Damian Beresford

Late night last night developing the first version of the 2009 Budget Calculator for Tax123.ie, you can run it from here:

https://tax123.ie/Budget2009Calc.php

Harsh budget this year, don’t expect to be better off!

We will be improving it over the coming days, the main omissions at the moment are the changes in Mortgage Interest Relief and also the Car Parking changes.

I attended the first Transition Town Tramore (t3.ie) event back in September and was very impressed by it, not having heard of the Transition Towns movement before. It was a very informative presentation from Dave Philips from the Cultivate Centre in Dublin and was quite well attended.

What impressed me most is that we hear a lot about how doomed the planet is, etc but very little about what we can do about it at a local practical level, and the Transition movement has plenty of ideas here. It’s also heavily based on the idea of community involvement and transition at a community level, and anything in my view that promotes community spirit and getting to know our neighbors better should be supported by everyone.

So the next event is on this Thursday, 8pm in the Grand Hotel Tramore, brief as follows (more information can be found at http://t3.ie/):

Transition Town Tramore Presents

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

In the second of a series of events to raise awareness about the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change, the Tramore Transition Town Initiative is showing the award winning film The Power of Community on October 16th at the Grand Hotel Tramore.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half ‐ and food by 80 percent ‐ people were desperate.

This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call “The Special Period.”

The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis ‐ the massive reduction of fossil fuels ‐ is an example of options and hope.

“Global Oil production has not grown since May 2005” says Stan Nangle, a member of Transition Town Tramore ”and we have been on a plateau of about 85 million barrels of oil a day since them. We know that sooner or later total daily production of oil will start to reduce ‐ as it has in individual oilfields such as the North Sea ‐ and this is going to have a major impact on how we live and how our economy works.”

The Power of Community offers an insight into how Cuban society adapted to meet the challenges posed by Peak Oil, often without support from the Authorities, and how the Cuban people turned the situation around by using their initiative and working together to achieve a common goal.

“We are constantly hearing and reading about the problems we will face from Climate Change and Peak Oil, but nobody in authority is telling us what we need to do to overcome these difficulties” says Edel Jennings of Transition Town Tramore. “This film shows very clearly how Communities can pull together to find solutions to the problems they face and it gives people a positive example of what can be achieved.”

Background:

The Tramore Transition Town Initiative is a community group which is actively working to find answers to the question: “ how can our community respond to the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change?”

The Tramore Initiative is based on the Transition Town model developed in Kinsale Co Cork by Rob Hopkins, and currently being implemented in more than 800 communities worldwide.

The Tramore steering committee is currently working to build awareness of the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change in our community by running a series of public events, and through direct contact with community groups, clubs and societies in Tramore. The series of awareness events will run on a monthly basis from September 2007 to February 2008 and will be followed in March 2008 by the setting up of working groups to look at how we might mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and Climate Change in the areas of food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods.

I recently installed Ubuntu on my home laptop (and subsequently on my work laptop also, but thats a different story). The primary motivation for this was to get Vista off my home laptop (a Dell Vostro 1700). So why ditch Vista?

Well for starters, I never wanted it in the first place. When I went to buy a laptop last December, the best deal by far was for the Vostro, but, there was no option to get it with XP, it had to come with Vista (damn you Dell!) Secondly, Vista really is as crap as everyone says, here’s a summary of the problems I had with it:

• blue screens: I thought blue screens were a thing of the past, but no, happened about once a month or so, for no apparent reason.
• explorer really unstable: this happened quite a bit, explorer just bombs out and restarts itself, quite annoying as you loose all your open explorers, etc..
• no improvements: ok fair enough I thought, the first version is bound to have some teething problems, I’m sure a lot of things will be fixed in SP1. Nope, SP1 came and not a single noticeable difference. I also have zero confidence that it will ever improve. I also have zero confience that Micrsoft will ever do anything innovative on the desktop either after my Vista experience, XP will be around forever.
• slow, slow, slow: I bought a pretty kick ass machine (dual 2.4GHz processors, 4G memory) and I was quite disappointed with its performance under Vista, it just felt sluggish.

Now that I’m up and running and fully migrated all my apps/work over to Ubuntu, how has it worked out? Quite frankly, it couldn’t of worked out better! I did have some installation issues, which I’ll blog about again, nothing major just a few things that cost me some time that really shouldn’t of. I also should point out that I have used Linux on the desktop in the past and had to take an 7 year break as such (as the last company I worked for developed software explicitly for windows) so I’m not a complete linux novice (although close enough at times!)

The most notable difference is a general increase in productivity, which is what I had hoped would happen. The Vostro performs so much better under Ubuntu, its sharp, its snappy. It’s also incredibly stable, and I’m finally feeling happy about the machine and seeing some bang for my buck in buying a slightly higher spec machine.

I should point out what tools I use to do my work and their equivalents on Ubuntu (as there isn’t that much difference between the two operating systems from a tools perspective):

• Emacs, Eclipse and Firefox: I spend most of my days flicking between these 3, all work identically on Ubuntu as they did on windows. My personal email is Gmail/Google Apps so all browser based.
• lots of command shells: Gnome Terminal replaces both Putty on windows (which is a great tools but sucks when you spend a lot of time in it) and the default windows command prompt, its so superior to both its not funny.. This coupled with the workspace switcher is where my biggest gain in productivity has come from.
• the odd presentation & word/excel documents: Open Office has done the trick here so far here. Just about though, some really screwed up word formatted docs just don’t appear right. This hasn’t be a real issue so far, but its for this reason that I still have a windows partition to boot to on the off chance that Open Office can’t handle some critical word document at some point in the future.
• on a slightly negative note, the one tool I’ve yet to adequately replace on Ubuntu is the Tortoise windows shell for Subversion. I’ve tried kdesvn and rapidsvn but both fall well short of the simplicity of Tortoise (who knew Tortoise was a killer app, eah?). I find myself using subversion from the command line on Ubuntu more and more (which feels like a step backwards). I use subversion a lot (both at work and for personal projects, and I also use it as a backup of sorts for stuff I don’t want to loose) so I need to spend a bit of time figuring out what works best for me now on Ubuntu.

So now that I’ve moved, and never going back, how do I get my ‘Vista tax’ back from Dell? (and Dell if your listening, note that I’ll never buy a machine from you again thats preconfigured with any flavour of Windows!)

(Creative commons, courtesy of Hannes Pasqualini)

Interestingly that only after 5 days since the Economist gave her a glowing profile, Diane Green of VMWare got the boot, bad timing for all concerned. I also remember they did a glowing report on Enron (which I just dug up here) a few months before it went bankrupt, again bad timing for all concerned!

However, this story about Ahmad Batebi in last weeks edition is both tragic and amazing that having your picture on the front cover of the Economist could land you in so much shite. Will be keeping an eye out for translations of his blog which may well be what is under construction here.

I know we have (and have had) our own troubles in this country but I think the most of us would take recession over repression any day..

Just realised its been a month since my last confession (sorry, blog post) – in no particular order, this is what I’ve been up to of late:

Golf – its that magical 2 month window in the year that you can get 11 holes in teeing off at 7pm. The golf club in Tramore has recently opened up the long awaited 9 new holes, and they really are fantastic – its like having a brand new course in your old course (or something like that). Haven’t helped my game unfortunately, the new holes are a bit hard!

Euro2008 – ’nuff said. Roll on the olympics.

The new job – just over two months now in the new job and really enjoying it. It’s real startup stuff, every deadline is critical, securing the first big customer is critical, etc but quite exciting and a challenging to boot. I’ve mainly been looking at scalability, so lots of multi-threading, performance analysis, fixing bottlenecks, etc. Good fun so far. Here’s a video of the team on a recent night out – thanks Paul!

FeedHenry Team Dinner from Paul Watson on Vimeo.

Only came across YSlow recently, it’s a neat little Firefox plugin for analysing website performance developed by Yahoo!. It provides help/advice for each ‘performance grade’ and the accompanying background articles make a very interesting read.

Obviously not all the advice applies to every site (we’re all not Yahoo) and perhaps some of the advice is of more benefit to huge sites (like having a CDN, again, we’re all not Yahoo). For me, the top three are:
1) Add an Expires Header
2) Configure Etags
3) GZip

However, with regards to Expires and Etags, you really need to know what your doing or it can be a disaster! IMO you shouldn’t really use Expires unless your using versioned content (e.g. instead of serving up http://…file.css serve http://…file-1.0.css) and can set the Expires date in the far far future (to never expire effectively). Then when your content changes on the server side, you change your version and a completely fresh copy is loaded into the cache, to expire again in the far far future). Non-trivial to implement. Setting Expires to be hours/days in the future is just guess work and should be avoided.

You also shouldn’t use ETags at the webserver level unless your sure its safe (as it relies on file based checksums which causes problems on server farms). To effectively use ETags, the value of the ETag in the request header needs to mean something to you when your processing it on the server, e.g. a ‘last modified’ timestamp from the database or something. If your sure the content hasn’t changed, return a 304 response, otherwise return 200 and the full content.

So thread carefully with Expires and ETags, but when they work, they do work very very well! GZip is a no-brainer, its safe, tried and trusted but still needs to be explicitly turned on in the majority of cases. Kudos to Yahoo though, YSlow is an excellent tool, just make sure you fully understand the advice being offered!