Following a discussion with a colleague of mine, Cormac Daly, I drew up this document describing a proposed reform of the Oireachtas. In June 2009, I submitted it to the Department of the Environment for consideration.
Reconstituting the Oireachtas
October 10th, 2009 by eibhear… they have no word for …
August 30th, 2009 by eibhearThere is a (snopes-confirmed) apocryphal story that former US President George W. Bush commented to then British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the problem with the French “… is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”. As much as I would like to think it’s true, it happens not to be.
However, that’s doesn’t stop us from having fun with a bit of word-play. I would like to come up with as many of these as possible, and I am looking for donations: How many “The X can’t Y: they have no word for Z” are there out there? I’d say there’re thousands. I’m going to kick it off here, and anyone who wants to leave a sample or a few, please do so as comments, and I’ll add them to the post.
Ireland inc.
February 24th, 2009 by eibhear
Is there anyway that we can get people to stop using the term “Ireland Inc.”?
It’s disgusting.
It suggests that the responsibility of the government is to maximise profit.
It suggests that spending is irresponsible, unless it can be shown to be maximising profit.
It suggests that those who don’t agree shouldn’t be considered.
Ireland is a country. It’s not a company. The how and why of running it is, and should be, completely different to a company.
Stop it.
Please.
Mandriva Linux, encrypted partitions
November 24th, 2005 byI have recently upgraded my main home system from Mandrake Linux 10.1 Official to Mandriva Linux 2006.0 (Official). There have been some issues with this and the first that I have solved is as follows:
I used the drakloop facility in the older version to create an encrypted partition in my home directory. Whenever I logged onto the system using KDM, I was prompted for my passphrase in order to allow the partition to be mounted. However, after I upgraded the system, there was no attempt to mount the partition whenever I logged in.
I can’t remember how I discovered how to create the file system in the first place, but some looking around with Google showed up that the utility drakloop as provided by the distro was what I used. I now have a vague memory of seeing a menu item or a button and thinking “That would be nice…”
Éibhear’s CV — the whole thing
October 24th, 2005 byThe complete version of my CV can be seen here, which is a permanent page.
Éibhear’s CV — Client Solutions/O2
October 24th, 2005 byContract Developer
Client Solutions/O2 (Dublin, Ireland)
April 2005-August 2005
The Customer Enterprise Management team of O2 Ireland designs and develops the data warehouse systems for the Business Intelligence team. I was taken on to perform database design and development tasks as part of a major new campaign management implementation project.
When all else fails…
July 12th, 2005 by… sue your customers.
There have been various acts performed by businesses, small to large, around the world to protect their markets. These often involve dodgy deals with partners, defamation, “lock-in” and threats.
The recent SCO vs. The World lawsuits have demostrated a new strategy: sue your customers. SCO sued two of its (former) customers, Autozone and Daimler Chrysler, essentially because they switched from SCO’s products to competitors’. The expectation, one can assume, was that SCO’s current customers would think twice about switching too. That remains to be seen, but signs are that the strategy may not have been thought through completely.
Sun JDS and Linux
July 1st, 2005 byIn an entry I put up in January, I put forward a theory that Sun was using GNU/Linux for its JDS until such a time as OpenSolaris was ready for it. This appears to be now, believe it or not. I’m quite surprised at this as I though it would be a few years before OpenSolaris would be ready for use with JDS.
The language snob strikes…
May 20th, 2005 byFrom this story on BreakingNews.ie:
A legal adviser to Saddam Hussein today criticised jailers of the former Iraqi dictator for allowing half-naked pictures of him to be taken.
What, prey tell, are half-naked pictures?
Quis custodiet custodiens?
April 12th, 2005 byThe following is the text of a letter I sent to the editor of the Irish Times on the 11th March, 2005. To my knowledge, the Irish Times didn’t publish it.
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The Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six were all imprisoned for lengthy sentences on terrorist charges that were eventually shown to have been false.
In November 2004, at the behest of the Governments of Italy and Switzerland, the FBI raided the data centre of the Indymedia organisation in the UK, under the pretence of a counter-terrorism investigation. The disks confiscated appear to have contained information relating to Indymedia’s investigations of Italian and Swiss police agents who are alleged to have been attempting to stir-up violence during so-called anti-globalisation protests.
In March of 2004, Adam McGaughey, of the fan website SG1Archive.com was charged with breaking U.S. federal copyright laws. The USA PATRIOT Act was used to facilitate the FBI investigation. Intended as a measure to protect the public from terrorist threats, the USA PATRIOT Act allows investigators to operate in ways that would be prohibited under other legislation. Its measures are, one by one, being invalidated as being counter to the US Constitution. Yet, the provisions were used to investigate a copyright case, and at the behest of MGM and the Motion Picture Association of America.
In 1996, the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) demanded royalty money from, among others, Girl Scouts for singing songs around campfires.
Innovation for the sake of….. innovation
April 12th, 2005 byOn the 18th March this year, there was a “Commercial” supplement to the Irish Times celebrating Microsoft’s 20 years of operations in Ireland. In it, there was a piece featuring Cathal Friel, Chairperson of the Irish Software Association, who made some rather disparaging comments about “open source” and those who develop Free Software.
Many on the fora I contribute to (ILUG, the Irish Linux Users’ Group and IFSO, the Irish Free Software Organisation) were offended by the comments. Some of the responses involved writing to the editor of the Irish Times to complain about the bias shown in the article. This is a fair attempt to set the record straight, but I knew it would be unlikely to succeed because we’re dealing with a commercial supplement: the Irish Times was probably paid a great deal of money by Microsoft and its partners. Wouldn’t do to offend that revenue stream, now would it?
Therefore, I decided to send a letter to Mr. Friel himself, objecting to the piece. Below is the text of that letter, re-edited into the format of a response piece. I wanted to remove any personal identifying information and to remove the second-person grammar. In the letter, however, I asked Mr. Friel to consider his statement and, if he wished, to respond to my correspondence.
On Holy Thursday, as I was stuck in traffic on what turned out to be a gruelling 10-hour journey to Cork from Dublin, I received a ‘phone call from Kathryn Raleigh, Director of the ISA, in reponse to my letter. Read the rest of this entry »
Yay for democracy and the separation of powers
February 16th, 2005 byPicture this scenario:
A bank levies charges on you for services. However, the bank never told you that there was a charge, and you believed that the services involved were covered by the other charges you pay.
After a number of years, the bank announces that its legal department had advised it that the charge was not legal. However, there is still a cost to providing the service, and therefore this charge will be properly announced, notified, approved and regularised. Read the rest of this entry »
Sun, Open Solaris and the Java Desktop System
January 27th, 2005 byWe all remember the excitement when AIB announced its plan to migrate its desktop systems to Sun’s Java Desktop System (JDS). Touted as a triumph for Linux and its arrival in the IT market (especially the desktop market), many people told me that it was a great boost.
I was never convinced. Read the rest of this entry »
Éibhear’s CV — Oracle Corporation
January 15th, 2005 bySenior Software Engineer, Project Lead
Oracle Corporation (Dublin, Ireland)
June 1994-January 2000
Oracle products are written for UNIX platforms on Sun Solaris. My team and I ported these products to other UNIX platforms. This involved iterations of compiling, testing and fixing bugs. Aside from my routine product development duties, I was tasked with improving processes and with transferring knowledge. To this end, I developed a number of web applications for developers and other members of Oracle staff to use to gather and disseminate information. These were been developed using a UNIX workstation — Sun SunOS or SGI IRIX — an Apache (or, before Apache, NCSA) web server, CGI programming, implemented in UNIX shell scripting. It was usually necessary for me to install and configure the server software myself.
Éibhear’s CV — first-e Bancorp
January 15th, 2005 bySenior Software Engineer/Team Lead
first-e Bancorp (Dublin, Ireland)
January 2000-September 2001
first-e Bancorp was the nominal operator and de facto promoter of the first-e banks. As part of that operation there was a team dedicated to implementing solutions that are outside the remit of the daily operations of the banks: marketing campaigns, “non-customer” registration, etc. I was the senior developer in this team. I also provided team leadership for the large projects. Prior to being appointed to this position, I was a senior developer on the “German Launch Project” which was the project that implemented first-e’s bank for the German market, implementing the nightly/weekly/monthly batch jobs.
The first-e banks were implemented using Oracle8 8.0.6 at the back-end with a bespoke middle-tier and an applet-based front-end. Both the middle-tier and the applet were written in java. After one year of operation, the front-end was reengineered to make it more efficient. This was implemented using HTML and javascript at the front-end and a JSP and java beans based application server.
The first-e banking software system was designed using Oracle Designer Release 6.0, and the data model was stored in an Oracle Designer Repository.
Éibhear’s CV — CampusIT
January 15th, 2005 byTeam Lead, Senior Software Engineer
CampusIT (Dublin, Ireland)
September 2001-August 2002
CampusIT implements a fully integrated management information system for third level educational institutions. This product is known as QuercusPlus. My r�le was to provide developers with mentorship, to lead development on enhancements to the product and to contribute to architectural changes. The main projects from my time there were: Exam entry, the contacts subsystem, interview scheduling and Self Service (enhancement and creation of a security engine). I was also part of the team which assessed and responded to enhancement requests that came from customers and support agents.
QuercusPlus and its peripheral products were designed, developed and deployed using a complete Oracle solution. Some of the data design was done using Oracle Designer. The application functionality was developed using Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports in the front-end and PL/SQL stored functions and procedures at the back-end. The Self Service module was developed using Oracle’s Application Server. The product was deployed using Oracle RDBMS Server Version 8i and Oracle Developer Release 6i (runtime, webforms).
Éibhear’s CV — Solution6 Learning
January 15th, 2005 byContract Trainer
Solution6 Learning/Pollak6 (Sydney, Australia)
January-February 2003
Solution6 Learning (or Pollak6) provides training to corporate customers for a range of areas in the IT world. I was contracted by them to provide training in Red Hat Linux to a group of help desk analysts from a world wide recognised provider of computing systems (Dell). These students were studying for the Red Hat Certified Engineer exam. I prepared a pair of courses based on Red Hat Linux Version 8.0. The first course was an introduction to GNU/Linux and how to manage a GNU/Linux workstation. This was given over four days. The second course expanded on the first and trained in the area of managing a GNU/Linux server. This was a five-day course. There was a final day of training given as a follow-up day to provide last minute tips for the exam. (See below for a summary of the course topics.)
Éibhear’s CV — P&O Nedlloyd
January 15th, 2005 byContract Developer
P&O Nedlloyd (Sydney, Australia)
February 2003-June 2003
P&O Nedlloyd is a globally renowned shipping firm. The software development department for applications used by the P&O Asia-Pacific offices is located in Sydney, Australia. I worked as a contract UNIX and Oracle development engineer in the Asia-Pacific Regional Development team. All software was developed for the IBM AIX (UNIX) platform, using Oracle Forms and Reports 6i, Oracle PL/SQL and Oracle Pro*C (Oracle SQL and PL/SQL embedded in C programs) deployed on Oracle 8i databases. Batch jobs were managed using the ksh scripting language.
Initially I was taken on to develop applications and fix bugs using these technologies. Towards the end of the contract, I was worked as part of a team specifically responsible for fixing the worst performing batch jobs and reports.
Éibhear’s CV — UNSW
January 15th, 2005 byPHP Developer
University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia)
May – June 2003
The Department of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications in the University of New South Wales was developing a new system to track information regarding thesis projects � including who was working on them, who the supervisors and examiners were, what the thesis topics and titles were. Also an important feature was to facilitate thesis projects that had either one or more than one participating students. This included moving students from project to project during the course of the academic year. The application was to be developed on a GNU/Linux system using the apache web server and PHP as the programming language. MySQL was the database server.
Luas and the walls of Trinity
November 4th, 2004 byA story in today’s Irish Times suggests that the extension of the Luas between Stephen’s Green and Abbey St. will cost around €70m. This doesn’t contradict the earlier story, which estimated the cost at less than €100m.
Read the rest of this entry »