Author: Rory

I’ve Christmas-ified the DIT Juggling site. No, the site isn’t finished yet; yes, it has to be done by Wednesday if I’m to submit it as my multimedia project; yes, I should have spent the time I spent Christmassing it up actually finishing it; no, I don’t care. Also I needed an excuse to pimp my stupidly high (given my limited readership) Page Rank at the site, since it’s new and no-one can find it yet.

It took me three days to come up with that title… Actually it took me three days to realise I hadn’t posted about this yet. I was at Google’s European operations headquarters on Tuesday and, long story short, pretty much competely geeked out.

There was a Wall. Not a wall, well there were walls obviously, but I’m talking about a Wall. The search Wall. You might have heard of this before; I knew they had one at the Mountainview campus, but I didn’t think I’d ever get to see one. This wall (sorry, Wall) has people’s searches scrolling up it in real time, from all over the world. It’s about the coolest, most hypnotic decoration short of a lava lamp with real lava. Every now and then a search would elicit a murmer of laughter from the assembled nerd community. My protracted staring at the Wall was accompanied by lots of free Coke. Obviously Google knows the way to my heart. They most likely found out about it on the Web somewhere.

The event itself was a thinly-veiled (or, at the end, unveiled) recruitment drive. That’s fine by me. Google can happily recruit me at their earliest convenience as far as I’m concerned. We were treated to a technical seminar with an overview of Google’s systems: networks, hardware, and the Google File System (GFS). It was no more detailed than the information already available on the web. I guess we can hardly expect to hear their trade secrets.

Humour was present at every turn. One of the slides showed a picture of Google’s dog. The speaker said he used to accompany that slide by saying their dog was bigger than Lycos’s but no-one get’s that joke anymore. Eh? I guess you had to be there. I was surprised to see ther first server had a Lego case; that’s something I’ve been telling Djinn to do with his computer for years.

Then came the extended period that I’ve termed "walking around, eating free food, drinking free drinks, and talking to Google staff". Despite my best intentions I utterly failed to remember to ask what they feed the pigeons. Maybe next time.

When you constrain user input, for example by using a dropdown box instead of a text field, it’s important to allow for every possible valid input. Taking this vital rule to heart, British Airways have made the most complete online registration page I’ve ever seen. No longer will His Majesty the King of Spain or His Holiness the Pope have to endure the embarassment of entering their titles as Mr when travelling to Britain. It’s still missing Field Marshal The Most Noble… etc.

I spent the weekend in Tralee at the juggling festival, which largely involved gaping in awe at some very talented performers and generally not sleeping. I got tantalisingly close to qualifying a five-ball juggle (ie. getting ten catches of five balls) on Saturday, which I hadn’t expected to happen this side of Christmas. I’m beginning to feel that juggling is quite like programming in one important respect: you need about two hours to catch up with where you were last time before you can start to do something worthwhile.

The weekend peaked on Saturday night at the Renegade show. For those who haven’t been to a juggling convention before (which I take to be all of my readers), Renegade is an opportunity for the people who think they’re great to get on stage and prove it. For the most part they did prove it. Given my preference for technical tricks over crowd-pleasing visuals I prefered Renegade to the more family-oriented public show earlier in the day.

I’m proud to say that Cecily and I won the Diabolo-tennis doubles, beating Paul—the hat man—and Ruben—apparently some sort of mutant juggling-child owned by the circus—to the top prize of a cookie and a lollipop.

No doubt we’ll have some photos, and maybe some videos, at the DIT JugSoc site at some point, but since that site is in the very preliminary stages of development it may be a few weeks. On a related note, I’m designing the site for DIT’s JugSoc so if you have any comments about it I’d like to hear them. You know how to comment.

There’s some hubbub around Mozilla.org as Thunderbird 0.9 and Firefox 1.0 RC 2 were both released today. The current prediction, and I can’t see how it could be innacurate so late in the day so I assume it’s right, is that Firefox 1.0 will be out next Tuesday 9^th November.

I made the greivous error of telling my classmates about this site, so I have to quickly scramble to put something here that’ll be of interest to them… Ah screw it. Just go read the archives; link is to your left. Clicking on the little speech bubble with a plus beneath any entry will give you a comment form, with which you can abuse and/or praise me. Be gentle. Comments are enabled on most entries.

Given that Ireland’s presidency wasn’t contested this year (leaving us with an unelected foreigner as our figurehead-of-state) I’ve been paying more attention to the US campaign. The first votes were cast a few hours ago, so this is the time for me to finally lay out my prediction, sans any semblance of justification. I think Kerry is going to win. Time will tell. II promise not to remove this prediction if I’m wrong, though I can’t promise I won’t complain loudly.

Update (3 November, 12:30): I think I can now safely say: Bah! You maniacs. I’m with Dunstan on this one.

Proof, if anyone was interested, that a person working off an hour’s sleep is more critically aware than a person who is under heavy alcohol influence: I have just negotiated a deal to rent the lower floor of my house to my brother and his friends for the low low rate of €50, secured by the collateral of a current ATM card. I consider this a good deal for them because my usual rate for my time is a modest €20 per hour and I expect them to remain for at least 4 hours. I consider it a good deal for me because I ultimately have no recourse beyond whining to the parents on Sunday evening, the only possible effect of which is to slightly mar their next break with guilt in leaving me here with the hordes.

I was ready to post a short piece as a counterpoint to Aquarion’s bus woes, about how I just got home from college on the 84 in less than an hour door-to-door (not much more than half the usual time). I was going to mention that the 4pm bus must have taken about 45 minutes to reach UCD from Dublin but then raced through Bray at a speed unequalled in that town, except perhaps by the angry shop-keepers chasing the local children. And adults.

I’ve changed my mind, and now this is going to be a piece consisting of not much more than "Huh? Why is my sound card suddenly working under Linux?" I’m afraid to try to find out. I’ll sit in happy ignorance for the time being.

To coincide with the new series of QI on BBC TWO and BBC Four, there’s a new QI website at www.qi.com. I’m still wandering around it marvelling at the ridiculous array of completely useless facts, but I’ve taken a break to tell my dear reader(s) that

To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

is an anagram of

In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.