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..

]]> I've been away the last couple of months. In September I was on holidays with some friends in Japan. Then I came back to Ireland for a week before being sent to London for all of October to work with a client over there.

The London work was a great learning experience. I was assisting a Sarbanes-Oxley audit and gained a lot of experience with IT controls and the financial sector.

While in London I brainstormed some ideas for things to write about in my blog. It will keep a technology focus but obviously is gonna change with my interests and work. So not everything will be software development related.

I hope to write another entry during the week. Till then, Peace!

Soca

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

]]> What's it about?

From the site:
"The Soca CD Project was started out of the need for an efficient means of information distribution about the artform. How many calypso and soca songs, artists and albums are out there? Unlimited. How many do you know? Exactly. Which CD has on that song I keep hearing? Exactly. These are some reccuring reasons why The Soca CD Project was started.

Also, we aim to promote the calypso artform and music as an all year round production and full-time profession. We believe that it is time for carnivals & festivals to be associated with calypso music rather than vice versa. "

I love Soca. Its a very upbeat form of music with some great artists. I definitely recommend Destra for starters. Its a very pop type of music which mightn't suit people who prefer Radiohead or more as I call it "guitar music" but I recommend everyone have a listen if they can.

Destra is from Trinidad & Tobago and here comes the weird crossover with my own fascination with all things Indian. One of the languages of T&T is Hindi which was passed down from East Indians who were brought there as indentured labourers by the British when they ruled T&T. Some Soca songs (off the top of my head, Come Beta by Destra and Shurwayne Winchester) feature Hindi in them which is cool imo :o)

Not exactly a computer related post but Soca is a totally overlooked musical form and I recommend it to anyone interested in expanding their musical horizons.

Irish Computer Society seminars

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

]]> The first part of the programme will be three seminars given by Eamon O' Tuathail who won the Microsoft EMEA Security Championship 2004.

The talks will cover, in chronological order: Threat Modelling, Prevention of Web Application Hacking, and Practical Use of Cryptography. The first two talks are on 8th and 22nd September, and the third talk is on the 6th October.

Contact events at ics.ie to register to attend. Non-ICS members must pay a fee of �10.

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.

JConsumer

This is to announce the start of a personal project called JConsumer...

]]> As I wrote some time back I am a huge fan of an application called FeedDemon. It is a software which you can use to track RSS feeds, from weblogs or news sites or whatever.
I use it to keep up to date on a number of techie sites and blogs which I read regularly to keep up to date on the latest happenings in the world of software development.

Anyway another interest of mine is the idea of personalised web search which presents information suited to the _idea_ of what you are looking for, not the hard text of what you are looking for. RSS syndication offers a wonderful chance for people to access information on tap from a number of sources via a single interface, giving them what they want to see, not what a search engine thinks they want to see. More refined searching should be possible allowing people to access the information they need more quickly and with less stress.

JConsumer brings these two ideas together.

So yes, JConsumer is _another_ reader of RSS feeds. But what I hope to do is look into allowing it to group and search feeds and individual items in a more flexible way than is presently done in most newsreaders I have tried. One thing I hate about blog readers at the moment is going through several blog entries about the same topic and seeing people just expressing the same idea or discussing the same link with different language. So I hope to build a nice app to make feed reading more pleasurable for myself :o)

Why not take an existing open source reader and build on that? Well I'd like to start from scratch to improve my Swing programming abilities. It's claimed nowadays that Swing is fast _if_ you know how to code it properly, and this is what I hope to learn. Also, I'm a little hesitant about building on other people's code, especially if it's covered by a viral open source license. I may decide to release JConsumer later on, either open or closed source, for people to use and I'd prefer if it was 100% my own code :o)

Will post updates often hopefully.

So simple

Such a simple idea yet I haven't seen anyone do this component before (although I haven't searched for it so maybe there are loads around)...

]]> It's a PDF textbox for .Net which allows you to edit a pdf document. That's a very powerful yet simple component. Beautiful.

I don't have .net installed on this machine yet so haven't tested it out so any and all possible disclaimers apply :o)

In other news I figured out what was up with my "About me" page and have fixed it.

Videogame spoilers

I was tempted today to look at online guides for a game I bought recently: Final Fantasy X-2.

]]> It's not that I'm stuck in the game (not yet anyway). But the Final Fantasy games have a lot of hidden bonuses in them which can be easy to miss if you don't talk to the right character at the right time or investigate all the crystals in the second chapter or whatever. I missed some parts of Final Fantasy X because I didn't do the right thing at the right point and later on wasn't able to go back and rectify it without playing the game all the way through from the start again, which I couldn't be bothered doing.

I was wary of reading too many spoilers for the new game. Already I've read enough to know I've missed some crucial secrets already :o(

In my opinion there is a huge difference between spoiling a video game like Final Fantasy and spoiling a television series like Stargate, for example.
Firstly, just reading the details of what happens completely ignores the direction and production values that a movie or tv program will have. In a videogame I don't think these values are so important.
Secondly a lot of the enjoyment of watching a dramatic production (even something like Stargate :o)) is the atmosphere created by the actors and the script and watching actors you like becoming characters you like. This is absent really in a video game, even something like Final Fantasy which does try to be deep.

So while I am a sucker for television programme spoilers I am able to successfully resist too many spoilers for videogames like Final Fantasy!

On a completely unrelated note something appears to be wrong with my "About Me" blog not displaying properly and I'll try to fix that soon.

Posting from Bangalore

Posting from a Reliance WebWorld netcafe on Brigade Road, one of the most happening areas of Bangalore.

]]> Not much to do in Bangalore as a tourist. Most of the goodness of Bangalore is for people who are living here. There are many cafes, pubs, international brand clothes stores, and restaurants for hip young software developers and call centre executives to take advantage of.
Reliance WebWorld is a cool netcafe with good facilities by Indian standards. Cheap enough too. My main problem with it (I always have a problem with everything!) is the sneaky way it tries to get you to top up your credit in the last half hour of use. And the whole thing of having to create an account just to log in and check your emails and surf the web etc...

Bangalore is nice but I am looking forward to coming home soon to Dublin. If anyone reads this and knows of any companies looking for Java software developers or general dog's bodies, give me a shout ;o)

About Me

Added a new section to tell a little bit about the confused mix of everything that is me.

Everything you never wanted to know about Conor O' Kane

The Revolution Will Be Televised

Anyone reading from Japan (i.e. Andy) may not be impressed by this news, but for those of us from ye olde GSM networks it was certainly impressive. I saw for the first time, television on a mobile phone the other day.

]]> A friend of mine has a new LG phone on the CDMA network of Reliance here in Jaipur, India. I was looking at his phone a couple of days ago and watched a brief news clip from Aaj Tak, an Indian news station. The frame rate was slow and the image tiny, but that just reminded me of the early avi clips on PCs, when the video was in a tiny box in the centre of the monitor and the film was grainy and the frame rate matched a snail's pace. PCs have come a long way since and doubtlessly mobile phones will as well.

On an unrelated note, I'm in love with FeedDemon, although I think it will make me less productive as I can now easily follow any blog I find any way interesting. It's only $30 to buy so I may purchase it soon! No bugs so far except for it crashing once when it hung trying to display a webpage (which displayed ok upon relaunching it). Don't like the 30 uses trial though, especially when it decrements if it quits because of an error and you have to restart it..

Feeddemon

Ah.. back in IE ;o)

Continuing with trying new software today I have decided to catch up with the 21st century and get myself an RSS reader. Downloaded Feeddemon from Bradbury Software. Really sharp looking program. Really nice introduction the first time you run it as well which introduces you to the basic concepts of how it works.

I'm going to give this a go and hopefully it'll help me keep track of my favourite blogs. Only issue is that I'm using a shared pc here in work and amn't comfortable with other users of the pc being able to see what content I read. Not like I'm reading anything suspicious.. oh no.. *ahem*

Firefox

Just tried a new browser called Firefox. Seems nice enough. Few annoying things so far are that it seems to load images more slowly than IE, although that may be IE's use of a cache? Other annoying thing is it not rendering the movabletype entry editing form properly! Unusable (almost, I'm typing this entry in via Firefox, but it's hell).