Cokane

Disaster in Asia

For people in Ireland its hard to know what to do to help the people affected by the terrible disaster in South-East Asia.

I've done a quick search of the web and found the following Irish sites for donating to charities who are helping the people of South-East Asia recover from the tsunamis.

GOAL Ireland
Irish Red Cross
Trocaire
Oxfam UK

All of the above sites allow online donations. Please give what you can to help people who have lost family, friends and livelihoods.

Update

I haven't updated this blog in a long time and so here's a quick update along with a promise of more regular updates..

Soca

Found this site today. It's the Soca CD Project.

Irish Computer Society seminars

The Irish Computer Society (ICS) has picked security as its theme for its September seminars.

Employed!

I've finally landed a job! In fact I started about a month ago but have not found the time to update my blog. I'm not a java developer now but a consultant with one of the major international consulting companies (try to guess which one, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised :o)). What do I consult on? Anything and everything to do with IT, but mostly IT security in many of its forms, from penetration testing to application testing to system hardening to system design and so on. Since I've started I've done a report on the security of a system for a utilities company, contributed to a best practises document about hardening Websphere and done various other bits and bobs which I'm not going to comment on at the moment (cause they're boring :o)).

What else have I been doing? I've rejoined the Simon Community as a volunteer on their soup run, giving nice soup and sandwiches to the homeless around Dublin. Its an interesting diversion from the rest of my life. Aside from that I'm learning holiday Japanese in preparation for my trip to Japan in September with a few of the lads from college to visit a friend (jesus @ rb) who's working over there. Like any nerd I've always been interested in Japan (manga, nintendo, sony, all that ;o)) so am really looking forward to seeing Japan!

That's pretty much what's happening with me these days. I'll try to post more often on aspects relating to my job or to vent my various crazy opinions on subjects such as the debate on open sourcing Java.

I'm also going to find some way to stop my blog comments being spammed.. or at least check my blog regularly enough so that when they do appear I delete them asap. Grrr.. spammers...

Hardest part of a vocabulary to learn?

I think the hardest part of a language's vocabulary (human language, not programming) to learn must be the technical language. And one specific area I thought of today that would be hard to find out (not necessarily to learn) would be the "management talk." You know, the fluffy language which paints a big picture rather than getting into nitty-gritty details.

Imagine you're a Chinese native speaker and you're learning English. Where would you learn that "down sizing" is a nicer term to use than "firing" or "making redundant" ? You aren't going to see it in a normal English language tutorial. Maybe they teach those terms on Business Language courses..

just a thought..

How Charming

Been hit by the comment spammers I see.. gonna have to try to do something about that.

In other news, progress is going slowly on the personal project I announced in my last posting. Catching up on my offline and online reading and trying to find a job has interfered with things and occupied a lot of my time. So JConsumer is on hold for the time being.