Adrian Smith’s Blog

This isn’t something I normally write about but it pisses me off so much that I just have to say something.

Why oh why do some people still think that it’s ok to have “just one or two” drinks and then drive? It just doesn’t make sense to me. Martin Ferris TD was brought in and tested on Friday night after having two pints and a glass of wine. He thought to himself, ah sure I’m fine, I’ve only had the two pints. That’s just crazy talk. Even one drink is enough to impair your judgment.

Some people seem to think that the aim of the not drinking and driving is so that they won’t be caught by the Gardaí­. The aim is that they don’t kill/injure themselves or other people. Why is that so hard to comprehend?

What Martin Ferris did was wrong for so many reasons but it’s his reaction that really annoys me. All he seems to be sorry about is that he was caught.

I decided to give jajah a go the other day, partly because I just wanted to see what it was like and partly because it was cheaper than my normal mobile tarrif. I’d used it once before for setting up a call between two landlines and it all went very smoothly. This time however I was setting up a call between two mobiles.

On the first attempt it took about a minute before I got the callback from jajah. When it connected the other party the line was really bad so I had to hangup an try again. On the second attempt it still took about a minute to get connected but the quality was fine.

Soon afterwards I tried to make another call to a different mobile. This time I never got the callback. After waiting about 5 minutes I tried to setup the call again. After trying this about three times I gave up. A couple of minutes later I finally got the callback from jahjah. It connected the other party but also connected the party I made a call to originally. So the three of us were connected and none of us had anything to say. It reminded me of that Garda prank a while back.

Anyway, needless to say I’m not very impressed. I’ll probably still use jajah again (if for no other reason than because by account with them still has a couple of euro left) but only as a backup. The rates they offer are really attractive but the hassle of setting up a call, waiting for a callback is a bit of a pain in the arse, especially when it takes about five minutes to get that callback.

What kind of experience have others had?

Just got back this morning from a great weekend in Waterford at Barcamp South East. Congratulations and thank you to Tom Corcoran, Keith Bohanna and everyone else involved in organizing the day. It was really great fun meeting and putting faces to the names I’ve been reading over the past months and years.

So here’s what I got to during the day…

Aidan Finn’s session on Rails, Django, TurboGears. Apart from the getting up to speed on the various frameworks out there the most interesting point I took from this session was that there’s the real lack of Rails developers in Ireland. I wonder how this will change over the coming year as Rails gets more popular?

Donncha O Caoimh’s session on Wordpress & Wordpress MU. It was interesting to hear how Automattic handle the challenge of hosting so many popular blogs. On a personal level Donnacha discussed how he copes with working from home and working for a US based company (getting paid in dollars, yikes).

Justin Mason’s session on Amazon’s S3 and EC2 web services. I’ve been really interested in these particular webservices recently so it was good to hear from someone who’s actually used them. One interesting point raised by Justin and seconded by Joe Drumgoole is that S3 can be quite unreliable (GET’s timing out). I wonder if this is a common occurence or just a localized problem?

The panel discussion on “Finding money for your start-up”. I only caught the end of this particular talk unfortunately.

The second panel discussion on “Building a Web Services company”. The panelists were very forthcoming about their particular companies, the problems they had/have, where they’re going and what business model is. It was strange to hear from more than one panelist that finding good developers in Ireland is really difficult. I guess developers need to do more to promote themselves. I used FreeMind to take some notes during this session. Here’s the png and the original mm. Apologies if some of it is meaningless or if I recorded the details incorrectly.

TJ McIntyre’s session on “Who owns software?”. This session covered the legal side of software development. I never knew it was such a minefield. The lesson learned is that you should always have a contract with your employer and it should clearly state who will own the copyright to the developed software (and sourecode).

One of the most fun parts of the day was the Pecha Kucha session at the end. Who would have guessed that a fews seconds and a few slides could have been such a laugh.

All in all a very enjoyable day. I’m looking forward to the next barcamp already.