Al's blog

Shamrock Rovers and the Tallaght Community Stadium

The following press release has just been issued by Shamrock Rovers F.C. It touches on some of the points I made in my last post, and its good to see the club officially responding to allegations made recently by some journalists. Shamrock Rovers and the Tallaght Community Stadium ShamrockRovers is refuting recent unfounded and unjustifiable comments in the press relating to the club and the Tallaght Community Stadium. "There has been some blatantly untrue and Read more

By albertw,

Geocaching Ireland Geocoin

Dino has created an Irish Geocoin!   Preorders are currently (until Saturday!) being taken at  http://geocoins.croaghan.com/This is the first official Irish Geocoin and probably will not be re-minted so get your orders in!   Read more

By albertw,

The Tallaght Stadium Saga continues

Last Friday Thomas Davis GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) club took South Dublin County Council to the high court to see a judicial review of the Tallaght Stadium. Their argument is on a legal point of process, but the core of the matter is that the GAA club want the stadium redesigned to accommodate a full size GAA pitch. The matter has been discussed at length elsewhere but it simply boils down to the fact that Read more

By albertw,

Patching with Live Upgrade

Live Upgrade is a technology in Solaris that allows you to easily upgrade a system while not risking change to your running environment. You can easily revert back to your previous environment if you need to. BigAdmin has a great guide on setting up Live Upgrade. I’ve mentioned before about the problems of patching live systems. With the latest Solaris 10 KU for example most of the effort went into crafting the patch scripts so Read more

By albertw,

ipfilter logging

A wile ago some of our test suites were failing due to erroneous requests to port 80 on the test machines. The simplest thing to do was to just block requests to anything other than our webserver in the lab using ipfilter.  pass in quick on bge2 proto tcp from any to <webserver IP> port = 80 block in quick on bge2 from any to any port = 80 bge2 is our external interface. The bit Read more

By albertw,

Indoor torch photography

Recently I bought a 5 million candle power torch for photography. The intention was to use it to ‘paint’ nighttime photos. However today I thought I’d try it out to light a boquet of flowers.     This shot was taken of a single rose in a pint glass. In order to get the dark background you just need to have a distant background and ensure that the torch is only lighting the target. The Read more

By albertw,

Getting security issues patched

When I did an interview for my current job in Sun I was asked what I didn’t like about the company. Having been the sysadmin for some machines in college I hated Suns security patching policy. A vulnerability would be posted to bugtraq and the students would soon start trying to exploit the vulnerability. Some source code patch would come out for other OS’s but the best you would get from Sun was a workaround. Read more

By albertw,

SRFC Champions!

Last night Shamrock Rovers were presented with the eircom League 1st Division title after the last match of the season in Cobh. The calm before the storm in a Cobh pub:   The Hoops goalkeeper with the trophy.  Ultras adding to the celebrations!    Read more

By albertw,

The state of Irish Football

After the 5-2 drubbing of the Republic of Ireland by Cyprus the team needed to get something out of the game against the Czech Republic. They did, it finished 1-1. In typical Irish football fan style gone were the calls for resignations to be replaced by the Ole Ole brigade acting like we had actually won something. Such is the fickleness of Irish football fans, a little wallpaper of the gaping cracks and they are Read more

By albertw,