The acquisition of FeedHenry by Red Hat isn’t just one the most exciting tech stories in Ireland in 2014, it is also wonderfully satisfying for me as one of only two people in Product Management. When I found out that Red Hat was negotiating to buy the company, I couldn’t have been happier. Apart from the almost perfect cultural fit, it was very cool to be joining a company whose products I first used in 1997 with Red Hat Linux 4. »
First some very detailed background. The Beginning: I joined Twitter in Feb 2007 so that I could live-Tweet the Irish Blog Awards results via SMS. It was when Twitter finally clicked with me. 2007-2008 was a fantastic time to be on Twitter if you had even a modicum of programming ability. There’s a chance it could be so again. CorkProbs: Whilst LouderVoice took up 95% of my time around then, the other 5% was thinking about all of the incredible things that Twitter facilitated. »
This time it’s more about software than hardware. But first, hardware. Lightning: We had a lightning strike near our home a few weeks back and my main Windows desktop has been acting dodgy ever since. I swapped the PSU but that didn’t help and finally came to the conclusion that some of the USB ports were damaged on the motherboard. One replacement Gigabyte 970A-DS3P later and all seems to be well. »
Once you get out of the habit of blogging it can take ages to get back in the zone. A week’s vacation this week should do the trick for me. This is partially a link dump and partially the subjects of a bunch of upcoming posts. Red Hat acquired FeedHenry. I first installed Linux in 2006 when working in San Jose and was a Red Hat user all through those early years and into the initial Fedora years. »
I have long bemoaned Lego’s approach to adding electronics/power to their kits. Technics seems to be its own little sub-section and Mindstorms is a crazy waste of money in an Arduino and Raspberry Pi world. Now that they are the biggest toy company globally, I’d love to see how either of those product ranges are adding to the bottom line. In that spirit I was very excited about the possibilities of the Lego Batman kit I got in Hamley’s recently. »
By bringing together gurus of branding and design, Apple has changed everything for everyone, yet again. »
All two of them. In 2007. 7 years and 2 days ago. »
Back in 2011, I created a simple scraper in Python to take the river level reported by the Bandon Flood Early Warning System every 15 minutes and save it in Google Fusion Tables. In 2012, I extended it to also save the data on Pachube/Cosm/Xively/Fleeglrheumazoid (or whatever insane name they have this week). So you have 2.5 years of river data in tabular and graphic form. The code itself is very simple and just involved walking through the page (actually a bloody iframe! »
I already have a request in from her sister to do her name with each character a different colour. Time to figure out how to use 123D properly. »
One small annoyance with the Baseline bolierplate in harp.js is that every blogpost needs to be listed in a file called _data.json with all the relevant metadata. Whilst it’s not a huge job to slug-ify a title and add the ID and epoch time, it’s sufficiently annoying to add friction to me blogging more. Here’s the entry for this blogpost: "a-simple-nodejs-script-to-setup-a-new-blog-post-in-harpjs": { "ID": 1291, "author": "admin", "date": 1403504847928, "ptype": "post", "description": "This little script generates the relevant metadata in the _data. »