donal's blog

F1 is back with a bang... and the changes for the 2008 season have had a dramatic affect on today's Australian GP... Just 7 cars finished the race which saw plenty of driver mistakes. Both Ferrari drivers had bad days with both Massa and Raikkonen making mistakes which saw them in the gravel pit. Indeed, Massa's demise was probably related to the collision which put Coulthard out on lap 26. Raikkonen missed breaking zones, spun his Ferrari while trying to take Timo Glock. The pundit's conclusion on the Massa / Coulthard collision is that Coulthard should have left Massa more room... I disagree! Coulthard was quite right to keep his position and Massa probably overcooked it just a tiny bit. He definitely didn't deserve to be taken out as he was having a good race. Timo Glock's spectacular spin on lap 44 robbed Kovalainen of 2nd place but resulted in Raikkonen, Kovalainen and Alonso being line astern after the 3rd safety car. This resulted in some good overtaking... K...

I happened to be flying through New York's JFK airport last sunday and got delayed over an hour on landing and again on departure. The pilot of our flight mentioned that there was some sort of security incident but there was no mention on the JFK website or in any of the main news sites... We could see a LOT plane in a secluded area of the airport surrounded by a bunch of police / security vehicles and it looked pretty serious... It turns out, the flight had the Polish Prime Minister (Donald Tusk) on it and someone had phoned in a bomb alert for the flight (it turned out to be a hoax). the only websites to report this news (which delayed 100+ flights) appear to be polish websites (and 2 of the new york papers)... very little mention of it in the mainstream news... http://www.poland.pl/news/article,Polish_PM_opens_visit_to_the_United_States,id,318420.htm http://www.polskieradio.pl/thenews/human-interest/?id=77632 http://www.nypost.com/seven/03102008/news/regionalnews/polish_pm_in_jf...

yep - one step closer to minority report style interaction with your PC... http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/03/wiimote-re-purposed-for-glove-based-multi-touch-system/ i want one... :)

in no particular order, these are my top 11 events of 2007 (couldn't choose 10!)... eating sushi in a real japanese restaurant in downtown tokyo (january) google ski trip to the italian alps (january) Weekend in Ballydavid, Co. Kerry for Siobhán Begley's art exhibition (may) Seeing R.E.M. at the olympia twice in one week even if they exclaimed "THIS IS NOT A SHOW" (july) kayaking near sigulda in latvia (september) Sligo hiking / clean-up weekend with folk from Google (october) Lewis Hamilton almost winning the F1 championship (october). Seeing The Frames at the Grand Opera House, Belfast (october) Seeing Ryan Adams in Munich (november) Handing off my first huge project as a project manager more or less on time (november / december) going to the christmas market in munich with berny (december) hopefully 2008 will be a much longer list... :)

Last sunday, Rafael (a colleague from Google) and myself went hiking in Glendalough (following the white route up along the ridge and then back along the valley to the visitor centre). We were fortunate to find a gap in the rain over the weekend - it was lashing rain and extremely windy at 3am and more rain showers arrived towards the end of the hike at 2pm (kudos to www.met.ie having rain radar on their website and to O2/Vodafone for coverage in the area). We warned a few hikers setting out later than us that heavy rain was on the way (particularly 2 folk who didn't look particularly well kitted out) and I'm guessing they got rather wet on top of the ridge. Overall - has a great time on the hike and it was really good to get out and about early on a sunday (loads of people had a similar idea).

I just had a read of an interesting report by DCC on Apartment Living - they served nearly 200 schemes across the Dublin area and looked at a number of items regarding management of the schemes. The 2 areas that interested me were the fire standards of apartment schemes and noise complaints. Fire standards for apartments are extremely low with poor signage and equipment. Noise is a large percentage of complaint to management companies but only 6 (yes 6!!) complaints were made to DCC in relation to apartment complex noise. The full report (which includes the checklist they used) is available here: http://www.dublincity.ie/Images/Apartment%20Living%20Part%202%20Oct%2007_tcm35-57039.pdf The checklist might be useful for folk renting/buying apartments so do check it out - page 116.

On the last leg of our journey around latvia and estonia (a 5hour bus trip from tallinn to riga). Has been an interesting 10 days - wandering arounds Riga's old town and the beach resort of Jurmala; cycling and canoeing in Sigulda; relaxing in the Georg Ots spa hotel in Kuressaare; and finally wandering around the old town of Tallinn. We've seen the presidents of Finland and Estonia as well as the Northern Ireland football team while enjoying some great weather along the way. More updates when I'm back in Dublin along with photos and videos... :)

Great weather in Dublin right now... Leaving the house this morning I had to wind down the window in the car is was that warm... and that was at 10am! The weekend was nice too - bright until well after 9pm these days. Great views of the moon too with the clear skies over Dublin... ... and now I'm stuck in the office only able to peer out the window and dream of holidays in the sun... still - got this great picture (left) to remind me of New Zealand last year. :)

as sinéad puts it "i got tickets, up yours!"... haha The last time REM played in Ireland was back in 1999 iirc - in Landsdowne Road. I fell out with a guy I went to school with over that gig - we were meant to go and get tickets together and he went off and bought the tickets without talking to me. I never went to the concert... so now that they've announced 5 nights in the Olympia, I'm delighted. It will be a preview of new material which is being recorded this spring. I love the intimacy of the Olympia so this will be a real treat... We've got tickets for sunday and thursday night. see you there...

heard this on phantomFM tonight while driving home from the cinema... genius...

c/o www.timesonline.co.uk I happened to notice this article in the sunday times when i was getting off the train today. I had expected it to be easy to find online but it took about 10mins of searching... The reaction on the times website seems to be "so what!". so what? do folk realise just how much society relies on the internet these days? The article is scarce of real facts but I would be surprised if the location they mention would have been the only target. Anyone with any knowledge of networks would realise that there are easier targets than one of the world's main internet hubs. More and more telecommunication companies are pushing data and voice over the same physical medium so both voice and data could be affected by such an attack. This worries me a little... A simultaneous attack on key network infrastructure in a handful of countries could result in killing communications for a larger percentage of the world. This has a knock-on effect for national security...

Incandescent light bulbs are to be phased out over the next 2 years as part of an EU initiative to reduce CO 2 emissions. This is abosultely brilliant and should result in cheaper prices and availability for CFL light bulbs. We replaced all the bulbs in our house last year at a cost of about €90 - that's not cheap and will drop considerably with competition. Kevin Barry has an interesting article in today's Irish Examiner. He recently visited the northwest and comments about how the current economic situation in ireland is having an effect on areas outside the Pale. he writes "the shimmering prosperity of the capital verges fades very quickly" and "once you get to longford and beyond, it can seem like you're back in 1987". This is a worrying sign if you take into account that house prices are falling in certain areas of dublin, a number of multi-nationals have reduced their footstep in ireland and that interest rates and inflation are set to increase...

I've been itching to try it out for a while and report on the current status of mobile computing possibilities in Ireland. Back in October of last year I went to New Zealand for 3 weeks and had hoped to create entries on my blog using my mobile phone or blackberry (i had both with me). Unfortunately my plans were dashed on arrival when I found both my phones could use very few of the data services available. There was also a bug in the blackberry Google Mail client I was testing at the time which meant i could read email but not send any. fast-forward to March 2007... I'm on a fast train to Cork and this seems like a perfect time to test out tethering my blackberry to my laptop. I had attempted to get it working a few weeks back with no joy but this time I had strong signal and the availability of an EDGE-enabled mast. After hooking up my blackberry to the laptop, starting the blackberry device manager and dialing into the o2 network i'm connected! First time, no messing, ...

so i've finally managed to get access to blogspot.com subdomains again (thanks to a ssh tunnel to a server on another network)! what follows is speculation based on the various reports on the internet (boards.ie; blogger's help group)... so it appears sometime in the past week (28feb / 01 mar), a change in NTL's routing policy has resulted in packets destined for blogspot IP space to be routed rather strangely (via various networks which are now owned by virgin)... |------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | WinMTR statistics | | Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last | |------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------| | [removed] - 0 | 57 | 57 | 0 | 29 | 110 | 10 | | [removed].ntlworld.ie - 0 | ...

so i came across an interesting spam issue this week over on the frames' website. We have a really simple stats tool that works out who spends the most time on the message board (based on # of posts) - some people really do no work at all! on monday (01 Jan) I noticed that the top 7 or 8 or had spam type names (vigra@online, etc) which tweaked my interest. so after a bit of investigation, i found that one particular url had made it into a spammer's attack vector list - getting hit multiple times in one day (over 1600 spam replies to the thread). my initial inclination was to block the IPs previously used (no joy! these spammers are no doubt using open proxies / infected machines). next step was to implement some sort of lookup on the IPs posting - i checked a random sampling of the IPs against email blacklist and lo-and-behold they were mostly listed on email blacklists too. bingo - check IPs against blacklists before accepting the post. so now all attempts to post to the fram...

So I've been trying to get my picasa albums displayed in the sidebar for a while now... as yes - i finally have it working... more later... so this week I've been a little idle but I've made up for it by spend^H^H^H^H^Hwasting my time on social networking websites. I've finally given in and joined myspace because some people find that it's uptime is so much better than other messaging providers that use standard-based messaging systems like SMTP (email). I have 11 friends already which isn't half bad for being 20hrs-old myspace-virgin. ;) One thing that bugged me about blogger for a while was that you couldn't easily add content to the sidebar from other sites... since i last checked though Blogger have lauched a better page layout editor (myspace sucks in this field too btw) which is pretty easy to use. Thanks to the folk on the blogger discussion list at work (yes - working at Google does have it's advantages) I have managed to add my picasaweb albums...

So after 3 or so weeks on the road we're back sitting in LHR waiting for our Aer Lingus flight to Dublin. It's amazing how much you can cram into 3 weeks as well as clocking up ~ 40000km of air travel and ~ 3000km of driving (new Zealand is deceivingly large). Thoughts right now: - flying east for 24hrs is grand if you have two naps en-route (no jet lag at all) - LHR must be warmest airport ever - it always seems to be ~ 30 degrees inside - can someone please come up with a air security standard that makes sense. - it is Monday. my body says it's Tuesday. - did the clocks change yesterday? i think we missed it. - Boots do excellent meal deals if you're ever going through LHR (£3.30 for any sandwich, drink and snack). - airports need showers. - new zealand is so cheap to live in. - wifi hot spots are good right - time to go and board the flight. photos will follow as soon as i'm home... :)

So we've been here for just over a week and having loads of fun... so far we've walked a fair bit, snowboarded, skied, bathed in thermal pools and gone swimming/snorkeling with seals. So since I last wrote, we spent 1 more day in Christchurch before heading to the mountains to get some late season snowboarding in. sinéad gave up on the snowboarding after the first day and found she was much better on skis! The last day we were up the mountains, the weather closed in and it snowed like crazy... was amazing and slightly scary trying to get down the mountain on a 30 seater bus (think the worst irish dirt road covered in snow with a 30 degree incline). fun! Yesterday saw us drop Oisín's 4x4 back to Christchurch and pick up our rental car. We drove up to Hanmer Springs and tried out the thermal springs - they were wonderful. pools of 38-41 degree pools filled with various minerals (we didn't particularly like the smell of the sulphur pools). Today, we drove up to Kaikoura an...

Arrived just over 24hrs ago and loving it already... The flight over was long and tiring but the kindness of the crew and the inflight entertainment kept us going. Sinead was feeling pretty sick after the first leg but the crew were really nice (thanks Andy!) and did everything they could to make her more confortable (gave us exit row seats with extra leg room & bottled water). Yesterday, we met up with Sinead's brother at the airport and went for some coffee to pass the time until our room at the YMCA was ready. Our room at the YMCA is really nice - ensuite bathroom, double bed, {tea,coffee,hot chocolate} making facilties and a balcony with great views of the botanic park and the mountains. After that we went for a stroll into the city centre to get our bearings. Headed back to the YMCA for a nap (we both konked out for 2hours!) before going for dinner with Oisín and his girlfriend Justine - great food and lovely drinks at the restaurant. Then it was back to the hostel to watc...

So am about to embark on a 3week trip to New Zealand. Less than 12 hours until my flight leaves Dublin. Can't wait... Our flights takes us via LHR, LAX and AKL and we will eventually arrive in Christchurch late Sunday evening Irish time (about 9am monday new zealand time). We're flying Aer Lingus (sans Ryanair-styling) to London and then Air New Zealand the rest of the way. Hopefully Ryanair haven't taken over by thr time we get back!! I fly Aer Lingus a lot so I'm used to the no thrills but respectful service at this stage (perfect for short trips). I haven't flown with Air New Zealand before but by all accounts they seem to fairly ok. They have an on-demand entertainment system which will hopefully keep me entertained for the longhaul flights (2 x 12hrs i believe). I have my laptop filled to the brim of CD music if it doesn't work out though... :) I'm going to miss every bit of this weekend's sports action including the international football and the ...