Aidan Delaney’s weblog

Friday is always hard. Especially the afternoon as it’s warm and I feel sleepy. Today was especially hard as I had a slight hangover.

We only got to see the last 20 minutes of the match last night, but we got to see the Matt Holland goal. It was fantastic. Afterwards Mihai, Remco and I went to get The Best Pizza In The World ™ near fountain square (Placa de la font – in Catalan). We ended up talking world politics untill 3 o’clock in il Candil. Unfortunatly the wine is reasonably priced at €12 for a fantastic bottle of the local red, which obviously meant we drank way too much. ‘Twas fun though.

Off to play basketball now.

I’m tired of makeing up titles for blog posts, however I’m not going to rant.

Watched the UEFA cup final last night and then did the excercises for class. Got all of them finished, which even surprised me I’ll be going to Excalibur (the Irish bar) tonight with two Romanians to watch Ireland -v- Romania. There’s a friendly bet hanging on the outcome of the match.

Finished Ian M. Banks “Use of Weapons”, it’s brilliant. started Pratchett’s “Strata” today, I’ll blog how good that one is over the weekend.

Got home last Friday for a flying visit. It was a good weekend. Met the lads in the pub and had a few beers. I spent the rest of the weekend with Lori, doing nothing.
I was pretty tired when I got back yesterday and nearly fell asleep in class. We’re doing some crazy combinatorics stuff at the moment.
The IFSO talk last night seemed to go well, I’ve hard that ~300 people were there, including some MEP’s and Euro election candidates. Glad to see that some parties are interested in “engaging with young people” as from what I heard, most of the crowd was young. Furthermore, “engaging with young people” was a reason to introduce electronic voting, where were the candidates who backed that reason last night?
So shouts out to RMS himself, Ciaran, Malcom, Glenn, Teresa, Éibhear, other IFSO “involveds”, the MiNDS> crew, TCD and UCD netsoc for putting on a good show.

In between my time studying and writing a research report I’ve managed to package up the XML-RPC stuff I was working on. This is a developers release, don’t expect to be able to run this unless you know a little Python or similar scripting language. The source is available under the terms of the GNU GPL from here.

I finished the proof of concept XML-RPC gateway for MiNDS>, it gives access to both the minds.storage and minds.news features. I’m going to package it up over the weekend. It’s still very rough but it _does_ work and I think it’s a good solution.
Started classes on grammar systems today. The first lecture was pretty awesome. I think a lot of these ideas will influence the direction of my thesis. Considering the original research came from operating system problems, it’ll be interesting to see if I can return it to it’s roots It may even have been previously done, so I have to do a literature search.
Szliard and I went out for a beer with Prof. Markus Holzer on Tuesday. He’s a fantastic researcher and really interesting to talk to. His research was the basis for my work on k-TPA which I’m now looking at more positively. I think I can prove an upper bound of ET0L for k-PDA (i.e. PDA not our restricted TPA) using results from grammar systems, more precicely that CD*,*CF(t)=ET0L. I reckon that k-PDA can simulate a CD*,*CF(t) system and vice-versa. I don’t know how the result will hold for k-TPA, but I’m going to assume that it’s reasonably similar or will follow.

I’ve been doing little lately except studying. I promised myself that my 4th year exams would be the last ones I’d ever do (apart from smaller certification exams like LPI) but here I am doing another. The course has gotten a lot harder over the past week or two, especially the abstract algebras part.
So, apologies for not blogging lately, but I’ve been studying. I’ll post somthing more often.

The slashdotting wasn’t as bad as it threatened to be. In fact it was pretty lame, we got ~10,000 hits. I’m dissapointed by it as I wanted to see how much stress the server could handle.

In other news the bloody students in the Residencia (where I stay) did the usual screaming untill 3 o’clock on a Sunday night. They’re all giddy after they return from the weekend. It suffices to say that I didn’t get much sleep. Lastly, Mitext has hit a wall. There are no C# bindings for libbonobo-ui, hence one can’t write a full Gnome program in C#. I may start hacking on some bindings, just for the laugh.

Well that woud’ve been the last news if I hadn’t spoken to the “network administrator” in the Residencia. The guy has good enough English to understand what I think of him. He is a gobshite. I’ve informed him many times that his DNS dosn’t work. His retort is that it does work because he’s configured it and it musn’t be working for me because I run GNU/Linux. He has obviously never tested it and dosn’t realise that his wireless A.P. also runs GNU/Linux.

I was only pointing it out to him as I have to help the others when DNS fails, I have no problem with it…and newsflash, it only fails for Windows users. Some of the others complained aswell and he’s now reinstalling every (read five) client machines. How clueless can he get? The DNS server dosn’t work so he reinstalls the clients?

It’s not totally his fault, it’s actually a Telefonica DNS problem, but the stupid runt won’t listen. I’ve stopped using ADSL in the residencia as I think if he blames me for breaking the connection again I’ll hit him. Stupid admins make me angry…especially stupid admins who don’t see the solution when you explain it to them rationally and with diagrams.