Hey all. If you’ve not already been following this, head over to www.politics.ie. I got a text from A. at about 19:00 saying that Bertie is on his way out. It’s been fun to follow this for the past hour from abroad.
Archive for September, 2006
Irish government to crash tonight
Thursday, September 28th, 2006More DIY (not)
Monday, September 25th, 2006I’m going to take a leaf out of Michael Meeks’ book. No, not become an awesome OpenOffice.org hacker and fix all the bugs with a single twitch of my left nostril, but start to refer to people by a letter of their name rather than their whole name.
So the bathroom is not yet finished, nor is the flooring in the sitting-room down. It was supposed to be done before A. comes over for the weekend. He’s bringing his girlfriend over and we thought we’d make her as comfortable as possible given that A. is used to sleeping drunkenly on our couch and she doesn’t know us very well. Unfortunately, L. had a bad day in school where one of her students started waving a screwdriver at her… It’s almost comical because it was a screwdriver, hammer and a saw. So we didn’t get much of the DIY finished.
To her credit, she’ll be back in tomorrow taking control of the situation. Whereas I’d simply refuse to go back in.
Start of a new semester
Monday, September 25th, 2006So summer is finally over. I know this because we had our first league game of the season last Saturday (and lost 
) and there are quite a number of confused students walking around the building today. I remember my first day at University. I took a lift in with Donie who was going in to fix the lights in the student union bar (I worked for a sound and lighting company then. There was no room in the van, so I had to lie on a ladder in the back. But now the tables have turned…
And there’s a lot planned for this year. I’m rolling out the method of teaching software engineering that I presented at PPIG 2006. Hopefully I’ll be able to collect some data to support my hypothesis and present that next year. I’ve also got a few new courses such as Real-Time Systems and Client-Server Technologies. I’m planning to roll out the Real-Time Systems course using RT-Linux on ARM (using qemu), which sould be a lot of fun. I’ll be using the hardware/software plaform to underline the theoretical issues of Real Time Systems. This should also form a basis of an Advanced Linux course that we intend to introduce 2007-2008.
Plus I’ve got a lot of research to finish this year. It’s going to be quite an eventful one, though I don’t know if it’ll top getting married. Which reminds me that I should blog more about food. On Friday (our two-month anniversary [yes I know the word means annual]) I made L. a nice meal, starting with spinach and feta cheese in filo parcels, Thai fish curry with Japanese steamed rice for main followed by Tiramasu for desert. It all worked out very well, and it didn’t take too long to do. Once the Tiramasu is in the fridge about 5 hours in advance, everything else only takes about an hour to make. I’ll try to remember to post the recipies tomorrow.
A diagram
Friday, September 15th, 2006Havn’t been blogging much lately as there’s been too much comment spam. Hopefully it has been fixed now. Though, dear reader, I need your help. Could you please tell me what you think I’m communicating via this diagram? Update: I’ve already modified the diagram, based on some feedback. More is appreciated.
I’m giving a similar (or modified) image to my second year students. I’d like to know if I’m actually communicating what I intend to communicate. Consider this a usability test(ish).