Darragh Ó Héiligh blog and accessibility guides

I just wanted to write to show you two YouTube videos that really stand out as my favourites at the moment.   Unfortunately, none of them are on CD yet so that’s the only source I have to listen to them via. 

 

The first one from Tony Byrne is a guitar player I play regularly with.  He’s a musician with a group that I follow closely by the name of At first light.  This is a very difficult tune he’s playing.  He learned it off a piper that released it about fifteen years ago. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF8YqUHjxAk

 

This next one is Michael Mcgoldrick,  a flute and Úilléann pipe player fromManchester in England.  He is probably one of the best musicians in the world.  This man has a way of learning a tune, looking at it from every angle and coming up with a version that is really cool while keeping the foundation of the tune intact. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehSTssRUTRk

I’m back again.  Sorry I didn’t write earlier today.  Thanks to Dave and Abby who commented last night.  Their only two commenter’s at the moment.  Hahahaha. Sad isn’t it? 

Last night, I met with everyone I was waiting on and again this morning, the people for the windows came over and the garage repair man took a look at the lock.  I could actually see the important jobs finished in the house with four to six weeks.  That’s fantastic.  This weekend, I thought it was going to take much longer.  I think the key is just get professional people in and get them to take care of each job individually.  I was hoping to get friends and family to do as much as possible but with that option, I’d be waiting for them to have some free time.  I will need my father to do the furniture part of things in certain rooms but other than that, I’ll be using companies that I know around the area.

Oh, the electrician came over last night as well.  I was having some electrical problems in one of the front rooms down stairs.  It was intermittently overdriving the entire system and in fact, it was burning out the wires in that part of the wall.  The electrician had to get me to dig out a big section in the wall to cut out the wire and seal it up.  I think I’m going to have to get rid of that wire and trace a new one from the circuit board.  It’s going to be a big job but it’s going to hopefully tie in nicely with the heating installation.  That is of course, if I manage to coordinate everything well enough.

On the way home yesterday, I took an unfamiliar route to the house.  For some crazy reason, for the first time in years, I tripped over a step and latterly went flying.  I’ve banged myself up quite a bit as a result.  I’ve hurt something in my knee so I’m limping very badly on my left leg, I’ve hurt both my rests and when my head hit the wall, I hurt it and my neck as well.  So, it’s lodes of fun.  As I said, I’ve no idea how it happened.  I was aware that I didn’t know the area at all and I know the foot paths are very dodgy so as I’m usually a very fast walker, I reduced my pace a lot.  I still have no idea how it happened. 

I’m just taking it easy for the rest of the night.  I’m waiting for a call from 98FM, a radio station in Dublin soon.  They’re going to call me to interview me live on air.  It should be kind of interesting. 

There’s a lot to do, but I think that what I’ve done in the last few days has actually moved things along quite well.

I’m back to work today but I’m absolutely exhausted.  My eyes just will not stay open!  I’m sitting here at my desk listening to recorded phone conversations to get them audited and coached before the end of the month but I’m almost a sleep.  It’s going to be a very long night….

The weekend was very busy and
not as positive as I’d have liked.  As you know, I got the house on Friday and the real work started in it on Saturday morning.  Through one thing and another, not a huge amount of progress was made on Saturday but still, we were all kept going.  I had my sister, mother, Emma and Emma’s mother around for most of the day to help out. We actually got there around half nine and stayed until six that evening so actually we were there for quite a while.  Sunday, we got there at around 12PM in the afternoon and stayed until ten that night.  We got quite a bit done that day.  Things really started to move along much faster.  Yesterday, we had a few problems, On Sunday night, the alarm started to act up so I had to get a technician around to take a look at it.  While he was there, the new cooker, fridge and washing machine was delivered.  At the same time, my two sisters and their kids dropped in to take a look too!  As luck would have it, the alarm started going off intermittently and the first of the electricity problems emerged as well.  It looks like the day before, we damaged a wire in one of the spare rooms while taking down a very old, horrible and dirty shelving unit.  That intermittently caused problems for the rest of the day.  It looks like the wire is shorting the entire system out from in side the wall somewhere.  I’ve the electrician coming around later so I’ll ask him to look around and see what’s connecting to where.    One thing I’ll say about all of this, I’m learning about every wall in the house because I’m ripping things out and pulling things down.  Speaking of pulling things down, I spent about an hour last night pulling a sealing down but I’ll tell you about that in a minute. 

So, this weekend, we’ve taken all the paper down from the kitchen, we’ve pulled the paper off the sealings, we’ve stripped everything from the front spare room that’s connected to the kitchen, we’ve completely cleaned the bathroom so it’s now spotless, we’ve done the back windows and taken delivery of the new kitchen appliances.  Yesterday, we also went out and bought a suite of furniture for the living room from Land of Leather.  I’m actually very happy about that.  Their very comfortable chairs and we got an excellent deal considering the very high quality of the material.

One thing we’ve noticed is that the living room, i.e, the extension of the house is the coldest room of the house.  I had anticipated that it was not insulated but to my surprise, not alone is it not insulated, it’s also not covered up properly from the back.  It’s difficult to explain the layout of the room, but basically, the back wall of the extension is the old outside wall.  They’ve just plastered the inside and built it up.  Behind the extension, they build a shed that intersects with another old shed.   So, from the front of the house, you have a living room, behind that you then have the shed.  The only thing separating them is this old external wall.  The roof for the shed is a slated roof and the roof for the extension is slanted.  That means,  from the top of the back wall of the living room to the beginning of the main extension room, there is approximately 16 inches at minimum So, it seems that air is blowing inform the shed in and cooling the air that is rising  out through the sealing of the living room.  It’s not open, it’s just not insulated.  So, I’ve had to cut through the sealing in the shed to make a crall space up over the sealing of the extension in order to make space for someone to insulate the pitched roof.  When I get that insulated, I’ll patch up the spaces between the shed and the living room roofs and insulate that and the external wall as well.  That means that that room will be insulated just like any other room in the house.  It should really have been done when they were building the extension, but like a lot of jobs they had done in that house, it was never finished properly. 
Unfortunately, I’ll have a lot of dirty jobs like this to do but that’s the same with any old house you buy.  The owners never have things perfect.  No old house is a turn key property unless it is on the market for well over three hundred and fifty thousand.  We got this for two hundred and seventy thousand.  Not bad, but certainly now that I know how busy I’m going to be over the next few months, not great either. 
I started writing this post at around eleven this morning.  It’s almost four now.  I really couldn’t keep writing earlier, I was just too tired to think.  Since this morning, I’ve organized to meet electricians, two plumbers, two window installers, a plasterer and a man who can fix the lock on the garage.  Tomorrow, I have more people coming in.  More of the same kind of trades.  I’m just hoping that I can find the lowest price possible while getting the best quality I can afford.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this preparation.  It’s very hard going, I’m going to have to do a lot of things that I’ve never done before but it will be a welcome challenge.

So, After three months of looking at this house, making phone calls and talking to dozeons of people for advice, we are now the proud owners of a four bedroom house in Drogheda. 

I'm up early this morning to go back down to Drogheda to start to work on getting it sorted.  There's still a long way to go.  Installing the heating is first followed by the Windows.  Then, we'll take it from there.

Have a good weekend.

Tomorrow, we are getting the keys to our new house.  Wish us luck! 

Oh, Emma got promoted today.  She is now working on the professional support team.  That's a great step up for her and I know she's going to do incredibly well in it.

I'll probably not get time to post during the weekend but I'll be back again on Tuesday at the latest.

Don't forget to look in on the other project I'm kick starting at the moment:  www.14u.ie

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Sorry for not posting yesterday.  I was kept busy for the entire day.  I decided to work on a little idea that I had but I got carried away and ended up working on it and variants of it for the day.  Actually, the idea grew from discussions I had here at work on Monday.  People in the team that I’m leading asked that I train them on some more unusual topics.  One person specifically said that they’d like to be able to install OpenSuSE onto a pen drive.  So, with some thinking, I started to look at the possibilities of getting this to work.  Firstly, grub needs to be made to grub from the USB key and not use the MBR of the first hard drive.  If this didn’t work, when the pen drive wasn’t installed the computer wouldn’t boot.  Second, when the kernel was loaded into memory, I needed to bring the modules or as their known in Windows, drivers to the top of the priority list so they’d work and provide the required USB functionality to the rest of the system.  Plus, the kernel needed to wait for a moment before continuing to make sure that they had actually loaded first!

So, after that, I set about writing down a few notes, researching a few possibilities and of course, beginning the installation.  

It’s been rough sailing because to make the pen bootable, partitions and indeed the installation needed to be heavily customized but I think I’m finally getting there.  I’ve needed to concentrate on other things today so I’ve not given it much time but I’ll get back around to it soon.

xIt wouldn’t take me half the time but the test PC’s here excluding one that Novell provided are all absolutely useless.  It takes about thirty seconds for gnome-terminal to launch.  

While looking for something to do last night, I tried installing PHPOpenChat.  It’s a real-time web based chat application.  Unfortunately, the installation instructions are absolutely terrible and I’m slightly stuck on the database preparation steps but, it’s not that difficult.  I just need to remember my user and table creation and administration commands for the MySQL database.  It’s over a year since I’ve had to interact with a database on this level manually so I have a few things to refresh on.  It’s interesting though.  The more web based applications I install at a server level, the more I’ll hopefully learn about Apache2 and other relevant applications.

Oh, I should also mention that I have revived www.14u.ie Go over and have a look.  It's a community site that I tried to get going about a year ago.  It was going great but I had a lot of problems with comment spam so because I didn't have time to fix or administer it, I shut it down.  Now, I'm looking for someone else to take up the rains.  Any takers?  The scope of the site is as wide or as narrow as you want it to be.  If your not the most technical person in the world, don't worry, I'll handle the technical side of things if you'd rather.  My main objective is to make something out of it so that someone benefits. x

I was getting a lot of attempted log ins on my server on Sunday.  So much so that it was actually slowing down the DHCP daemon.  So, I temporarily shut down SSH for a few hours and set up a cron job to start it up again after 2 hours.  Very Clever wasn’t it?  So, as a test, I changed the port for SSH to 32 and have it mapping to 22 on the internal machine.  This should be fine but for some reason….. It’s not.  I’m not getting any response from port 32 or the default of22.  I’m not sure why yet but I’ll figure it out later.   My thinking was that if these automatic tests that seem to be causing me problems are by default checking on the normal port for SSH then changing that default could actually slow them down slightly.

They say that today Monday the 21st of January is the most depressing day of the year.  Christmas related debts, bad weather, and work related stress amount to a very blue day.  Personally, I’m very tired but depressed? Na.  Of course, there are better places that I’d like to be in right now compared to sitting at my desk in work but hay.  With the good we must take the bad.  It allows us to appreciate the good times that bit more.

I had quite a good weekend this week actually.  On Saturday, My self and Emma were working from 11 to 3PM to help out with a recruitment open day.  I was doing a lot of role plays to assess peoples call handling skills so it was interesting enough.  Not something I’d like to do too often but it was a break from the norm and the money will come in handy for the house.  It also gave me an opportunity to show Emma the new office.  I don’t think it’s as bad as she thought it was going to be which is great.  There are some space issues but I think they’ll be ironed out when facilities can see how things are going.

On Saturday night, I worked on an application on the server called Gallery2.  It’s a basic enough gallery application.  In a nutshell, it allows users to organize, sort, comment, filter and present images.  So, if you have a lot of photographs and you want to be able to show them to people or even just port them from one place to another then it can be handy.  I set it up for Emma as she’s really into photography and it’ll possibly help organize the thousands of pictures she’s been building up.
Sunday up to 4PM was quiet enough.  I did some practice on the pipes for a while but aside from that I had a very lazy day.  From then on though things got much more interesting.  I met with Fimbar Fury. At his house.  Maurice got me in contact with him.  He wanted to try to adapt a reed that he’d made a few days before to my chanter so it was a good opportunity to learn from him.  The man is just a fountain of knowledge when it comes to tuning pipes.  You pick up a few things as you go along and the need arises but some of the things he knows have been handed down by countless pipers.  The result is that every note I played had an associated tweak on the reed.  For example, the high d, or the thumb as he called it was very sharp with his reed.  So, he got a bit of string from a banjo, doubled it over, twisted it a bit and put it up the staple of the reed.  That actually worked well but he suggested that I remove that at some stage soon and get a long piece of copper welding rod.  That can be bent slightly and stuck up through the chanter.  I already have a piece of metal up there but he says it’s not long enough.  He demonstrated the difference it can make and it’s amazing what a small piece of metal can do.

After talking to Fimbar, we went to Rathmines to play some music.  It’s nice to have the pipes behaving again but I didn’t bother going to the second session in Fairhouse.  I’ve a lot on this week so I didn’t want to start the week off tired.  Thinking back, that didn’t really do me much good did it!  I hardly slept for some reason last night anyway!

So, to close, I’ve a lot on this week:
Tuesday evening I’m teaching,
Wednesday night I’m playing in a pub called the Speaker Connolly,
Thursday I’m playing in Mortins in Fairhouse,
Friday night I’m doing a private gig.
Saturday night I’m doing a gig in the Seamus Ennis centre in the Nall.

OH, and on Friday, not to forget, we’re getting the house so there’s a lot to do on that side as well.

I've to go to a friend of mine tonight to get a few things done with the pipes.  I'm buying a practise bag and I've to get a crack fixed at the top of my regulators.  His name is Bill haneman. You'll find his website at www.billhaneman.ie  He's a very tallented pipe maker.  Strangely, he's only been making Úilléann pipes full time since March.  Already he has a four year waiting list and he's stopped taking orders.  That's some job isn't it?  When you can just stop taking orders because your too busy after less than a year in business. Fair play to him.

One of my students, Helen who started learning the pipes in August has just ordered her first set of pipes from him.  At the moment, she's playing on a Burk set that I've loaned her.  When I get things sorted with the house, I'll be putting out advertisements for Pipes, Bodhran and Tin whistle lessons into the local papers.  There are no musicians in the area teaching the pipes and actually definitly none within a wider area offering a set on loan for the first few months ! So, I think I'll get a reasonable amount of interest.

Well, that's all for now.  I'm leaving in about seven minutes.  so I'll probably write during the weekend again at some stage.  I'm working tomorrow interviewing in a recrutement open day so I'll be kept going. 

Have a good one.

I've wanted to make a few changes to the blog for the last few days.  I just didn't really know what I wanted to do differently.   Today, I've modified the style just slightly to make the site more accessible.  The result is that each blog post is now marked with a heading at level one,  so, if like me, your blind and your using Orca, Jaws, Window Eyes or Hal, you can press the number 1 to jump right past the navigation links on the left to the post titles.  From there, just down arrow to the content.  It couldn't be easier. 

Of course, if you want, you can feel free to email me using the link provided on each page.

My Domain Name look up service (DNS) on my server seems to be slightly broken.  It’s very frustrating!  It is resolving external addresses without any problems but it won’t resolve the host name for the server any more.  I have a feeling that this could be due to the new iptables rule that I created last Friday but I can’t remember, did I access the server via its host name on Monday?  I think I did!  I was mulling the idea over of using local dns tables in Windows and Linux" machines to resolve internal addresses automatically…. Or, maybe it could be sent via dhcp to each computer that connects along with the IP their getting for that session?  I’m slightly stumpt.  I thought of using tcpdump on the command line to monitor traffic coming in and out of the server but I’m not sure what port is used for looking up addresses.  Maybe I can read up on the service used for DNS called Named today to see what it has to offer.  Perhaps it keeps a log of successful and unsuccessful DNS requests that could provide me with some more information. Either way, this thing worked perfectly and now it doesn’t.  The key now is to determine what stopped running and what caused it.

In this country, most Internet Service Providers (ISP's) work from a system of setting dynamic IP addresses.  I.e, the address assigned to your connection changes intermittently.  Unfortunately, when your running a server with publically accesssible services, having a dynamic IP makes things a bit more complicated.  Of course, there are ways of getting around it but I'd just really like to get a static address.  I use to have one with Smart broadband but they haven't reached our area yet.  Any ideas?  I'm with BT at the moment. 

As part of what I do at work, I have set up a blog where, from time to time, I post on topics that directly or indirectly relate to technical support.  Today, I learned that the reporting tool that I use on my proxy, Sarg was released in OpenSuSE with a bug.  That was the reason that it hasn't been generating the correct reports for me.  So, partly to document for my own benefit and partly to show people one of the faces of Technical support, I've written a short note about this bug. You'll find the blog at: http://www.novell.com/communities/blogs/doheiligh

So last night didn’t actually go as expected in terms of recording anyway.  I played so much music that really, recording took second place so I’m very sorry for not putting something up here for you to listen to.  I do actually have one tune that Maurice played that I haven’t heard before I think so I might put that up.  It was Scottish I think.  It has a great minor in the second part.  Possibly not a piping tune but still nice to have it in the head for a while.

Tony byrne on Guitar from At first light was there with his girlfriend playing fiddle, Maurice Lennon one of the founding members of Stoctons wing of course was on fiddle as well.  There was another guitar player there but I cant think of his name.  So, there were basically five of us playing.  I mostly played the pipes but I got a few tunes in on the Bodhrán as well.

Oh, after the session, Maurices partner, Sandra dropped into a conversation that I was doing a gig with Maurice next Saturday on the 26th.   With a guitar player called Mossy.  We played on the Pat Kenny show there just before Christmas on the 17th so we’re use to playing together but Although Maurice was suppose to tell me, he forgot so I’ve just over a week to prepare.  I’m not too bothered though.  Maurice is an outstanding musician so I’ve full confedence that we’ll bring it all together.

So, that’s basically the updates for this morning.  In work today, I have to interview one person for a technical position in a team that I use to work in but other than that, it should be a reasonably straight forward day.

I've been away for almost a year!  for over twelve months, there has been no blog on this site but for some reason, here we go again!  This time, if I stop, Emma has permission to hit me with something. 

So, what's happening?  well, We're buying a house.  we should have it on the 25th of this month. We need to do a lot with it like install new heating, windows, internal doors, repaint etc. but hay.  that's all part of it isn't it.  On the upside, we'll get a house that we've fully customized to our own needs and taste and it should really feel more like ours.  I've lived in apartments and rented accomidation for so long, I'm really looking forward to setting things up the way I want them.  ehem.  sorry.  The way "WE" want them.  :) 

I've a lot of technical things going on as well.  Oh Wait until you see what is in store in the world of Linux"!  I've been doing a lot with OpenSuSE, server administration and technical support and I'm hoping that I'll get time to introduce a lot of that on this blog. 

So, your going to get a mixture of everything.  Hopefully, after tonight, you'll get a recording of a session that I'm playing in with the legend Maurice Lennon from stocktons wing and Tony Byrne, a guitar player who entertains with the fantastic, At first light. 

   All coming up soon.  Stay tuned.