Stochastic Geometry

Choosing the next job rather than finding it…

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:07:53 +0000

On choosing the next job, rather than letting it choose you.

Married!

Mark Dennehy — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:44:56 +0000

With thanks to 32.ie who recorded the whole proceedings… which was handy since our camcorder packed up on the morning!

Married in the castle like a princess

ON Thursday, Claire Nolan, daughter of Ann and Pat Nolan of College Road married Mark Dennehy from Kerry in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle, in a civil ceremony, surrounded by family and friends.

They say that every little girl dreams of getting married like a princess, but until recently if you did not want to marry in a church, you had no choice but to make your vows in a registry office. In Kilkenny that was inside the Health Service Executive building at Lacken, which, at least had some lawn and trees outside, unlike some other counties which had very unromantic settings indeed.

Since 2004, the registrar may perform a marriage outside of a registry office. There are conditions, however, and Ann Boyle, the registrar in Kilkenny says

… Read the rest

My interviews at Google

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:45:16 +0000

So I've now completed the interview process twice with Google (once in 2007 and once in 2010), and while I'm not sure advice from someone not hired after two run-throughs is all that useful, I figured that the more information out there for those undergoing pre-Google-Interview stress, the better, so here's how it went.

In both cases, I was contacted out of the blue by a Google recruiter. The first time I had been considering looking for a new role and pursued it immediately; the second time I hadn't been and put off the recruitment process for several months, during which the same recruiter contacted me again twice to follow up. If nothing else, that's a nice ego boost, but a more cynical mind might be considering the shotgun approach to a narrow recruiting filter and commissions :D

First, a quick data point, I was applying for an SRE(SA) position on both occasions - Site Reliability Engineer (System Administration), because in most of my roles to date, I've been doing both sysadmin and development work and I've never seemed to drift towards one pigeonhole or another. SRE(SA) seemed optimal - interesting sysadmin work on large-scale systems and quite a bit of tool-writing to boot. This was decided on between myself and the recruiter, based on the self-assessment form you are given to fill out. I would love to know how they get around illusory superiority and the Dunning-Kruger effect with those forms, especially given the wierd bias they'd have in the dataset from having so many of the best in their fields working there.

Both times, the process proceeded in the same way:

andi-servo

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:11:28 +0000

Finally released my linux driver for the Ajeco ANDI-SERVO motion control board.

Dagda – part two (cameras and computers)

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:32:39 +0000

Dagda, the robot I spent several years of my PhD building - this post is on the cameras and computer system on the robot.

Dagda

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:13:30 +0000

Dagda, the robot I spent several years of my PhD building - this post is on the main frame of the robot, motors and motor control, and power systems, as well as how the robot managed to shoot me in the face.

Why the Nokia N900 is fundamentally better than the iPhone

Mark Dennehy — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:02:11 +0000

The 2 reasons why the Nokia N900 is (and will remain) fundamentally better than an iPhone.

10 things about the Nokia N900

Mark Dennehy — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:00:12 +0000

10 things I love about the Nokia N900 and 10 things I hate about it.

Can the Nokia N900 replace a netbook?

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:05:20 +0000

Using the Nokia N900 in the field, and why its €500 pricetag isn't really so daft after all.

Python on the Nokia N900

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:13:16 +0000

Getting started with Python development on the N900.

Nokia N900 vs Nokia E71

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:29:44 +0000

Comparing the N900 to the E71.

N900 Unboxing

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:37:15 +0000

Unboxing the Nokia N900

N900 trial

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:19:24 +0000

How I got asked to trial a Nokia N900 for a fortnight for free, and why I said yes, and what's coming up next.

Continuing Professional Development – does your company do enough for you?

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:03:12 +0000

[polldaddy poll=2983230]

Continuing Professional Development in Ireland - how much does your company do, and why don't more Irish companies get involved in it?

Smartphone data traffic eclipses Feature Phones but the iDevices are coming up fast…

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:33:52 +0000

Latest study shows that smartphones now demand the majority of the data traffic on mobile networks but that mobile internet devices are going to become an even greater data sink, thus hastening the predicted "mobile data apocalypse".

Nagios notifications via clickatell

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:03:43 +0000

A simple, cheap way to get SMS notifications from a server running Nagios without additional hardware.

Ben Nanonote with WiFi

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:14:18 +0000

The new Qi Hardware palmtop, the Ben Nanonote, looks really interesting but doesn't have wifi. However, there is a solution now and more features coming in the Ya and Mu Nanonotes. Is this a future direction for the notebook market?

No Redditting Allowed

Mark Dennehy — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:30:22 +0000

Links to this site from Reddit.com are no longer allowed.

Not-so-shortlisted!

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:31:46 +0000

I got shortlisted for Best Technology Blog in the Irish Blog Awards!

Performance tuning a server in less than three minutes while being slashdotted

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:33:35 +0000

Tuning a webserver in three minutes while it's being slashdotted.

Silently banned from Reddit…

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:44:35 +0000

On getting sneakily banned from reddit without reason, warning, process or notification.

Suura over coffee

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:31 +0000

Filmed before Mobile World Congress:

Technorati claim

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:11:38 +0000

AZ8MFBCNWD84

JJ4K5WXYZ4R3

Searching for a decent set of cans…

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:49:34 +0000

The old and fairly reliable Sennheiser RS40′s I was using up until a few weeks ago finally gave up the ghost in the run-up to Mobile World Congress this year – or to be more accurate, the battery packs finally gave up. Despite overnight charging, I was getting only about three hours of operating time; and since the charger in the headphones themselves wasn’t working, I only had the charged battery in the base unit, so I was getting maybe four hours a day from them.

The RS40s were (and are) really lovely headphones, with the great feature that if you stood up to walk to the printer and forgot you were wearing them, you didn’t treat the rest of the lab to the cartoon Yoink! Thud! sound effects as you nearly strangled yourself with the headset cord. Shame they were let down by the powerpacks…

You can’t… Read the rest

A little light reading…

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:44:37 +0000

What do you do when you’ve successfully gotten a demo to Mobile World Congress and you want to reward yourself?

Go order a little light reading of course!

Amazon are really getting to like it when I log in at this stage I think

Although, the more recent book purchase was with The Book Depository and between lower prices and free shipping, they actually worked out cheaper than Amazon did (and thanks to Neal Asher for that tip). They weren’t cheaper for every book though – ironically the science fiction books I was looking at were more expensive – but for the programming books I was looking for, they came in about seven or eight euros under amazon.com and their shipping is about six weeks faster than amazon’s, for free. So we’ll see in a day or three when the books arrive if they’re as good as they look…

Mobile World Congress 2010

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:32:47 +0000

Two years ago while I was working at dotMobi, I was one of the programmers working on the DeviceAtlas project, which launched at Mobile World Congress 2008. At the time, it was the largest launch I’d been involved in and it was quite a ride towards the end – when you’re launching to 60,000 people at the largest trade show in the world for your industry, the pressure is enormous.

So when Suura undertook to demo at this year’s Mobile World Congress, I knew we were in for a major project with a high workload. Or at least I thought I did, but if anything, I underestimated how much pressure there is for a small startup at this event. I’d like to say everything got done in normal business hours without stress, but I think everyone who’s ever even attended — let alone exhibited at — MWC would… Read the rest

Moving from wordpress.com to wordpress.org

Mark Dennehy — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 02:28:28 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been planning a move from wordpress.com to my own dedicated server for a while now, not only for this blog but also for On Target and Wallpaper and herself’s book site. I said I’d write things up once I was done, so…

Step one in this process was local testing. I already had a LAMP stack running locally on the r61 so I just had to create a directory, download the latest wordpress.org tarball and untar it into that directory, then edit wp-config.php, create a database for the site to use, and walk through the automatic install. Very easy, very clean, and took about ten minutes all told. Got to hand it to wordpress there, the man-hours that have gone into streamlining and debugging the install process really shows. Once it’s installed, I went back to the wordpress.com site, exported the blog and imported… Read the rest

Idle thought…

Mark Dennehy — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:26:14 +0000

Zombie movies: the intersection of horror films and string theory?
“Branes…. branes….”

How long is an hour?

Mark Dennehy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:21:51 +0000

[digg http://digg.com/educational/How_long_is_an_hour]So on Saturday, the Minister for Education announced that he was very worried because two people had told him (possibly over coffee and some nice biscuits) that most academics only work for four hours a week. Now most of the time, with most people, that’d lead to someone looking up what the situation actually is and determining if there was a problem and so noone would be worried about knee-jerk reactions. Thing is, we’re talking about a Minister for Education who recently decided to abolish the NUI and didn’t tell anyone until the press conference (ignoring the point that abolishing the NUI does not abolish the work they are required to do; and that therefore abolishing the NUI means replacing a working system that’s been there since before the founding of the state with a quango whose suitability and efficacy will be utterly unproven). So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the Minister responded… Read the rest

Noone puts baby in a corner… of the box…

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:49:04 +0000

[digg http://digg.com/comedy/Noone_puts_baby_in_a_corner_of_the_box]We ordered a 1610 Peli case from procases.co.uk to ferry the demo Suura system to Barcelona in, and … well

I know, I know, there’s probably a very good reason for this warning sign, but I still cracked up when I saw it.