID or HCI jobs were in Ireland, I'd be banging on their door for a job! Free good food and soooo many toys...... Not to mind interesting work, well at least Steve has more than definitely landed on his feet.

Bits from the Ether include:
12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them, "Pilfering ravens, Corvus corax, adjust their behaviour to social context and identity of competitors" (but its probably easier to read the article in this month's Scientific American). The greater Boston area are deploying a wireless-sensor network to report pollution and traffic, the ESA are tracking farmers for compliance via satellite imagery.

A definite watch for any QuickSilver OS X junkie is Hack Attack: The Quicksilver video extravaganza which has more QuickSilver tips and tricks that are just top notch. On a tools notes, I've started using iGTD which is another tool in the GTD vein but with its sweet QuickSilver links and nice touches is definitely one to watch. iGTD has nice iCal links which suits as the group are seriously into using GCal but you can use this post to ensure iCal and GCal play nice.

How do you look as a tagcloud ?

2007-04-04T14:59:00.000+01:00

Here's a nice diversion for a couple of minutes, which allows you to submit an image and tag list and view the result as a tag cloud.

Here is the pre tag cloud version of me:

Here is the tag cloud version of me:

According to the textorizer website, its can take a raster image in a format such as png, jpeg or gif, perform edge detection using Sobel convolution filtering and then replace these edges with the supplied lines of text. Check here, for more about it, including source. More examples can be seen on Flickr.

RubyOSA-discuss list to the rescue

2007-03-30T00:28:00.000+01:00

Pints are owed to Laurent Sansonetti for a very swift answer and reminder about spring cleaning of ruby directories. I was having some real frustration today trying to get RubyOSA to talk to iTunes to add a set of playlists within a folder as part of a larger idea for doing simple pairwise auditory comparisons using iTunes (it should allow tracking for times played too) rather than using either Gary's Sonic Mapper or the Sonic Browser. The idea is not quite finished yet but the rough ruby code is up for a look to give you a gist.

All the sounds for a particular pairwise comparison experiment

The sounds for a particular pairwise comparison

Weekend Vote Petition

2007-03-26T16:27:00.000+01:00

Support the petition for Weekend Voting for the forthcoming General Election.

See also Cian's post on No Thursday Voting.

Videos, Text To Speech

2007-03-26T15:40:00.000+01:00

I've added some holiday videos online on YouTube.

Seems the lads and ladies at xFruits have been busy and teamed up with vocalfruits to provide a nice RSS to MP3 feature for blogs using some standard enough text to speech processing. See and hear an example using my blog's rss.

Also need to update my Linked In profile to keep up with the lads.

Back from Skiing

2007-03-26T12:31:00.000+01:00

Had a great week with some fortunately timed snowfall in Saalbach-Hintergleem so its back to work today!

More photos can be seen here.

Gone Skiing

2007-03-16T16:07:00.000Z

Off for a bit of a skiing holiday with some of the lads, so it's goodbye to this

and Hello to this

via DeadKenny

Bits, pieces and ramblings

2007-03-13T15:22:00.000Z

If the number of emails I'm getting about Campbell's latest price increase is anything to go by, UL will have probably spent enough cash to boil the water for everyone due to the cost of sending around all the emails (1 - M). It'd be interesting to see a calculation with regard to number of recipents, server time and electricity costs...

On a ruby note - Introducing Behaviour-Driven Development and A new look at test driven development, have a look at GeoKit.

Using Twitter productively.

Mac OS X treats include Quicksilver’s “Comma Trick”, Enabling Quicksilver proxies and application menus and The Levelator (an free [non-commerical use] app that is a leveler that corrects for medium-term variations in loudness instead of the short-term and long-term variatons processed by compressor/limiters and normalizers in sound files). Thinking about Calendars, whilst I'm a big Google Calendar fan - I still like the look of Remind and its python frontend, wxRemind. Here is a couple of reasons why to choose Remind over Google Calendar.

For asides check out the video of the Big Brother State, read all about FarmSubsidy.org (where and to who does the EU CAP money go ?), there is also a nice interview with Anthony Dunne who is the Head of Design Interactions at the RCA.

Monday - some work some play

2007-03-12T17:07:00.000Z

Got the board done so now its time for finalising the coding for my little arduino app!

The O'Reilly Network has got some nice bits on MacFUSE and on Event Stream Processing.

I have been wondering about Social networking and rails (maybe Ning is a better alternative) as we might be doing a new IDC alumni site.

Getting back to my current auditory display seeing as the arduino stuff is done and it works with Skype, I was wondering about Twitter but its a mud pit when it comes to active vs. passive notification and also to ambient intimacy but there is already some growl-twitter (Quicksilver too!) work done so I'm between decisions as of yet... I'll probably add a mock object and see what the demand and usage is like for twitter in the lab.