Posts

Interesting announcements yesterday by Apple, finally releasing an iWatch. A lot of the talk on tech sites was reminiscent of the famous CMDR Taco (of Slashdot) line: “Less space then a nomad. Lame.” I happened to own a Nomad shortly after that famous quote was made. So we can see, quoting Steve Jobs “[They] have no taste” is applicable to me! I just don’t get the watch yet. As a permanent contact wearer, I’m waiting for Google Glass in a contact lens! What I do predict however is: motor accidents due to Apple Watch updates and laws banning staring at the thing. ...

I’ve followed this tutorial personally, not using Mongo as the database at first. It’s clear and to the point and provides just what you need to know to get started. Highly recommended.

As part of my undergradute thesis, I found a template (for LyX) to ease the pain of formatting a thesis in LaTeX. Making it look just right to me was very important. If your are writing a thesis, perhaps you feel the same way? If so, read on… While doing my first undergraduate thesis in Computer Science, I found a template used for a Computer Science thesis in NUI Maynooth (a university in Ireland). What attracted me was simple: it was battle tested and easily customisable. That was 2011 and since then I’d pretty much forgotten about it. ...

Worth a read for those wishing to optimise programs that process a lot of data. It proves that less really is more… Money quote: The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.

A great guide to get up to speed with Fish shell. What is Fish? It’s a shell written from the ground up to be more easily understandable the the traditional shells (bash, tcsh). I don’t know yet if I’ll switch (anything you can do in Fish can be made to work in Bash). It’s an interesting concept and I’ll try it for a while…

I’ve recently decided to further my education by applying for a Masters in Computer Science at University College Dublin. It’s very different from a traditional masters course in that it is very much focused on industry, the term the University uses is “Negotiated Learning”. It was a colleague of mine that introduced me to it, I was not even aware that there was what I would call ’non-strict masters’ (that is not a set-in-stone syllabus/research direction). ...

The article is a great tip for those who spend a good chunk of the working day on the command line. I made some adjustments to Bash completion code to get it to work on Mac OS X: Original: \_completemarks() { local curw=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]} local wordlist=$(find $MARKPATH -type l -printf "%f\n") COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W '${wordlist[@]}' -- "$curw")) return 0 } complete -F \_completemarks jump unmark My modified version (tested on Mac OS X and Ubuntu): ...

I am currently in Switzerland on a business trip. In between work, I managed to get some time over the Swiss national holiday to visit the CERN. CERN is world famous for the invention of WWW and of course most recently, the almost certainty that the Higgs Boson (aka. “The God Particle”) - the particle that gives energy mass - exists. The CERN tour is completely free and highly recommended. I visited the Atlas experiment with a colleague (who just so happened to have a Phd. in Physics) and questions were encouraged at every turn. What impressed me the most was the fact that there was no stupid questions. You can be a Phd weilding Physicist or a child and each question was handled the same by the staff. The guide (an active researcher at CERN) even expressed disappointment at the Higgs: ...

If your like me and you deal with a lot of servers for development or test and do it from a Unix machine, I’ve got a really handy tip: SSH hostname pattern matching. Say I’ve got a SSH config file like this (at ~/.ssh/config ): host s* HostName atrcu%h.example.com User example1 Port 22 host b* HostName atrcx%h.example.com User example2 Port 22 host ??* HostName atvts%h.example.com User example5 Port 2205 The ssh man page explains this really well: ...

Bash, a command line shell is one of the most used pieces of software in my daily work. I like scripting repetitive actions to save a lot time (it brings me great joy!). One of the simplest and easiest customisations is to add a bit of colour to your otherwise boring bash prompt (otherwise known as $PS1): [ngrogan@localhost:~]$ can be turned in to this: The thing about Bash is the colour codes to achieve this can look archaic: ...