Monthly Archives: August 2011

Physicist cuts plane boarding time in half – Except in Ireland

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“This savings could be as much as $110,000,000 annually per carrier–well over a billion dollars for the industry–and likely could be more given the parallel nature of the boarding process,” Steffen writes in a recent follow-up paper. “Indeed, a test with a longer aircraft may show surprising results in this regard.”

via news.cnet.com

As anyone who travels regularly know, 97% of Irish people are genetically incapable of boarding a plane quickly, efficiently or correctly.

The best example of this that I encountered was on a recent Ryanair flight to Stansted. The person in front of me got on the plane via the rear door, decided to pick the second-last seat, spent several minutes dicking around in the aisle with their bags and finally turns around and asks “oh did you want to get past?”.

You also see people with no hand-baggage queuing for a plane with assigned seating, before the plane has even landed.

So whilst the Steffen Method looks wonderful, the only way it will work here is if cattle prods were involved. I would love to see Ryanair try this. The cattle prods I mean.

Any Irish Incubators Signed-Up with Rackspace Startup Programme @scobleizer e.g. @ndrc_i2i ?

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Rackspace Startup Program

Incubators/Accelerators
Established or new on the scene? If you are currently affiliated with an incubator or accelerator, we want to hear from you. See how we can help startups like yours with up to $2,000 in Rackspace cloud credit per month for up to a 12-month period applicable to Rackspace cloud services. Use the form and tell us all about your startup and incubator / accelerator experience today. After completing the submission form, we will get right back to you about the best fit and next steps within the Rackspace Startup Program.

via rackspacestartups.com

Looks like a fantastic deal from Rackspace. Pinged them but got no response yet.

You’d think Amazon in Ireland would jump on the opportunity to support Irish start-ups in Incubators after the PR disaster of the recent outage but I’ve seen no supports from them apart from their global competition thing.

I always feel that Rackspace has a very low profile in Europe compared to AWS. Could be a nice way to improve that (SeedCamp, iGap, etc).

Our replacement for Sky TV cost €99. Ariva 120. No monthly fees!

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So the kids complained about the removal of Sky. A lot. There are only so many Charlie and Lola episodes you can watch on YouTube, particularly the ones in Finnish.

The intention was to get that very highly recommended Humax Freesat box on Amazon but it's bloody pricey and we weren't sure we needed all of the features. Then the very kind @gpelly on Twitter mentioned the hugely impressive Ferguson Ariva 120 Combo. I love finding absolute bargains that don't disappoint and this ticks both of those boxes. It is a FTA satellite receiver and DTT receiver. So it can handle Freesat and Saorview programmes. At €99 on Satellite.ie, it's a complete steal.

Ours arrived yesterday and already the kids are happier. I plugged a spare 500GB USB HDD into it and it does full PVR functionality too. You can watch DTT and record Satellite or vice-versa. It does 720p and 1080i and can upscale SD content. It has a LAN port, SCART and HDMI. I'm intrigued by the LAN port. If they could add UPNP or SMB browsing then you have a pretty bloody decent streaming media player thrown in too. It's also tiny. Software upgrade is easily done using USB.

There is a massive thread about it on boards.ie with tons of support from Tony in Satellite.ie.

The Freesat programme list is not massive but is not bad. As it's not an official Freesat box, there is no EPG, so you only have now/next for the programme info. CBBC, CBeebies, CITV and daytime TV on some of the other channels should keep the kids from going completely mad.

I can't report on DTT performance as our aerial doesn't seem to be working right now. It is pointing into a tree in the general direction of the old Carrigaline repeater so I'll need to twist it to point to a local digital mast and test it too. 

And all without any Rupert tax to pay. I'm already thinking of getting a second one.

VS Day – Victory Over Sky Day. Free at last etc etc yadda yadda

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After our ongoing argument over the telephone connection with Sky TV, they doubled the multi-room charge, so we cancelled the lot in early August. Today the cancellation finally kicked in. 

The kids are in shock.

We had planned to get a Freesat box but we're actually going to play it by ear and get nothing for a while. Let's see how they survive on the few stations they can get in "Other Channels" on the Sky box, along with BBC iPlayer, Hulu and YouTube.

I would say RTE Player too, but we don't watch RTE in our house except for the odd food show once every six months.

Biggest holes are probably going to be Wizards of Waverly Place and Hannah Montana.The younger ones will be happy enough with CBeebies (by whatever route).

I still want to get a HBO subscription. Some day the US TV stations will figure all of this internet stuff out and put Rupert out of business.

I'll report back after a week or so.

Kindle for Kids Must Be Coming Soon

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Sibéal, our 7 y/o, just read a sample chapter of Judy Moody on my Kindle. Some of the words were beyond her and we made good use of the dictionary feature which is pretty decent.

But it struck me that a "Kid Mode" would be 100x more useful. It would give a child-friendly pop-up explanation plus optional audio pronounciation. Basically what the VTech Storio does but at Amazon scale.

Next logical step would be cool kid designs on the devices and a kid-only Kindle Store.

20 Years of WWW – I think I started in 1995 with RTEMS

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Rtems2

Today is the 20th anniversary of the web. Pretty incredible 20 years really. My own history of the internet was finding Usenet in 1990 when I started my Masters in UCD, followed by email, FTP.FUNET.FI, Gopher, WAIS and the joy of downloadable shareware. There was then a pause from 92-94 as I worked on GSM basestation software in S3 and only had email. Ever resourceful, we then discovered FTP-by-email. Yes it was as clunky as it sounds but it bloody worked.

At the start of 1995 I was put in charge of an incredibly cool software project – to build the embedded software for Philip’s first generation of MPEG-2 decoders. One of the requirements was to use a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). Now this is proper Real-Time, not Twitter Real-Time. When you are decoding video, “best effort” is not good enough, you have no wiggle room when it comes to managing a transport stream with a 24Mhz CPU.

My boss at the time mentioned the Web, which I was vaguely aware of as a sort of tarted-up Gopher. He has Mosaic installed on his PC and a modem attached to that. The only access point in the entire company! He showed me some directory site (possibly Yahoo, but not sure) and I went digging. I also re-discovered Usenet and what a wonderful wealth of information it had. Actually I think you can call Usenet the Twitter of its day. It was the fastest most efficient way to get an answer to a technical question for years. Of course I can still search back on posts from 1995 thanks to Google. Try that in 2028 for this year’s Tweets.

Somehow I found RTEMS, the Real-Time Executive for Missile Systems, renamed to the more palatable Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems. It was an OS developed for the US Army Missile Command in Alabama and was fully Open Source. It was also compatible with the Philips P90CE201 variant of the 68000 embedded CPU we were using. I won’t bore you with the details of compiling GCC cross-compilers on VAX but we had an interesting few months with RTEMS (and got a kick out of using a Missile OS in a Set Top Box). The attached screenshot from WaybackMachine from 1998 looks close to the one in 1995.

So in my mind the RTEMS site is the first real site I visited on the Web. Any idea what your’s was?