Stochastic Geometry

Sherlock’s Folly – the problem is the system itself

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:54:39 +0000

Sherlock's Folly (the Irish version of SOPA) is not the main problem we have to deal with...

Unbricking the N9

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:05:02 +0000

Flashing the firmware of a Nokia N9 to unbrick it from the "Device is malfunctioning" screen.

Oh bother…

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:34:55 +0000

I knew it was going too well...

N9 v N900

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:47:11 +0000

Comparing the N9 to the N900...

N9 Unboxing

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:22:30 +0000

Unboxing the Nokia N9, and fun and games with trimming a SIM card to microSIM size...

N9 trial

Mark Dennehy — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:30:41 +0000

Trialling the Nokia N9 for WomWorldNokia

Biscuit

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 23:45:22 +0000

Some good news...

Home server build, part two – assembly

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:24:26 +0000

Building a home NAS/Backup/Media/seedbox server, part two - unpacking and assembly.

Er…

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:27:24 +0000

Every so often, a web error message just gets that little bit surreal…

I mean, a 404 error for humanism, well, watch the six o’clock news and that’s not a surprising thing – even a 500 or a 501 error seems about right some days. So should we take a mere temporary suspension of humanism as a lucky escape from something a bit more permanent?

… Read the rest

Home server build, part one – specifications

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 01:29:55 +0000

Building a home server for NAS storage, backups, downloads and so forth. Part one - specifications and the parts list.

New Robotics Forum

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:40:05 +0000

Boards.ie has created another forum in the past week or so; the Robotics forum.

Car trouble and honest mechanics

Mark Dennehy — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:53:51 +0000

So the car was misfiring on one cylinder and it’d done 100,000km+ so I thought it was time for a good solid service. And obviously that means a citroen garage where they’re used to seeing citroen cars coming in and doing this sort of thing, thinks me, and goes into Gowan Motors with my little car.

Some of you are already facepalming. Wait for it, it gets better.

A few hours later, the nice lady calls me at work to tell me that *everything* on my car (an 05 model that passed the NCT with flying colours on the first pass five months ago) was broken and needed to be replaced, they had no parts in stock and would have to order them in specially, and that they’d like €2,000 please.

Well that was nice, I’d like €2,000 myself. So I said thank you very much, came in and collected my car, paid the €50 or so for the inspection and then the €50 or so for the 6 hours of hiring a car while they inspected mine and left.

And called Myles Reilly, my local mechanic (22 Croke Park Industrial Estate, 087 242 7785) who said he’d be happy to give it a second opinion. By now the engine warning light was on and I was a tad worried, so he said to call by the night before I left the car in to be serviced with him, and he plugged the diagnostic computer into the car and sure enough, cylinder #4 is misfiring, but everything else is grand and so I drive away, reassured that my car isn’t about to die on me.

The next evening I drop it in and a day or so later I get a phone call. Did they say they ran an emissions … Read the rest

An Garda Siochana seek to implement website blocking without legislation or oversight

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:01:08 +0000

As caught by Digital Rights Ireland, the Gardai are seeking - without public debate or legislation - by private contact with ISPs, to introduce website blocking in Ireland in the name of preventing child pornography. Which is what studies abroad show it patently does not do - it's not preventing child abuse, it's implementing "See no Evil".

New Gaming Rig, Part Two – Unboxing and Assembly

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:01:57 +0000

There’s something terribly nice about a box full of stuff Scan got the parts to me right on time so Thursday night was to be assembly night, with the goal of getting to a working POST by the end. So out came the boxcutter and I started unpacking…

So here are all the components, less the CPU which is hiding off to one side, just out of shot:

Looking at the case first of all (nice solid construction on this…):

The assembly went relatively smoothly, though it did take a few hours, mainly because I wasn’t really pushing myself. The PSU went in first, then the DVD drive and the hard drive, then the motherboard pillars went in and then the motherboard, then the graphics card, then some swearing, out came the graphics card and the hard drive was moved two bays down so the graphics card didn’t poke it, then the graphics card went in, then more swearing, the motherboard came off its pillars so I could pull it back an inch to fit the I/O facia panel, then back goes the motherboard and in goes the CPU and then I assemble the CPU heatsink/cooler assembly and lots of swearing and poking later, it’s latched onto the mounting lugs. I’m rather paranoid about those lugs not being sufficient in a tower configuration – some tiewrapping is due there I think just in case. After all this, it was wiring time.

The less said about wiring time, the better, but put it this way:

Eventually, everything was where I wanted it, with everything plugged in, screwed on, clipped, latched, tiewrapped, twisted, pushed, poked, pulled, prodded, bent and scrunched as appropriate.

It won’t be winning any build awards for neatness, but it’s in, it’s secure, and it’s tidy enough. So … Read the rest

New Gaming Rig, Part One – The Decision

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:00:46 +0000

Deciding to get a new gaming rig, the websites and other resources used, and the final build manifest...

WordPress Simple Graph Plugin

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:42:02 +0000

I'm finally getting back to some coding in my spare time (what little of it I have), and I'm starting slowly with some maintenance work on a Wordpress Plugin called Simple Graph.

Pycon 2011 videos

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:02:14 +0000

The Pycon 2011 videos are now up on Blip!

NXT Mindstorms

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:21:22 +0000

Doing a side project to help out in the job at the moment for a christmas thing, and getting to play with the new NXT mindstorms kit as a result (I only used the older mindstorms kit before now in TCD). They’re much beefier on the inside, the sensors are much more polished-looking, Robolab has come on a long way (but is still a wussy way to program these things, wish I had time to blast an open source firmware to the brick), and they’re even faster to get up and running with. In 20 minutes, I had this built:

The ultrasonic sensor is a nice addition to the kits – stick that on a servo mount and you’d have a 360° sensor for mapping your environment… albiet a really noisy crappy one

Ten minutes later I had Robolab installed on a WinXP virtualbox on my Debian-running laptop (sweet how far we’ve come – in the old days, I’d just have to dual-boot to get usable performance like this), and ten minutes of fiddling later, I had taught my new robot to fear me…

(You have to teach them to fear you first, otherwise they’ll turn around and shoot you in the face…)

… Read the rest

Snow in Dublin

Mark Dennehy — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:26:11 +0000

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Sphere Within Snow"][/caption]

It's getting a bit chilly out there. Last time it was this cold this early in the year was 25 years ago. What was that about climate change not existing again?

Pulled Pork

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:12:35 +0000

A pretty decent pulled pork recipe with lots of step-by-step photos.

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 that they all make perfect sense considering existing regulations and our climate. The place must be public, in good repair and a solid structure, so no marquees in the garden and no beaches or mountaintops are allowed. It must be a dignified venue with no connection to any religion. There must be room for the guests to sit comfortably and access for those with physical disability.

Claire Nolan arrived with her father by car to the Parade Tower. Staff at the castle, Frank Kavanagh and Anne Teehan were on hand to usher her into the lift to the second floor where there ceremony took place in front of waiting guests.

Afterwards the celebration was in the Ormonde Hotel and the destination for the honeymoon, well, that was a secret.

All at 32.ie wish the happy couple well in their future together.

Married in Kilkenny Castle

… 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.