It appears that the tallyman is safe. An Independent Commission has found the proposed electronic voting machines cannot be recommended.
In other news, it appears that the recent appearance of Jason Byrne on the Irish team in Poland could cost Shelbourne 50,000 euro – or about 10,000 euro a minute – as part of the deal they signed with Bray Wanderers when he was transferred. Even Roy Keane doesn’t cost that much 
Scores a goal and the cup comes home!
I see from the news report on ireland.com that Jason Byrne, who is cousin of Keane the smaller, was capped for Ireland tonight in Poland. Okay, so he was only on for all of two minutes, but its still great to see a former Bray player get his cap. Congratulations!
Here is what the official Bray Wanderers site has to say.
Last night was of course Tuesday. It being Tuesday, it’s time for the regular choral society practice (if anyone cares, we were doing John Rutters “O When the Saints” and “Down by the Riverside”). Afterwards we go to the pub as we often do.
When I get home, TOP has already left to go bed (I presume – she was N/A in ICQ and a “Are you awake” message didn’t elicit a response). It left me thinking that this is the really bad thing about LDRs – if I saw TOP most days it wouldn’t bother me that we barely talked last night, but the fact we didn’t talk does bother me – a lot. Maybe its just the fact this is a new thing, but when in an LDR, you clearly need whatever contact you can get.
I find it interesting how the public perception of what happened as opposed to what actually happened, even on very recent events (ie within the last three years) is often very different.
For instance, Roy Keane did not, in the final analysis, leave Saipan from choice. He was in fact sent home by Mick McCarthy. Despite this, a survey for the Sunday Independent shows that 55% of people believe Keane walked out on the squad (he had walked out – then been talked around into staying).
Another instance is a couple of comments in the Irish Times about the retirement of Cardinal Connell – Patsy McGarry comments on the row a couple of years ago about the Taoiseach and Ms Larkin hosting a reception in his honour. A lot of people seem to forget that the original instigators of that row were two clerics from the Church of Ireland who objected to the Taoiseach’s private arrangements, and said publicly that they had no intention of going to the reception in order to make the point. Seems a little unfair to blame the Cardinal for starting that particular row methinks!
NSCD kept me up last night. We had a problem with mrtg not collecting data. Problem was that it was accessing the wrong IP, despite the fact dig and host were showing the correct IPs. Problem turned out to be a bug in nscd, so I turned off host caching.
We then looked on a debian box that has some very rude things to say about nscd and host caching
Yes it does exist. Somewhere.
I’m currently playing with FreeRadius to try to get it to send L2TP attributes to the NAS that makes the request if the realm specified is not “the usual” one.
This is proving a little tricky – if the user doesn’t exist in the local database, everything’s fine. Service-Type is set to Outbound-User.
However, irritatingly if userpart exists in the local database, Service-Type is set to Framed-User. This is clearly a problem. I need to fix this.
I am that thick!
So anyway – after much of the dithering that seems to surround any decision I make ever about women, I recently finally got around to not dithering and making up my mind.
Of course part of the hesitation was uncertainty about TOP (the other person) felt. Discovered that TOP has been agonising over this decision for months (it was a little mind blowing to discover this goes backs to weeks before Christmas).
TOP showed me her blog. She did ask me not to pass the URL on – but I do feel a complete idiot right now.
I must learn to not forget my password.
I must learn to not forget my password.
Microsoft have announced that they are closing the MSN Chatrooms “for the children”. Apparently paedophiles have been using the chatrooms for grooming their victims.
The latter statement is roughly in the same category as “the sun rose in the East this morning” or “there is rain in Ireland in September”. Its not exactly a new issue, and the cynical amongst us might wonder at the timing of this announcement given the prevalence of the latest Windows worm.
This leads us to a wider issue – what really bugs me about this story is that they quote the head of the National Children’s Homes as saying that “free un-moderated chat cannot be made completely safe for consumers and children.” No of course it can’t – and noone ever claimed it could be. If you meet someone online, and then take that “offline” – you run a risk of discovering that the person in real life is very different. But adults are well able to handle this – and following all the normal guidelines can remain as safe as reasonably expected. But now my ability as an adult to indulge in chat is being hampered because of the risks to children.
Now forgive me if I’m missing something, but aren’t parents supposed to be the main protectors of their children? This means they should be monitoring what their children are up to – and with who – especially online. Online is a big bad world, and just as I would divert my children away from sex shops and men in dirty macs, so also would I monitor their online usage and make sure they are behaving sensibly. I get the feeling that there is an expectation with the internet that somehow ISPs should cover for parents who don’t want to do their jobs as parents.
An interesting weekend to say the least. Cardiff City (boo hiss!) won their playoff in Cardiff, as did Bournemouth and Wolves. Nice to see Wolves finally back in the top flight – it’s scary to realise that I remember the last time they were there (though I seem to recall in their last, disastrous season in the old division one they managed to beat Liverpool, who were good in those days, 1-0).
Today I got the completion notice letter – this means things are afoot, and I have to spend the next few days chasing people for all sorts of things.
Actually thats not entirely fair. I’ve been spending sometime trying to make OpenLDAP work with replication – I had a serious go a few months ago, but ending up giving up because other stuff got in the way.
Turns out the reason is annoyingly simple. I was using slapcat and slapadd to create the slave. As it turns out, slapadd (naturally enough) creates the files as root. OpenLDAP under RedHat runs as user ldap, not root (this is good). But it can’t read the files.
Best solution is to change the ownership of the files. Of course, it would be nice if OpenLDAP actually told you that, instead of leaving you to work it out for yourself, but it’s now working fine.
The other thing you should do is ensure the DN you’re using for binding as the replicator exists in the directory that you import with slapadd. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to bind to the slave from the master.
I seem to have got a fair bit of feedback on my quake analogy. None the less – its still valid.
On a slightly more interesting post, I see the collective have decided to lay off more staff. Thank God I’ve been liberated.
Heading off to Kerry this evening for a stag weekend with Pron. We had a discussion about quake on the train (which rather assumes the existance of power sockets on the train).
Ended the conversation about the requirement for a mouse to play quake with the line “I can’t play quake without a mouse – it’s like sex without a woman”
I’ve been working in the ISP industry for some years now. During the past six years, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with a couple of Telcos, and am well experienced with the argument “it’s not our problem” when in fact, yes it is your problem and would you please damn well fix it. I’m accustomed to dealing with Telcos who at the very best mislead you, and tell you they’ve someone working on it, when in fact their definition of working on it appears to be “we’re trying to find the ticket”.
So let me apologise to Colt. Recently we moved to the new INEX location, and ordered a ten meg circuit from them. We plugged the circuit in, and it got very tempermental. In fact the problem was narrowed down to the A end seeing what the B end was sending it, but the B end couldn’t see what the A end was sending (yes, this constitutes a problem in my book). So I ask Colt to have a look at the circuit. They test it “everything’s okay”. Now I’m accustomed to hearing this from certain other $TELCOs when the circuit was working fine, stopped working and then eventually had them admit “oh yeah – we put something wrong there”. So I take none of this – have another look. Ring Colt. Colt send engineers. Hmmm… still not working. Play with it a bit more – make more discoveries. Colt agree to send out an engineer again – but want me onsite (fair enough). Talk to engineer at B end – have him test the presentation point – everything’s okay. Have him test to wear the connection is going into the router…. Aha! We have a problem.
Turns out you see the problem is actually on the patch panel. So its not Colt’s fault. So apologies to Colt for judging them by the same low standards as certain other telcos (not that I’m naming names or anything), and thanks for your patience. INEX traffic working beautifully once more.
Just speak for themselves. On IRC today:
“Damned if I can get this box to see the network, and it’s distressing. I think it could be related to the driver being for a different board.”
Think people think!
The war has started. Frankly the only thing left to do is pray for a quick finish. This is clearly no more futile than protesting about it (for those of us who are believers, it might make a difference – for those of you who aren’t – do you really think your protests will turn Bush and Blair off the current road).
People are dying. This is not good. Bush says that he’s sending humanitarian aid into Iraq. Good. Lets hope it includes lots of those medicines allegedly “denied” to Iraqi hospitals by UN sanctions. I don’t really care who is right – the right who claim that Saddam’s officials where siphoning off the goodies, or the left who claim sanctions are to blame. Its not relevant to the child who can’t get the drugs he needs.
On the subject of being a believer, which I am, I just reflected on the use of a certain expletive below. There’s little doubt I swear too much, though I am cutting down and it’s got to the stage where certain blasphemies are really starting to get to me. I dunno if it’s the seminary training getting to me in the end or what – but it really does start to bug when people use “Jesus” as a swear word.
On a more geeky level – this is the week when finally we redesign the network. Maybe. If the first link works and we can get the second one up we could be sucking diesel as they say. Or something.
So here’s me, innocently heading out of the office at just before 1pm to go and install a router in the DEG facility on the Nangor Road (for non dubs, this is about ten miles from the city centre, and at least 40 minutes in a car if you’re lucky). This is fairly okay – plug router in, plug link from other place in, not working. Bugger. Try lots of things to make sure its not me, and then ring $TELCO and ask them to fix it. Spend afternoon in data centre bored out of my tree, waiting for them to do their test it, fix it, routine etc. etc….
Anyway, about five o’clock it becomes apparent that $TELCO aren’t going to get this fixed (its clearly getting to the send engineers on site to test stage, and the other end closes at 5:30 and its not urgent enough to justify paying for it to be kept open). So I decide to ring a taxi, as I have a very important (to me) appointment in the city centre at 6. We ring four taxi firms – best we can do when we reach the fourth is an hour. Decide said appointment will have to be cancelled.
BUT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? Every single time I get into a taxi the driver when asked will tell you there are too many taxis on the road? Really? So why is it when I’m in one of the remaining large data centres in the so called Digital Hub that I can’t get a taxi for an hour? This isn’t New Year, this isn’t Christmas. This isn’t even three o’clock on a Saturday morning when the night clubs close. This is a comparatively normal Thursday evening and I’m sitting in whats left of Ireland’s Digital Hub. Woe betide the next taxi driver that says there are too many taxis on the road – there clearly aren’t enough.
One day back in Ireland – and already its lashing rain, thundering and generally being miserable.
I did a practice CCIE lab last Saturday – it was frustrating (firstly one of the routers wasn’t accessible and then another one crashed with memory errors…. very annoying). There’s a fairly complicated and interesting BGP issue with next hops and network statements and route relectors. It makes you think alright. Certain I feel more challenged and experienced – but I definitely have to learn more about the 3550.
Now call me an academic snob, which I am. I’ve been spending the last fortnight in the UK, and not just in the UK, but a part of the UK where the average person would struggle to tell you whether Galway is in Northern Ireland or the Republic. So instead of reading the Irish Times of a morning, I’ve been reading the Daily Telegraph. In the coffee room, we also get the Mail (no hyper link for them).
Britain, when not debating the morality of the war on Iraq, is getting its knickers in a tizzy over university admissions. Now I will declare an interest – my uber brainy, dead smart, brilliant at Maths, younger brother has just been offered a place at Cambridge to read Maths (he was second or something in the country in the Maths Olympiad last year – he’s good). Younger brother (YB) goes to an average, “bog standard” Christian Brothers school, and will be doing the Leaving Cert not A Levels.
Anyway, apparently Bristol university have been “discriminating” against students from the independent sector in favour of students from “average” state schools, allegedly because the government is offering more money to the colleges for students from certain post codes. This is an incredibly difficult issue to resolve in the context of the UK (I seem to recall reading something like 40,000 students in the UK last year got three A’s at A levels) thats more than the entire intake for Oxford, Cambridge and a couple of other universities put together (the fact that both Oxbridge universities average three applications for each place means that at least three times their combined annual intake expect to get three As). We need to have more faith in the university application system – do people in the UK really want to adopt the Irish system which means for the most popular places admissions would be decided by lottery?