Posts on Vague Memories, Nothing but Memories

TSSG Innovation Policy 2009

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 11:14:52 +0000

Just over ten years ago the Irish goverment called on all interested parties to make contributions to an Innovation Task Force. This Irish Times article documented the announcement, listing the members.

In the TSSG we took this opportunity to document what we had been doing for the previius 15 years, since the TSSG was founded in 1996.

I’m reposting the documents here in my private blog as the centrally referenced versions on the TSSG website (that I used to cite) no longer exist.

Hugo Blogging Migration

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 11:15:00 +0000

Today I migrated to two new systems for my blogging platform.

Firstly I migrated my old content from Ghost to Hugo. This means reverting to a stantically generated site, which give the frequency of my blogging isn’t a big overhead, and has many other advantages.

I’ve also created a new Firebase Hosting project to host the statically generated site. This means I no longer need to maintain a cloud server running Ghost. The Firebase Hosting also auto-generates SSL certs, so that https works, which is good for 2020 when most users expect this.

Official Opening, Red Hat Waterford

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 15:02:21 +0000

#Monday 6th Feb 2017 #Red Hat Waterford Opening

On Monday 6th Feb 2017, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Mary Mitchell O’Connor TD officially opened the new Red Hat offices in Waterford, Ireland.

Pictured to the right I’m in the middle with Anne-Marie Tierney-Le Roux from the IDA, Ireland and the minister.

The IDA publsihed an agreed press release that also covered the announcement of a succesful Research, Development and Innovation grant for Red Hat.

Red Hat Mobile: Advice to Enterprise Mobility Developers

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 11:00:00 +0000

Abstract

People often ask me for my advice on enterprise mobile development. This short blog post is a summary of our experience initially in FeedHenry, 2010-2014, and subsequently in Red Hat Mobile from October 2014 onwards. It is advice based on the best approach to take when planning to develop a larger numnber of enterpise mobility solutions, typically for internal employees, where minimising overall cost and increasing the speed of development is paramount. In our experience that’s usually what concerns the business.

Red Hat Mobile, Engineering, Face-2-Face

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 15:53:30 +0000

Red Hat Mobile, Engineering, Face-2-Face (Kinsale, Ireland)

It was a great pleasure to host the Red Hat Mobile, Engineering F2F in Ireland September 2015. This was the first F2F to be held since FeedHenry was acquired in October 2014. The seaside town of Kinsale in County Cork was the venue, and it was a break in the normal routine for those of us usually based in Waterford, 2h down the road on the south coast, as well as for those who travelled from abroad. It gave an opportunity for the whole team, who are distributed right around the world, located from Vancouver to Switzerland, to meet and discuss our priorities, our challenges and our plans to address these. We had updwards of 40 people on the busiest days, and we really enjoyed the intense work-related activities of the day, and the equally intense social activities in the evenings.

Red Hat Summit 2015

Tue, 30 Jun 2015 15:56:28 +0000

I have returned today from an excellent week in Boston MA and Westford MA.

From Mon-Fri last week I attended the two Red Hat conferences Red Hat Summit and DevNation. This was an excellent opportunity for a series of presentations from the Red Hat Mobile team, including one by myself at Summit. Perhaps the biggest splash was made at the Red Hat Middleware Demo, c.f. Behind the Scenes – Blog Post, where OpenShift, JBoss Middleware, and Red Hat Mobile (aka FeedHenry) were demoed in an integrated fashion.

A Raspberry Pi is like a doll -- new clothes

Wed, 06 May 2015 11:25:44 +0000

I bought a Pibow Coupé case for my Raspberry Pi 2 B+ – yes I’m dressing my new doll, but it’s got IPv6.

Raspberry Pi 2 <= Love It

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 18:53:29 +0000

Well, after a number of years I finally jumped on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon, and bought a new Raspberry Pi 2, and it was delivered last Sunday. I bought a starter pack on Amazon UK that included a HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi Dongle, a power supply and an SD Card with an installation NOOBS image. You can see the WiFi Dongle and my wireless keyboard/trackpad dongle in the picture. So all you need a monitor and keyboard/mouse/trackpad to get going, and once setup you can access remotely over the network at the command line.

Unix/Linux personal timeline

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 13:32:18 +0000

I visited my old desk in Waterford Institute of Technology this morning and found an original Red Hat 6.0 box set distrubtion. That prompted me to send off a 4 tweet history of my Unix/Linux timeline, a potted history in four pictures.

Bourne Unix book (bought in 1987) while in University of Keele

Perfectly aligned

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 12:59:42 +0000

As CTO of FeedHenry I am delighted with the announcement that Red Hat Inc. will be our new owners. FeedHenry has been focused on easing the pains associated with enterprise mobility with a flexible end-to-end platform built on open standards for client-side and server-side mobile app development. Many of the core building blocks that we use are open source including Linux, Node.js and Apache Cordova. Red Hat is the leading enterprise open source company in the world, and has blazed a trail over the past two decades since the first Linux distribution of that name was launched by Marc Ewing in 1994. On a personal note, my own computing history is one based on early GNU open source software in the 1980s, followed by an enthusiastic adoption of Linux and the web ecosystem. Red Hat has been a pillar of innovation in this shifting world.

Reflections on my 18 years in the TSSG

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 14:13:06 +0000

Last week the Irish Independent had a series of articles about the TSSG in Waterford Institute of Technology, spin-out and spin-in companies associated with the TSSG, and other tech startups in Waterford: Waterford’s Specialist Startups Take Over the Mobile World. I was very pleased to see that the hard work many people had been engaged in, in building up this regional capability, was being recognised nationally. Pictured above left to right are Eamonn de Leastar, Willie Donnelly, Barry Downes and Mícheál Ó Foghlú (that’s me) who have collectively led the TSSG for most of its lifetime.

An even better smartphone? OnePlus One

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 16:19:45 +0000

UPDATE 2014-08-15 My new 64GB OnePlus One arrived today, it cost me GBP 265 plus P&P. Only downside so far is lack of Band 20 for 4G. With Vodafone here in Waterford that seems to impact my upload rather than my download speed, and still gives good performance.

As is often the case, when you buy a nice device, as I did with the Moto G, another comes along to make you wish you’d postponed your decision.

Moto G -- Best value Smartphone?

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 13:54:47 +0000

This month I purchased a Moto G 16GB Android Smartphone. I was impressed by the specification for the price. I got a SIM-free version from Expansys for €220 including a nice PDair leather flip cover/case. I have been using it for around a week now, with a Pay-as-you-Go SIM from Three Ireland that gives me unlimited data when topped up by €20, and it’s a great wee device. Okay, the downsides are that it does not have 4G or an external SDCard slot, and the camera is just okay at 5MP, but it is super responsive, and bang up to date with the latest Android from Google.

New Ghost Blog -- My Blogging History

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:01:55 +0000

Another year, another blogging platform. Yes I am falling into the trap of spending more time fiddling with blogging platforms than actually blogging. Back in 2012 I deployed Octopress, and now I’m deploying Ghost. Here’s an overview of my longer term blogging history, dating back to the 1980s, read on if you’re interested…..

The two main features I configured in Ghost were to add a Feedburner feed link to the main theme (rather than the local RSS file) c.f. Troy, and to add Discus comments when the full article is viewed, c.f. Voigt. Both of these are implemented by editing a template file in the theme, and restarting ghost.