Northern 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
4
Aug 11
Best Description of Northern Ireland I’ve heard yet
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.
Continue reading →
12
Feb 11
Bolsters Code-Related Rants (An ongoing collection)
FFFFFFUUUUUUUU
- 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 $filenamebefore updating or committing, otherwise noone has any idea whats going on. Ditto removals of files, itshg 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…
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
4
Aug 10
High-Frequency Trading Revolt, and Why its a good idea!!
Remember 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).
14
Jun 10
Ongoing CUDA work, aka, I love this book.
If anyone has any interest in CUDA, or GPU/Parallel programming in general, David B. Kirk and Wen-mei Hwu‘s groundbreaking “Programming Massively Parallel Processors” is a must. Continue reading →
4
May 10
Ubuntu Boosting Blog Hits
I had a bit of a surprise logging into my weekly stats-fest that is my Google Analytics account; 300% rise in Search Based traffic. My daily traffic is meagre to say the least but still, to see such a jump on the week-on-week numbers is always a good thing.
24
Apr 10
Ads Outside the Box?
I cant for the life of me remember who it was who pointed this out on Twitter, either @cimota or @stuartgibson.
Jesse Schell , Author, Educator, Game Developer, Ex-imagineer, Futurist, spendshalf of this video deliberating over the unexpected rise and rise of facebook.
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…
Continue reading →