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31
Dec 11

Ringing in the New Year by seeing out the old

2011 has been a great year for me;

  • Graduated with a 1st MEng in Electronics & Software Engineering @QUB,
  • Got Job offer to a major financial house, which I turned down,
  • Got Job offer to a C|EH company in England, which I turned down,
  • Got DELNI Funded PhD offer (x4) from CSIT/ECIT, which I turned down,
  • Got selected to be one of the two UK projects within a Joint UK/FR Defence PhD Programme, which I accepted,
  • Saw fantastic growth in QUESTS and the Hacker^H^H^H^H^H^HMakerspace, including the beginning of a Major project, which we got EEECS Funding for and are also hoping to get QAF funding for QUESTS in general,
  • We are on track to get a actual space for the Makerspace circa Summer 2012,
  • Had the fantastic experience of living and working in Zurich for the summer with IAESTE / Pc Engines Gmbh, which gave me the opportunity to visit all over Europe, which was great for my confidence and self-belief, and also gave me a great many new friends all over the world,
  • Started (re-)learning French,
  • Came second in the UK Nationals of the IET’s Present Around the World Competition in Liverpool for my talk on Privacy in the Modern world (I keep meaning to screen-cast this but keep forgetting…)
  • Had a great time making an interesting site with Matt Campbell, Alastair McKinley, and the Sisk Brothers (was live for a few days over the summer, and we didn’t want to pay for it so let it die; may go back to it this year!)
  • Was asked to speak at the QUB EEECS RS Colloquium, representing Digital Communications within QUB/ECIT.
  • Travelled over 6,000 Miles, visiting at least 12 cities in 7 countries.
  • Lost a phone and a bike,
  • Went on 12 ‘dates’, 5 of which were worth while, 3 of which I’m still in touch with,
  • Taught at least 5 first years that C++ isn’t magic, it’s just poorly taught,
  • Sat on 5 committees, only one of which made me feel productive,
  • Had a pretty awesome time.

Going forward, I’m not going to make a load of promises I won’t keep. Thanks to all my friends, family, colleagues, competitors, enemies, bureaucrats, pencil-pushers, and random-folk who made my year what it was.

I plan on only two things;  KISS, and…

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17
Oct 11

Today’s Accomplishments: The 2.0 Generation

As I was walking back from our kitchen in the office, I realised that that ‘lift coffee cup, walk to kitchen, make coffee cup, return to desk’ was the most inefficient part of my working day; I can even justify writing this post as vaguely productive as I’m waiting for a download to complete…
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29
Sep 11

Through The Drinking Glass

Inspired by the drinking game ‘Kings’

Co-Authors:W.P.L. Cully, and L. Martin

Requirements:
1 standard deck of cards
1 jug/tankard/chalice/large vessel
1 top hat (or suitably ‘posh’ headgear)
at least 4 people
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4
Aug 11

Best Description of Northern Ireland I’ve heard yet

Easter Rising-era Propaganda PostcardNorthern Ireland, its history, and its current situation, are a guaranteed topic of conversation to any self-identifying Northern Irishman, especially one travelling around Europe. As I am neither a historian, a bigot, or particularly political, I don’t know a whole pile of detail, so my explanations become rambling personal perspectives which I generally suspect make things less-clear; otherwise I dumb it down so much that the point is kinda mixed, usually ending something like ‘its weird; its British, but we get to be Irish too, except without being quite so broke’.  Continue reading →

Commentary / hackerspace / Off-Topic — 1 Comment
7
Apr 11

Why Belfast Needs a Hackerspace

I was sitting in Sinnamon on the Stranmillis Road, enjoying a coffee, a sausage roll, and my Kindle, reading the latest 2600. One article immediatly stood out to me, ‘A World Spinning’. The main focus of the article was the world-changing domino effect, toppling regimes across the middle east, all caused by one, little textfile. The textfile in question was a US Embassy cable highlighting the indemic corruption in the (ex) Tunisian Government. As most know, this leak was from WikiLeaks; a rag-tag loosely knit chaotic alliance of hackers across the globe, all with the the same general aim to allow open and plain discourse and stopping governments across the globe from hiding secrets from their citizenry; big secrets and small…
Of course, as with most things to do with hackers, the aim isn’t that simple; having spoken to some of those involved, it was abundantly clear that some elements within Wikileaks purely want to screw with governments that (they feel have) wronged them, but others are simply motivated by the cat-and-mouse challenge of acquiring, validating, securing and releasing information in a hostile environment.

Its this kind of spectrum that makes me wish that I could just fastforward a year or so (or much longer), to a point where Belfast Hackerspace is established, stable, self-funding, and growing. Innovation only comes from discourse, and the best innovations (in my opinion) come from differences.
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12
Feb 11

Bolsters Code-Related Rants (An ongoing collection)

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  • Logging functions being called with just a variable and no comment as to what the hell it is
  • logging has functions more than logging.info, use them.
    • Debug = useful information if something breaks but isn’t interesting during normal operation
    • info = useful and generally interesting information
    • warn = something went wrong, indicating something should probably be refactored / fixed, but the system could recover from it.
    • error = oh dear jesus fuck the entire site evaporated into a swarm of zombie locusts, I better put something in the error log.
  • Commented out historical code! Using a version control system means you can go back to any point in the history of the codebase and see how we used to do something; you don’t need dozens of lines of extraneous code ‘just in case’
  • Checking in inoperable code to the default branch (I know I’m guilty of this sometimes too). If major changes to one section are being made, do it in a branch, that’s what branches are there for. Then, when the new functionality is stable, update your local code with respect to the default branch, then make sure all the functionality still works and only then commit and check it in to default
  • Non existent or orphan files; if you add a new file,hg add $filename before updating or committing, otherwise noone has any idea whats going on. Ditto removals of files, its hg remove $filename ; rm $filename, not the other way around.

You guys got any to add? I’ll be adding to this as I think of them… / come across them…

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8
Jan 11

Rant: Job Applications

Inspired by Barry Haughey’s recent facebook post;

Dear International Banking Conglomerates and other major employers,

I just spent 3 hours of my life writing custom cover letters, answering pointless assessment questions, and entering my ‘skillsets’ on 4 different occasions for an application for one job… Just gimme the bloody job already; you’re big enough and ugly enough to have been able to pick up all that infomation from either a) My extensive and detailed resume, b) my attached university transcript.

For companies whose bread and butter is data management and analysis, wise the hell up;

Why not just pull all the information from my LinkedIn page?

What about having a standardized assessment test that everyone can use, and do, ONCE, and then you pull their score from that profile?

What about taking all that time that people waste putting THE SAME INFORMATION over and over and over again, and using that time to, I dunno, study to get a better degree?

That way, you get the BEST candidates, not the ones who spray their CV’s around like a bedwetting ADHD-sufferring 5 year old.

Yours Exhaustedly

Andrew Bolster

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4
Aug 10

High-Frequency Trading Revolt, and Why its a good idea!!

High Frequency TradingRemember that little economic apocalypse that happened a few years ago? You may remember it as the day your 401(k) dropped a digit or 3; those short sighted (w/b)ankers and middle management that essentially collectively said “You want some money? Sure, go ahead!” to the entire world and didn’t think about where it was coming from, while getting paid sums of money that would make Scrouge McDuck blush. Well, turns out they have been too greedy at home (no suprise).

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17
Jul 10

Belfast Hackerspace Anyone?

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of a ‘hacker‘ (or at least self described ones) has very little to do with coding and networking wizards pounding through systems and stealing valuable information or just destroying everything they touch. In fact, Google (and Princeton University’s) first definition of the word has more to do with Golf than security (try it by googling “define:hacker”).

The so called ‘hacker subculture’ is usually taken as a group of not necessarily like minded, but creative individuals with or without technical or theoretical skill, including artists, musicians, carpenters, machinists, or extreme knitters, and can generally be shortened down to ‘tinker-ers’ or ‘messers’. Continue reading →

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24
Jun 10

Great HOPEs

TheNextHope

TheNextHope

This is it; my first convention! Yes folks, I’m going to be attending (and volunteering) at TheNextHOPE (@thenexthope), 16-18 July.

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