Brian O'Donovan (aka BOD)

Is the unrestricted distribution of music on the internet really a threat to the music industry?

2012-01-28T08:49:00.000Z

The recent controversy about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States and its close equivalent in Ireland has largely been represented in the media as a battle between the rights of music consumers (who want to be free to do anything they want to) and the music industry (who want to be able to exert as much control over online activity so that they can protect their livelihood). While there is some accuracy in this portrayal, the reality is much more subtle.

The people working in the music industry can broadly be divided into two groups:

The musicians who are involved in composing and/or performing music.
People who are involved in facilitating the distribution of music e.g. people working for record companies or working in a music venue.

I think that the later group of people might have a reason to fear that the unrestricted distribution of music might threaten their jobs, because the internet makes music distribution so easy that they are not needed as much as before. However, I don't think that the musicians have anything to fear. On the contrary, modern technology means that the current generation of youngsters find that it is easier than ever before to create music and to distribute it to music lovers all over the world. Similarly, people are listening to more music than ever on their various different devices. Hence I think that the future of the music industry is very secure.

In recent years the number of professional recordings made by formal record labels has been actually increasing. The number of home made recordings is increasing at an even more dramatic rate, because the cost of the equipment required is dropping and the equipment is becoming easier for non-experts to use. Of course, the record industry is not happy with their reduced profits because they are selling fewer copies of each recording. However, there is very little sign that the music industry is in decline and consumers have no reason to fear that the range of music available will decline.

Dublin's public transport leaps forward into the information age

2012-01-27T12:45:00.000Z

Users of public transport in Dublin will have been delighted to see that Dublin bus have recently been putting display signs on some of their busier bus stops to tell potential travelers how long they will need to wait for the arrival of the next bus on each of the routes service this particular stop. These display systems are connected to GPS sensors on their buses so apparently the predictions for the bus arrival time is very accurate.

Unfortunately it is not feasible to put one of these fancy displays on all bus stops. However, this does not mean that people who are not lucky enough to have a display on their local bus stop cannot benefit from the GPS data because the data behind the system is also published in the form of a feed to. There are several smartphone applications that use this data, but my favorite is Next Dublin Bus, which allows you to see the expected arrival times of the next buses on each of the routes serving your favorite stops. You don't even have to know the stop numbers when you are out and about because it uses the GPS sensor in your phone to help it draw a map of stops near to where you are at the moment. This application could be very handy if the weather turns nasty, because it will allow people go to the bus stop at the last possible moment instead of waiting for a long time in the cold and rain.

We also benefited from the recent launch of the LeapCard system which allows us to pay for our journey on any of the forms of public transport in the city with a single electronic card. I know that several cities have had this for years (e.g. London's Oyster card), but is exciting for us poor Dubliners to finally have this system which was long promised. As far as I understand, the factors delaying the launch were not technical issues, but political in-fighting between the various transport providers. In any case, I am glad that it is finally operational and seems to work very smoothly.

These technology updates are highly appropriate for Dublin, now that it has been officially declared European City of Science for 2012.

My personal highlights from the BTYSTE exhibition

2012-01-22T08:55:00.002Z

While at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition last week, I had an informal wander around the exhibition hall and this is some of the exhibits that stood out for me. I did not have time to visit all projects so it possible that I missed some wonderful projects. I won't cover the Primary Science fair because I reviewed it earlier.

I spoke briefly with one of the students behind the overall winning project and I was very impressed with how pleasant and down to earth he was. He managed to explain a complex project in simple and easy to understand terms. He also told me about his career plans and those of his partner - I have no doubt that they will achieve all of them.
The project which impressed me most, was done by a student from Avondale Community School which was entitled "Safe driving with the ice device". This project was clearly inspired by the cold weather around the time of last years exhibition. The student had developed a novel system to deal with the problem of windscreen de-icing during cold weather. The problem he spotted was the fact that water used for washing the windscreen will often be frozen and so he built a simple simple electric heater which could melt it. Then if the windscreen begins to re-freeze, the driver can simply spray some hot water onto the windscreen which will unfreeze it as well as washing it. He even took into account the fact that often the water in the pipes leading to the window washer and/or the nozzles can be blocked with frozen water and so he added a compressed air system to assist with unblocking it.
I think this is an idea with a lot of potential and the student involved was very eloquent and well able to explain the merits of his system. Here he is pictured with his model car demonstrating the system.
Two young second year students from Desmond College in Limerick won the overall group runner-up prize for their project "InVigil8 -A Personal Portable Security System" which combined 8 different devices to help with personal protection. I don't want to seem dismissive of their achievements, but I was surprised to see that in most cases they had not actually developed any of the devices from scratch, but had instead adapted an existing device/alarm to a new usage pattern. However, what really did impress me (and presumably the judges) was the confident way that they could demonstrate their project. I think that these young students have a bright future in business even if they decide not to pursue a scientific career.
Another project which was inspired by last years unusually cold weather was "Smart Pipe – An Automated Water Circulation Anti-Freezing System". This project implemented a system to stop pipes bursting during periods of freezing weather. The system they built had a motor to circulate the water within the houses plumbing system, this motor was automatically turned on when the temperature dropped below freezing point and this was effectively a less wasteful version of the old trick of leaving a tap running when freezing weather is expected. This trick is only effective when the water is slightly below its freezing point and so when the temperature dropped further the system automatically diverted water from the hot water tank into the cold water system. Since the cold water was already circulating the small amount of hot water added was dispersed and brought the overall temperature of the water only slightly above freezing.
The winners of the IBM award were two students from Tipperary who had developed a database of recordings of health and diseased horse hearts. They combined their database with an existing pattern recognition system so that vets can now submit a sample heartbeat recording from one of the horses under care and the application will tell them what heart disease (if any) the horse is suffering from. Read more about their project here.
The project "iCollapse:A mobile phone application for assisting those who are liable to collapse" should have won the prize for the most catchy project name is one was being given out. It also had a very clever and useful application - it uses the accelerometer and sensors in someone's iPhone to detect when the person had collapsed and then it will automatically contact a carer to come check on them. This is clearly an idea with great potential and I hope the student involves goes on to make it generally available.
Another ambitious technology project was the student who developed the FreeFlowApp web site combining formal traffic reports with people tweeting about traffic issues on the twitter platform. I know from experience that this is a simple concept, but very difficult to implement in practice. At the exhibition the student had a working version of the web site - not only could I see him demonstrate it himself, but I was also able to access it myself on my phone. Unfortunately the site does not seem to be active anymore.

As well as the student exhibitors, there were also a number of exhibits run by professional science and technology organizations. Naturally I thought that the IBM stand was the best, but I was also particularly impressed by the stand run by Institute of Structural engineers. Their stand was not very complex, but they managed to get visitors actively involved in the real issues dealt with by structural engineers by getting them to build complex structures out of paper discs. As you can see from the picture some of the resulting structures were very complex and I think people seemed to be spending hours at their stand.

Upgrading my home internet connection speed

2012-01-21T08:16:00.000Z

As I reported before, the download speed of the connection between my house and the ISP is typically not the factor that the determines the overall responsiveness on most web sites. However, I recently decided to sign up with one of the broadband/TV/phone packages with UPC and I was tempted to upgrade my internet connection speed from 25Mbs to 50Mbs at the same time because the cost difference was minimal (€5 per month). I must compliment the UPC staff for how helpful they were in making the upgrade process as simple as possible.

The first thing I did after installing the new router was to test the connection speed using the SpeedTest.net service. The download speed when connecting from my desktop computer (which was connected to the router by an ethernet cable with a nominal speed of 100 Mbs) was a very impressive 47.5Mbs

Next I tried running the test from a laptop which was connected by wifi link with a nominal speed of 56 Mbs (I was sitting right beside the router so the signal would have been very strong). Unfortunately, I could only achieve ~20 Mbs download speed. Since I was using the same test service and the same ISP link, it is clear that it was the link bertween the laptop and the WiFi router that was causing the bottlekneck.

I tried connecting via Android phone I could only achieve a download speed of about 10Mbs, but when I disabled encryption on my WiFi router the speed of the connection from my phone increased to 20 Mbs (the same as the laptop connection). Clearly the CPU load on my phone to encrypt the packets was limiting the transfer speed. As a result I decided to disable encryption on my router in common with my policy of allowing casual sharing of my network link with anyone nearby.

I was quite pleased to see that the upload speed had increased from the 1 Mbs I was getting with the 25Mbs package to 4.6-4.7 Mbs with the 50 Mbs. The upload speed did not seem to vary much from measurement to measurement which incicates that the connection between my house and the ISP was indeed the limiting factor in the overall performance. I think that this increase in upload speed alone will justify the extra €5 per month that they charge for the faster service.

Regional restrictions on media license are fundamentally unfair and hence doomed to become obselete

2012-01-19T20:19:00.000Z

The recent launch of the netflix service in the UK and Ireland was initially greeted with great enthusiasm, but this enthusiasm quickly turned to disappointment when people realized that the aomount of movies and TV shows available on this service was going to be much reduced compared to what was on offer in the USA (for essentially the same monthly price). This brings into focus the fundamental unfairness of regional restrictions on media rights.

In the pre-digital world, the owners of the copyright on work with a global appeal were forced to work with local partners in each grography to help get their content distributed. Typically they negotiated different licnese terms for each region based upon the market reality. This tradition has become entrenched in the media indistry and some players are trying to implement a similar scheme on the internet, but it is doomed to failure for three reasons:

It is technically hard to enforce regional restrictions on the internet, because the architecture of the internet was designed to make the user's geographic location invisible. Most sites that implement geographic restrictions do so by accessing databases that map IP addresses to geographic locations, but these are not notoriously inaccurate. For example, when I access the internet from work, most sites seem to think that I am in the UK since we get internet connectivity from a UK based ISP. This means that sites like RTÉ Player provide only a restricted service since they claim I am not in Ireland.
In the pre-digital era, movies were promoted on TV stations and in newspapers and other outlets that only had a regional reach. Therefore they would not tend to be very aware of what entertainment offerings were available in other countries. However, now people typically learn about new media offerings on the internet which has a global reach and when they read about wonderful new services they tend to get frustrated when they can't access them.
The majority of people see regional restrictions on media usage as fundamentally unfair. While their conscience might trouble them if they were sharing pirated track via BitTorrent,so they have no moral objection to using any of the freely available tools that make them appear to be located in a different country than they are.

The first generation of digital distribution for movies was on DVDs. The movie industry tried to continue implementing a different distribution model for different regions by implementing a system of DVD region locking this system was widely circumvented because people believed that it was morally unfair that someone should try to stop them playing DVD movies at home that they had legitimately bought while on holiday in another country. This system gradually lost it effectiveness because consumers rebelled against it and began to buy region-free DVD players, I think the same thing will happen to the regional restrictions on streaming media services and the sooner the industry wakes up to this fact the better.

Delighted to see the enthusiasm for science from the participants at the PrimaryScience fair

2012-01-15T11:11:00.000Z

Sometimes people complain that the current generation of young people are losing their interest in and enthusiams for Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM). However, anyoine who visited the Primary Science fair at the Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS this week could not possibly believe that these complaints are true.

Yesterday, I was scheduled to help demonstrate the Watson system at the IBM stand in the afternoon, so I came to the RDS early and spent the morning wandering around the exhibition. The first sction I visited was the PrimaryScience sectioon and the enthusiasm and energy of the young pupils demonstrating their work was wonderful to see. They were clearly very enthusisatic about their projects and rightly proud of what they had done.

All of the project were great, but the highlights for me were:

The Mount Sackville project "Smart Energy" which looked at ways that the girls could be less wasteful of electricity both in school and at home. Of course I am biased by the fact that I was involved in launching this project, but the reality is that I had relatively little to do with the project.
Once I introduced the girls to the topic they embraced the it with great enthusiasm and did not require much help. They used the current cost meters that I had set up for them to chart enetric usage and they summarised it in some wonderful charts. They also came up with great ideas for how they could be more effecient.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see how prominently they acknowledged the help they got from IBM.
The boys who were presenting the Unlimited Energy stand had built a number of different devices that showed different forms of energy being applied. Unfortunately I didn't record the name of their school, but I couln't help being impressed by the amount of enegry that the boys were putting into their involvement in the science fair as the battled with each other for the honour of explaining how each of the devices worked. For example, the heat driven motor shown on the right was powering a propeller from the heat contained in a cup of coffee. What was really cool about this type of motor was that no steam was allowed to escape and hence the motor is suitable for use on submarines and other environments when steam escaping would not be acceptable.
The FunBrayzia project from the boys at St Peter's National School, Bray was a very clever choice of project because they analysed the physics behing the various attractions in the funfair. I don't think it would have been too hard to get the young boys interested in funfairs. They had built very elaborate models of the various rides using and were using these to explain the physics involved.

Of course there is a lot more to the Young Scientist exhibition than just the PrimaryScience section. I will write up a fuller report later when I have a chance.

Synge Street Mathematicians scoop the honours again

2012-01-13T22:30:00.001Z

I just heard the news that two 17 year old mathematicians Eric Doyle and Mark Kelly from Synge Street, CBS won the overall best project award at the annual Young Scientists competition.

I didn't yet get a chance to view their project entitled "Simulation Accuracy in the Gravitational Many-Body Problem", but this brief description makes it clear that it was a very complex project and I am sure they were very worthy winners.

However, what is really impresses me is that this is the third time in recent years that the overall prize has been won by a maths related project from this same school. I don't want to take away from the great work done by the students, but I think that the person who deserves most praise is their teacher Jim Cook who is apparently great at encouraging his pupils to take an active interest in Maths and Science.

In recent times, many commentators have been moaning about the declining interest in maths and physics among the current generation of teenagers who see as being "too hard". Clearly what this country needs is more teachers like this who can help their pupils to learn to love these very rewarding subjects.

Review of 2011

2012-01-05T22:17:00.000Z

I started blogging at the end of 2008, so 2011 was my third full year of blogging. So I thought it might be a good time to review briefly my blog activity and life in general.

The number of blog posts I wrote in 2011 was 84, which is slightly down on the 113 posts I wrote in 2010. However, most of the drop is accounted for by the elimination of the weekly reviews, which I started at the start of 2010 and then abandoned. I have settled into a steady rhythm of roughly 2 posts a week and a reasonably stable set of topics involving mainly technology and gadgets.

I am happy with the tone of the blog and the level of interest it generates. The one thing that surprises me is how little I blog about IBM or the products that I work on. I think that the reason for this is not that I don't have anything to say about IBM products, but it is because I need to think more carefully before expressing an opinion about IBM products. For example, I spent almost 3 months working on a recent article for Developerworks while a typical blog post is written is less than a half an hour. I may increase the work related content on my blog, but it will probably involve mainly short posts pointing at more substantial articles that already exist elsewhere on the web.

In terms of life changes, the biggest change in 2011 was my decision to move from a people management role to an individual contributor role. As I blogged recently, I am still struggling to settle in to the changed role, but I am still happy that I took this brave decision. I think that it will the end of 2012 before I will be totally clear on how I feel about the change.

Getting Things Done (GTD) was one of the main topics in my blog for 2010, but it is not mentioned at all in 2011. This is mainly because I have stopped implementing the GTD methodology. My decision to abandon GTD is because my work now involves a smaller set of substantial tasks to complete as compared to my former role as a manager which involved tracking many different tasks each of which involved less work from me directly.

Going off-line for the Christmas break

2011-12-22T22:31:00.000Z

I am leaving tomorrow morning for a weeks holiday. Since the roaming charges on my phone are likely to be exorbitant and I won't be bringing my laptop with me I will be totally off-line for the week (definitely a change for me).

I think it is appropriate that the last thing I post to the blog should be my favourite Christmas tune which is Frank Kelly's adaptation of the classic song "The Twelve Days of Christmas". It is impossible not to laugh when hearing this song.

It takes power to stay connected

2011-12-20T07:57:00.000Z

The big advantage of having broadband Internet access (instead of the ISDN access which I had before) is not the speed of the link, but the fact that my home is constantly connected to the Internet. This enables many applications, but it also requires that I keep the networking equipment in my home constantly powered on. I decided to measure the power consumption of the devices in my home that are permanently network connected to see how much power this is consuming.

I get network services from UPC. They supply me with a cable modem that consumes 6.1 watts and a wifi access points that consumes 6 watts or power, so this means that I need 12.1 watts to keep my broadband link active.

However, I also have some equipment at home which is left permanently switched on to use this network connectivity. I have a current cost electricity monitor that tracks my electricity usage at home and a bridge device that uploads the data to a tracking web site. In total this requires only 2.8 watts (it is good that the device is very power efficient).

I also have a Tonido plug which is a small very small Linux server that can do a number of things. The most important thing from my point of view is that it uploads weather data from the weather station in my back garden to my personal weather web site and it also runs some software to help with my project to determine the accuracy of weather forecasts. It consumes 5.1 watts.

This leads to a constant power consumption of 20 watts, which translates to 14.4 Kilowatt-Hours per month which would cost about €2. I think that €24 per year is a small price to pay for the convenience of being constantly connected to the digital world.

Getting ready for BTYSTE 2012

2011-12-17T15:38:00.000Z

The highlight of the holiday season for me is the annual BT Young Scientist exhibition. Irish people will all be very familiar with this long running event which happens at the start of each year, but foreigners are sometimes surprised to hear that a science competition for school children generates such interest and excitement that event receives over 40 thousand visitors and the announcement of the winner is normally the lead item on that night's national TV news.

For the last few years I have had the privilege of helping run the IBM stand at this exhibition. It is always invigorating to meet young people with such obvious passion for learning about science. I always go away from the event with renewed confidence that Ireland will have a bright future with youngsters like this joining our workforce in the future.

IBM will have a significantly larger stand this year and very exciting plans for what we will be demonstrating. The dedicated blog has just re-opened for business and will carry all of the details.

My personal role on the stand will be in helping demonstrate the capabilities of IBM's Watson technology which recently made headlines by winning the Jeapordy TV game show against the best human competitors. The video explains a little why IBM believes that the technology developed for a simple game can be adapted to solve real world challenges.

Energy levels and my morning coffee

2011-12-10T07:37:00.000Z

I am a big coffee fan. In fact I find it almost impossible to complete my cycle to work each morning unless I have topped up my caffeine levels with at least two mugs of the drug. While the coffee tops up my personal energy levels, I need to use some electricity to make the coffee. I decided it might be interesting to use my new energy monitor to measure exactly how much electricity do I consume to keep me fully caffeinated in the mornings.

I actually have three choices of how to make my morning brew (listed in the order of how much personal energy is required from me):

I could use my old fashioned kettle to boil some water and then make instant coffee. This has the advantage of being really easy to prepare.
I have a traditional filter coffee maker which makes reasonably pleasant coffee. The preparation takes a little more energy from me, but the taste is better.
I recently got a fancy cappuccino making machine. Although there is quite a bit of work involved in using this machine, the result is a lovely tasty cup of coffee and so as a result this is my favoured choice most mornings.

The kettle does not consume any energy when plugged in, but not actually boiling water (I didn't expect that it would, but I checked to be sure). When I turned it on it consumed 2795 watts and took about 1.5 minutes to boil a half full kettle of cold water. This means that if I boiled the kettle once per day it would cost me about €3.50 per year in electricity (in reality I boil the kettle much more often than once per day).

If I use the filter coffee maker it consumes 928 watts of electricity and takes about 6 minutes to brew a medium sized jug of coffee which fills 3 mugs which is more than enough to kick-start my morning. If I used this device to brew my morning coffee every day for a year the electric bill would be just over 6 euro which is quite reasonable when you consider how much I would have to pay in a coffee shop.

However, I was surprised to see that the filter coffee maker consumed 2.2 watts when plugged in and not in use. I guess this must be because it has a clock built in and it is capable of being set up to automatically brew a jug coffee at a predetermined time so that I could have freshly brewed coffee available as soon as I step out of bed. Although this is a really appealing feature when the salesperson explains it in the shop, the reality is that I never use it, mainly because the mornings when I really need an instant cup of freshly brewed coffee are the mornings after the nights when I am least likely to set up the coffee maker correctly. Simply leaving the coffee maker was costing me about €2.70 per year in electricity - not a fortune, but I thought I might as well save that money so in future I will leave it unplugged when not in use.

Next I decided to analyse the electricity usage of the cappuccino maker. This is a more complex device and in fact the reason why I keep the filter coffee maker is because sometimes my personal energy levels are too low to make a cappuccino.

My first surprise was to see that the cappuccino maker consumes 1.6 watts when plugged in and not in use. It is hard to understand why this should be the case, unlike the filter coffee maker with its clock function there is no good explanation for why it should consume stand-by power because the cappuccino maker has no LEDs or other indication that it might be consuming electricity when not in use. I resolved that in future I also leave it disconnected from the supply saving me a further €2 per year (every euro counts these days).

Next to look at the power consumption when actually in use. The device has three different functions, each with their own power consumption profiles:

The milk heater consumes about 466 watts when turned on, but the energy draw is not constant. The heating element turns it self on and off while the milk is being heated (presumably in response to a thermostat).
The espresso brewer consumes 828 watts when turned on and it will turn itself off automatically once it senses that the coffee has been brewed (a little green LED comes on to alert me that it has done its work).
The whisk is used to give a froth to the heated milk. It is recommended that I only need to use this for 30 seconds and the power consumed varies between 5 and 8 watts depending upon how deeply the whisk is immersed in the jug of milk. Actually I was surprised at how little power this was consuming because it makes such a loud racket that I would never accidentally leave it switched on - but the device consumes about 50% of the same electricity by simply being plugged in.

Overall the total power consumption to make a large cappuccino is 0.09 Kilowatt-hours. If I made an average of one cappuccino per day (which I do), the electric bill would be under €5 per year which is quite good value when you consider that there are some coffee shops in Dublin which would charge this for a single mug. However, I was surprised to find that I was spending an extra 50% on power simply by leaving it plugged in while idle.

A lazy person's guide to staying active on several social networks at once

2011-12-08T07:56:00.000Z

I am a keen adopter of new technologies and as a result I sign up for account on most new social networking related sites. People sometimes as me how I manage to find the time to keep all of these accounts active. However, the truth is I can't keep active on all of these different sites, but with clever management of the feeds between the different services it is possible to give the appearance of being active on all of them without actually logging into most of the sites in question regularly.

For, example the following diagram outlines some of the automated information flows that I have set up between the various social networks on which I am active:

While Facebook is most popular among young students, LinkedIn is a social network more popular with older professionals. There is a large overlap between the people registered on both sites, but if you want to maintain links with all of your friends, you really need an account on both services. Since people seem to spend more time keeping their status updated on Facebook or Twitter than LinkedIn, LinkedIn has a feature that you can enable to automatically import status updates from the other platforms. This has the benefit of making it seem like you are paying more attention to your LinkedIn profile than you really are, but you need to be careful because the social norms on LinkedIn are radically different from Facebook and what is seen as a really cool status update on Facebook, might seem highly inappropriate on LinkedIn.
I use Foursquare for sharing with my friends details of where in the world I happen to be located at any one time. I like Foursquare because it is most fun to use, but since only a sub-set of my friends are active users of Foursquare I have configured it to automatically share my activity on Facebook and Twitter. Although some of the non-users of FourSquare are puzzled to read the announcements that I have become mayor of some arbitrary place, I get more comments and feedback through these other platforms than I get on FourSquare itself.
I track my exercise using the MyTracks application on my Android phone. This is a really handy application which uses the GPS in my phone to keep track of how fast and far I have been running or cycling. The data collected by this application is truly amazing, but it is not really a very social application. So when I want to share my training data with friends I like to use the DailyMile site. This site can automatically share information with both Facebook and Twitter. Luckily a colleague from IBM has developed a really handy Android application called Tracks2Miles which automatically transfers data from MyTracks on to DailyMile (which in turn shares it on Facebook and Twitter - which in turn feeds LinkedIn).
Bit.ly is a popular URL shortening service. If you create an account on this service and associate your Twitter and Facebook credentials with your bit.ly account, then you can automatically share a status update to both services at the same time as shortening a long URL.
If you wish to interact with social networks inside IBM, security restrictions mean that web based tools can't help. However, BlueTwit sidebar is a Firefox extension that is available inside IBM. It is useful because it allows you to conveniently read and write status updates from several different social networks both inside and outside the IBM firewall from a single UI..It is available as a sidebar whenever you have Firefox open (which is most of the day for a lot of people).
In a similar vein, WildFire is an open source extension available for Lotus Notes that allows me to read and write social network updates to a large number of different social networks from a single UI. It is really handy for anyone who has the Lotus Notes client running all day long (most IBM employees fall into his category).

While these automated tools are really handy and save me a lot of effort, they do have one significant drawback. Although they give the impression that I am active on several sites, and alert human can easily detect the fact that I am not really engaged. For example, there is no way for an automated tool to read what someone else has written and leave them a thoughtful reply. Most social software experts advise that you should spend at least twice as much time reading as you do writing (in real-life nobody likes people who turn up at a party and talk incessantly without listening - this is what these tools make you look like online). In fact some people feel so strongly against automated tools like the ones I described here that they refer to them as "anti-social software"

This problem can be partially overcome by setting up email notifications (most social network platforms can be set up to periodically email you a summary of recent activity that might be of interest so that you can respond to some).

A service that I don't use much any more is ping.fm - but if you really want to automate your status updates this is the tool for you. It is capable of connecting a huge variety of social networking sites and it is even extensible so that if support for your favourite network is not yet enabled, you can add it yourself. A really neat feature of this platform is what they call vocabulary expansion, this allows you to put special tags into your status updates and have the system intelligently replace these tags with something different when propagating your status update each of the target platforms. However, this feature never really caught on since most social networkers are more interested in vocabulary contractions than expansion.

Is working from home a good idea?

2011-12-06T07:57:00.000Z

One of the benefits of modern network technology is supposed to be the fact that "location doesn't matter" and "you can work from anywhere". While it is true that remote working is now very feasible for many occupations, I think that where you choose to do your work has a very significant effect upon your productivity.

I was recently at a conference and I noticed that during the lunch break many delegates chose to use the free time to catch up on the work they were missing by reading emails, checking voicemail, returning calls etc.. They were all a long way from their normal place of work so it is good that they could get some work done. However, they did not simply choose any location in which to do their work, instead there was a frantic search for suitable locations i.e. a quiet alcove where they had some peace and quiet as well as a place to sit and maybe even a place to rest their laptop.

What this means is that where you are located on a global scale doesn't matter. For example, you can easily do most jobs from New York City, but it would not be a good idea to base yourself in the middle of Times Square if your job requires some peace and quiet. Likewise you could probably do most jobs from a location in a remote wilderness location in African so long as you had power and in Internet connection, but you would probably need to move to a shady location ensure there was not too much glare on the screen.

IBM is quite liberal in terms of allowing employees to work from home if they want. In general the consensus seems to be that senior people can work productively even when remote from their colleagues, but junior employees benefit significantly from working in a team where they can learn from more experienced engineers. In some IBM labs in the USA, there are so many people working from home that people are beginning to complain that there is little point in being in the office since there is nobody else there to interact with, and the company has launched a "back to the lab" initiative to counteract the problem (which I guess is similar to the problem of city centres becoming empty shells when all businesses move to malls in the suburbs).

The factors influencing your decision about whether to work from home or not would include:

How far your home is from your normal workplace? I am luck enough to need only 20 minutes to cycle to work each morning, but many people live over 100km from work so they naturally don't want to make that journey if they can avoid it.
What is your home environment like? Some people are lucky enough to have a well furnished office space at home, but others might live in cramped accommodation shared with other people and hence working from home might not be feasible for them.

I am the only person from the team I am currently working with who is based in Ireland, so all of our team meetings are virtual meetings. However, I still find it useful to go into the office most days, becuase I know if I spent too long at home I would begin to suffer from severe cabin fever. It is great that companies allow people to work from home, but this does not mean that everyone could/should work from home on a regular basis.

Does the clock on my microwave consume more power than the heating element??

2011-12-04T20:41:00.000Z

According to this article in the Economist "a typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food". This seems very surprising to me so I decided to test if it is really true by using the individual appliance monitor that I bought from Current Cost Ltd. to monitor the electrical power consumed by my own microwave oven at home.

When not cooking food, my microwave consumes 2 watts of power to power the LED clock. This is actually higher than the 1 watt estimate used in the article and would represent a daily usage of about 0.05 Kilowatt-hours. When actively cooking food it uses about 430 watts, I was surprised how low this was since the microwave was sold as an 800 watt unit and seems to be capable of heating food as fast as expected by receipts written for an 800 watt model.

The total daily power consumed by the microwave naturally depends upon how much it is used. However, my figures were that the normal usage amounted to about 0.15-0.20 Kilowatt-hours per day. This means that for my microwave, the allegation in the article is not true. However, it is surprising to me that the LED clock is consuming 25-30% of the power of the heating element. Because of this information, I would like to plug out my microwave while not in use. Unfortunately the socket where the microwave gets plugged in is buried behind a press and it is not very easy to get access to so I will have to do some re-wiring before this is feasible.

Phone chargers are not all the same

2011-12-02T07:23:00.000Z

When I initially tested the electricity consumption of my phone charger when plugged in but not actively charging, I was pleasantly surprised to see that no electricity was consumed. Since I was running that test with the current cost meter which could only measure to an accuracy of 1 watt, I decided to repeat the test with my new more accurate meter and also I compared three different phone chargers. The three chargers I tested are shown in the picture on the right.

On the far right is the charger which came with my phone (a Samsung Galaxy II).
In the middle is a charger that came with my first ever Android phone. I bought the phone from a clone maker in China via eBay because Android phones were not offically available in Ireland. The phone was truly dreadful, but the charger was really cute looking so I hung on to it.
On the left is a charger which was part of a multi-device charger set I bought in Lidl.

The results of my testing were that the chargers on the left and right truly consumed no power when not actively charging the phone. At least they consumed less than 0.05 watts since the measuring device reported the power consumption rounded to 0.1 watts. Unfortunately the charger in the middle (the cute looking one) consumed about 0.5 watts when plugged in but not charging. This is not going to cost much money (roughly 5 cent per month if left plugged in permanently) but since I have better charges available, perhaps I should consign this charger to its most appropriate use as an ornament.

All of the tests were done with the same phone. Obviously it has logic to stop drawing power once the battery is fully charged, I can't be sure that other phones would have the same feature. Therefore as the saying goes "your mileage may vary".

Are the weather forecasts in Ireland really as bad as people complain?

2011-11-30T12:12:00.000Z

The weather in Ireland is notoriously changeable. As a result of this the common perceptions is that the professional weather forecasters often fail to accurately predict the weather even a few days into the future. However, it is hard to find definitive data about how accurate or not the weather forecasts are.

A quick search of the Internet will reveal several sites giving confident predictions for what the weather will be in the future and/or listing what the weather was at various dates in the past. However, very few of them reveal what their past predictions were and so it is difficult to find an objective measure for how much confidence you should place in a particular forecast.

I thought this would make a very interesting project for the BT Young Scientist competition for my daughter and a few of her friends. Unfortunately the judges did not agree and they rejected their entry into the competition. However, in anticipation of their project being accepted, I created a simple batch job that fetched weather forecasts from three different Internet sites each day and saved them in files for later analysis. Since the data was being collected anyway, I thought it would be a shame not to do anything with it and so I decided to a short bit of analysis which I write up here. If you don't want to bother reading all of the blog post the short summary is that the forecasts are indeed not very accurate.

When choosing the sites to use I was more influenced by how easy the data was to collect than by whether or not the source was authoritative. For example, the Met Éireann are the official forecasting service of the Irish Government, but their forecasts are deliberately translated from numerical predictions into a forecast that humans can easily understand e.g. "rain will spread from the west and become heavy by nightfall". It is very hard to do any statistical analysis on forecasts like that, so I deliberately chose three services which provided numerical forecasts in a format that was easy to parse:

The Yahoo weather service is widely used. By fetching the contents of this URL each day I was able to retrieve an XML file with details of current weather conditions in Dublin, Ireland as well as their forecast for the weather the next 2 days.
Weather.com is the weather service provided by the well known Weather channel and it provides weather data and predictions for all parts of the globe. By fetching this URL I got an XML file with their current weather data for Dublin as well as a prediction for the next 4 days.
WeatherOnline is not quite so well known a weather prediction site, but they make their data very easy to retrieve. By fetching this URL, I was able to get a CSV formatted file with current weather conditions in Dublin and a forecast for the next 5 days.

I have collected about 2 months worth of data at this stage. Initially I decided to analyse the accuracy of the WeatherOnline data for the practical reason that it was easier to transform CSV files into spreadsheets than to transform XML files.

The first thing I looked at was rainfall predictions. The following chart shows the predicted rainfall (on the Y-Axis in millimetres) plotted against the actual observed rainfall (on the X-Axis). If the forecast was perfect all the dots would be on a straight line with a 45 degree slope. I don't think that anyone would expect the forecast to be perfect, but I must admit that I was personally surprised at how poor this forecast is. I calculated the correlation coefficient between the forecast and actual data and it came out at 0.28 - the general rule of thumb would be to interpret such a low correlation figure as "there may be some small association between the figures". If I looked at the prediction from 5 days before rather than the prediction from the day before the correlation coefficient goes down to 0.07 - this is normally interpreted to mean that there is no association between the prediction and actual values.

Rainfall Prediction v Actual (mm)

The next parameter I looked at was temperature. The following chart show the actual temperature plotted against the predicted temperature from the day before and from 5 days before.

I think you would agree that the temperature predictions seem to be a little better than the rain predictions and this next chart shows the predicted temperature readings from the day before (in degrees Celsius on the Y-Axis) plotted against the actual temperature on the X-Axis. This is not the straight 45 degree line we would hope for, but at least there is some association between the two. Indeed the correlation coefficient is 0.33 which is jut high enough to indicate that there is a medium strength correlation.

Predicted Temp v Actual Temp

However, the team at WeatherOnline should not be too proud of this result because the temperature in Ireland does not swing very much from day to day so it should be easy to predict. The average error in their temperature prediction was 2.66 degrees. I am sure that they use a very sophisticated prediction methodology, but if instead they simply predicted that the temperature tomorrow will be the same as today, their average error would only increase to 2.76 degrees.

I have only scratched the surface of this topic. If the girls' project had been accepted they would probably have done a much more extensive analysis. Areas that would be interesting to tackle would be:

Analysing the other factors of the prediction e.g. wind speed and direction, pressure etc.
Looking at different weather prediction services to see if some are better than others.
Looking at longer time scales. Because of the way I am collecting the data it is not possible to go back into the past and collect historical data, but if anyone knows of a data source showing old weather predictions I would love to analyse this.
Looking at similar prediction accuracy in other parts of the world. For example, the weather is an extremely popular topic of conversation among Irish people, but an Egyptian colleague assures me that Egyptian people rarely discuss weather among themselves. I guess a discussion of the weather among Egyptians would quickly become boring since most days are warm and dry. Presumably weather predictions in Egypt are probably more accurate than in Ireland (but maybe nobody bothers to read them).

If anyone wants to learn more about this you can download the raw data here.

Sleeping and still consumping electricity

2011-11-29T07:55:00.000Z

I know that many people are worried about the amount of power being consumed by electronic devices which are in stand-by mode and not actually doing anything useful. For example this article from the Economist magazine suggests that devices on stand-by could be consuming either 5% or 10% of total domestic electric demand (depending upon what part of the article you believe). I recently found out about the One Watt initiative which aims to ensure that in future all devices will be legally obliged to consume a maximum of 1 watt each while on stand-by.

The current cost meter that I have installed in my home provides me with an indication of the lowest power consumption rate each day. This figure is normally around 140-150 watts. Presumably this rate is reached when all of the household is asleep and not actively using any of the many devices we have in the house. My total power consumption varies from day to day, but on a normal day this background usage level would account for roughly 20% of my total consumption.

Not all of the devices consuming power could or should be switched off at night e.g. it would not be a good idea to unplug the fridge/freezer before going to bed each night. However, I am sure that we should be able to reduce this figure significantly.

In order to identify which devices are consuming power at night, I would need to take measurements of the consumption of the various devices left on at night. The amount of power that each device consumes would probably be quite small and so the current cost meter (which only measures to the nearest watt) is probably not accurate enough. So I bought a plug in energy monitor from Maplins. which was capable of monitoring to an accuracy of 0.1 watts.

My first impressions are that this is a great device and wonderful value for money. However, the device has two main drawbacks which make it difficult for me to use:

The display has no back light and so it cannot be read unless I have a bright light shining on it. However, I can understand this since they don't want the device itself consuming too much power. And in any case, the use of a flash-light can overcome this problem.
The digits on the display are so small that they are barely legible. The unit has a number of different modes. In each mode one measurement is displayed in large digits, a secondary measurement is displayed in smaller digits an unfortunately I can only guess what value us being displayed. It also uses an even smaller symbol to indicate what mode it is in an this sysmbol is so small that I have no hope of even guessing what it us. However, I have developed a little trick to work around this problem - the voltage reading will always be close to 240 and it would be very bad luck if any other measurement gave a similar reading. If I cycle through the modes until I see a reading close to 240, then I can use the manual to see how many more times I have to switch through modes to get to the mode I want. It is a pity that a great device should be ruined by such a simple defect.

When I complete my measurements with this new device I hope to be able to report back here on which devices I was able to switch off and how much electricity I saved.

Microphone adjustment on the Thinkpad W510

2011-11-25T22:18:00.000Z

As I blogged about before, my current work laptop is a Lenovo W510 which is a really great machine once you get it working, but the setup can be a little bit tricky. Because I work on Sametime and most of my collagues are remote from me, I spend most of my days in Sametime Audio/Video meetings. When I got the laptop initially one of the factors that impressed me was the quality of the built in microphone. In fact the quality of the built in microphone was so high that I no longer had to use a dedicated headset.

Unfortunately, after a few months people began to complain that they could not hear me clearly. Initially I was able to solve this by simply turning up the microphone gain with the "sound preferences" application, but eventually people complained that they could no longer hear me even with the gain turned up to the maximum. I was so desperate to find a solution that I even tried using Windows on my laptop, but this didn't seem to behave any differently so I was convinced that the problem was a hardware one.

I raised a ticket with our local hardware support team to see if they could repair it. They reported that when they tested it the volume coming from the microphone was OK, but there was a lot of background hiss and so they replaced the microphone control board. Initially the microphone worked OK, but then it started to tun itself off again randomly after a reboot or a suspend/resume. Now that I was convinced that it was unlikely to be a hardware problem so I did a little bit more digging on the Internet.

Eventually I found a solution. It seems that although the "sound preferences" application treats the microphone as a single device, there are actually two different devices contained within it. The alsamixer application sees these two devices as "Capture" and "Analog Mic Boost" each with their separate settings (see picture). The sensitivity of the microphone is effectively a combination of both settings, but the "sound preferences" application only adjusts the level of the "capture" device. For some reason the "Analog Mic Boost" had been turned down to 0 and when I adjusted this back up I was then able to make myself heard at team meetings.

An example of Foursquare's sense of fun

2011-11-24T12:25:00.001Z

I blogged before about how FourSquare seems to have managed to inject the right amount of fun into their platform. Just today, I saw an example when I checked in this morning at a local coffee shop I got the following email from FourSquare. It is hard not to smile when you read this :-)

Congrats! Your recent check-in at Insomnia just unlocked the Fresh Brew badge, Level 2!

Look at you, Juan Valdez! That's a lot of coffee. Now that you've had your caffeine fix, get out there and conquer the day - one twitchy step at a time.

Nice! You've hit up 5 different coffee spots. 5 more new ones and you'll unlock Level 3! Foam moustache party!

It is leaving your laptop in sleep mode that consumes energy, not whether or not it is plugged in

2011-11-17T14:10:00.001Z

I blogged before about how leaving your laptop charger attached to your laptop can cause it to consume a small amount of electricity if the laptop is in sleep mode as distinct from being either switched off or in hibernate mode.

When I was thinking again about this I realised that this is probably caused by the fact that the laptop's battery needed to be constantly topped up. Therefore I decided to leave the laptop unplugged in sleep mode overnight. When I plugged in charger to the laptop the following morning it started to consume about 24 watts of energy until the battery was back to full power again and then it went back down to the 1-2 watts of trickle power again.

As a result I had not saved any power overall by leaving the charger unplugged overnight.

Laptop Chargers consume much more power than phone chargers

2011-11-15T20:07:00.000Z

Previously I blogged about the power consumed by my phone charger and I concluded that it was nothing to get too worried about. However, laptops typically consume much more power than mobile phones and so it is to be expected that laptop chargers will consume significantly more power than phone chargers. Therefore I decided to do a similar measurement on the power consumed by my laptop charger.

The laptop I used for the test was a reasonably old Compaq and the charger is not the original one which came with it (the original died a few years ago). I leave my laptop charger almost constantly plugged into the electrical socket in the wall, but for the purposes of the test I connected it through the Individual Appliance Monitor as shown in the picture.

I checked the power consumed by the laptop charger when there was no laptop attached and like the phone charger it was consuming 0 watts.
I waited until the laptop battery was well drained and then I plugged it in. The charger immediately started to consume about 63/64 watts of power.
I put the laptop into sleep mode, but the power consumption of the charger did not decrease (presumably because it was still busy charging the battery). After 2 hours the power consumption gradually decreased to 1/2 watts but not to 0. I assume that this is because the laptop is still consuming power in sleep mode. To eliminate all power consumption I would need to either unplug the laptop or else put it into hibernate mode.
The charger consumed roughly 0.05 KWh to charge the battery fully. At current electricity prices in Ireland this would cost slightly less than a cent.
When I woke the laptop from standby the consumption went back up to 24 watts. I assume this is because the charger is providing live power to run the laptop, but not needing to charge the battery.

Overall I think the lesson is that leaving the laptop charger plugged into the wall is does not waste electricity, but leaving the laptop plugged into it and in sleep mode does consume electricity. However, if you leave your laptop unplugged in sleep mode, you will still need to charge up the battery when you do plug it in later. To be really effecient on power you need to turn off your laptop completely or else put it into hibernate mode if you are not going to be using it for a long time.

Does leaving chargers plugged in really waste electricty?

2011-11-13T21:08:00.000Z

I have often heard people say that you can save significant amounts of electricity by unplugging your phone and laptop chargers when they are not in active use. However, I have also heard people say that this is rubbish because modern well designed chargers will consume virtually no electricity when not actively charging a device. I was not sure which advice to trust and so I decided to run some tests with my new current cost meter in order to check it out.

In order to test out how much electricity is used charging my phone, I made sure to make heavy use of it today and I completely drained its battery (not an unusual thing for me to do). Then I plugged it in to my phone charger and observed the electricity usage using my Current Cost monitor. Despite the fact that my charger was plugged in all day, it consumed no measurable amount of electricity until I plugged in my phone. As soon as I plugged in my phone the consumption jumped up to 4 watts for 2 hours before the phone was fully charged and the usage went down to zero again.

Based upon this measurement, I calculated that if I was paying 14 cent per KiloWattHour, I would spend roughly 50 cent on electricity to charge my phone for a whole year. Leaving the phone charger plugged in while not in use would make absolutely no difference to my bill.

What do I blog about and why

2011-11-09T07:48:00.003Z

Recently I was interviewed by a member of the IBM internal communications team for their "meet a colleague" series. The interview, which was published on the IBM intranet went reasonably well, but there was one question that she asked me that I found difficult. She asked me "what do you blog about and why?". The reason why I didn't answer very clearly is because I don't really know this myself.

It might seem surprising that I write a blog without a clear idea of why I am blogging or even a clear plan for what to write about it. However, to understand how this situation arose you need to know how I got started blogging. I initially started blogging on the IBM internal blog platform as part of an effort to understand the usefulness of the Lotus Connections product which at the time we were proposing to develop. My motivation was simply to get a better understanding of how/if people could derive value from using these tools because without this understanding I could not really judge if the platform we were developing was a good one or not.

Towards the end of 2008, I had a discussion about my blogging activity with one of my mentors (who was an avid blogger). She advised me that blogging inside the IBM firewall was somewhat like cycling with stabilizer wheels - a useful training exercise, but nothing like the real thing. As a result of her advice, I established an external blog. Initially I wrote very few blog posts on my external but gradually I gained confidence and now I would say that I am reasonably comfortable with my blogging activity. I still have an IBM internal blog, but I post to that blog relatively rarely because I focus my efforts on maintaining the external blog.

I still can't really say that I fully understand exactly how blogging can provide value for the blogger, but the fact that I am still actively blogging years later is evidence that I must be getting some value from all this effort. In general blogging can be used for spreading information and/or for facilitating discussion. As you will see below, I use my blog for both purposes (with mixed success).

One of the advantages of a blog is that you have a record of your activity so I decided that I would do a detailed analysis on what I was actually writing about and whether or not it was achieving my goals. In terms of spreading information, I guess that it is successful if a reasonable number of people are reading my posts. On the other have, the number of comments left on my blog would probably be a better measure of whether or not it is helping facilitate discussion. Here is the detailed analysis of my blogging activity for the last year (apologies for the length of this post, but since you have read this far you might as well read the whole post):

Why blog on IBM internal platform rather than external blog?: During the last year I wrote 103 posts to my external blog which means that I blog on average twice per week. However, I only posted 6 times on my internal blog . Three of the of the posts on the internal blog were cross-posts form the external one (to increase the chance of IBM employees seeing the post). Of the remaining three internal only posts, two were on a topic that would not be of any interest to someone outside IBM and one was expressing an opinion on an IBM policy. As I said earlier, I knew my external blog was taking over from the internals one, but I was surprised at this statistic. On reflection I should probably redress this balance slightly (even if this is only done by cross posting more frequently).

What do I blog about?: In general I blog about whatever I am thinking about. When a though enters my mind about what would be a topic worth blogging about, I generally create a draft blog entry with that title to remind me. I revisit my blog when I have time available and work on polishing the draft entries until they are ready for publishing. At the moment there are 15 draft entries in my blog, but if I need more than a few weeks to polish them I take this as an indication that I don't have a very clear opinion on the topic to express and so I delete the draft.
I analysed the content of the posts over the last year in detail and I could see that slightly less than half (45%) were expressing an opinion and hence were inviting comments. The remaining posts were split between passing in news about stuff that was happening (35%) and posts which were giving technical information on how to do something (20%),

Do people read my blog?: My first ever first blog post got 7 views, as my blog became better known the number of readers settled into the low double figures. In the last year, none of my posts got fewer than 10 reads, roughly 2/3 of the posts received between 10 and 50 readers and the remainder were split evenly between posts that received 50-100 readers and posts that received over 100 readers. In general I am happy with this level of readership, after all I am not a celebrity and in reality there are ways people can read the content without appearing in the statistics so if anything the readership would be higher than these statistics indicate.

Why do some posts receive a lot of readers?: This is a bit of a mystery for me because sometimes I write a post that I expect to be popular and it gets hardly any attention, but other times a post will be an unexpected hit. The most popular post over the last year (getting over 1,200 hits) was a description of how I recorded OSSBarCamp and converted the content into a format suitable for posting online so apparently this is a subject that people struggle with. Most blog posts are mainly only read in the week immediately after they are posted, but occasionally a popular post will continue to be read for a long time afterwards. For example, shortly after I started my blog I posted a test entry from my mobile phone. The entry did not have much content because it is difficult to type much on my phone and in any case I intended to delete it once I verified that it was successfully posted (but obviously I forgot). This turns out to be my second most popular post ever and interestingly almost all of the readers come from mobile devices (the content describes how I posted from my mobile and hence it is more interesting for this audience).

Where are my readers?: Surprisingly, more of my readers come from USA (4,587) than Ireland (3,285) and my readers come from developed countries all over the world. As you can see from this map, Africa and South America are not at all represented among the readers of my blog..

Does the blog help start discussion?: Unfortunately I get very few comments on my blog. Roughly 80% of my posts get no comments at all. Half of the remainder (10%) get 1 comment an only 10% receive more than one comment. At first glance this is very disappointing and would seem to indicate that the blog has very little success in generating conversation. However, I do find that I get quite a few comments that are not left on the blog itself. Sometimes people will comment on the Facebook of LinkedIn platforms where all of my entries get cross-posted. What really surprises me is how often I will be standing in the queue for coffee in work when the person next to me will turn around and say "I was reading what you wrote on your blog about X and I was thinking ..." - this can often lead to a very interesting discussion.

Am I really a human?

2011-11-09T07:34:00.000Z

Lots of web sites implement a CAPTCHA system to stop access to their site from automated programs. Normally this involves showing a distorted picture of a few letters and asking the user to read them and type them into a text box to verify that they are a real human. The general idea is that reading such a distorted picture should be an easy task for a human, but it is a surprisingly difficult task for automated image recognition programs.

When CAPTCHAs were first introduced the distortion in the picture was relatively minor and so it was not a major inconvenience for user to type in the letters. However, it should not have been a major surprise that the bad guys invested in improved software for reading distorted letters and the CAPTCHA developers were then forced to implement even greater distortion of their sample letters to trick the automated software. As a result I now find that the letters in most CAPTCHAs are extremely difficult for me to read.

Maybe it is simply the fact that my sight is failing because I am getting older, but the last few times I have failed to complete it at the first attempt. I normally require at least 2 or 3 attempts before I manage to get the letters right which probably makes the site suspect I am not a real human. Do other people find the same problem with completing CAPTCHAs?

Much of FourSuqre's attraction comes from its mystery

2011-11-07T18:57:00.000Z

FourSquare is clearly the leading location based social network. The reason seems to be that most people agree that it is the platform that provides most fun. Unfortunately for their competitors it is hard to define exactly why it provides most fun. Personally I think that much of the enjoyment comes from an element of mystery about how exactly the rewards are handed out.

If you have used FourSquare you will probably know that they award badges for various activity. Once you unlock a badge, they give you a page explaining exactly why you were awarded it. However, they don't tell you in advance exactly what you will have to do tho earn badges that you have not yet been awarded. It is not really hard to guess that for example the Newbie badge is earned for your first ever check-in and if you hover over the logo for an unearned badge they will give you a hint, but you still don't know the rules for sure.

For me, I know that FourSquare often gives me a pleasant surprise when I earn badges or points that I was not expecting. For example, this morning when I checked into my local Lidl I got a surprise to see that I earned 25 bonus points for being the anniversary of my first check-in. If the FourSquare team keep up the good work I will probably keep using it for a feew more years.

Automatically starting the VNC server at boot time on your Linux virtual machines

2011-11-05T12:23:00.000Z

These days, many people in IBM (and I am sure many other companies) are using Linux virtual machines for their normal work. The hard core geeks are happy to connect to their virtual machines via ssh and do all of their work on the command line. However, the rest of use appreciate the convenience of a graphical interface and so like to use VNC. Unfortunately, the default configuration is that the VNC server does not automatically start every time you reboot. If you reboot your server regularly, it can be a pain to continually have to log into the server and start VNC.

After a bit of digging I found this excellent blog post which describes how to auto-start the VNC server on Ubuntu. However, most people I know tend to install Ubuntu on their laptop (which doesn't really need VNC server to be running) and use either SUSE or RedHat on their real servers. I had to make a few minor tweaks to get the script working on these Linux variants. The script below works on SUSE and RedHat variants of Linux. I have tested it on SLES 11 and RHEL5.6 - it should work on pretty much any Linux variant, but I would love to hear feedback from people if there are any issues.

As described in andrew's blog, it is necessary to start VNC manually the first time so that you can enter the security password. The first time you launch the program will create a default ~/.vnc/xstartup script which you can customize to meet your preferences. You should download the script to /etc/init.d/vncserver (making sure that the script is executable with the command "chmod +x /etc/init.d/vncserver") and then use the command "chkconfig vncserver on" to configure the server to start at boot time.

The bulk of the script is identical to Andrew's so you can read his description of how it works. I highlighted in red the places where I needed to alter it:

The original script declared a dependency on the networking service, but this service is called network on other Linux variants. Changing the dependency to $network allows the script to be more portable.
At the start of the script you can see some specially formatted comments which are interpreted as directives by the chkconfig command. There are several variants of this command and most systems do not have detailed documentation on what directives are used. The Debian wiki seems to have a complete list of possible directives. You don't need to worry about putting in special directives which are not understood by your variant of chkconfig because they will simply be treated as normal comments. The original script has enough directives to keep Ubuntu happy, but SUSE seems to insist on a "Required-Stop:" directive and RedHat seems to insist on the service description being included.
The original script used log_action_begin_msg, but this seems to be a command only supported on Debian derivatives so I changed them to simple echo commands.

#!/bin/sh -e
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          vncserver
# Required-Start:    $network
# Default-Start:     3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 6
# Required-Stop:
# Short-Description: Starts and stops VNC server
# Description: Starts and stops VNC server
### END INIT INFO
PATH="$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin/"

# The Username:Group that will run VNC
export USER="root"
#${RUNAS}

# The display that VNC will use
DISPLAY="1"

# Color depth (between 8 and 32)
DEPTH="16"

# The Desktop geometry to use.
#GEOMETRY="x"
#GEOMETRY="800x600"
GEOMETRY="1024x768"
#GEOMETRY="1280x1024"

# The name that the VNC Desktop will have.
NAME="my-vnc-server"

OPTIONS="-name ${NAME} -depth ${DEPTH} -geometry ${GEOMETRY} :${DISPLAY}"

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

case "$1" in
start)
echo "Starting vncserver for user '${USER}' on localhost:${DISPLAY}"
su ${USER} -c "/usr/bin/vncserver ${OPTIONS}"
;;

stop)
echo "Stoping vncserver for user '${USER}' on localhost:${DISPLAY}"
su ${USER} -c "/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :${DISPLAY}"
;;

restart)
$0 stop
$0 start
;;
esac

exit 0

Can you run 64bit Virtual Machines on a 32 bit host operating system

2011-11-02T10:22:00.000Z

I was recently trying to use VMWARE Player to run some 64 bit virtual machines which a colleague had built for me. I used Google to find out if it would be possible to run the 64 bit guest OS on a 32 bit host - unfortunately the results seemed to be split almost 50-50 between saying yes and no, so I had to try it for myself.

When I tried to power on the virtual machine I got the following error screen. I went to the link suggested by the error page and I downloaded the utility to see if my CPU was capable of running in 64 bit mode. The tool from VMWARE told me that my CPU was not capable of running a 64 bit operating system. This puzzled me because until recently I was running a 64 bit operating system (RHEL6) on the same laptop.

I still thought that the problem might be that it is not possible to run a 64 bit guest operating system on a 32 bit host operating system. Then I remembered that I still had kept the boot partition for the 64 bit OS, so I booted this partition and tried again to run the virtual machines. Puzzlingly I still got the same result. The VMWARE test utility was also still telling me that my CPU was not capable of operating in 64 bit mode which was deifnietly not true since it was running in 64 bit mode when I ran the test.

I did a bit more digging and I found a utility from KVM which is supposed to check if your system can run 64bit virtual machines. It also told me that I couldn't, but it gave a very different error message. As the error message suggested, I went into my BIOS settings and enabled support for "Intel Virtualized Technology" and hey-presto I was able to run the 64 bit virtual machines. Unfortunately I don't really know what "Intel Virtualized Technology" is, but this article seems to have a feasible explanation.

Progress report on my new job

2011-10-30T20:01:00.000Z

It is now roughly half a year since my new job was announced so I thought it might be a good idea to reflect on how my new role was working out. This blog posts summarises what I have done and perhaps equally importantly, how I felt about it.

First, what I did:

Before starting my new job, I had been using Sametime for many years and I had developed a number of Sametime client plugins, but I had no experience at all of installing or configuring Sametime servers. So, I needed to learn a lot about unfamiliar technologies. As well as taking formal courses, I spent a lot of time doing test deployments so that I got a good feeling for how the process works and what can go wrong.
I joined the Sametime install team and I fixed a number of bugs. Many developers hate bug fixing work because they consider it unglamorous. However, I though that it was an important part of my familiarisation with the code (you really only fully understand code when you are able to fix bugs). In addition I thought it was important to make it clear to my colleagues that I was not shirking the unglamorous tasks.
I was given special responsibility in relation to a new feature which we refer to as "Install on existing Websphere" - where the Sametime installer does not install its own copy of Websphere Applications Server, but instead uses a pre-existing instance that was installed previously. The feature had been developed before I got involved with the team, but I had to test it and do some tweaking of the user interface.
Around this time I was assigned as a representative of the development team for a small number of key customer accounts.
One of the most important things I did was lead a deployment task force that looked at what are the main issues encountered by users installing and configuring Sametime family of products. This task force produced a report that summarised the main issues (in priority order) and outlined steps that we could take to tackle these issues. This report was published inside IBM and reviewed with senior executives. I am now working on transforming the report into an agreed development plan where we will address the issues identified. The roadmap for my new role is now becoming clearer.
The report itself is naturally IBM confidential, but it is available on the IBM intranet. Given recent trends in the industry it will surprise nobody to hear that one of the top priority recommendations is to make Sametime more friendly to cloud deployments.
One of the first steps on this journey is to allow users clone an image of a running Sametime server and get it working with its new host name. My recently published article on the DeveloperWorks site describes the manual steps required to do this. I was surprised myself with how complex the process is (the article is 20 pages long) and so now I am working on automating the procedure. These are the first baby steps in making Sametime more deployable for our increasingly important cloud customers.

Next, how I felt (which followed a pretty typical cycle):

Initially I was in a honeymoon period where I was delighted to free from personnel management responsibilities. As people came to me to tell me about some personnel issue with the team, it was a great relief to be able to pass them on to my replacement as manager of the team to handle it. At the same time nobody really expected me to be up to speed in my new role yet.
However, after about a month and a half, I began to enter what is typically called "The trough of despair". As I said earlier, I initially found my new role very challenging. There were times when I was definitely overwhelmed by how much I had to learn and there were times when I doubted if I would ever master the technology.
Fixing bugs in the installer can be very difficult - first you need to understand how the server needs to work once installed, then you need to understand how the installer needs to work in order to achieve that results and then finally you need to understand the complex Sametime build process (if customers think the deployment process is complex, it is nothing compared to the complexity of the build system). At times I spent over a week solving what seemed like relatively trivial bugs.
It was even more challenging to chart a long term strategy for an area where I was only really a beginner.
At this stage I was very determined not to admit defeat and I was careful to maintain a narrow focus and not allow myself get distracted by anything outside of the core job. Eventually this determination paid off. I learned more and began to gain some confidence. I also realised that other people also find the technology complex so I don't feel so bad.
I hope this does not come across the wrong way, but when I started working with customers I immediately I became relatively much more of an expert. Previously I was speaking with people who had worked on Sametime for several years so I felt like a novice, but speaking to customers who were only beginning to deploy Sametime I realised that I knew quite a bit. It also was great to learn first hand about how customers experience the Sametime deployment process.
At this stage I would say that I have finally got up to speed in my new role (but I still have a lot to learn) and I am more comfortable in my new role. I knew when I took on the job that this choice would be a long term one and so I am definitely going to stick with my decision.
I was surprised by how little time I spent actually writing code. If anything I spend much more time testing than coding. Any developer needs to also test their own code, but the length of time involved in testing an installer means that the development/test ratio is highly skewed towards testing.
One thing that surprised me is that I am missing the social aspects of being a manager. People often need to inform their manager about what they are doing and hence the manager is well aware of what is happening in the wider team. An individual contributor on the other hand only gets informed about things that directly affect their work.
My decision to consciously narrow in my focus probably made me even more isolated from the social life of the team. It was probably the right decision back when I was starting my new role, but now I think the time has come to widen my focus a little again.

BTYSTE project about Smarter Energy kicks-off

2011-10-28T14:21:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I visited Mount Sackville primary school to help get them started on their Smarter Energy project for the BT Young Scientist &Technology Exhibition. I introduced them to the concepts behind the IBM Smarter Planet campaign using a set of slides that had been specially adapted to be understandable by that age group. I was delighted to see that they had no trouble in understanding the message. They were very enthusiastic and seemed excited to be involved.

I also helped them use the lighting efficiency tester that I developed as part of the recent Hackday to measure the efficiency of a number of different types of light bulbs. The device was very popular. Children of that age love to get hands-on with technology (actually when I think about it men in their late 40s still love to get hands on with technology).

My colleague Fred Raguillat joined me for the visit because he has experience from running a similar project with Dunboyne national school. After we left the class we configured the Current Cost meters that they are going to be using to monitor their electricity usage for the duration of the project. All went smoothly, once we figured out how to work around a problem with the bridge not interacting properly with the DHCP server on their network.

I look forward to seeing their results at the exhibition in January.

You know you are definitely back from Holidays when you lose all of the Mayorships in Foursquare

2011-10-24T20:25:00.032+01:00

Earlier this year I went on a holiday of a lifetime in South Africa. I was so thrilled with myself for being so far away from home that I regularly checked in with FourSuqare. As a result I was declared "Mayor" of a wide variety of locations.

After I arrived back in Ireland, the glowing feeling of well-being from the holiday faded fairly fast, but the FourSquare mayorships were surprisingly long lived. I was just notified yesterday of the fact that I was ousted as mayor of the beautiful Knysna Country House. I am still Mayor for Fancourt, Hotel in George - but I am not sure how much longer that will last and all of my Foursquare mayorships will ba back in Ireland.

Blogger's new Dynamic Views are not yet ready for use

2011-10-23T17:46:00.000+01:00

Blogger recently launched a new feature called "Dynamic Views". They looked really cool so I tried them out for a while on this blog, but they are not functional enough to be used so I switched back again to my old theme.

The good thing about dynamic views is that they let the reader choose from a number of really stylish looking layouts. Unfortunately it is not possible to use any widgets with these views. I know that I probably put too many widgets on my blog, but some are really useful and I didn't think the new look was enough to make up for having them all gone.

You can see what my blog looked like with dynamic views enabled in the screenshots below:

A floating voter looking for guidance

2011-10-23T08:30:00.000+01:00

One of the great things about living in a democracy is that you get to regularly make decisions which affect your country. In general, I think that this is such an important privilege that I always take time to educate myself on the issues so I can make an informed decision. However, on Thursday next, I will be faced with 4 different ballot papers and it will be tough to educate myself on all 4 ballots.

Here is my position on each ballot (in descending order of certainty)

The issue which has received most public attention is the election of a new President. I am delighted that we have 7 candidates to choose from - the complex nomination process often means that we don't get to choose. Unfortunately the campaign has degenerated into mudslinging which doesn't make any of the candidates look good (e.g. Mary Robinson Tapestry for President group on Facebook gives a flavour of how juvenile the debating has become). I decided at the start of the campaign that I would vote for Michael D. Higgins and nothing during the campaign so far has made me change my mind on the topic.
There are also two referendums being decided tomorrow. The first issue is fairly straight forward. When the constitution was being drafted it contained a clause that the government could never decrease the pay of a judge. At the time they probably wanted to avoid the possibility of a vindictive government arbitrarily reducing the pay of a judge who took an unpopular decision and so the clause made sense. They never considered the situation we recently encountered whereby the pay of all public servants was reduced and it is clearly wrong that Judges should be the only public servants exempted from these cuts.
Despite the efforts of the referendum commission many people don't fully appreciate this second topic that we are being asked to vote upon. It seems that the government wants to increase the powers of parliamentary inquiries so that they can eliminate the need for expensive and slow tribunals of inquiry. This change has not been widely debated in the press, but the few articles and letters to the editor that I have read on the topic seem to be arguing against this change. It is hard to argue against making public inquiries more efficient, but some of the proposed new powers definitely seem to be open to abuse. It is important to also bear in mind that politicians are some of the people most likely to be the subject of a public inquiry so I don't think they are the best people to be put in charge of the subject. On balance I will vote against this change (but I could be easily persuaded to change my mind).
In West Dublin, we will also have to decide who gets the Dáil seat left vacant by the tragic death of Brian Lenihan. After the last election we had 4 very high profile representatives from our constituency (Leo Vradkar - Minister for Transport, Joan Burton - Minister for Social Protection, Brian Lenihan RIP - former Minister for Finance and Joe Higgins who is probably higher profile than any Minister). I believe that there are 7 candidates to fill the vacant seat, but I couldn't honestly name more than 4 of them. Normally a by-election would be well covered in the media, but there has been so much coverage of the presidential campaign in the media that there has been hardly any space left for coverage of the by-election. I guess I will be the ultimate floating voter on this ballot, because I might get a surprise when I see the full list of names.

If anyone wants to change my mind on any of these ballots, feel free to leave a comment below.

Update 26th/Oct: I just checked out the ElctionsIreland site for information about the candidates in our by-election and I found out that there were actually 13 candidates not the 7 I though. Clearly some of them have not been very scuessfull in making themselves know.

What is the right way to treat unpopular former leaders

2011-10-21T18:42:00.001+01:00

Today's newspapers are full of gruesome images of the late Cornel Gaddafi beside pictures of Libyan crowds cheering an celebrating. I know that he was an extremely unpleasant person, but at the same time I must say that it seems incongruous to see crowds enthusiastically celebrating such a sad end for any human being.

A few years ago I was talking to a friend from the Middle East about the prospects for democracy in the region. When I asked him if there were any democracies in the region, his answer was that there were some countries that pretended to be democratic but in no case was there a living ex-president. I thought that this was a very interesting way to judge whether or not a democracy is genuine.

In western democracies, former leaders are normally treated with quite a bit of respect. Although the level of respect varies somewhat depending upon their record in office, there is no reason for any leader to fear that they will not be able to enjoy a comfortable and peaceful retirement (in fact many people believe that the pensions provided to our former leaders are excessive - but this is a different topic).

I know the papers will often describe our politicians as "trying really hard to cling onto power", but none would ever fight quite as long and hard as Gaddafi fought to cling onto power. I can't help thinking that part of the reason why he fought so hard was because he knew what fate was awaiting him.

I am watching the trial of former President Mubarrack in Egypt with great interest. While some people doubt that it will be a totally fair trial, at least they are making some attempt to follow the rule of law. The current batch of Arab leaders will probably be more likely to facilitate a smooth peaceful handover of power when the time arrives if they believe that they can enjoy a peaceful retirement.

My blog gets a new look

2011-10-20T11:20:00.001+01:00

The blogger platform just released some new "Dynamic Views" and so I decided it was worth trying them out. One of the advantages of using a platform like Blogger is that you get these new features without having to do anything. The new template makes my blog look completely different with virtually no work required from me. Let me know what you think of the new look..

If you click on the down-arrow beside the "Sidebar" at the left of the page header you can even choose a completely different layout. I think some of them look really cool although I must at some stage make a few more tweaks to ensure it looks correct and maybe even add back in a few of my old widgets which seem to have disappeared.

Where did you hear about Steve Jobs passing away?

2011-10-07T18:25:00.000+01:00

People of a certain generation always remember where they were when they first heard the news that John F Kennedy had been assassinated. I was only 14 months old when JFK passed away, but I still know where I was when the news came through because my father said that he had just come home from work and I was sitting on his lap when he turned on the TV news.

Hearing about the passing of JFK was a real shocking moment for Irish Americans of my father's generation. In many ways the passing of Steve Jobs was an equally tragic moment for geeks of my generation. Apple computers was founded around when I was finishing up in secondary school and was learning about computers for the first time. When I was in college I followed with envy the exploits of the two Steves. I was personally more of a fan of Steve Wozniack than Steve Jobs, but I must admit that I would have loved to be more like either of these giants in the computer industry.

I use Google Listen application on my phone to listen to a selection of Podcasts on my commute to and from work. On Thursday morning I was reviewing the podcasts that had been downloaded overnight to see which I should add to my Listen queue when I noticed that the TWiT network had just published a Steve Jobs Special episode. I suspected that the reason for the special episode was because he passed away, so added the episode to my Listen queue and then I checked the RTE news app to see that there was indeed a short story about Steve passing losing his battle with cancer..

Listening to the show was a great review of a wonderful life. Steve Jobs was 7 years older than me and Steve Wozniack was a further 5 years older than him, but their growing up closely mirrored my growing up and the growing up of the computer industry. I know Steve Jobs would have probably preferred if I had been listening to the program on an iPhone rather than on an Android phone, but it was nevertheless a tribute to his contribution to the change in the computer industry that I was getting my news through a podcast from the other side of the globe rather than a local TV or Radio program.

Getting Eclipse 3.4 working on Ubuntu

2011-10-07T08:08:00.002+01:00

Lots of people might be planning to develop Sametime plug-ins for Hackday. While the Sametime plug-in development environment is really easy to use once you get it set-up it can be tricky to get your environment configured. I always tell people that they must read the instructions in the Sametime SDK very carefully and follow the instructions exactly.

One thing that is slightly annoying is the fact that the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit which is needed to configure your Sametime launch configuration can only be installed with Eclipse 3.4. This is annoying to users of any platform who may prefer to use a more recent version, but it is especially annoying to users of Ubuntu and other variants of Linux because there is a well known bug in this version which can stop Eclipse from launching.

Fortunately there is a simple work around. You just need to edit the eclipse.ini file (which will be ins the same folder where the eclipse executable is installed) and add this line

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner

One you have made this change, eclipse will launch properly and there will be nothing to stop you from doing the coolest Hackday project ever :-)

Hackday Project results in Patent

2011-10-06T07:12:00.004+01:00

Hackday 9 is taking place tomorrow and due to a training course, I won't be able to take part for the first time in several years. Therefore it was ironic that I just got notification of a patent that was just issued based upon a project I did back for Hackday 6.

The patent is entitled "System and method for client-based instant message monitoring for off-line users" and it deals with an innovative way that I devised to get around the fact that I was forced to implement my Hackday project on the client side due to the fact that I didn't have access to change the server. If you want to find out more, you can access the patent via Google Patents.

Good luck to everyone taking part this year. I hope you succeed in generating several more patents.

My Hackday mini-Project

2011-10-04T21:09:00.000+01:00

Due to schedule conflicts, I won't able to take part in Hackday 9 which is due to happen on Friday. However, I felt it would be setting a bad precedent if I completely ignored the event. Hence I decided to tackle a mini-project the last Sunday at home.

I have been recently working with some local primary schools helping them to do projects relating to Smarter Energy for display at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition next January. In order to help introduce the concept I was decided to build a simple test rig with several different types of light bulbs that the students can use to measure the efficiency of the bulbs. This was not a technically very challenging job, but it did involve a few hours of hard work stripping wires and screwing in light fixtures. On the right you can see my completed handy-work.

I have also purchased a simple plug-in power meter so that the students can easily measure the power consumed as each of the lights is switched on. Of course the power consumed is only telling part of the story - I also needed to measure the light output of the various bulbs because as well as having a huge variation in power consumption the bulbs also produce radically different amounts of light.

Rather than purchase a dedicated light meter I decided to see if I could find an application for my phone which was capable of taking the measurements. After a bit of experimentation I settled on using the Light Meter Application from Borce Trajowski. As well as producing reliable measurements of light intensity, this free application also has a really attractive retro-style display. Of course it is only fair to mention that I also tried a different application called Light Meter as well as ones called beeCamLightMeter and Lux Meter which didn't seem to work reliably at all (which just goes to show that you can't totally trust the application descriptions in the Android market).

I plan to use this test rig in some upcoming visits to schools by myself, but of course I am happy to lend it to anyone else who would like to use it for similar events.

Where should electric car charging points be located

2011-10-03T20:10:00.000+01:00

eCar Charger Coolmine

Apparently electric cars are set to become much more common in Ireland in the near future. However, before this can happen there will need to be a network of charging points for electric cars located at convenient locations throughout the country. The ESB is currently rolling out a series of such charging points.

Obviously such charging points are going to be located at Motorway service stations to facilitate motorists who are trying to undertake a long journey across the country. I was also interested to see that one has been installed in the "Park and Ride" facility attached to Coolmine rail station (near where I live). The idea must be that they expect that local commuters will use their eCars for the short trip to get to the rail station before taking the train.

This seems like a sensible idea, however the only problem is that the charging point is located in the area reserved for disabled drivers. Do the ESB expect that eCars will only be driven by disabled drivers or do they plan to give eCar drivers special permission to use the disabled parking spots?

Hackday is coming again

2011-09-30T10:20:00.000+01:00

As I have mentioned on my blog previously, Hackday is a wonderful event which is held at IBM each year. The general idea is to see what cool "hacks" employees can build in a single day. These events are a wonderful way to encourage innovation and also build morale because employees get to work on a fun project of their own choosing. I have been involved in the Hackday event since shortly after it started and I entered every Hackday since Hackday 2. As a result I once was awared the title "The Oldest Hacker in Town" in recognition of my long term commitment to the contest.

This years event "Hackday 9" is scheduled to take place next Friday and the newly redesiged contest site is now up and running for employees to register their projects (unfortunately the site is not accessible outside IBM). Although there is a local event planned for the Dublin lab I don't think I will be able to take part myself this year due to the fact that I will be on a course. However, you can rest assured that I will definitely be thinking of all the IBM hackers and I will also be helping out with the judging process later.

Variable rate mortgages are fundamentally unjust

2011-09-09T21:42:00.000+01:00

The vast majority of mortgages offered by Irish banks are variable rate mortgages, so most consumers have no option but to choose one. However, I have always struggled to see how this system could be considered fair. Consumers have to choose a lender based upon what rate they are currently charging, but since the rate will change several times over the life of the mortgage there is no guarantee that the lender they choose will be cheapest overall.

The way this system works is that the banks constantly alter the rate of interest that they charge mortgage holders based upon the rate that the bank have to pay on the inter-bank markets to borrow money (plus a profit margin of course). It might seem at first glance that this is fair, but surely the bank only need to source money on the inter-bank markets when they give out new mortgages rather than constantly through the life of a mortgage. If most mortgages are for a term of 20 years or more, this means that on average mortgage holders took out their mortgages about 10 years ago and hence the inter-bank rates charged 10 years ago are more relevant than the inter-bank rates now.

It could be argued that consumers are free to choose which bank they want to get a mortgage from, but since consumers need to pay considerable administrative fees to switch from one mortgage provider to another, they don't really have a choice to switch from one bank to another in the middle of the term of the loan. Some banks exploit this fact by offering new customers a special introductory offer for the first year, which means that they are using their existing customers (who have no choice) to subsidise potential new customers (who do have a choice). Surely this is grossly unfair and should not be allowed!

A few Irish banks offer fixed rate mortgages where the interest rate is fixed for a limited term (e.g. 3 or 5 years), but since most consumers want a mortgage over 20 years or more this is of limited value to consumers. I wonder why no Irish bank offers customers the option to lock the interest rate for the entire life of the mortgage - banks in other countries offer this.

How much energy does it take to watch television

2011-08-30T22:53:00.001+01:00

The Individual Appliance Monitor (IAM) I ordered from Current Costs arrived yesterday. This is a device that I can insert between the plug of an appliance and the wall socket that will then send data to my home electricity monitoring system about how much electricity is being consumed by the device(s) plugged into this socket. This will enable me to analyse the power consumption of individual devices more accurately. The first thing I decided to look at was the amount of energy being consumed by the television in my living room.

I have often heard people say that it is possible to save a significant amount of power by completely switching off your television rather than just leave it on stand-by where it can be switched back on again with the remote. I have always been sceptical of this information and the measurement from the IAM indicate that it is not drawing any power while in stand-by mode (or at least the power being consumed was too small to register and the IAM is capable or registering a single watt of power). Therefore, I conclude that it is not worth my while to unplug the TV from the wall every night.

When I turn on the TV, but leave the cable decoder box switched off the TV begins to consume about 100 watts of power (it is showing a blank screen). When I switch on the cable decoder box and begin watching something on the screen, the amount of power being consumed by the TV increases to about 200 watts. Therefore leaving my TV permanently switched on would cost about 20 euro per month, which would be a significant amount of money to waste.

I get television service from UPC and the package I have signed-up for includes the ability to automatically record all episodes of a program. Naturally for this feature to work I need to leave the decoder box constantly connected to power and in stand-by mode. When the box is completely in stand-by mode it consumes about 8 watts of power, but once it is either switched on or starts to record a program from my preferences its power consumption raises to about 20 watts. Therefore the TV recording service is effectively costing me between 1 and 2 euro per month in power in addition to the subscription costs from my cable provider. I think this is quite reasonable.

Circles, Friends and Followers

2011-08-25T08:39:00.000+01:00

There has been a lot of interest in the recent launch of Google+ social networking service. One of the features that has gained most attention is the fact that Google+ use the concept of circles to track the relationships between people as distinct from how Facebook uses Friends and Twitter uses Followers. However, many people are confused about how Google+ uses circles so I thought it might be helpful to write a brief explanation.

Facebook was originally based upon a simple model of symmetric friend links, this means that for if Tom is Jane's friend then Jane must also be Tom's friend. It is for this reason that when you add a new friend on Facebook the other person must confirm that they also wish to add you as a friend. This simple model of friendship works well for the friendships that we establish in school (and hence it is a good match for Facebook which originally was most used within a school setting). However, real world relationships are much more complex and hence mode advanced models of social relationships are sometimes needed.

Not all friendships are the same. For example, most people would have different criterion for what they would be comfortable sharing with their work colleagues and what they would like to share with their close friends and family members. For this reason, Facebook introduced a feature called 'lists' where you can divide your friends into different catergories. When you share something on Facebook you can choose whether you want to share it with all of your friends or else restrict it to only the members of a particular list. Since this feature was not originally in Facebook when it launched many users are not even aware of its existence and hence they tend to share everything with all of their friends (and this is the default anyway).

The other weakness in the Facebook friendship model is the fact that it is not necessary true that the people whose updates you would like to read are the same as the people whom you are happy to allow read what you post to the site (Facebook uses your friend list for these two different purposes). Systems like Twitter recognise this difference by implementing asymmetric links that they call 'followers'. By default all updates sent to Twitter can be read by anyone. If I add someone to my 'follow' list it simply means that I would like their updates to appear in my default stream and does not imply that there is any relationship between us. For example, I follow the Dalai Lama on Twitter because I am interested in reading the profound thoughts that His Holiness posts to twitter, but I have no reason to think that His Holiness is interested in reading the boring stuff that I post. For this reason the Dalai Lama has over 2.5 million followers on Twitter, although he doesn't follow anyone.

Google circles are asymmetric links (like Twitter) because you can add anyone you want to your circles and there is no need for them to approve this and/or add you to one of their circles. However, Google circles are not like Twitter follow lists because circles are used to control who can read your updates as well as whose updates are presented to you in your default stream. Everytime you post something to Google+ you are asked to specify which of your circle's members should be allowed to read the update (there is a special group called 'public' that you can share with if you don't care who reads this update).

By default Google+ shows you all of the updates you are allowed to see from any of the people in any of your groups, but you can also click on a circle name to only show updates from people who are in that circle. Therefore in order for you to see a particular update it will be necessary that you have added the person who posted the update to one of your circles and it will also be necessary for you to be a member of one of the circles that the person posting the update chose to share it with. Hence the logo shows intersecting circles.

My trip of a life time

2011-07-26T20:39:00.012+01:00

I have been quite actively blogging in the past while, but for the next 3 weeks I will probably not be active on the internet very much because I am going to be on holiday in South Africa.

I am very excited because this will be my first trip south of the equator and I expect that it will be a very different country, especially during the Safari we have planned. In addition I will be meeting up with an old friend from school and college whom I had lost touch with until recently.

I am sure I will have lots of lovely pictures to share when I come back because my sister has given me the loan of her fancy DSLR camera to ensure we capture all of the adventures.

What is happening in my house when I am not there?

2011-07-20T22:18:00.019+01:00

My ENVIr energy monitor system from Current Cost is constantly monitoring my electric usage and posting these statistics to the CurrentCost web site where I can view lots of interesting graphs.

I was recently away from the house for a few days, so it was interesting to see how much electricity was being used when there was nobody in the house. As you can see from the screenshot below, their is constant electricity usage rate of roughly 170 watts (probably a sign of the large number of electronic devices on stand-by).

I wondered what this background electricity usage is costing me. For simplicity sake I assumed 30 days in a month, so 170 watts would equate to 122.4 Kilowatt-hours (170x24X30/1000). If I assume that my electricity rate is around €0.14 per Kilowatt-hour this means that I am using about €17 worth of electricity before I even switch anything on. This is not a huge amount of money, but it world be worth reducing if possible.

Every 2 hours or so the electricity jumps up by 100 watts or so for a period of about 10-15 minutes before dropping back again. I am not certain what causes that, but I guess it might be the fridge/freezer which needs to turn on its motor occasionally to keep the food cold.Again this might be worth investigating further, but I will have to wait until my individual appliance monitors arrive..

Banshee helps me listen to a more eclectic selection of music.

2011-07-19T17:17:00.025+01:00

I normally use the Banshee music player that comes with Ubuntu to play background music while I work. I must say that I find its user interface very slick and easy to use (I would even say it is an improvement on the RhythmBox player that they used before).

I don't look very closely at the user interface and so it was only recently that I spotted that they have an unheard view on your music library which shows the tracks in your library that you have never listened to. I was amazed to see that I had 715 tracks in this category (out of slightly more than 1,000 tracks in total). I know this does not really mean that I never listened to these tracks, it means that I haven't listened to them since I upgraded to Banshee a few months ago.

But it still tells me that my music listening is not as diverse as it should be. As a result I have set the player to play random selections from my unheard list for the last few days and I have really being enjoying discovering old favourites, although it can be a little strange to hear the music switch from Metallica, to Vivaldi and then move on to Horslips.

My Electricity usage is now available on-line

2011-07-18T18:50:00.002+01:00

My Current Cost bridge device arrived in the post so my electricity usage statistics are now being posted and stored on-line. The Current Cost Dashboard site allows me to draw many nice graphs to help me understand trends etc. Although my weather data is publicly visible, I decided that I ought not share my live electricity usage so freely because someone pointed out to me the electric usage data could identify whether or not someone is home which in turn could be helpful to burglars.

I will probably share some data on my historic usage, but unfortunately I can't do that yet because I don't have enough data uploaded yet to make the graphs interesting.

How much does it cost to cook at home

2011-07-15T20:57:00.061+01:00

In my initial post about electricity consumption I compared the energy used by the various different ways of making a cup of coffee in the morning. Today I decided to look at the electricity consumption of the devices that I might use to cook something more substantial.

If I was cooking a fancy meal, I would use the fan oven which consumes about 2.5 Kilowatts when heating up and even when I turn off the oven the fan continues to circulate air which consumes about 65 watts. Large joints of meat can take several hours to cook. I know that the thermostat would probably switch off the oven several times during this period, but since electricity costs about 14 cent per Kilowatt-hour I can see the cost of cooking a joint could be significant (maybe the pre-cooked chickens are good value after all).

If I was cooking something smaller I would probably use the rings on the hob on top of the cooker. My cooker has both large and small rings to accommodate different size saucepans. I realised that there would be a difference in the amount of energy required to heat up the different size of ring, but I was surprised to see that the consumption of the larger ring (2 Killowatts) was over 50% higher than the amount required to heat the smaller rings (1.3 Kilowatts). So I must remember to use the smaller rings as much as possible.

The grill consumed about 1.8 Kilowatts, while the toaster only consumed about 780 watts. The means that the toaster is much more efficient at toasting bread especially since the bred will be toasted faster in the toaster than under the grill.

The Microwave oven consumes about 1.6 Kilowatts when switched to full power. However, since it cooks food much faster than conventional cooking it probably would save money to use it whenever possible.

The clothes drier is the one device that I really expected to consume a lot of electricity because I have often heard complain about how wasteful this device is. However, I measured that it only consumed about 1.2 Kilowatts. I suppose that if you really want to be environmentally friendly you would put your washing in the drier and eat a cold meal. This would be more fuel efficient than hanging your clothes out to dry in the open and eating a hot meal.

Fancy lighting can be very ineffecient

2011-07-14T19:21:00.046+01:00

I blogged yesterday about the amount of electricity I might need to make myself a cup of coffee in the morning. In these bright summer mornings there is normally enough natural light to allow me to see what I am doing. However, in the winter I expect that a considerable amount of electricity would go towards providing lights in the house so today I decided to measure the power consumption of my lights.

My kitchen is fairly large and so I need two bulbs to provide adequate light. However, since these lights are used a lot I was sure to ensure that I installed CFL bulbs in these lights. I was pleasantly surprised to measure that both lights beking switched on only consumed 30 watts (i.e. 15 watts each).

As well as the main lights, I also have a strip light under the presses. This light does not really provide enough light to do any work in the kitchen and its real purpose is to provide a nice ambiance in the kitchen while eating a romantic dinner. Therefore I was shocked to measure that it consumed 50 watts which is more than the two main lights.

In most of the rooms I have CFL bulbs which consume less than 20 watts each. In fact their power consumption was so low that it was hard for me to measure accurately. I was also pleasantly suprised to see that the two incandescent bulbs I had were consuming less power than they are supposed to. A 75w bulb which I have in a small utility room was only consuming about 60 watts and a 40w bulb in a Hot-press was actually only consuming 30 watts.

In the upstairs bathroom we have Halogen light fittings mainly because the female members of my family assure me that they look very stylish. I always knew that they were not very efficient, but I was shocked when I measured that they consumed 260 watts (i.e. more than 8 times as much energy as the kitchen lights which light a much larger room).

I suppose the lesson to learn is that it is expensive to be stylish!

How much energy am I using in the kitchen

2011-07-13T20:21:00.000+01:00

I recently purchased an ENVIr energy monitor system from Current Cost to track my electricity usage at home. I am still waiting for delivery of the bridge device which will allow me to publish my data to the Internet in real time, but I thought I would share some initial data that I manually recorded.

It seems that the energy consumption in the house never goes much below 200 watts (probably due to things like networking equipment and other electronic devices that I have at home). Unfortunately they are out of stock on the Individual Appliance Monitors which would allow me to track the usage of individual devices but I was able to estimate the consumption of various appliances in the kitchen by switching them on and off and looking at how much this changed my total electric power consumption.

The first thing I measured was my cappuccino maker (which is often the first device switched on in the morning). This actually consists of three different devices, a milk warmer which consumed about 615 watts, an espresso maker which consumed about 730 watts and a frother for the milk which only consumed about 5 watts. This meant that the total consumption was 1.35 Kilowatts. For comparison I measured the filter coffee maker and it only consumed 950 watts so I could trim about 30% off my power consumption (as well as trimming a few inches from my waistline) by switching to filter coffee. However, I was surprised to learn that the kettle was consuming about 2.94 kilowatts - so if I went back to instant coffee my power consumption would more than double.

I will post more data over the next few days as I make more measurements.

Sometimes Computers get stuff very wrong

2011-07-12T09:24:00.000+01:00

There is an old joke "To err is human, but to really mess things up you need a computer".

I don't run very often, but when I do I normally use the My Tracks application on my Android phone to track my progress. This allows me to keep a training record which is usually very accurate. However, the other day I went on a training run that was more or less following the route of the Streets of Galway race. I had to run a little bit extra to get to and from the race route so I reckoned I would have clocked up slightly more than 8km. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the route that my phone thought I took. Instead of running roughly 10km per hour on the streets of Galway, it thought I was swimming at over 100km per hour around the Irish Sea!!!

View Galway in a larger map

How to avoid being ripped off by exorbitant mobile data roaming charges

2011-07-08T16:56:00.000+01:00

I (like many other people) have become very reliant upon my Smartphone. Luckily the market is quite competitive both for phones and for service providers so that in general you can get very good value when either buying a new phone or when subscribing to a mobile data service to allow you get the most out of it.

One big exception to this is when you leave your home country. The roaming data rates charged by most operators when you bring your Smartphone abroad are nothing short of outrageous. For example, my provider charges €10 per MByte for data access when I am outside of Ireland so naturally I turn of 3G on my phone and try to survive without connectivity when I am travelling.

In recent years the European Union has done a great service to the public by putting pressure on the carriers to reduce their roaming charges for phone calls within the EU. They have recently turned their attention to also reducing data roaming charges, but this initiative is likely to take some time to bear fruit.

I recently came across and the TEP Wireless service which seems like a really cool idea whereby you can rent a pocket wifi from them for the country that you are travelling to. Then you can configure your Smartphone to use this wifi service and you are able to use your Smartphone abroad as much as you want without having to worry about running up large bills. The rates seem quite reasonable, presumably because they buy the devices and sign up for contracts in the country you are visiting so they are paying local rates rather than visitor rates.

I can't wait to try out this service (it was only launched a few weeks ago). Unfortunately they don't offer service in South Africa yet, so I won't be able to use it on my upcoming vacation, but I definitely will try it out soon.

Is the era of Windows dominance coming to an end?

2011-07-04T19:40:00.005+01:00

Whenever possible I like to use Linux software on all of my PCs. Many of my colleagues also have a similar preference and so I would consider it quite normal for people to choose Linux as a desktop operating system in preference to Windows. However, I do realise that my world view might be slightly skewed and Windows might still be the overwhelming favourite operating system in the real world.

I wrote before , that Google Analytics tells me that roughly a quarter of the readers of my blog are using Linux, but this is a small and unrepresentative sample. I recently received a newsletter from the Google Analytics team where they analyse data from hundreds of thousands of sites (including mine) which have enabled anonymous data sharing.

The following table summarises their statistics about the relative popularity of various operating systems at the start of this year as compared with the year before. I assume it is probably typical of the Internet as a whole.

% Visits from OS	Nov/09 - Feb/10	Nov/10 - Feb/11	Difference
Windows	89.9%	84.8%	-5.1%
Macintosh	4.5%	5.2%	+0.7%
Linux	0.6%	0.7%	+0.1%
Other	5%	9.3%	+4.3%

You can see that the percentage of people using Windows is indeed going down (even if it is still the lions share of the market at about 85%). What is interesting is that most people are not moving to Linux or Macintosh, but are moving to "Other". I suspect that this is mainly a reflection in the increasing number of people using various mobile devices to access the Internet.

I think that this is great news, because variety is very important for the health of the Internet.

I will be going to the London Olympics in 2012

2011-06-22T21:36:00.001+01:00

I was very excited to hear that I will be going to the London Olympics next year. Recently my friend Ross jokingly commented that I should be able to qualify for the olympics because I had accidentally uploaded GPS data from a cycling trip with tags indicating that it was a run. However, this is not the reason I am going to the Olympics - the real reason is because I was lucky enough to be allocated tickets for Hockey and Canoe sprint heats in the recent lottery based application procedure. I have been allocated 6 tickets so I will be bringing my parents as well as my wife and two daughters. It should truly be the experience of a lifetime and none of us are likely to get to the olympics ever again (unless the girls have sporting skills that they have not yet revealled). My daughters are actively involved in both sports so I know that they will like to see top class athletes competing in sports that they understand.

Many people who did not get the tickets that they were seeking, have been critical of the lottery process. I know my opinion is coloured by the fact that it worked out for me, but I think that the allocation process is as fair as it could be. Whenever the demand outstrips the supply by such a huge amount, it is inevitable that people will be disappointed.

The one thing that I thought was unfair, was the fact that tickets could only be purchased with a Visa credit card, but I can't say I am surprised because they are a major sponsor. The way that the process works is that you needed to supply details of all of the events that you would like to go to by a dealiner in May. This is a tricky process because you need to have enough money/credit available to buy all of the tickets you have applied for eventhough it was obvious that applicants were unlikely to get most of the tickets that they applied for. I chose to apply for a large selection of low profile events rather than going for some of the high profile events which I thought would be way oversubscribed. Since these events were cheaper, I was able to afford to apply for a wider range. It seems that this was a sensible choice because I applied for just short of 2,000 pounds worth of tickets and was allocated over 200 pounds worth which seems to be higher than the normal "rate of return".

I have not yet made any travel or accomodation arrangements. I know demand will be very high during the busy Olympic period, but I have more than a year to sort this out surely it will be possible too arrange something.

P.S. What is really cool is the fact that I was able to write up this blog post while on a plane thanks to the cool tablet PC I got for father's day.

A fathers day present that really brings a smile

2011-06-22T07:26:00.001+01:00

Last Sunday was father's day in Ireland. The ladies in my life know that I always love getting a new gadget and so they decided to club together to by me a tablet PC. I had been considering purchasing a tablet PC for some time but I was put off by the high prices and also since I have both a Laptop and a SmartPhone, I was not really convinced that I need a device that fitted in between. They must have spent a lot of time researching the purchase because, they really made an excellent choice. The model they bought be was a miScroll. which is an Android 2.3 based tablet so I was able to leverage my experience of using an Android phone to know which applications to install.

What really makes this present useful is the fact that they also bought be a cover/case to protect it which includes a built in keyboard. This means that I don't need to frustrate myself (and make loads of typing mistakes) by trying to use the in built touch screen keyboard. As you can see in the picture, when in the case, it looks more like a small netbook than a tablet (and I still have the option of removing it from the case if I really want)

Although the keyboard is quite small, I have not had nay problems when typing long documents with it. I have even started use Lotus Traveler on this device because it is much easier to type a complex password on this keyboard and hence my earlier objections to using it on my phone won't apply.

It always takes a little while to determine if a new computer is something that I will really use. I have only been using this device for a few days so far, but I am convinced that this will be a long term love affair rather than a brief fling.

Is it possible for someone in their 50s to remain cool?

2011-06-18T08:45:00.002+01:00

When I was in college (many years ago), I was in a rock band called UllSkull with my brother and a few other friends. When I tell my kids about this, they look very skeptical and doubt if I am telling them the truth. Any band formed these days would probably have lots of videos on YouTube and elsewhere to prove that the band really did exist. Unfortunately recording equipment was not as readily available back then and so there is no record of what we sounded like. I think a few photographs might have been taken, but although we thought we looked really cool back in the 70s, we would probably look ridiculous to the modern generation so I am not going to search too hard for them.

I grew up and matured so my music career is only a distant memory, but my brother is determined to remain young at hard and so he joined with a few friends to form a new band recently. His new band is called Diamonds in the Rough and here is a video of them in action. They actually sound not unlike what I remember of UllSkull (not sure which band members will be more insulted by that comparison) but thankfully they don't look at all similar.

If you are based in North Carolina and are looking for a band, I am sure they would accept bookings. In fact I am sure that they would be happy to travel even further away from home if the fee was right :-)

Our team for the Cycling Challenge is called "re-cycling crew"

2011-06-01T12:15:00.000+01:00

IBM and a number of other companies have teamed up with the Smarter Travel site, to organize a 10 minute cycle challenge which will be held from the 1st to 22nd of June. This is a fun event aimed at encouraging people to cycle more. Teams are awarded points for every time one of the team members goes on a cycle that lasts 10 minutes or more. There are bonus points for journeys that are to and from work and novice cyclists (i.e. people who haven't cycled in the last 6 months before the challenge) get bonus points.

As I normally cycle to and from work, I think this is a great idea. I have recruited 5 colleagues (including one novice cyclist) to join me in a team which we have chosen to call th ere-cycling crew. I am sure you will wish me luck, although this is clearly an event where the taking part is more important that the winning. Hopefully there won't be too much rain during the month. You will be able to follow how we are doing on the leaderboard which will be updated weekly.

With broadband speed you don't necessarily know what you will be getting

2011-05-31T20:05:00.096+01:00

Since I live in an urban area, I am luck enough to now have a choice of Internet service providers vying for my business. Competition is definitely a good thing from the customer's point of view, but one of the problems is that many consumers don't know if they can believe the claims of the competing service providers about the speed of their Internet services.

Recently, I was delighted to receive the following text from my broadband provider: "UPC has increased your broadband speed from 15Mb to 20Mb Unplug your modem from the power supply, plug it back in and you'll have even faster broadband. Enjoy." Clearly, this was good news, but since I am sceptical I decided to use a SpeedTest.net testing service to test my Internet service both before and after the upgrade to see if the speed I experience really was as high as claimed.

If you read to the end, you can see the full details of the testing I did of my connection speed before and after the upgrade, but if you want a quick summary here are the conclusions:

The download speed achieved on my download link did indeed increase as promised by my ISP, however in most cases it would not have any noticeable effect upon the overall experience of using the Internet because download speeds from many sites was way slower than the maximum capacity of the link from my ISP. Therefore, although any increase is welcome, it is probably not worth my while to spend more money on a further increase in download speed.
The upload speed of my connection was much slower than the download speed. This did not change noticeably after the upgrade which is a pity because this would be a factor that would impact my experience of the Internet. Upload speed should become an important factor when comparing different Internet providers, but very few publicize their upload speed.
Some of the sites which were giving me the fastest download speed also had considerable ping delays. In some applications (e.g. VOIP calls) the ping delays I measured would be likely to have a noticeable impact upon performance.

When considering the speed of your internet connection, one of the first things that you need to realize is that the internet is not a single unified entity. The speed of the connection from your house to one particular server on the internet might be quite slow, but your connection to other servers might be fast. In order to account for this, the Speedtest site has a wide range of test servers all over the world and you can choose which one you can use for testing your speed.

Before I present the actual test results, I think I should briefly explain the parameters that SpeedTest measures about the link. It measures three factors:

Download Speed: This is metric shows how quickly it is possible to download a large file from the test site. It is measured by downloading test files of various sizes and then measuring how the time to download varies with the size of the file i.e. they ignore the overhead delay which would be required to start any download. This is the metric most commonly quoted by ISPs in their advertisements because one of the most common uses of the Internet when it first became popular was to download large software kits. However, the things that people do on the Internet has changed significantly in recent years so this is not necessarily the most relevant metric for current users of popular sites like Facebook etc..
Upload Speed: This is a measure of how quickly you can upload a large file to the internet. It is essentially the same measurement as the download speed except that the data is going in the reverse direction. This would be the metric that would affect how quickly you could upload some pictures to your favorite photo sharing service. Many Internet links provide significantly less upload speed than the download speed because they assume that you will spend the bulk of your time accessing information that other people have uploaded rather than uploading your own information. However, since many people spend a lot of their time online using social network sites it is not clear to me that this assumption is still valid.
Ping Time: This is a simple measure of how long a single packet of information takes to travel from your computer to the chosen Internet server and back again. This measure is important in any application which involves real-time interaction over the network because this will set the minimum on the communications lag. For example, many people will have seen remote correspondents being interviewed on the TV news where it is clear that their is a noticeable lag between the interviewer asking a question and the question being heard by the interviewee. As you know packets are not sent directly from your computer to the Internet server, instead they pass through several intermediate nodes with each hop adding to the delay in delivery time.

These are not the only factors that need to be measured to judge the quality of the line. Other factors include the percentage of packets lost and the jitter (i.e. how much does the ping time vary from one packet to another), but to make my life easy I only considered the parameters that Speedtest gave me.

I ran the first test utility before I rebooted my network router so this would be a measure of the performance of my existing network link. By default, the site assigned me to use a server in Limerick for testing, but the performance of my link to this server was surprisingly poor so I repeated the tests with 3 other servers in more distant parts of the planet. I took each measurement twice to get a quick feel about how repeatable the test result might be.

By default, the speedtest site selected a server in Limerick, Ireland to test my connection. Although Limerick is not very far from my home (roughly 200km) I found that the results from this server were quite poor (perhaps the server is overloaded or else it might be in a data center without fast connections to other parts of the Internet). I chose a few other servers in different cities to repeat my test and as you can see below the tests varied quite a bit depending upon which server I selected.

The speed of my link to Oslo and San Jose was reasonably good, but the link to Philadelphia was not as good and the link to Limerick was worst of all. It is surprising that it took longer for my network packets to reach Limerick (which is roughly 200 km from my house in Dublin) than they took to reach San Jose (which is over 8,000 km away) - but of course the packets destined for Limerick could very well be routed through intermediate servers on the far side of the Atlantic.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
0.97/1.97	0.94/1.03	215/220	Limerick
10.27/9.23	0.99/0.95	115/120	Oslo
2.25/1.99	1.08/0.99	123/124	Philadephia
9.07/6.75	0.84/0.82	176/182	San Jose

I repeated the same test immediately after I rebooted the network to see if there was a noticeable difference. When I ran the pre-upgrade tests I did not realize that there was a test server available in Dublin. I ran tests with this server and I was pleased to see that the speed achieved to this server was over 15 Mb/s so the link from my house must indeed have been upgraded beyond 15Mb/s. The ping time to the server in Dublin was dramatically better than any of the others which probably means that there were very few networks hops between my home and this server.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
0.98/1.39	0.80/0.84	217/231	Limerick
10.38/11.18	1.05/1.03	122/110	Oslo
1.70/2.10	1.15/1.06	121/124	Philadelphia
10.18/10.88	1.23/1.10	178/178	San Jose
15.98/15.36	0.94/1.02	31/30	Dublin

In general there was not a noticeable difference in the speed of the link to any of the servers I had used before. Of course the speed of an overall network link is determined by the speed of the slowest link along the path. Looking at download speed, there is a dramatic difference between the speed when using different sites. This seems to suggest that the so the link from my house to the ISP's data center is not the bottleneck and the bottleneck must be somewhere else along the path to the slower sites. Therefore speeding up the capability of the link between my house and the ISP is not likely to affect the overall download speed achieved from most of the hosts.

However, the upload speed tells a very different story. The upload speed was around 1 Mb/s for any of the servers tested which is much less than the download speed. This means that the upload speed was probably limited by the link between my house and the ISP's data center.

Using a VOIP tool like Skype, the same amount of data would be transferred in both directions. In most cases it is the upload speed of each parties Internet link rather than the download speed that would determine the overall quality of the connection achieved. Therefore someone who is unhappy with the quality of their Skype link would be wasting their time and money in switching to an alternative service provider who promised higher download speeds.

Of course network performance will vary depending upon congestion so I did the following tests the next morning. It seems that the download speed from Limerick had improved from the day before, but the download speed from the server in Dublin was worse. The upload speed was still remarkably similar for both servers although it was about 20% faster than the night before.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
3.05/2.93	1.27/1.1.6	216/214	Limerick
12.93/12.72	1.29/1.33	27/24	Dublin

This asymmetry between the upload and download speeds is mainly a feature of the domestic broadband market. Commercial services are more likely to provide matched upload and download speeds. To see how a commercial service would perform I repeated the tests from the office where I work.

Although I the office is physically in Dublin, my employer has an internet connection provided by a UK based company. Therefore the SpeedTest.net service defaulted to using a server in London which it was able to reach faster than the one in Dublin. Luckily my employers has a very good internet link, but the download speed was 14-15Mb/s which is only slightly better than the speed I was getting at home. Looking at the upload speed however, the connection in the office was about 10 times faster than my home link

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
14.38/14.23	12.90/13.82	56/77	Dublin
15.10/14.09	10.68/13.10	24/24	London

I mentioned before that part of the reason limiting the speedtest results are the fact that my packets were competing with packets from other network users (this is called network contention). Therefore I decided to test the speed of the link again early on a Sunday morning when I guessed that there would be relatively little traffic congestion on the network. As you can see from the results below the download speed was indeed much faster, but the upload speed was virtually unchanged.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
19.52/19.16	1.25/1.24	26/25	Dublin
2.75/2.10	1.26/1.28	215/215	Limerick
12.38/12.90	1.37/1.38	110/109	Oslo

Could I run a Triathlon?

2011-05-28T19:21:00.000+01:00

I like to keep myself fit and healthy through a reasonable amount of regular exercise. However, I have mixed feelings about the idea of running a triathlon. On the one hand I think the athletes are foolish to subject their bodies to the strain of such an event, but I must also admit that I am envious of how fit they must be to be able to complete such a tough course without collapsing.

A colleague recently told me that he was entering into the Tri Athy event. This is billed as "The Perfect Introduction to Triathlon" because the relatively short course that involves a 400m Swim followed by a 13.6km Cycle and a 3.6km Run. I did give some consideration to joining him for the event, but then I chickened out at the end because I was not sure if I would be able for even this shortened version of a triathlon.

This morning I was visiting the gym and so I decided to do my own version of a mini triathlon to see how I would get on.

I started by swiming 20 lengths of the pool which is equivalent to 500m. This took me about 17 minutes which I think is a reasonable pace. I swam crawl all the way and didn't stop at all, although I slowed down quite a bit nearing the end.
Next I went for a cycle of about about 15km which took me slightly over 4o minutes. I was trying to be as close to triathlon conditions as possible, but I didn't run out of the gym onto my bike in my swimming gear. Instead I tried off properly and changed into my cycling gear. If it was a real triathlon, I think that the transition from swimming to cycling would be hard to do properly and I would certainly not relish the prospect of cycling in wet gear in Irish weather.
I was feeling Next I ran a 6km jog around a nearby park which took me 36 minutes. I was wondering how I would be sure how far I was running. I used the My Tracks application on my phone to monitor my progress and a new version of the application was pushed out just this week. I was pleasantly surprised that with the new version a robotic voice informed me as I passed each kilometer marker and it gave me statistics about my running pace so I never had to look down ad the screen to monitor my progress.

At the end of all this I was quite tired, but I am happy to report that I was not close to collapsing. Perhaps with a bit more practice, I will feel able to tackle the introductory triathlon next year.

Do we really need competition in the electricity market?

2011-05-20T06:19:00.000+01:00

Ireland has only relatively recently introduced competition into the residential electricity market. As a result a considerable amount of broadcast time on both radio and TV is devoted to advertisements from the various electricity companies encouraging household to switch electricity suppliers. Naturally, I took advantage of this situation to switch to a company who is providing me with cheapest electricity, but at the same time I am confused by what is the point of the exercise.

I am not an economist, but as far as I understand the reason why they recommend the introduction of competition into markets is because the competitive pressure to win market share will encourage the various companies involved to introduce innovations that will reduce costs and/or increase quality of service.

I can see how this works in the telecoms market. Some of the companies active in the market provide high quality services and premium prices and others provide lower levels of service, but at cheaper prices. In practice it can be difficult to find out the quailty level of the service you will get from a particular service provider (in fact it can sometimes be hard to find out the exact price they will charge you either), but in general the market works well with different service offerings appealing to different market segments.

The trouble with the electricity market is that the electric grid is designed to deliver exactly the same voltage of electricity to all of the customers. I know that some of the companies like to boast about the fact that they use a high percentage of renewable energy sources such as wind, but there is no way to tell that the electricity delivered to their customers' houses is from these clean source sand not from the dirty coal fired stations owned by their competitors. Likewise, if the wind didn't blow and there was a shortage of electricity, fairness should dictate that the environmentally conscious customers should be the ones subjected to the inconvenience of a temporary loss of supply - but there is no way to cut off supply to these customers while maintaining supply to the customers who chose to go with the less environmentally friendly company.

As far as I can see the only way that the electricity companies can compete with each other is in their billing system. This is hardly the area where the greatest amount of innovation is to be found. Am I missing something?

The importance of regular excercise

2011-05-13T08:32:00.032+01:00

I am a big fan of getting regular exercise. However, instead of being intensively involved in a single sport I normally try to fit exercise into my normal daily routine. I normally only use Ben Hardill's wonderful Tracks2Miles application to upload my DailyMile records when I undertake a significant run/cycle. However, most of my exercise is accounted for by the fact that cycle to and from work when the weather allows. I also try to fit in a short walk at lunch time each day - I find that the fresh air helps improve my productivity in the afternoon.

It is surprising how few IBM employees at the site where I am based realise that there is a beautiful walk around the perimeter. The complete circuit is 4.5km, but several shorter options are also possible if time is limited. Although parts of the path can get a little bit mucky during the winter months it is really beautiful. Trees have been planted that obscure the view of the IBM buildings and at times you would find it hard to see the IBM buildings and so when you see the cows on the neighbouring farms, you would find it hard to believe that over a thousand people are working in high-tech jobs only meters from where you are walking in the middle of nature. It is very common to see hares sharing the track and even the occasional fox (probably looking to feast on the Hares).

View Lunch walk Around IBM campus in a larger map

Incidentally I am no longer mayor of my local gym. I have not been back since I was ousted from the mayorship at the end of March. It is not that I have been sulking it is just that it seems a shame to be indoors running on a treadmill when we have been experiencing a rare extended spell of sunny spring weather in Ireland.

My new job is offically announced

2011-05-09T08:42:00.002+01:00

When people ask me what I do for a living I normally tell them that I am a software engineer. This is not entirely a lie, because I do have an engineering degree and I work in a software engineering related job. However, for over a decade my job has essentially been that of a manager. While I am proud to say that I have been able to keep up with the latest trends and technologies in software development - a very small proportion of my working days were spent writing software and a large percentage of my working days were spent doing general management tasks.

I have always believed that the work of the engineers in a high-tech company is much more valuable than the work of their managers. However, in recent times I had direct or indirect people management responsibility for over 100 employees. The vast majority of these employees were able to do their job with minimal input from me, but when you have responsibility for such a large team it is inevitable that you end up having to spend a lot of time 'managing' and hence have very little time left for 'engineering'.

Towards the end of last year I had career planing discussions with both my mentor and my own manager. It became clear to me that if I wanted to be successful while staying in the same career path I would have to devote even more energy to the management side of my role and hence reduce even further the limited amount of time I was spending on direct engineering work. This is not what I really wanted to do with my life and hence I decided that I would attempt to change my career path away from management and towards engineering.

It took a few months for me to find a suitable new role and to also arrange a replacement for my management position. However, I am delighted to say that the move has finally been formally announced and I am starting my new career this month.

I will still be part of the Sametime development team, but my new job responsibility will be to lead an imitative to simplify the way the product is installed and configured. Many of our customers have been telling us that they love the wonderful new capabilities of the most recent versions of Sametime, however they are less thrilled with the complex steps required to get the product installed and configured in a way that is compatible with their network infrastructure. It is easy to recognize that this is a problem we need to tackle, but it will not be easy to solve it.

One of the great things about working for a company like IBM is that it is possible to rise to a very senior level without having to be a manager. However, the more senior a person is, the harder it is for them to make such a dramatic career change. Because I am reasonably senior in IBM, it will be hard for me to make the change successfully, and still meet the expectations of someone at my pay grade, but if I postpone the move any longer it will only become more difficult. I have no doubt that it will be very difficult for me to become a high performer in my new role, but I am looking forward to the challenge and I know deep down that I am making the right move.

Update: I posted more information about my new role on my IBM internal blog.

The importance of play in successful organisations

2011-05-06T18:34:00.048+01:00

As my friends know I am a great believer in the importance of taking time to ensure that I and my colleagues have fun at work. In fact "Have Fun at Work" was one of the official corporate values at Lotus when I first started in my current job. Unfortunately IBM does not have a similar corporate value, so it lapsed as partof the take-over.

However, many IBMers do some great work to ensure that IBM is a really fun place to work. A large portion of the key leaders at the Dublin Software Lab are former Lotus people and as a result of this many of our employee surveys speak highly of how it is a really fun place to work. I think we need to be careful that we don't lose this culture because it is a valuable recruiting an retention tool.

I recently found this wonderful TED talk by a Primatologist named Isabel Behncke Izquierdo where she explains much more eloquently than I ever could why the human race could increase tolerance and harmony by learning from studies of how Bonobo society values play.

"Spousonomics" is not a word I plan to use

2011-05-03T20:42:00.000+01:00

Some people use their blog to write reviews of books that they have read. However I am going to use mine to write about a book that I have no intention of ever reading.

When I visit my local library, I normally visit their "new arrivals" shelf to see if there are any interesting books. On my most recent visit I spotted an interesting looking book cover with the catchy title of Spousonomics. From reading the blurb the book seems to be about how you can use lessons from economic theories to achieve a happy marriage. Not surprisingly the authors are American and have a web site to go with the book complete with a Facebook page, a Twitter feed etc.

I can't be too critics of Americans because technically I am a US citizen - but one of the most laughable aspects of American society is a belief that all aspects of life are explainable by economics. I find this book title hilarious but, I have no intention of reading it and I think that it would probably be detrimental to my marriage to start quoting this rubbish.

A new Arrival in our Household

2011-04-16T21:10:00.001+01:00

People normally use this phrase to announce the birth of a child. I don't love my gadgets as much as I love my children, but the arrival of my latest new gadget is a reasonably big deal.

I wrote before about how I needed to have my weather station constantly attached to a running computer in order to have the collected weather data instantly uploaded to my personal weather site on the internet. Since I don't want to waste power by leaving my desktop PC plugged on all the time, I needed to look for alternative options.

My initial thoughts was that I could use an Arduino device, but an Arduino expert that I met at the Young Scientist advised me that it wouldn't really be up to the task. I then decided to check out one of the new "plug computers". This is a newly emerging form factor for low power computers which look just like a voltage converter (see the picture of my new device beside a pair of sunglasses for comparison.

I looked at a few options on the Internet, before finally settling upon a TonidoPlug, which is an Ubuntu 9.04 based PC which comes complete with a specialised home server package installed upon it (which is optimised for sharing files and other things that you might want to do).

The device was trivially easy to set up. I had my home server up and running in about 5 minutes after opening the package. It took me a little longer to get the weather station installed and configured, but there were no major problems since I am already fairly familiar with Ubuntu, and now my personal weather station is being kept constantly up to date instead of having to depend upon me remembering to manually upload data.

The device was not completely perfect. I had assumed that it would come with WiFi support but it didn't so I am going to have to leave it close to a network port until I get around to buying a new WiFi card for it. In addition I was hoping that I would be able to attach my 1 TByte USB drive to the Tonidoplug, but it seems that the USB ports don't provide enough power so I am going to have to make do with a 8 GByte USB card for now.

Cross Posting from MyTracks to DailyMile

2011-04-15T09:10:00.001+01:00

As I wrote before, I find that the My Tracks application from Google is a very useful and easy to use utility to use for tracking my running training. Howver, I have noticed that many people I know seemed to be using an application called DailyMile to post details of their exercise activity on Facebook.

This integration with Facebook seems to be great fun and it allows people to give and receive motivational messages, so I decided to register for DailyMile myself to see how it worked. When I started using it first I was ~~surprised~~ shocked to find that people are expected to manually enter details of the routes that they run. It struck me that there should be an application to automatically upload GPS traces to DailyMile, but when I asked a few friends nobody knew of one. However, my asking sparked a colleague Ben Hardill from IBM's Hursley lab to take on the challenge of building such an application. It only took him a few days to get it working and he describes his progress on his blog.

He has not yet officially released the application, but he asked me to be one of the Beta testers. It works brilliantly, with one limitation which means that you must use a regular DailyMile account rather than logging into DailyMile with your Facebook credentials. This bug is caused by a limitation in Daily Mile's implementation of OAuth rather than a limitation in Ben's code and in any case doesn't bother me, because I don't have any significant Daily Mile history to worry about abandoning

The existence of this application provoked me to go for a run this morning before work just so I had something to use to try out the application. I am glad to say that it worked great.

Great Ireland Run

2011-04-10T16:05:00.000+01:00

Today myself and my brother joined several thousand other athletes in the Great Ireland Run.The sunshine was glorious and it definitely was uplifting to see so many people of varying levels of fitness out in the open air enjoying themselves.

All credit must go to the organisers who did a great job - coordinating thousands of runners cannot be easy.

According to the record I kept on my phone, I took 1 hour and 3 minutes for the 10km route. I started recording before I crossed the official start line, so my official time will probably be slightly faster. However, I don't think I achieved my personal goal of completing under the hour mark.

Why I uninstalled Lotus Traveller from my Phone

2011-04-04T08:17:00.031+01:00

I recently enrolled in the Beta program for Lotus Traveler on Android. A number of friends have asked me how I am getting on with and they are amazed to hear that I have removed it from my phone. Therefore I thought I should write a short note to explain why.

First to explain that Lotus Traveler is a product which allows people to read Lotus Notes email from their mobile phone. The product has existed for some time, but only recently added support for the Android platform.

The product itself works very well and while a mobile phone is not an ideal platform for reading and replying to emails, it can occasionally be convenient to be able to check for urgent emails or have a quick glance at my scheduled meetings for tomorrow without having to open my laptop.

The only problem is with the IBM security policy which insists that any device which has access to our email infrastructure is protected by an automatic screen-lock that is secured by a password which is at least 8 characters long and contains a mix of upper-case lower-case characters and non-alphabetic characters. This policy is entirely reasonable and I have no problem in typing such a complex password to unlock my work laptop. However, the logistics of typing such a complex password on a small touch screen phone make it rather annoying - especially when I am simply trying to make a phone call on my own personally owned phone.

In addition I eventually decided that it was better for work/life balance if I didn't have constant access to my work email at all times and so I removed Lotus Traveler and reset my phone to use a simpler unlock pattern which is more appropriate to this type of device.

Perfecting my menu for "Come Dine With Me"

2011-03-28T07:31:00.000+01:00

At this stage, I am giving up hope of being selected to appear on the "Come Dine With Me" show on TV. Nevertheless, I decided to have another practice run with friends this weekend. I tweaked the menu slightly this time.

The one think I was most nervous about in the new menu was the Pavlova for desert, because I had never cooked this before. However, I think it came out quite well as you can see from this picture. I thought I had done something wrong when the inside was all soft, but my sister who is a Pavlova specialist assured me that this was actually how it was supposed to be.

I cooked salmon-en-croute for the main course which was the same as last time, but I cooked Prawns-Pil-Pil for a starter. I forgot to take a picture of the Prawns, but I did take a picture of the home made brown bread that I baked to accompany them.

I took no short cuts with the pre-dinner nibbles either. I made a dip from soured cream and chives. I combined this with carrots and celery to produce a very attractive looking tri-colour platter. The guests seemed to enjoy this, but I personally thought the dip tasted slightly bland. Maybe I will search for another dip recipe if I do get selected for the TV show.

Overall we had a great night. I even managed to get the Nintendo Wii working for the after dinner entertainment without having to call up on my daughter's hesitance to get it started. So, I am delighted that I entered the competition becuase I have had some great nights entertainment with the practice runs.

Helping older people to take advantage of internet technology

2011-03-19T09:31:00.001Z

I know that many older people are very enthusiastic users of the internet, but others struggle to get started. In order to help people who are struggling to get started with computers, IBM Ireland are teaming up with Age Action Ireland to run a number of introductory computer courses for older people. The courses will be held every Tuesday lunchtime starting on 29th of March. They will cover the basic of getting started with computers and no prior knowledge at all is required.

If anyone wants to sign up for the courses (which are free), you should send an email to Jill Brown who is coordinating.

Using a smartphone to keep a detailed training log

2011-03-17T12:38:00.000Z

I am not really much of a runner, but I usually enter the Great Ireland Run in the Phoenix Park. I recently realized that the race is coming up soon and so I decided I needed to restart my training. I am mostly concerned that I am capable of running the full 10km and I was not really sure of the length of my planned route. I decided to use the My Tracks application on my phone, to record the route.

View Longer Loop Including Porterstown in a larger map

This simple, but powerful uses the phone's GPS to track exactly where I run. All I have to do is press the start button as I head off on my run and then press stop when I get back. The application automatically generates a map of where I have gone and record statistics about how fast I was running etc. (see sample above). If I want it can also the the application to export the data into a training log so that I can see if my pace is increasing as I get fitter (the training log can be private if you want, but I don't care who follows my running progress)

My previous run was slightly under 1`0km, so I added an extra loop to this mornings run to take it over the 10km mark. The run took me slightly over an hour, but I think I am on track to complete the 10km under the hour mark which is the goal I set myself. I think my training is not necessarily great, but at least it will be well monitored :-)

What is the weather like where I live

2011-03-14T08:32:00.020Z

I finally got around to connecting my new weather station to the internet using the pywws open source software to upload data from my weather station to the Weather Underground site. Now if you want to check what the weather is like in my back garden, you can visit my personal weather station page on wunderground.com.

This site is a really cool collaboration of amateur weather monitoring stations all over the world. It automatically generates trend maps and other cool visualizations of amateur weather readings. Unfortunately, my weather station is not (yet) set up to automatically upload readings in real time and hence the will data only get updated when I manually connect the weather station to my laptop and upload a batch of data. I hope to rectify this sometime soon.

How green is my driving?

2011-03-09T07:24:00.006Z

I just got a new car which has a feature whereby it constantly rates the environmental friendliness of how it is being driven. When the car is being driven in a very fuel efficient manner the speedometer display has a green background. As the driver starts to waste fuel, the speedometer background turns a blueish shade of green and finally when fuel is being needlessly wasted it turns pure blue.

Being a gadget freak, I naturally had to experiment with this feature to understand exactly how it works. It seems that the decision about what colour to display is taken based upon what is happening at that exact time, while it would be more useful if it took a slightly longer term view.

Here are some samples of what I observed:

When I put my foot on the brake and come to a complete stop (e.g. at a traffic light) the engine control system will frequently turn off the engine completely. This behaviour takes a bit of getting used to, because the first few times I though that I had caused the engine to stall. Naturally the efficiency meter is pure green in this case because there is no fuel being used at all.
At other times, when I stop the engine is not automatically switched off (presumably because the engine control system detected that the batteries need charging). In this case the efficiency display will turn pure blue. I can understand that it is wasteful of fuel to have the engine running, but since there is nothing the driver can do to change this I am not sure what value this information provides.
The most inefficient way to drive is by accelerating quickly away from traffic lights before slamming on the brakes at the next junction. If I drive like this, the meter will show me as green when I slam on the brakes because no fuel is being used as I slow down - however if it averaged the fuel consumption over a longer period it would rightly identify this as inefficient driving.

The computer pioneer who left a lasting legacy in Ireland

2011-03-06T08:17:00.000Z

This is a tribute to Ken Olsen written by Mike Mulqueen who had the distinction of being the first employee employed by Digital Equipment Corporation in Ireland:

Ken Olsen, engineer, entrepreneur, computer designer, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and friend died Sunday February 6, 2011.

I first met Ken in the early ‘70s and found him to be a very modest private person who spoke little of himself, other than to say that he was a Christian and a scientist. He described himself many times in this way.

This gentle giant socialised very little, he was a non-smoker, didn’t drink or swear. He was a religious man who once devoted a lot of his time to a Sunday School in Boston.

After a spell in the US navy, he studied at MIT Boston where he graduated with BSc and MSc. He also spent time there directing their Lincoln Laboratory. I believe this was where he got the idea of setting up his own company.

In 1957 Ken and another engineer from MIT set about founding the company of which he had dreamed. He knew what his product would be, not an IBM or Honeywell type but something much smaller, about the size of a filing cabinet. They both set out to find a workshop, not in a major city but, as Ken would have it, in some rural area. Their search was complete when they visited a small town called Maynard in Massachusetts. There they rented space in an old woollen mill. They had no money but eventually overcame that difficulty with the help of Georges Doriot, head of American Research and Development. This came at a price. In return for $70,000 ARD got 70% of their company.

They started preparing their ‘workshop’ which had no furniture or rooms or anything they could use. Ken found an old desk which was left behind by previous tenants.

Their first product was not the mini-computer he had planned but instead they started designing and producing logic modules. The first computer, the PDP1, was born in 1959. The computer industry was changed for ever. In less than ten years he led his company to become the second most powerful in the computer industry. Doriot’s $70,000 investment had grown to about €500,000 in 15 years. The PDP1 was replaced by others such as the PDP5, PDP8, PDP11 and so on to the VAX.

In addition to being a computer pioneer Ken was also a management innovator. In Digital facilities throughout the world he created a working environment that allowed the reticent to blossom and the confident to excel. The atmosphere his style created was key to Digital's global success and ultimately had a transformational effect on industrial development in Ireland. Few would question that this country's current reputation as a centre of excellence in the ICT field can be traced back to the decision to set up the Digital plant in Galway in 1971.

When we met the first time he looked anything but the kind of CEO I had experience of before. He wore casual clothes, flannel shirt, ill-fitting jacket and pants, and boots. When we sat down to talk I first noticed his big hands and then his piercing eyes. He spoke a lot in parables which at first was difficult to follow, but as one got to know him better it became easy.

During our conversations any time I met Ken, either in Ireland or in his office, the subject was always about our employees. When we talked about Ireland, a place he considered special, he was always concerned about how we were viewed by the community, State bodies and Government. I believe that no matter where DEC had facilities, he was concerned about such matters.

For Galway’s Quincentenary in 1984 DEC developed a park in Salthill for use by senior citizens. When completed, and on one of Ken’s visits to Galway, I took him to see it. I told him that people knew it as Digital Park. Again the humble and private Ken, who never expected acknowledgements or thanks for any DEC contribution, made it very clear the site should be known by what it was intended for – “The Senior Citizens’ Park”. To him Digital had made a contribution and had no further claim to it.

On one of his early visits to Ireland he was looking for somewhere to spend a few days in privacy and focus on some thoughts and ideas. I recommended Connemara and after his first visit he returned several times, once bringing his wife Aulikki with him.

Ken first met Aulikki, from Finland, while she attended college in the US. After graduating she returned home but not before Ken had fallen for her. She was not aware of this. After Ken had graduated from MIT he went on vacation to Scandinavia. After some searching he was eventually to meet up with Aulikki in Sweden. The romance blossomed, Ken took a job in Sweden and they later became engaged. They were married in December 1950 by Aulikki’s father who was a Lutheran minister. After that Ken brought his wife back to the US. Ken’s father was Norwegian and his mother Swedish.

In 1986 Fortune Magazine listed Ken Olsen as the most successful entrepreneur in the history of American business. He was also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Reluctantly, Ken resigned from DEC in 1992, having changed the world of computers forever.
In 2006 Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, is quoted as referring to Ken Olsen as “one of the true pioneers of computing”, and added, “He was also a major influence in my life”.

The last time I met Ken some years ago, he said he wanted to bring his grandchildren to Ireland in the spring. He didn’t get an opportunity.

He was a legend who impacted many lives. I think it is safe to say we all owe a lot to Ken, directly or indirectly.

He has gone to his reward to be reunited with his beloved Aulikki, who predeceased him in March 2009.

Ar Deis de go rabh a anam dilis.

Ken Olsen: Born February 20, 1926; died February 6, 2011

Promoting the use of Open Technology inside of IBM

2011-03-04T08:50:00.001Z

IBM is strongly in favour of Open Standards, I think that this is partly due to the fact that IBM had a near-death experience in the 1980s caused by an over-reliance on proprietary technology, but it is also due to the fact that almost all of IBM's customers also buy IT equipment and services from other vendors and so it is vitally important to be able to interoperate freely.

It would make little sense for IBM to be preaching the importance of openness in IT to customers unless they were also practising openness and freedom in their own IT infrastructure. As I explained in my presentation to OSSBarCamp last year, IBM employees have a choice of different operating systems to use on their work desktop machine. Since many people simply stick with the default operating system on their assigned PC (usually Microsoft Windows), a number of Linux fans in the company run a number of events to try to help build awareness of the choices available.

Last year we ran an event called Open Client Awareness Week where employees at a variety of different IBM locations throughout the globe ran a stand where they gave out DVDs with live bootable images of the IBM Open Client layer running on top of a variety of different flavours of Linux. The people operating the stand were all using Linux for their daily work and so they were able to advise interested employees about which distribution might suit them best and the advantages/dis-advantages of making the switch from Windows. They were also able help propose solutions to problems that people had encountered while making the switch.

I helped organise the stand held on the Mulhuddart campus where I am based. I must say that I was amazed with the level of interest we received. Almost all people passing by the stand had heard of the Linux Open Client. A number of people mentioned that they were considering trying out Linux on their laptop, but they were worried that they would not know whom to ask for help if they ran into problems - these people were reassured to know that there were employees on the same site as them who had experience of Linux and were willing to help newcomers adjust.

This year, instead of repeating the same format, we organised an event called Open Technology Awareness Month. The differences were:

Instead of simply concentrating on promoting Linux, we broadened the scope to also include promoting the use of the Firefox browser and the Lotus Symphony document editors. The hope was that employees who were reluctant to replace their entire Windows operating system, might still try these open tools.
The length of the event was increased from a week to a month. This did not mean that each site ran a stand for the entire month, but it meant that each site could pick the dates within the month that best suited them to run the stand.

In order to make things as easy as possible for the local teams, the corporate team provided each local team with a package of goodies to give out. Each pack contained 25 of each of the following (but since there are a lot of people working on the Mulhuddart campus, we asked for 3 packs i.e. 75 of each):

Posters that we could stick up around the site advertising when and where our stand would be located.
DVDs with a live boot of 32-bit Ubuntu Linux fully configured with the IBM layer i.e. all of the applications commonly needed by IBM employees to do their work. These DVDs had a fancy label so they looked very professional.
DVDs with a live boot of 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the IBM layer.
CDs with a copy of the latest version of Lotus Symphony editors for a variety of
Decals for people to stick on their laptops with a variety of open technology related logos e.g. Ubuntu, Firefox, "Linux Inside" etc.
Information leaflets giving people information about the DVD/CDs that we were giving out as well as general information about open technologies.

As you would expect the free goodies were very popular. However, some were more popular than others which is probably an indication of the relative popularity of various technologies.

As with last year, the Ubuntu DVDs were by far the most popular. By the end of the first day were were running low on supplies and I had to ask the release lab if they could make up an extra batch of 40 DVDs so that we didn't run out.
The Red Hat DVDs were also popular because if the fact that they contained a 64 bit OS. On the second day the Red Hat DVDs started to become almost level in popularity. This may have been due to the fact that at that stage we were giving out Ubuntu DVDs with a plain label, while the Red Hat DVDs still had the fancy label. For the third and final day of the stand we had to get the release lab to produce an additional 30 of each variant of the live boot (this meant we gave out a total of 145 Ubuntu and 105 Red Hat DVDs)
While Lotus Symphony was not quite as popular, we eventually managed to give away all 75 which was in contrast with last year when we only managed to give out 4 copies of Lotus Symphony over 3 days (although we were strongly encouraging people to take the Lotus Symphony CD and only allowing them to take one of the live boot DVDs if they convinced us that they really were going to make use of it).
The decals were also reasonably popular. We gave away almost all of the Ubuntu decals and about half of each of the other decals.
We found it very hard to get people to take one of the leaflets. The most popular leaflet was the one explaining how to install from the Ubuntu live boot DVD, but we only gave away 10 of this leaflet. Unfortunately the rest of them ended up in the recycling bin.

In summary, I was pleasantly surprised at how popular the stand was and to see that almost all of the visitors to the stand already knew quite a bit about the IBM Open Client. Most of the questions we got were quite detailed relating to support of specific hardware rather than basic questions about differences between Linux and Windows.

Practice run for "Come Dine with Me"

2011-02-28T20:10:00.005Z

TV3 recently announced that they are launching an Irish version of the popular Come Dine With Me program where people compete to win a prize by hosting a dinner party for a bunch of strangers. In a moment of madness I decided to put my name forward to appear in the program. I would describe myself as a mediocre cook at best so I decided that it would make sense for me to practice for the show by inviting a few friends over.

I had my first such practice session last night and I tried out the following menu:

Starter: Goats Cheese Tart with Red Onion Confit

Main Course: Salmon en Croute served with

green beans and garlic potatoes

Dessert: Very Berry Jelly

Entertainment: Wii Sports

It went very well and the guests really entered into the spirit of the game. One guest even brought a video camera and recorded each of the guests giving me feedback and marks at the end. The guests were very kind to me and scored me a mix of 8s and 9s, but I doubt that a group of strangers would have been so kind.

I got a few pointers for areas of improvement:

The Starters

There was not enough goats cheese on the starters. As you can see from the picture on the right, my starters only had a drop of goats cheese in the center, while in the the picture withe the recipe shows them completely smothered. This was caused by the fact that the container of goat's cheese I bought was misleading and did not contain as much cheese as I was expecting.
Serving two pastry dishes in a row was too filling and while both were tasty, it would have been better to replace one of them with something lighter. The next revision of the menu will have to rectify this.
When the guests arrived, I served crisps with a selection of dips to accompany their pre-dinner drinks. I made a slip up by forgetting to give them napkins, but also I was unable to tell them what the dips contained which made it obvious that I had not made them myself. I doubt that I could stretch to making home-made dips, so maybe I should not bother serving anything with the drinks at all.

If I am lucky enough to be selected for the TV show I am now confident that I won't make a complete disgrace of myself.

My environmentally friendly new car

2011-02-25T07:15:00.001Z

Honda Insight

I am not really a big car fan, but my company car was well overdue to be replaced and after some consideration I decided to go green and choose a Hybrid electric/petrol car. The model I chose is a Honda Insight. which looks quite stylish (an important consideration for the female members of my family). It was delivered yesterday and I must say that my first impression are that it was a good choice - it is a pleasure to drive and it comes with lots of cool accessories that I have not yet had time to fully explore (e.g. a Bluetooth hands free speaker system for my phone and a USB connection to connect my music player with the car's entertainment system).

I am not certain that Hybrid vehicles really are that much more environmentally friendly than a conventional car since all of the power ultimately comes from the petrol engine, but pure electric vehicles are not yet widely available in Ireland and even if they were there would be concerns about the availability of charging stations.

It is a pity that Ford doesn't offer it's Sync platform in Europe, because I would have been very tempted to choose a Ford vehicle if they did. They have announced that they will begin selling both Hybrid and fully electric vehicles in 2011, but as in the software industry there is a significant lag between an announcement and the product being available for sale.

My Triple Mandate

2011-02-21T07:15:00.000Z

I think it is too easy to become a mayor on Foursquare. I blogged earlier about how I became mayor of my local Gym and without any great effort on my behalf I am now also mayor of two different restaurants. In Irish politics there used to be a common practice whereby many TDs (members of the Irish Parliament) were also members of their local council, but now this practice has been outlawed and people elected to parliament are forced to resign their seats on their local council. Maybe Foursquare should have a similar policy and only allow people to be mayor of one place at a time. What do you think?

Where are the readers of this blog located

2011-02-18T08:08:00.018Z

I think Google Analytics is a really great tool. I have enabled it for this blog and it allows me to find our all sorts of interesting facts about the people who visit the site. For example I recently was looking at the data for what countries the visitors to the blog are coming from. The darker colours indicate countries from which more visitors came.

I was not surprised to see that 41% of the visitors came from Ireland. The next most common country of origin was the UK (24%) and USA (15%) which wasn't surprising either. However, I was surprised to see how widely dispersed the visitors were. I have visitors for virtually all of the world apart from Greenland, and some countries in Africa, South America and Asia which might not have many internet users. Another notable exception was China which I suspect could mean that my site is blocked by the Great Firewall of China. I doubt if any Chinese censor has read my blog and found it objectionable, but perhaps all blogger based sites are blocked.

Starring on Google Street View

2011-02-16T19:51:00.046Z

A few years ago my brother and I hired out a cruiser and spent a week cruising with our families on the Shannon. When we were passing through Carrick-on-Shannon with our hired cruiser we spotted one of the Google Street view cars in the vicinity. I made a mental note of where I was when I spotted the car and when Street View was initially launched in Ireland I tried without success to see us on the site. The important point to know is where were we when the car saw us, not where were we when we saw the car.

However, I was browsing randomly on the site the other night and I happened to spot us appearing clearly as you can see from the screenshot below. You can click here to see us live on the web, but it is normally quite hard to find us because if you move to the position either left or right of this exact position there is no boat in the river. It seems that google selects images from multiple passes through an area, and we only appear in one of the passes (if you look carefully you can also see someone taking a picture of the Google Street View car).

In all modesty I must say that we look very good, but it would be hard to recognise us if you didn't know exactly who was on the boat at the time (I was driving and am partly obscured from view). You might think that it is extravagant for a recently appointed mayor to be driving such a fancy cruiser, but I must admit that it was only rented from Emerald Star. Hopefully the local Bord Failte office will be sending us payments in reward for the great way we are advertising the amenities of the area.

The Irish General Election is really using social media

2011-02-09T18:53:00.001Z

The campaign is now well underway for the Irish general election which will take place on 25th of February. One thing that has struck me about the campaign so far is how almost all candidates have finally appreciated the importance of leveraging the internet and social media tools.

I suppose much has changed in the four years since the last election. This report from the RTÉ Drivetime program reviews how the various candidates are engaging with social media - while some candidates are clearly more successful than others, all of them are trying to win the on-line battle.

The election reports on the nightly TV news is typically started with a summary of the political Twitterings of the day. Most of the relevant Tweets are tagged with #ge11 so it is easy to follow the conversation.

How I became mayor of my local Gym

2011-02-02T21:00:00.084Z

Since a General Election has just been called in Ireland, many people might be wondering how to achieve elected office. Those of you who follow my Twitter stream might have noticed my recent tweet "I just ousted @slkav as the mayor of Westpoint Health and Fitness Blanchardstown on @foursquare http://4sq.com/6LqwIq" and wondered how I achieved that.

This was actually achieved very easily compared to how difficult it would be to become a real mayor. I recently started to use a service called FourSquare which allows you to check-in to various locations to tell your friends where you are. Initially I was quite skeptical about the potential benefit of using such a service, but since it seems to be growing in popularity I said I would see what the fuss is about.

An obvious thing to worry about using a service like this is that you might not want people to know where you are at any particular time. However, this is not really an issue, since FourSquare only tracks my location when I explicitly check-in to a location (typically by using an application on my phone). This is quite different from services like Google Latitude or Facebook Places which can sometimes be publishing your location without you being consciously aware of that.

Initially I did not use it much because I was not sure when I might want to publish my location but then I joined a local gym and decided that I ought to boast about that fact to my friends. In my first check-in, I did not realize that the Gym was already registered on Foursquare and so I accidentally registered it a second time. The next two times I visited the gym I check-in properly with FourSquare and hey presto I was declared to be the mayor (based upon the fact that I had checked-in more frequently than anyone else in the previous 60 days) and FourSquare automatically tweeted the good news on my behalf. I should point out that at the time I was the only person check-in to the gym on FourSquare, but the gym was packed so the most frequent person to check in on FourSquare is not really a good estimate for who is visiting the gym most often.

Will this service catch on? I think it probably will, because it combines a fun element. I saw that my predecessor as mayor of the gym tweeted "nooooooooooooooooooooo!" in reply to the news of me becoming mayor, so maybe FourSquare can encourage more visits to the gym as we battle for the mayorship.

What is the big deal about net neutrality

2011-01-29T10:00:00.160Z

The debate about net neutrality is quite a heated one at the moment. This recent article from sociaclmedia.net explains why many of the original innovators behind the establishment of the internet think that it is important that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are forced, by law to respect the neutrality principle. However, many other people would argue that the exact definition of net neutrality is not clearly enough defined to be incorporated into law and having too much government regulation is a bad thing. These people argue that it would be better to allow companies maximum freedom to innovate in meeting their customer's requirements and that market competition will solve most issues.

I don't claim to be an expert in this area. I am mostly in favor of network neutrality principles, but I do see some merit in both sides of the argument. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

Market forces can only be relied upon when there us genuine competition in the market. I am lucky enough to live in an urban area of a well developed nation, so if my home broadband provider started to place any unreasonable restrictions on my network link I would not hesitate to switch to one of their competitors. However, I know that many other people are not so lucky and do not have any choice about whom they get their internet service from.

Whenever a company has monopoly on providing such a vital service, it is only right that the government should impose rules about how the service should be delivered.
In addition, any company which places restriction on how their network is used should make this information visible to customers before they sign up because many companies tie new subscribers in to long contracts and it would not be fair it the consumers don't learn about the limitations on a service until after they sign-up.

One of the topics in the debate is whether or not it is acceptable for certain companies to pay extra to ensure that their traffic gets priority delivery.

Personally I think that if companies are willing to pay extra for a premium service then I don't see any reason why companies should not be allowed to provide this service so long as they don't do this by downgrading the service to the regular customers below what they had paid for.
Of course very few ISPs currently provide any guarantee about the level of service. If you use a site like speedtest.net to test the actual performance of your internet link, you will see that you rarely get the speed of link that you though you paid for. The speed advertised by the ISP is normally the maximum theoretical speed of the link.
I think that ISPs should be forced to advertise the average or minimum speed offered. If this was done, then they could be allowed sell premium services to companies so long as this did not cause the service to their normal customers drop below the agreed level.

Another topic of the debate is whether mobile service providers should be forced to follow the same network neutrality standards as regular ISPs. I understand that it might be expensive to build a mobile network which is capable of delivering full unrestricted internet service.

I don't see any problem in allowing companies to try build a profitable service that is attractive to customers with limited disposable income (an increasingly large market segment) by providing devices which are capable of accessing only a limited number of sites/services. However, it is important that people know exactly what they are buying and therefore the companies should not be allowed to advertise that these devices have an internet connection.

Maybe some of my opinions are naive. I would love to hear what other people think.

Tethering my mobile phone - a cheap alternative to buying a USB 3G card

2011-01-27T19:43:00.011Z

I have often considered purchasing a 3G broadband stick to use with my laptop when away from home or office, but the reality is that my potential usage level have never justified the spend because I don't really travel very much. However, I was recently stuck in a place with no WiFi and time to spare so I thought I would try tethering my mobile phone (i.e. using my phone's 3G data connection to connect my laptop to the internet) - I was amazed how easy it was.

In the past I was put off trying this because, the instructions I read online made it seem very complicated. Then I remembered hearing that one of the benefits of updating my phone to Android 2.2 is the fact that it is supposed to make this much easier.

Here are the steps I followed:

On my phone I opened the "Settings menu" and then the "wireless & networks" sub-menu. About half way down there is an option "Tethering", when I opened this I saw a check-box labeled "USB Tethering", but the check-box was not enabled.
When I connected a USB cable from my laptop to the phone the check-box immediately became enabled and I clicked on it.
I then turned my attention to my laptop to see what I would need to do to configure it to use this connection. However, before I had a chance to do anything I saw a pop-up notification saying "network connected via USB". Straight away I was able to browse the internet and even connect to my employers VPN. I could hardly that it was so easy.

I should mention that I was using Ubuntu on my laptop which is famous for its ease of use - the instructions for Windows or MAC users might be more complicated. Although I didn't run any formal speed test in the link it was not noticeably slower than my normal broadband. Of course I had a strong signal (4 out of 5 bars) and I might not have been as happy with the speed achieved if I was on the edge of the network coverage area - but this would be the same if I had invested in a USB stick.

Harnessing the fun factor to bring young people into contact with the Lotus Products

2011-01-25T21:23:00.024Z

I am delighted to see that Lotus are making special efforts to connect young students during the upcoming Lotusphere event. The Lotus community is very vibrant and the people who work with the Lotus products tend love them and be very loyal. However since Lotus products are not really aimed at the consumer market, many young people who are studying computer science are not even aware of their existence.

The Lotusphere conference which is happening next week in Orlando, Florida is the biggest event in the year for the Lotus community. It combines education and fun in a way that really helps build enthusiasm for Lotus products. Normally this event is only attended by people who are already working with Lotus products, but this year a special initiative is being undertaken to help connect with the next generation of IT professionals - we are expecting over 500 students from local universities to attend Lotusphere on our special college day 31st of January,

In addition a special Xpages contest for students is being run in conjunction with a business partner. Because of all of the great results from the Hackdays inside IBM I am confident that we will get great results from this contest.

The video industry is currently in transition from 2D to 3D in much of the same way as it transitioned from b/w to colour over half a century ago

2011-01-20T07:15:00.002Z

3D Glasses for the Bolt 3D Movie
Originally uploaded by DanieVDM

The stories from the consumer electronics show that was recently held in Las Vegas indicate that the industry is investing heavily on 3D video technology. However, many consumers (including myself) are very skeptical about the transition. Although many cinemas are proudly boasting about the many new movies that they have available in 3D, the quality of the experience is not brilliant. Part of the reason that the electronics manufacturers are getting excited about 3D is because the cost of the equipment is dramatically higher. I think that most consumers will be waiting for the price to reduce and quality to improve before they decide to invest. In addition there is hardly any content available for 3D devices (not surprisingly because who would bother producing content that nobody has a device capable of consuming it).

At first glance you might think I am pessimistic about the chances of 3D video taking off, but since I am old enough to remember the transition from black & white TV to colour I can see many parallels.

I was a young child in the 1960s. At this time cinemas had completed the transition from black & white to colour and virtually all movies were released in colour. This is similar to the current situation where 3D is taking off in the cinema, but not yet in homes.
When I was young, colour TV had been invented, but very few people had purchased them because the cost was so much higher than the black and white version. Most TV stations broadcast the bulk of their content in b/w format with only occasional programs in colour (partly because very few of their viewers would notice). This is similar to the current situation where some but not all movies are available in 3D format.
Gradually all TV stations converted to colour broadcasting and consumers gradually converted to colour receivers. However even up to the 1980s they had to take into account that a significant number of viewers would be watching in b/w format e.g. if a football match was being broadcast between two teams who had jerseys that looked similar in b/w one of the teams would be asked to change. I wonder how long it will be before a movie will consider it OK to have a key plot line that would be missed by anyone watching in 2D!

Therefore I think that 3D video will eventually catch on, but the transition will take decades rather than years. After all, I don't think that it is possible to purchase a black & white TV anymore.

2011-01-15T06:44:00.000Z

I have two selfish reasons to be delighted that Alexander Amini won the overall prize at the young scientist:

He is a local boy from Castleknock College (although he only recently moved to Ireland)
His mother Lisa is a colleague in IBM

I tried a few times to see Alexander's project when I was at the exhibition yesterday, but I was not able to get near the stand because each time I came by he was busy talking to judges - I should have realized then that he was in the winning for a big prize. I will try meeting him again today, but in the meantime here is a short video of him talking about the project.

My favourite project from the BT Young Scientist Exhibition

2011-01-14T11:47:00.002Z

I will be helping to run the IBM stand at the Young Scientist exhibition tomorrow and so I decided to drop in for a quick visit this morning to check how things are going. I have been to this event many times and so I should have know what to expect, but once again I was blown away by the energy and excitement of this event.

Smart Helmet with built in Arduino

I had a very quick look at the projects and, one project which caught my eye was "Cycle helmet with built-in sensor controlled indicators", which was the work of a second year student in Gonzaga College. This project involved adding some sensors and an Arduino micro-controller to a cycle helmet so that the helmet could automatically detect when the cyclist was going to turn left or right (by the inevitable tilting of their head) and automatically turn on the indicator lights. In addition the helmet included a gyroscope which was used to detect when the turn was completed and the indicator lights should be turned off. The final touch was the addition of an accelerometer whick controlled the braking light.

I think that this is a really useful gadget which I would use (unfortunately he is not in a position to accept advance order yet), but what really impressed me was how such a young student was clearly very well informed about the technology scene. When he found out that I knew about Arduino devices he immediately launched into a discussion about the limitations of the USB interface on the board (the quick summary is that it doesn't quite match the formal interface specification). He also gave me pointed to some web sites for buying components and advised me on how to tackle a project I am planning with my recently acquired weather station.

DISCLAIMER: I did not get a chance to see all of the projects (or even a small proportion of them) so there may be many better projects - I will await the results of the formal judging which will be announced this evening.

Why the colour of you USB connectors does matter

2011-01-11T19:10:00.069Z

Recently I was one of the lucky IBM staff who received an updated Laptop. The current policy is to supply software developers with a W510 Lenovo Thinkpad. Unfortunately, the employees getting these new laptops have not been totally happy. While the laptops are very powerful and have impressive specifications, most people (including me) have experienced some problems. It seems the laptops do not work smoothly out of the box and the users need to spend some time updating their BIOS and device drivers to get their laptop working satisfactorily.

When I got the laptop first, one of the things that puzzled me was the fact that two of the USB connectors at the side were blue while the third one at the back was yellow. Initially I thought this was simply a matter of aesthetics, but after a while I noticed that some devices behaved differently depending upon which colour port I plugged my device into.

I did a little bit of research on the internet and it seems that this is not just an arbitrary colour scheme. The blue USB ports implement the new USB 3.0 standard. Although this new standard offers the promise of dramatic increases in speed, there are not many devices in the market yet which use this standard. While USB 3.0 should be mostly backward compatible with USB 2.0, the yellow USB 2.0 port is supplied just in case there are any incompatibilities. In addition, the yellow connectors also have a neat feature in that they allow you charge up you USB devices even when the laptop is turned off (see here for details).

Many people seem confused by the different port colour and not everyone sees exactly the same behavior depending upon their BIOS configuration (e.g. this query in the Lenovo forum). My own personal observations are as follows (your own mileage may vary):

If I have a USB mouse or keyboard plugged into the blue USB port when I turn on the laptop it will fail the power on self test. However, if I plug a USB mouse or keyboard into these ports after the laptop has booted they will work fine.
If I have a bootable USB key the laptop will only boot from it if it is plugged into the yellow USB port.
My mobile phone can be charged from any of the USB ports, but it seems to charge up much quicker when I plug it into the yellow port as compared to when I plug it into a blue port (this seems to conflict with some information on the web which implies that USB 3.0 has higher power capabilities)

Why I was wrong - Loc8 codes are a great idea

2011-01-09T11:20:00.000Z

Ireland is pretty unusual for a developed country in that we have no system of national postcodes. Although the government have being discussing the introduction of postcode system for the last few years, but the discussion doesn't seem to be getting any closer to reaching a conclusion.

In the meantime an enterprising company from Cork have invented their own post code system called Loc8 and they are actively promoting its adoption as a de facto national standard. To quote from their new web site "Loc8 Codes are the first and only All-Ireland Digital Address Code which is a smarter form of postcode. You can now easily find an exact location anywhere on the island of Ireland".

I looked at their web site and was quite impressed by the very sensible system that they are proposing to algorithmically transform between latitude and longitude coordinates and a post code string which is easy to remember. However, my inner geek was disappointed with the lack of detail provided about how the transformation was done and the company seemed to have the attitude that since they provide a free and easy to use conversion utility on their web site they didn't need to tell people the details of how the conversion was done. I was further outraged when I clicked on the link to their terms of use document - although I didn't read it carefully I was surprised to see a lot of legal jargon setting out restrictions.

I recently wrote on my blog about how Loc8 codes were basically a good idea, but that their restrictions were unreasonable for any proposal that hoped to be adopted as an official government standard. One of the people behind the company responded to blog post pointing out that do not in fact place restrictions on the use of Loc8 codes. The restrictive terms are in fact merely restrictions on the use of the aerial images from the Ordinance Survey office that they use on their webs site (and these restrictions are outside their control anyway).

A closer reading of their legal documentation made it clear to me that I was wrong in my interpretation. I am happy to admit my error and publicly state that I have been converted into a fan of this proposal.

A post code system for Ireland

2011-01-05T18:57:00.000Z

I read an article in yesterday's Irish Times which spoke about the post code system that they say will definitely be launched by the end of 2011. While I think that a system of post codes for Ireland would be a great idea, I am sceptical about the likelihood of it being launched this year. Part of my skepticism comes from the fact that there is no clear agreement on how the new post code system will work, but also I have heard such confident predictions about a post code system before. For example, this news item from RTÉ which was written in 2005 an confidently predicted that Irish postcodes would be in operation by 1st of January 2008.

The current proposal is that the post code system will start with a number of letters identifying the nearest town or city. This proposal has generated a backlash from the Irish language supporters who are insisting that the initial letters in the post code should come from the Irish name for the town rather than the English name for the town - in many cases these would be the same but Dublin/Baile Átha Cliath is a high profile example where they differ. In addition, if the system was to be adopted I can easily envisage a situation whereby small towns could be campaigning to have their own initial letters rather than being lumped in with a rival town.As a result I think that any system based upon place names is doomed to failure and disagreements. Instead we should ensure that the post codes are based upon latitude/longitude coordinates. This is especially relevant in the modern world where SatNav systems are almost ubiquitous and all work of of lat/long coordinates. For example the LOC8 system being pushed by Garmin has the general right idea in that they have a simple algorithm that converts between lat/long coordinates and a more easy to remember alphanumeric post code.

The one big problem with the Loc8 system is the fact that they are treating the algorithm to convert between post codes and the coordinates as a trade secret. I think that the company behind the Loc8 system is very foolish to take this attitude because they would make more money from their technology if the government were to adopt it as the official post code system, but there is no way that the government could endorse a postcode system whose workings were kept secret. . As I mentioned the algorithm is quite simple and so it would be trivially easy to reverse engineer the algorithm given a few sample coordinate/postcode pairs and the details that they provide on their web site. However, my understanding is that the company behind the Loc8 system would sue anyone that published the details of their algorithm - they don't charge people a fee to convert, but their policy is that the only way to do the conversion is via their web site.

How cold was it over the Christmas period?

2010-12-28T11:08:00.000Z

In Ireland the weather is always one of the most common topics of conversation. However, this Christmas period people were spending even more time than normal speaking about the weather because of the fact that we had a white Christmas which is quite unusual for us. The weather in Ireland is very localized so people are constantly asking each other "what is the weather like where you live" because the weather can be very different just a few miles away.

By lucky co-incidence Santa brought be a weather monitoring station (I must have been very good this year). I only assembled it around mid-day on Christmas and today I tried uploading some of the data from it. As you can see from this chart the temperature was slightly below zero when I installed int and dropped sharply as night fell, but then the thaw started.

A quick search of the internet revealed several interesting sites such as this one which have links to lots of useful software which can be used for manipulating and presenting data collected from weather stations such as mine. I suspect this present will provide me with many hours of very enjoyable fun. I am glad that I provided Santa with a very clear hint about what I wanted :-)

What would the nativity story looked like if they had the internet back then

2010-12-24T15:18:00.009Z

Christmas is a time for traditions so it is fun to consider how the nativity story could have been different if they had the Internet back then. This video does that.

I hope you enjoy it. Not surprisingly I found this video when a friend shared it on Facebook.

Why can't Dublin Bikes facilitate casual use by tourists?

2010-12-06T08:50:00.000Z

As many of you know I am a keen cyclist. Because, I have my own bike. I don't have a lot of cause to use the Dublin Bikes rental scheme, but I have been very impressed with the scheme whenever I do have a cause to use it. The only gripe I have about the system is that it is cumbersome to sign up and it typically takes several days to get a membership card. Unfortunately this means that the scheme can't be used by tourists visiting Dublin.

There is a similar scheme in many other cities. I see that the London cycle system recently added a facility for casual users to rent a bike without having to have an annual subscription. I wonder why Dublin bikes don't introduce a similar facility? I am sure tourists would love to use it to cycle around the city centre.

If you are too lazy to unsubscribe from an email list - let unsubscribe.com do it for you

2010-12-03T07:52:00.000Z

If you are like me you have probably carelessly subscribed to several mailing lists and you find the regular emails from these merchants to be vaguely annoying. Most of these maliing lists would probably remove you from their mailing list if you took the trouble to follow their process for unsubscribing. However, this can be a lot of trouble and there is always the risk that the senders are unethical hackers and will treat your click on their unsubscribe link as encouragement to send you more annoying emails.

Luckily there is a service called unsubscribe.com which will look after the unsubscription for you. After you register, you can either use their unsubscribe buttons (they have buttons for all of the major public email providers) or else you can simply forward any emails from the mailing list to mail@unsubscribe.com - they have software which can recognize which email list has sent the promotional email to you and they will initiate a removal request on your behalf.

They have a free account which will unregister you from a maximum of 5 lists per week. If you want more you can purchase a paid subscription, but I generally find that 5 per week is enough for me.

Still waiting for global warming to show up in Ireland

2010-12-02T07:51:00.000Z

I must admit to being somewhat skeptical of the scientists who continue to warn us that the global climate is definitely warming up rapidly due to the effects of human activity. While I do accept that human activity may be having an effect upon climate, it is hard to believe the confident predictions for what the weather will be like in 20-50 years from a profession that routinely fails to accurately predict what the weather will be like tomorrow.

Of course my skepticism may be influenced by the fact that I live in a country where the weather is notoriously unpredictable. This probably also explains why weather is a constant topic of conversation in Ireland. A colleague from Egypt once told me that Egyptians rarely speak about the weather, because for them it is a boring subject for conversation (pretty much every day is hot and dry).

The last week or so has seen the temperatures in Ireland reach a record low for the month of November. As you can see from this picture taken out my back garden, we also got quite a significant covering of snow. While this naturally caused some disruption, I am glad to report that life and business has not come to a complete halt. The children of course are delighted with this rare chance to build snowmen and play snowballs.

A simple way to be reminded of things you need to do

2010-11-30T08:32:00.003Z

Some people are very effective at using a methodology like GTD to track what are the most important things to do each day. However, the rest of us tend to simply focus our attention on the most recently arrived emails in our inbox. Luckily there is a really useful service called NudgeMail that I recently discovered which will send you email reminders on a scheduled date.

This free service is amazingly easy to use. For example if you wanted to be reminded that you should return your library books next Saturday you simply send an email with the subject "Return library books" to "Saturday@nudgemail.com" and next Saturday you will receive a copy of your email sent back to you. You don't even need to sign up because the one piece of personal information they need is your email address and this can be retrieved from your first email. They accept a wide variety of formats to specify the reminder date and time - they will send you a full list of acceptable formats in response to your first email.

I have no association with the people behind the service, but if you try the service I know you will find it useful. Maybe your first email can be emailing "tomorrow@nudgemail.com" with a subject line of "leave a commend on Brian's blog thanking him for recommending Nudgemail to me" :-)

What operating system do people use to read this blog

2010-11-25T08:01:00.002Z

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool for collecting statistics about the users of your web sites. I blogged before about how the readers of this blog are much more likely to use Firefox than the readers of another blog I maintain with news about a local soccer team. This time I decided to look at the operating system used by the visitors to the two sites.

The results are summariesd in the table below:

Platform	My Blog	Soccer Blog	Difference
Windows	62%	72%	10%
Linux	26%	4%	-22%
Macintosh	9%	18%	9%
Other	3%	6%	3%

The facts that jump out at me from these statistics are:

While Windows is clearly the most popular operating system, its level of dominance is nowhere near as hight as I would have thought.
The second most popular platform for readers of this blog is Linux (probably because I occasionally write about Linux related topics), but the second most popular platform for readers of the soccer blog is Macintosh (almost one in five readers use this platform).
Most of the "other" category is accounted for by various mobile platforms. They account for relatively few readers of either blog. I think that although many people have SmartPhone devices, they don't often use them for browsing the web of reading blogs.

Finding your way around Dublin using public transport

2010-11-23T18:57:00.004Z

I just discovered a brilliant site Hit the Road which allows you to find your way around Dublin by using a combination of different modes of public transport.

One of the things that makes getting around Dublin by public transport difficult is the fact that there are three totally independent public transport systems, Dublin Bus, Irish Rail and Luas each with their own web site which contains routes and schedules. However, if you use the Hit the Road web site, you can simply enter where you want to go to and where you are starting from and it will automatically find the best combination of services to use. It will even give you an estimate of your overall travelling time including walking to and from the bus/train stops. If there are a few alternatives which are close to being optimal it will show each of them so that you can manually choose and it will include a helpful link to the schedule for each of the services it is recommending.

It is great to see private innovation helping solve real problems for the citizens of Dublin while we are still waiting many years for the long promised integrated ticketing system between the various services.