Joe’s Blog

I liked this video and thought I would share - Supermarket 2.0

subclipse is a great little tool for working with SVN repositories and eclipse but it has caused me a few issues.

One of those was an error like this when adding the repository URL;

Error validating location: “org.tigris.subversion.javahl.ClientException: The requested name is valid and was found in the database, but it does not have the correct associated data being resolved for.
svn: Unknown hostname ‘ .sourceforge.net’
”
Keep location anyway?

and this when an attempt was made to connect;

Folder does not exist remotely

A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host.
svn: Can’t connect to host ‘ .svn.sourceforge.net’: A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host.

or

svn: No route to host: connect

The problem? An old socks proxy setting that subclipse does not update…
Even if the “Network Connections” settings in Eclipse specify that a direct connection to the Internet is to be used, subclipse may still have the setting in a file called servers stored somewhere like
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Subversion
or
~/.subversion/

Josh.st was the place I eventually found this and for more details on the fix, go there

oh yeah - the dramatic pause in blogging Seactain Na Gaeilge events was because we went on a little trip to CeBIT.

CeBIT for those of ye that don’t know is the world’s largest computer and IT trade fair - Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik; German for “Centre of Office and Information technology”

Quick run down on events:

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Wed: Daren wakes me from my slumber, train to Dublin, flight to Bremen, drive to Bad Gandersheim, pizza and beer (Gilde Ratskeller) in “Pizzeria Gino II”

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Thu: long breakfast, drive to CeBIT, registration, food in the Münchner Halle - a lovely slab of pork knuckle and a Maß (litre of beer) and then back to the fair. TCD actually had a stand where they were advertising the university and looking for Masters/PhD students. We got back to Bad Gandersheim for dinner that evening in Pizza Napoli and after a regular beer (Einbecker Pils), we were treated to a taste of Einbecker “Bock bier” which is quite tasty

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Fri: Back to CeBIT after breakfast but only 5 of the 10 of us, due to sickness. There was a smell of burning from the car on the way too so we called the rental company later that day and the breakdown service who decided to tow us back to the garage

Luckily, there wasn’t much wrong with the car apart from some oil spilt around the engine bay by the people who had rented it before us. After a good steam-clean, we were ready to go again. Mercedes service was actually quite good. Met up with the rest of the gang back in Hannover city centre, where we went for kebabs.

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Sat: Final Day of CeBIT and almost back to our full compliment of tourists. Quizzed the people in Ericsson for quite some time on WLAN, MIMO, LTE and IMS. The final thing I did was some quad-biking and then said goodbye to CeBIT…

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Sun: Headed back to Bremen, via Dublin and the train back to Limerick

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Some photos from CeBIT

The Interaction Design Centre

and

The Centre for Computational Musicology and Computer Music

cordially invites you to the launch of

“ Two Places “

the catalogue accompanying the exhibition in the University of Limerick and the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 5.00pm , Plassey House.

This project is also supported by

Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast

Arts Council of Northern Ireland

 The Arts Council of Ireland

Belfast City Council

and

UL Arts Office

www.twoplaces.ul.ie

Via CE4706
Source Unknown

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisers for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit micro-controller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognised the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”

“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialise this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialisation process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelette classes.”

“The ham and cheese omelette class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”

“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”

“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v. 8.3′ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 32MB of memory, a 1G hard disk, and an SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program
will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit micro-controller!).”

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
Another deep meaning tale
A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Project Manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careered out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car’s occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes.

What were they to do?

“I know”, said the Project Manager, “Let’s have a meeting, build a Vision by consensus, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, then we can be on our way.”

“No, no”, said the Hardware Engineer, “That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I’ve got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car’s braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way.”

“Well”, said the Software Engineer, “Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again.”

Some thoughts:
Which one are you?
Which one pays best?
Which one might you become?

I’ll be going to Limerick Blogger Coffee this Saturday 19th

We’re meeting in the foyer of the Marriott at about 11 and go for coffee or whatever you’re having yourself

Jon Arnold reports on Cisco C-Scape 2007 and how they are pushing telepresence. It’s like something from Star Wars

There is a second, longer video here

I thought this was just a joke:

until Aidanf pointed out the solution (scroll down to number 10)

For MGB Via Geewiz

Also - allegation that Mark Zuckerberg cashed in before Web 2.0 crashed. Quickly followed by clarification that it was a baseless rumour

Wholesome and safe (the more risky stuff is below the 2nd video)

Style Treaty is a lifestyle blog for Limerick.

Via Ze Frank - early episodes of Sesame Street have been reissued with a warning that the content is not suitable for the needs of today’s children Here is a nice slow-paced video about cows:

Interesting speech on wireless spectrum and regulation (this guy is quite a good speaker) Via Brough Turner

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let’s push the boundaries a little

Via Fastlad Passive-Aggressive Notes

A little late for World Aids Day (1st Dec) but this is from EUtube - “Chess Love - safe sex is a game for two”

Very un-pc and NSFW!
Phil discovers topless ladies playing a Nintendo Wii - Nuts magazine