Conall's Blog

So, I’m now out in Mountain View, California; where they have clear blue skies (apparently they aren’t an unnatural sight to see).

Unfortunately, the reports were true; Mountain View is for all intents and purposes, a large retirement community. There does not appear to be much to do here at the weekends, especially if you’re motor-vehicle operationally-challenged like myself. There should be more to do next weekend, when I get to go and explore San Francisco.

On my flights over, I learnt a few things:

• Airline food really is kak! I’d never been on a flight long enough before to get anything more than an overpriced, bland sandwich from Ryanair or Aer Lingus.
• These are the best headphones ever manufactured. They worked perfectly, making my flights as pleasant as possible.
• Apparently town planning isn’t as overly complicated and messy as it is in Ireland. All one needs is a copy of Sim City.
• So far, I appear to be either immune to jet lag (highly unlikely) or I’ve just been lucky so far. We’ll see how I do returning home in a few weeks, when I cross 10 time zones in 32 hours.

So, after spending a considerable amount of time biltzing my room and clearing my desk, I’ve decided to show you how much/little I now have on my desk

To work out what every thing is, there is a better lit, annoted version

Now that I have a comfortable work enviroment, I’m all set to be productive over the next 8 – 10 weeks. As a side project, for when I can’t resist the urge to tinker, I’m going to try and organise my mp3 collection somewhat. There are triplicate and quaduplicates of some things, which explains why my collection is currently weighing in at 118GB!

Suggestions for ID3 Tagging/Organising Tools for OS X (preferably) or Unix (CLI based) are welcome.

I’ve had an interesting time recently. I went along to the Inaugural IE-NOG event last Wednesday. The talks were interesting, the session in the Schoolhouse afterwards was good fun and I even got to match some faces to the names I see on mailing lists nowadays…

On Saturday night, I hosted a small barbeque at my house. We had good food (especially the home made cheesecakes for desert) and good fun hanging out and watching parts of Live8.

Today, I got my long awaited results from my exams. I failed 2, Statistics and Compile Design I/Software Engineering.

I’m not overly shocked by Statistics, I’m not a huge fan of expressionistic mathematics. It’s too similar to writing essays in my mind, mathetmatics shouldn’t involve lots of choices, just correct and incorrect methods. Compile Design/Software Engineering wasn’t expected, but is manageable.

At least I passed AI with room to spare and I have escaped from the dreaded OS/Networking course which was obviously meant to produce a long line of O/S and Networking programmers, nothing more. It was clearly based upon a single O/S book and a single networking book, neither of which were wonderfully good. The O/S lecturer is even misguided enough to think that the question “Are threads and processes the same?” can be asked as a true/false question. The correct answer is “it depends on the O/S”. (You can tell I swing both ways between Linux and BSD…

Anyway, tomorrow I’ve a job interview meddling with a few Linux web servers, so off I go to do something constructive with my evening…

After a long few weeks studying (cramming if you will), as of lunchtime tomorrow they’re all behind me. So far they’ve all gone well, even Prolog which was a pleasent surprise.

While studying, I’ve finally found a proper, decent radio station, especially since the Phantom FM online stream sucks. I’ve been listening to Virgin Radio UK, initially via iTunes, but I’ve switched to using VLC, since iTunes didn’t appear (to tcpdump) to be using the IPv6 stream.

In other college related news, I’ve gotten approval for my fyp proposal. Which means research begins over the summer since I am going to try and get into a testing cycle by Jan or Feb at the latest…

At least I’ve a few things to keep me busy for the next while, the long anticipated nap to catch up on lost sleep, tinkering with multimode fibre, LDAP, Kerberos, FreeBSD and all sorts of other things repeatidly pushed down the perverbial To Do list over and over. Suppose I should look for a job at the same time too…

Anyway, off to bed I go…