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| Aircraft engines | 04/01/2012 | April 1, 2012 Aircraft engines ================ Until recently, I’d never understood the distinctions between the various types of aircraft engines, and how they all worked. So I decided to write a guide to both common aircraft engines and niche, wildly-impractical engines. Nearly all aircraft engines have a common input and output. They use petroleum-based fuel, which is a wonderfully compact source of chemical energy. They produce thrust. The only difference is in the conversion from fuel to forward motion. Piston engines ============== A simple and popular propulsion system is the piston engine attached to a propeller. This is the setup used by the Wright brothers on their first flight at Kitty Hawk, and it’s still used in the Cessna 172, the most widely-flown airplane today. Pistons are neat devices. Fuel is burned and pushes down a piston. The downward motion is converted into rotation with a crankshaft, exactly the same way as when you pedal a bicycle. The crankshaft turns the propeller, which pulls air rearwards and causes the plane to move forwards. Though the fundamentals of the piston engines are the same in both cars and planes, the design constraints on each means we rarely share engines between cars and planes. Aircraft engines need to be light and capable of running at maximum power for extended periods, two constraints not as important in car engine design. Turboprops ========== People associate “turboprop” with nasty, noisy, unsafe regional airliners. That’s a pity, because turboprops are a clever invention. A turboprop’s construction is easy to remember if you split it out: it’s a turbine connected to a propeller. Turbines have been around forever. Simply put, a turbine gives you a handy rotating rod from a moving liquid or gas. The Ancient Romans made water mills by having a screw sit in the water. The flow would cause the screw to turn, and gears and rods brought that rotation to the millstone. During the Industrial Revolution, steam turbines became widespread. If you burn coal to make water boil, it produces rising steam and — oh, hey! — you’ve got a moving gas. Put a screw in that gas for it to flow through, and it’ll cause the screw to turn. We can now use that rotation to turn a ship’s propeller, a loom, a train, and other such steam-powered things that were fashionable at the time. How else can we create moving liquid or gas? As usual, lighting things on fire is the solution. Igniting petrol in air heats the air, causing it to expand rapidly. If you ignite it in a confined area, giving it only one way out through a screw, the outward gas will rotate the screw which can rotate a propeller. The propeller drives the plane forward in the same way we’ve seen before. Turboprops only differ from piston aircraft in how they burn fuel to turn the propeller. They’re so similar, in fact, that some manufacturers offer the same aircraft for sale with either a turbine or a piston engine as an option. Turbojets ========= With turboprops, we capture the energy in the air flying out of the combustion chamber and harness it to turn a propeller. Of course, we could just use that exhaust air as a source of thrust directly. If you sit on a skateboard with a leafblower pointing backwards, you’ll get the idea (and give the kids in your neighborhood bad ideas). Turbojets use forward-facing fans to pull air into the engine. More fans compress the air, then fuel is added and ignited. The rapidly expanding air flies out the back, pushing the engine (and the rest of the plane) forward. That’s all well and good, but what actually provides the power to make our fan blades and compressor turn? Fine, we have to capture a little bit of the energy from the air on its way out. We add a teensy turbine in the exhaust flow. The air turns it, and it turns a shaft which is connected to the fans and compressor. But most of the air flies straight out. Turbofans ========= The turbojets described above aren’t actually in any airliners these days. It turns out that if you already have a turbine in the exhaust flow, it doesn’t cost you very much thrust to make it bigger and capture more energy. And so you do that — but now you’re left with an excess of rotational power. What do you do? Let’s make our intake fan (the thing we use to pull air into the compressor) a bit bigger, without making the compressor intake bigger. The excess air we’re pulling in goes straight out the back, without being ignited. If this sounds familiar, it’s because here the fan is acting as a propeller, pulling air rearwards to move the plane forwards. In short, a turbofan has two distinct forms of thrust. In the center, the fan pulls air into a turbine, which spits hot air backwards to push the plane along. The multitalented fan also produces some thrust directly itself. A key property of turbofan engines is the bypass ratio, which is the amount of air that is pushed straight out by the fan (bypassing the turbine) relative to the amount of air which passes through the turbine. Over time, bypass ratios have been growing: the old Boeing 727’s engines had a roughly 1:1 bypass ratio. The 757 that replaced it in the 1980s had engines with a 6:1 bypass ratio. The newly-launched Boeing 787’s engines have an 11:1 bypass ratio. Remember the way old planes had these really long, narrow, cigar-looking jet engines? It’s because most of their thrust came from the exhaust. Now, they’re like giant fans. Engines you don’t see now on your aircraft, but you hopefully one day will ========================================================================== Rockets ======= Rockets are a magically simple form of propulsion. There are no turbines, compressors, or any serious moving parts. Rockets are reaction engines, meaning that something flying out the back pushes you forward. This stuff flying out the back can be hydrogen peroxide which has suddenly decomposed (and expanded) into steam and oxygen, or hydrogen that you’ve recently burned, or even half-atoms from a nuclear explosion. Rockets can provide wondrous amounts of thrust. The North American X-15 reached Mach 6.7 in 1967. That set the record for the fastest manned flight, which still stands today. Tragically, rockets aren’t a very efficient way to travel right now. Ramjets ======= If you flew a turbojet engine fast enough, there would be enough air coming at the engine that you wouldn’t even need fan blades to drag in the requisite air. Ramjets are simple hourglass-shaped tubes. As the plane travels at very high speeds, air is scooped in. The air is compressed as it travels back the narrowing tube. At the narrowest point, fuel is added and ignited, causing the combusted mix to shoot out and push the ramjet forward. Those of you paying attention will notice a slight hiccup in our lovely no-moving-parts design. Since a ramjet relies on its motion to bring air into the engine, it can’t start from a standstill. There is no way around this, which makes ramjets a little impractical for planes which want to do things like, say, land at an airport. |
| Permanent World Encyclopaedia | 03/18/2012 | March 18, 2012 Permanent World Encyclopaedia ============================= The phrase “Permanent World Encyclopaedia” conveys the gist of these ideas. As the core of such an institution would be a world synthesis of bibliography and documentation with the indexed archives of the world. A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting this index of human knowledge and keeping it up to date. Concurrently, the resources of micro-photography, as yet only in their infancy, will be creating a concentrated visual record. H. G. Wells outlines how technology will make the widespread distribution of all human knowledge possible. This technology is the microfilm. |
| Interview with Eureka | 12/20/2008 | December 20, 2008 Interview with Eureka ===================== Last Friday I did an interview for Conn and Bríd’s fantastic weekly radio show Eureka on Raidió na Gaeltachta. The Eureka site has all episodes available for download as podcasts - it’s well worth checking out, especially for students (like me) with an interest in tech who are looking to improve their Irish at the same time. I’ve been listening to Irish radio a lot recently and it does wonders. Anyway, here’s the clip: Listen to the interview (MP3). http://johncollison.ie/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/pod-v-171208-29m22s-eureka.mp3 Listen to the interview (MP3). |
| Running in Castletroy | 11/30/2008 | November 30, 2008 Running in Castletroy ===================== (click through for gmap-pedometer page) Found a great route to run yesterday. Most of the time running in Castletroy isn’t great - you tend to be underwhelmed by scenery and overwhelmed by roundabouts. This route, however, takes you along the banks of the Shannon for three miles - from UL all the way to the bridge at Corbally. From there, you go out the back roads past a Volvo dealer and the abandoned Verbatim factory to come back into UL near the Health and Sciences building. Anyone else got any nice routes? |
| All kitted up | 04/24/2008 | April 24, 2008 All kitted up ============= I stole the Garmin GPS for Dublin on Saturday: Yes, that is sellotape. |
| Frisco, redux | 04/18/2008 | April 18, 2008 Frisco, redux ============= Coming back to San Francisco makes me think I should never have left it. Stepping out onto the street, I found the city basking in glorious sunshine. You can’t help but be happy here. After dropping stuff to the hotel, I decided to go to one of the best places to eat ever - Pluto’s. San Francisco is the kind of place where you choose to walk this two miles rather than use the ridiculously good public transport (50c to anywhere!) because it’s just so damn enjoyable. Walking down Van Ness though, I realised that the city didn’t just become eclectic and awesome spontanously. It’s the people who live here who give it this vibe. With this realisation, I decided to contribute however I could. I took out my harmonica and harped away as I strolled towards Lombard. It feels like you’re in a movie as you peddle your blues while leaning against a lamppost, waiting to cross the street. Went to Starbucks this morning. Americans really are funny with their coffee. Turned up at 8.30 - bad time to come. The guy in front of me ordered a quad venti - a drink with a quadruple shot of espresso. Shouldn’t you need a prescription for that? I then mistakenly took another guy’s drink and ended up with - I’m not joking - a tall non-fat hazelnut soy latte. I’m pretty sure there’s so much crap in there that they don’t bother actually adding any coffee. The lead story on my SF Chronicle was Americans bitching about $4 per gallon for gas. Poor things have obviously never been to Ireland ($7.50/gal) or Britain ($8.50/gal). Speaking of price comparisons, everything seems so affordable with the current dollar rate. I’m going to encourage Tommy to invest in a house here with his Confirmation money. |
| Saturday project | 04/05/2008 | April 5, 2008 Saturday project ================ A few days ago I bought a harmonica for all of 8 euro. Of course, the real way to play it is with the guitar (like this guy). So: |
| The difference between Bebo and Facebook | 01/06/2008 | January 6, 2008 The difference between Bebo and Facebook ======================================== Just came across this browsing earlier, sums it up brilliantly. In matters relating to tea: Facebook group: [Image not archived: Facebook Tea] Bebo group: [Image not archived: Bebo Tea 2] |
| Who needs an AppleTV? | 11/18/2007 | November 18, 2007 Who needs an AppleTV? ===================== We got a new (HD!) telly which has a VGA port, so I finally got to hook up my new Linux media server: [Image not archived] Of course, I didn’t just leave the various parts strewn around: [Image not archived] Nice and neat. Note the special enclosure design to allow maximum airflow: [Image not archived] And a closeup: [Image not archived] Clever design allows all the parts to fit in the basket. Well-placed Vodafone box stops the power supply’s metal case short circuiting all the twiddly bits on the motherboard. Overall layout: [Image not archived] All in all the project was a great success. I envisage many uses: - Media hub - Modern art - Fire hazard - Tux Racer console - Accident waiting to happen |
| Irish comprehension of the week | 11/08/2007 | November 8, 2007 Irish comprehension of the week =============================== Here. Patrick has made it big! Some would say I had an unfair advantage in class today. |
| Plank’s constant | 10/25/2007 | October 25, 2007 Plank’s constant ================ Plank’s constant is a constant used to describe the time you must allow for delays when planning. It is the multiple you must use to compensate for people acting the plank and doing things like taking two car keys or posting your runners to Canada. |
| 5th year - one month in | 10/03/2007 | October 3, 2007 5th year - one month in ======================= Long time, no post. So I’ve pretty much finished working on Auctomatic since August, and gone back to finish my education :) Impressions of subjects so far: English: Much more fun than Junior Cert. Have a ninja teacher. Macbeth is gripping. Irish: Improved vastly since I got a new teacher. Maths: Easy and mostly enjoyable. Most interesting occurence so far has been school asking students to get new fancy Casio calculators, which can handle algebra and fractions. This of course means they refuse to give answers as decimals. Result? 7 * root 3 = 7 root 3. 2 pi = 2 pi. Many frustrations ensue. Spanish: Would be great if they didn’t keep it at a 2nd year level. Why not just throw us in at the deep end and we’ll learn more? Example: the teacher speaks English rather than Spanish to us. I mean come on! Physics: Currently covering stuff we’ve done to much more depth in Applied Maths, so I doze through most classes. Ask me again in a month. Chemistry: More learning than I had anticipated. It also turns out JC chemistry told us many, many lies and half-truths. Have concluded giving squirty bottles, fire or acid (or all three) to students of any age is a risky idea. History: Didn’t think I could enjoy this as much as I am. Course is fascinating (Bismarck ftw!), a four page essay is almost an enjoyable task. I’ve started comparing friends to 19th century diplomats subconsciously. Applied Maths: The intersection of Maths and Fun. It’s like they took what you knew in maths, and made cool problems for your enjoyment. They of course left out all the ugly, messy stuff like trigonometry. It’s kind of annoying though when you remember that none of your calculations will ever be right because of that prick air resistance. Design and Communication Graphics (i.e. dressed-up Tech Drawing): New course has 40% for a SolidWorks (CAD) project. SolidWorks is surprisingly easy to pick up and looks great. Most of my computer time I’m not actually working, just rotating my piece and watching the light bounce off it. All in all, being back at school’s pretty enjoyable. Doing other stuff like student politics, debating, chess etc. on the side. Life is good. |
| Hungarian tourist board faces fake shark accusation | 08/11/2007 | August 11, 2007 Hungarian tourist board faces fake shark accusation =================================================== Dad brought a page of the Budapest Times back from Hungary for me to read. Couldn’t help posting it. Ireland definitely needs more reporters like this. Montenegro shark “Hungarian ruse” Hungarian Tourist Board operatives have been dressing up as sharks and patrolling seaside resorts in Montenegro in an effort to encourage tourists to holiday at Lake Balaton, the Montenegrin government alleged last week. Sharks have been sighted off the coast of the popular holiday destination over the last few weeks, leading in one case to a lifeguard - who witnesses say looked a lot like Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff except in tighter shorts - frantically ordering people out of the water. However, government spokesman Slobodan Mladic claimed the “sharks” were nothing of the sort. Something fishy in the wate “We have credible information that Zsolt Zoltán, a local employee of the Hungarian Tourist Board and well-known agitator for affordable weekend breaks at Lake Balaton, is responsible,” said Mladic. “We believe he has in fact fashioned a shark fin using empty cereal boxes, sticky-backed plastic and some model aircraft paint, strapped it to his back and taken to snorkelling around the beaches. He is clearly trying to scare people into holidaying in Hungary.” Mladic produced records showing that Zoltán had rented out all three Jaws movies from the local video store in the week preceding the first shark sighting. “This clearly proves that Zoltán was researching how to fake a shark attack,” said Mladic. “I’m not sure which Jaws film it was in – probably the first one, as the other two were rubbish and I fell asleep during them – but I distinctly remember a scene where a teenager pretends to be a shark to frighten some large-breasted girls into having sex with him.” “I think he then gets his leg bitten off, but I suppose that’s not relevant,” Mladic continued. Zoltán denied the allegations, saying that he did not have to go to such lengths to attract people to Balaton: “With its crystal-clear waters, top-class accommodation, wonderful food and copious amounts of women in tiny thongs, Balaton is clearly a holiday destination that needs no promotion. Just look at the beautiful pictures in this free flyer.” Zoltán just a pervert, not agent Zoltán did admit to renting out the Jaws trilogy, but said that he simply got a perverse kick out of watching monsters kill people in increasingly gratuitous, pointless and bloody ways. “I also rented out Friday the Thirteenth last week, but that doesn’t mean I’m planning on donning a hockey mask and brutally butchering holidaymakers with various sharp implements in an attempt to create a mass exodus from the shabby, poor quality Montenegrin resorts to the paradise that is Balaton,” he said. “Having said that, there is a good deal on chainsaws down at the local DIY store.” Original article at the Budapest Times |
| Limerick OpenCoffeeClub | 08/09/2007 | August 9, 2007 Limerick OpenCoffeeClub ======================= Just back from the Limerick OpenCoffeeClub meetup in the Absolute Hotel. Had a great time, met loadsa cool folks, got away with a nifty TouristR t-shirt and saw the work of a marketing team who have not been to Limerick recently: [Image not archived: absolutespa] All in the same day! We hung around in the bar initially as people trickled in. Patrick and I got chatting to some of the other early attendees. Met lots of fellow EI-haters (always fun!) and also spent lots of time with the TouristR crowd. Conor, Jan and Juanita are making a really cool site. They also have a mascot for their site called TR who’s reminiscent of the reddit alien and changes for every country. Lovable little feller. After a while we went into the Brainbox room, and talked about Auctomatic and our experiences in the valley. It was cool giving the chat to all the Limerick OCC attendees, but the awesome thing was Conn O’Muineachain streamed it live to Ustream.tv (link). Once or twice people posted questions for us on the live Ustream chat. I could feel the head inflating! We also got to chat about Smalltalk, Seaside, and how incredible they are for building web applications. Hopefully we may have sparked some interest in the subject. Who knows, maybe Limerick might evolve into the first big Seaside hub - three more converts and Limerick will have the largest concentration of seaside developers in the world! Patrick managed to make it through the whole chat without hating on Rails too much. You could say Auctomatic has a love-hate relationship with Rails - I love it, Patrick hates it. I think he suffered some deep emotional trauma from an RDBMS in his earlier years and still hasn’t gotten over it. I like Rails for being able to write my code in TextMate instead of a VM (and not having to end lines with semicolons like certain other languages who shall remain nameless). As Harj said: “I want to be able to type rails foo and make it seem like I’ve done lots of work”. Afterwards, we hung out in the cafe. It was cool to be able to drink smoothies talk to lots of people who I’d previously only known from their twitters! In other news, I’ve just gotten my provisional license so hopefully I’ll be able to drive to the next Limerick OCC meeting in two weeks time! |
| Meteor web texts | 07/16/2007 | July 16, 2007 Meteor web texts ================ Sick and tired of using Meteor’s webtexter. Yeuch. Building my own pretty and useful one (think Ajax phonebook) in Rails now. It shall be the pinnacle of elegance! |
| Slightly more substantial post | 07/13/2007 | July 13, 2007 Slightly more substantial post ============================== Scenes from the Auctomatic apartment 1am: The four of us are seated around our 2 metre square desk. None of us can see each other, because there’s monitors in the way. None of us can talk to each other because we all have noise-isolating earphones in. All four of us are on the #auctomatic channel on irc.freenode.net, discussing the site. Someone says “so, what’re we going to do about dinner?” and the discussion goes there. 1:30am: It seems so unreasonable that all pizza places be shut at this hour. I mean come on? 2:00am: Playing soccer in the apartment. Airbed for a goal, kickboxing handwrap for a ball. Nearly trip and fall onto our new Dell servers strewn on the floor. The ball goes wide and hits Patrick’s monitor. We play on. The ball goes wide and flies out the open window, landing near the fountain five stories below. The games stops. All web development should be like this. Recently started using Firefox + Web Developer Toolbar + Firebug for when I’m working on frontend stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Being able to inspect your elements, find out where they’re getting their style and edit the CSS in the browser seem like features I could never do without. |
| Irish Times writeup | 07/13/2007 | July 13, 2007 Irish Times writeup =================== Whip out page six of the Business section of today’s Irish Times folks, and you’ll find a lovely article about Auctomatic. For those of us who aren’t subscribers (why do the Irish Times do this? Beats me.), Patrick’s posted a screenshot here. </shameless self promotion> |
| Work | 07/02/2007 | July 2, 2007 Work ==== I realise I’ve been posting mostly about aspects of life like food and blagging my way into things up to now. It’s high time for a post about how work on Auctomatic (the reason I’m here, after all) is going. Working towards launch Patrick and I have been churning out code at a fair rate to get things ready for launch. It’s maddening, because we’re 99% there, and have been for the last week. Things tend to take so much longer when you’re not allowed bugs and things have to work in Internet Explorer 6. Indeed, many times I’ve considered our homepage redirecting to getfirefox.com for IE6 users. Harj has been giving our site a complete makover and doing a seriously impressive job. Our frontend pages (non-logged in, that is) our now very pretty: Harj and I are now turning our attention to finalising details of our app’s interface. The big problem with all our competitors is their interfaces are horrible and clunky. From the feedback we got at eBay Live, people seem to really like ours. One powerseller gave Patrick a hug after he demo’ed the app to her. It’s even going to be better than the iPhone’s UI. There, I said it! Nostalgia Before we went to eBay Live! in Boston, Patrick spent a lot of time setting up the servers. We decided to name our architecture after villages in Tipperary to maintain our links with Ireland. It sounds odd to hear “incoming requests will hit the lighttpd server on Puckaun and be redirected to Killaloe, Ballina or Portroe.” I’m hoping our cables between machines have N7 written on them somewhere for extra meaningfulness. Getting things done Yesterday I had a problem with Seaside linking to a stylesheet multiple times (don’t ask). After 15 minutes I gave up and decided to ask Patrick. He wasn’t on MSN and I was about to email him asking him to when I realised I prod him onto MSN a lot - the time I spend sending him emails to go on is an inefficiency. I decided to write a script to be able to poke members of the Auctomatic team from the command line. After 15 minutes of debugging (I could have sworn it was chomp that takes off trailing new newlines. Maybe I was just hungry) it was finally working and at my shell I simply had to enter: $ poke p Of course, emailing him would have just taken 10 seconds more so I’ll have to do a lot of poking before I can chalk this up as a saving. |
| Kickphoning | 06/30/2007 | June 30, 2007 Kickphoning =========== San Franciscan character of the week Coming back in a cab from the Mission, we passed this low-riding 70’s red saloon with complete with tailfins and chrome. Rap was blasting out the windows and I fully expected to see this massive guy from the hood inside. Instead, a 5-foot-tall 50-year-old very white guy was behind the wheel, straining to see over it. He was completely bald but had an impressive elaborate French mustache to add to the effect. You only get these characters in SF. Kickboxing So I started going kickboxing in the Fairtex Muay Thai place near Bayside. It’s really good - I found out after my induction class that the guy teaching me was an ex-world champion. These dudes are serious. We looked him up on Youtube after the class. I think the teachers choose one of the two personas - good cop or bad cop. The guy I had the first few days was extremely positive and offered great encouragement. The one we had on Thursday seemed to take pleasure in watching us newbies do pushups, kick things until our feet hurt and deprive us of rest as much as is legal. iPhone launch So, yesterday I woke up, ate breakfast and walked down to the Apple Store - arriving at 5.45pm. There was a massive queue heading down the street. The atmosphere was amazing - I chatted to some improv artists who had a giant cardboard iPhone for kids to take their photo with. The cardPhone had a hole cut where the speaker would be above the screen and kids poked their heads through and pretended to be giant iPhones. What is it with Apple and generating this kind of hype? As I chatted with a guy with a camera attached to a baseball cap on one side and what I could only assume to be a stripper on the other, the line beside me started moving. I edged into the flow, letting the guy who’d been in line since yesterday go in front of me. I found myself walking up the stairs of the Apple Store, being applauded (for my prowess at queuing?) by Apple employees on both sides. The upstairs had a wall of Apple employees guiding me to the queue at the Genius Bar. The place had no customers yet so I was a wee bit intimidated by this human wall of Mac knowledge. I ducked out to the side, explaining that my friend was getting one and I was only here for solidarity… or something. I spent the next 20 minutes playing with the a display model of the iPhone. It’s pretty sweet. First thing I tried obviously was the texting. Surprisingly, my text to Patrick got a reply - they had working SIMs in the display models. I promptly initiated a conference call with Patrick and Harj, and made a mental note to come back here whenever I was out of credit. I also took some photos and tried calling Dad’s mobile before I realised it was 3am in Ireland. Kul came down to join me and I think would have bought one except you need to sign a 2-year contract with the devil - not an issue - but for that you need an SSN and a credit history. Maybe next year. |
| Problems with big cats | 06/22/2007 | June 22, 2007 Problems with big cats ====================== I’m not going to talk about eBay live - there’s too much funny stuff that happened and I wouldn’t do it justice. Instead, more aspects of American life! Shopping Safeway is our local “grocery store” - we returned to an empty house after Boston so did some proper shopping. Cereal was obviously first on the agenda. God, all the food in America is so dodgy. I know it’s been said before but jeez. In all the cereal isles - there was one cereal that didn’t contain sugar - Shredded wheat. There was no muesli or anything vaguely resembling something kinda sorta almost nearly natural. Most cereals were “frosted” or had “a touch of honey”. We found Chocolate Lucky Charms which were 50% sugar. The other worrying thing was that on all the cereals I found the message “Packaging is lined with BHT to preserve freshness”. Worried that most of my solid intake is laced with a substance that sounds like a cow-borne disease, I looked it up on the wiki. It turns out Butylated Hydroxytoluene is a fat-soluble organic compound also known as E321. From the wiki article: It is also used as an antioxidant in cosmetics, pharmaceutical drugs, jet fuels, rubber, petroleum products, and embalming fluid. … The compound has been banned for use in food in Japan (1958), Romania, Sweden, and Australia. Lovely. As Patrick noted in his American-life blog, you can’t get bread without sugar. The bread is actually sick, it’s so sweet. You can’t eat it with things because the sugar drowns out the taste of the things. You can’t eat it on its own because it’s disgusting. Most of the bread also seems to be enriched - Americans love this kind of thing. The milk has “antibiotics and added Vitamin D”. Everything is like “food, on steroids” - literally. Mauled by the leopard I installed the Leopard beta after WWDC. Everything is shiny and there’s lots of new features. But’s that’s negated by the fact that it broke everything I need - Rails, sudo and VPN. 16:30: I’m at the Apple store as I write this now. I explained my situation to the nice guy at the Genius Bar, and he told me it’d be $150 for a software reinstall. The thought process that followed went something like this: They want to charge me… because I broke it through my own fault… if only it was their fault - the laptop’s under warranty… any way to make it their fault… no… wait… hard drive failure! Of course! I just need to break the hard drive! I consulted Patrick, and sure enough, there’s a way to do it. He gave me a command to delete the bootloader, the thing that controls the laptop at startup. The laptop won’t be able to boot without it. 21:00: I felt really sorry for the guy at the Genius Bar. I had deleted /bin (all the system files) and he was trying to diagnose it. I wanted to tell him what was wrong, but obviously I couldn’t. Eventually he reinstalled Tiger and I was a happy camper again. |
| Theft | 06/12/2007 | June 12, 2007 Theft ===== Theft reared its head in many forms today - identity theft, theft of our expectations, theft of our brothers and finally theft of my usual night’s sleep. Identity theft As you might know, the big Apple developer conference WWDC started today and a few days ago Patrick and I decided we wanted to go. Patrick had managed to blag a free pass due to his Croma article and general being-Irishness but I wanted to go too. A friend of his had some time ago offered his pass to Patrick (he wasn’t able to go). The answer was obvious. I had to become him. And I had only a few hours to do it.Eventually, we worked out a system. At 6.30 this morning Patrick turned up at the Moscone Centre with a college identity card and his photo ID. He picked up his student pass without issue. 2 hours later I met Patrick and picked up my pass. The various hired goons didn’t seem to take issue with the college student presenting his pass being shorter, younger and generally differenter than I should have been. Expectation theft I was ushered along with the other students to the waiting area. It was a major letdown when we were told they would not be in the main auditorium for Steve Jobs’s keynote. The group of students felt odd too… there were lots of cliques of nerds talking together and I felt out of place. It was like a serious nerd camp. Like CTYI on steroids. I saw one sixty-something guy who was thin as a stick insect, had a rapidly thinning head of gray hair down past his shoulders, thick half moon spectacles and was hunched over… a Macbook. And he had a pass that proclaimed him to be a student. I don’t think I want to know the background to that particular story. Patrick and I both agreed after the keynote that it didn’t live up to our expectations. The three parts were: - features of Leopard, most of which everyone knew going in, - Apple’s Safari browser released for Windows XP and Vista (yay?), and - the development platform for the iPhone, which basically boiled down to “no, you can’t make apps for it” We did get free food though so it wasn’t all bad. Theft of our brothers Earlier this evening, Harj and Kul left for Boston. Before they went we had innumerable penalty shootouts to make up for the ones we wouldn’t be able to have in Boston. On the way to the airport they dropped by the justin.tv office (Justin.tv is another YC funded company where the founder is videocasting his life 24/7) and picked us up a camara for eBay live. We’re going to be broadcasting from our booth and hopefully we’ll score some publicity with it. [Image not archived: Pa in goals] Theft of my sleep I’m not sure how to put this. Let’s just say I’m not known for my capacity for dealing with a lack of sleep (Patrick, on the other hand, got no sleep the night before last and 2 hours last night, and is merry as a Frenchman). So when I realised (i.e. Patrick drilled it into me) that we’ve a lot of features we need to get ready for launch, I knew it was gonna be a long night. At 2am Patrick headed to bed and I stayed coding our ‘listings view’ feature. I nearly gave up trying to figure out AUTableInterface without Patrick to poke and annoy into helping me, but my saviour came in the form of the Wolfe Tones on Patrick’s laptop. After a few choruses of ‘Come out ye Black and Tans!’, the coding team found the problem and ruthlessly ambushed him. We had an insider order a ‘Self Halt!’ command and we opened a debugger fire from behind the tableHeadings. As I write this, I’m probably the closest I’ll come to being high without taking illegal substances. My attack on bugs and lameness in the app was fuelled by adrenaline and ridiculously strong coffee, tea and sugared Red Bull. I was high as a kite, but I had the talking Australian clownfish on my shoulder to point out errors and keep me on the straight and narrow. |
| Healthy eating and exercise | 06/09/2007 | June 9, 2007 Healthy eating and exercise =========================== I like how being up before 12 makes Harj the apartment’s early riser. Current group schedule seems to go like this: Get up 11 to half 12ish. Check email, dress and eat breakfast in that order. Lunch at 5ish. Dinner generally consists of pizza, Harj’s cooking or 2 bowls of Lucky Charms (muesli for me) at 11ish. I should probably put in a note about Lucky Charms here. It’s a really popular American cereal, especially in this apartment. It features Cheerio-like sugary wheat things and various “Lucky Charms” - coloured marshmallow pieces resembling green clovers, pink hearts, blue moons etc. A lot of the people assume that it’s a really popular Irish cereal because the mascot’s a leprechaun called Lucky and it’s marketed as such. The guys are a bit crazy for it. I went for a run this evening along the Embarcadero. The views are absolutely amazing. I was running beside the sea the whole time, with beautiful buildings all around and fantastic views over the bay. Tommy, you should recognise some of the views from Driver 1. The atmosphere was amazing. Tram bells clanged around me on my left, and on my right I would see a quaint smelly trawler on a rotting wooden pier right beside a shiny full length cruise ship. I passed a young businessman in a suit riding home on a skateboard, a 90-year-old woman powerwalking with great enthusiasm at 2 mph and many other joggers. I passed a warehouse full of old streetcars, many stretch limos (what’s up with the number of them in this city?) and some stretch Humvees too. I passed clubs, a dodgy looking circus, tackle-shops-turned-bars, ferry terminals and hawks flogging tickets for the Giants game. Needless to say, the surroundings make for an interesting run. The corporate culture at Auctomatic is great too. We put an airbed up against one of the walls as a soccer goal and use Kul’s kickboxing handwrap as a ball. It’s a common occurrence for someone to be working away and this little cloth blur to fly past their monitor or hit them on the head. Yesterday 2 of our servers arrived and reside now on the floor next to the football goal. We find it funny to be playing soccer next to our fragile $6k worth of servers, but we play on anyway. Our other 3 servers have just arrived today though so we might have to revise this. We’re heading out to eat now so I’ll have to wrap this up. It’s Harj’s 22nd birthday so we’re having a wee celebration. Talkcha. |