31st January, 2009

Save Nenagh Hospital

I’m back home from a “Save Nenagh Hospital” rally earlier on today – I estimated the number of people there to be at least two thousand.

As you might infer, this is quite serious – the Health Service Executive in Ireland have already made the first steps in downgrading and then closing the General Hospital in Nenagh. Already there are plans for numerous cuts, including a proposal to remove 24-hour accident and emergency services at the hospital in favour of the introduction of advance paramedics to partly replace the present service.

The only numbers important to the HSE, it seems, are those balanced on their accounts sheets – not the number of lives that will be lost, the number of minutes late that ambulances will arrive to road accidents, the ill and those in need.

Representatives of the HSE were invited to attend but did not – most likely because they know no matter how they try they can not make sense of their own arguments. In short, they can not justify what they are proposing.

Google for phrases such as “save nenagh hospital” and “friends of nenagh hospital” to see just how serious and important this is – you’ll find links such as this article in the Irish Times (Doctors to fight cuts at Nenagh hospital).

Please add your voice by joining the Save Nenagh Hospital group on facebook, by writing to your political representatives and by writing to the papers.

Don’t let Nenagh become the next Monaghan.

Posted at 11:24 pm | Comments Off

22nd January, 2009

DEV300_m39, a note on pure virtuals

DEV300_m39 callcatcher report. Couple of modules go down, a couple go up. Balances out to retain 927 unused methods. The top three offenders remain sd, writerfilter and sc.

Note that if a method declared as pure virtual in class X then if an implementation of that method in class X is provided then it *does not* get called through the vtable, i.e. the body of that method is effectively a non-virtual method, to get called it has to be explicitly called somehow.

So that means that callcatcher is correct if it reports that a pure virtual method is unused. Virtual methods are ignored, but implementations of base-class pure virtuals are a different kettle of fish and can themselves be treated as non-virtuals.

class foo
{
public:
virtual void bar() = 0;
};

//Can only get called by an explicit call of foo::bar() on some concrete subclass of abstract superclass foo
void foo::bar()
{
//something
}

Posted at 11:53 am | Comments Off

21st January, 2009

Connecting Linux to the University of Brighton wireless network

There are two aspects to connecting to the UoB wireless network. The first are the connection settings and the second is having the correct encryption key. The correct settings are depicted in the screenshot below. In a nutshell, you’ve got to use Version 0 of PEAP. And it’s important that you use version 0 as version 1 simply doesn’t work. Your username and password are your usual UoB login credentials.

The correct key for the network is the key from GTE Cyber Trust. The UoB key is signed by the GTE key. You can get that from here (or on this site Verizon Business somewhere), but you may have to rename it from a .crt file to a .pem file in order for the file-chooser to pick it up.

So just to run through all the steps:

  1. Choose to connect to the UoB wireless network from the dropdown list (see figure below)
  2. Ensure the correct settings are set (particularly the version 0)
  3. Put in your username and password
  4. Download the GTE certificate to your home directory (you can’t delete it later)
  5. Rename the GTE certificate from .crt to .pem
  6. Choose the GTE .pem file as the CA Certificate
  7. Click ok….it should then work

If you’re having problems and are a student of mine; bring your laptop to a lab. If you’re another staff member; feel free to email me.

Posted at 7:32 pm | Comments Off

19th January, 2009

Things I would do if I weren’t so busy attempting to create a Ph.D. thesis ex nihilo by doing nothing other than concentrating really hard while furrowing my brow #45:

Post interesting things on my blog.

Posted at 4:52 pm | Comments Off

14th January, 2009

7 things…

I got tagged by Chuck for this “7 Things” meme. So here are 7 things you may not know about me:

  1. I first met my wife at her house warming party seven years ago – it took four years for anything to happen though! I’m so happy it finally did though!
  2. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K that was bought when I was seven years old – I’ve since progressed through BBC computers, Apple Macs and then onto PCs. I also had a accounts on the WRTC vax – VMS and OSF/1.
  3. I’ve similarly gone through a number of differing computer languages: Basic in various incarnations (ZX Basic, BBC Basic, VB), Z80 Assembler, HyperCard (yes, really), C, C++, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, ColdFusion, Java.
  4. I might be Irish but my surname isn’t.
  5. I read a lot of fantasy: Gemmell, Eddings, Tolkien, Pratchett; though I also enjoy Tom Clancy and Dale Brown novels.
  6. I’m long-sighted in one eye and short-sighted in the other: one good reason why I’ve never been that good at sports.
  7. I am an active PEAR developer.

Tagging Others

I’m supposed to tag 7 other people who then repeat the whole process:

Rules

Posted at 8:57 pm | Comments Off

11th January, 2009

Really fast food

Today’s menu for the big’uns is pheasant with colcannon and veg. The C-monster gets trout with colcannon. In this part of the U.K. you can buy a pheasant for the same price as a chicken from a large retail chain. The pheasant is totally free-range (a wild bird) and we can make it stretch over two days. I could make a cheap chicken stretch over three to four days, but the quality of the wild bird is more than adequate compensation :) Plus it takes 30 mins to cook pheasant. That’s as quick as some stir-fry recipes and counts as really fast good food in my book.

Posted at 6:04 pm | Comments Off

10th January, 2009

Final year projects in Launchpad

Two of my students so far have released their (in development) final year project code as Free Software using Canonical’s Launchpad system. I hope a few more of my students will follow suit but, of course, I’m not insisting that they do so. The students are

The project have not been submitted yet so I won’t make any value judgement on them. But, as the code exists, it is obvious that some progress has been made.

Posted at 11:25 pm | Comments Off

8th January, 2009

PHP for Enterprise/Business Whitepaper

I’m very proud to have been involved as an editor and help with the translation and update of the AFUP’s PHP en Enterprise livre blanc into the PHP for Enterprise/Business Whitepaper: as far as I know this is the first full English language translation and update of the work done by the Association Française des Utilisateurs de PHP (French PHP Users Group). Also there is a lot of new content in the Whitepaper that with regards to how PHP is now utilised in Enterprise. Figures have been updated and techniques available in later versions of PHP have been referenced.

We’ve had an interesting time translating and updating the content – especially as I don’t know French let alone their idioms. Many thanks to Stéphane Lambert for his boundless energy and devotion to getting us this far!

Thanks also to PEAR President and fellow IPUG member David Coallier who also helped with the translation work and not forgetting Derick Rethans and Peter Keung who also assisted in fine-tuning our work into something a bit more fluent and graceful ;-)

I would be remiss to not mention Blacknight who have sponsored the IPUG from the start – without them there truly would not be a php.ie!

If I’ve left anybody out – please remind me!

All in all, as Chairman of the Irish PHP Users Group, I can say this is an exciting moment for us to have achieved – we’ve given something tangible back to the PHP Community as a whole and to top things off we’ve published the Whitepaper under the Open Licence Content – you may
freely use it if you clearly acknowledge the Irish PHP Users Group and if you retain the Open Content Licence. This means you can localise the Whitepaper to your own language and national figures if you so desire.

Posted at 7:43 pm | Comments Off

7th January, 2009

Working in a Uni

The best thing about working in a University is that I’m constantly surrounded by _really smart_ colleagues who can argue their point. This is good for me as they don’t let me get away with spouting too much bull.

Posted at 2:10 pm | Comments Off

5th January, 2009

DEV300_m38

The DEV300_m38 callcatcher results, now with added inline deltas niftyness to show which are the new unused methods since the last run. Overall increase of +5 methods since m37.

Posted at 5:33 pm | Comments Off


 

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