App of the day 2: Bump.

Aug 16, 2011 | ,

Continuing on with my top ten iPhone apps, today I thought I’d tell you about an App that makes up for a short-coming of the iPhone.

Bump allows you to transfer contacts pictures and more over Bluetooth to another iPhone running this app. Simply start bump, find the picture or contact you want to share then when the other person has started the app on their hand set just up both phones together to begin the transfer. Of course, for security, a confirmation message will be shown to verify the operation.

Bump seems to be trying to grow into an instant message or social networking tool. I personally think this is a bit of a waste but some might find it useful.

Unfortunately, accessibility with the Voiceover screen reader has become a bit strained recently however the app is still usable with some persistence.

I should also say that Bump is also a free app.

App of the day 1: Irish Taxi.

Aug 15, 2011 | ,

I’ve decided that it might be interesting to some readers if I do a top ten of iPhone apps. It’s nothing new. I’m sure plenty of sites out there do this kind of thing, but here’s my top apps.

I’ll write about one app a day for the next while.

In no particular order, let me introduce Irish Taxi. This is an app I only found recently but I think it’s brilliant! It is a location based app that shows you a list of near by taxi companies. When you’ve found a company you think is suitable, just tab it to see more information. There’s even a call and a save button so you can add the details to your contacts or call the company right away. IF it’s a company you’ll use regularly, you can also add it to the favorites page in the app.

The deels tab shows companies that have promotions or special offers. For example, in Dublin, I see that there are two companies that are providing money off.

Finally, the app provides details on customer responsibilities, rights and complaints procedures.

I think this is a must have for anyone who travels a lot.

Best of all, it’s free!

The times they are a changing

Aug 15, 2011 | ,

As I promised a few months ago, DigitalDarragh.com is undergoing a few changes. Some of these are minor and some are huge. For example, you may now listen to Irish traditional music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year from the Trad stream section below or in your media player or smart phone of choice by using the following link: http://digitaldarragh.com:8000/live.mp3

I fancied a change on Friday evening so I spruced up the design of DigitalDarragh.com for you. I hope you like it?

It should be a lot easier for people to read now. I had a few complaints about the background image so I’ve removed it.

I’ve also tidied up the layout quite a bit. I’m not sure if people are going to like it but it’s worth a shot.

Instead of navigation being at the right of every page, I’ve organized it all at the bottom. You’ll find the Trad stream on the left followed by categories. In the middle you’ll find my latest Twitter updates and below that you can browse to different social networks that I have accounts on. Finally, on the right, you’ll see the archive. This shows all the months back over the past two and a half years with the number of posts in each. Just go to one of these links to read everything I posted during that month.

The reason I am trying this layout is to make it easier to read longer than normal posts. Without links and images distracting you it might be easier to follow the text.

Please give me your feedback.

From an accessibility perspective, nothing has hugely changed. You will still access the site in the same way you did prior to the changes.

Pulling.

Aug 15, 2011 | ,

It’s amazing I’ve been playing the Uilleann pipes for over twenty years now and I have never in all that time pulled a muscle by pumping the bellows too hard. That is, until last night.

I’ve been playing a lovely gig on Sunday night with two friends of mine in a small place called Kents Town.

I always like good strong reids in my pipes. They sound nice and bright and they’ve a nice bit of volume as well as a result.

Last night I thought they were a little harder to pump than usual but I thought nothing of it.

I’m telling you, I feel it this morning though. I’ve pulled a muscle in my chest or something and I can feel it in my shoulder and right down to my wrist on my right arm.

It’s not like it’s all that painful or that I’m complaining. It’s just that I’m so surprised! In May, I played the pipes for 14 hours straight and I didn’t have a problem. I do one good gig on a Sunday and I pull something! It’s ironic!

I can’t wait until the next gig. I would do every gig for free. Seriously. I just love the buzz I get from them so much!

Live music on DigitalDarragh.com

Aug 1, 2011 |

For the past while, I have been running a constant stream of music from this site. You might have noticed that there is a heading on every page called Trad stream. Click the first button below that heading to have the music play directly in your browser or use the links for windows media player or iTunes to load your media player of choice.

I’m also very happy to be able to say that this stream is now available in the radio section of all Apple TV’s from today. Look under the International and World section of your Apple TV or in iTunes in the radio list. You’ll see the station called Mad For Trad.

My motives for setting this up are completely selfish. I didn’t always have my prefered playlists with me when traveling or even while in work so now I can connect to this stream from anywhere and hear some lovely traditional music at any time of the day or night. Because of the media player n this site, I can even listen to it while in work from behind the firewall.

This link will start your usual media player and begin playing the stream for you.

At the moment, there are no live shows. I’ve thought of changing this but for the moment, I’m quite happy with it being an automated system.

Oh, I should say that from time to time, you’ll hear two little breaks in the music that just remind you that your on DigitalDarragh.com. These have been created by Cathal Joyce. If you need this kind of thing done I suggest you speak to him. He’s brilliant!

The first liner.
The second liner.

Losing it.

Jul 27, 2011 | ,

I write dozens in fact, probably hundreds of mail messages every day.

Responding to escalations, contacting third parties, writing quick updates to projects or tasks I’m working on, answering or asking questions and even just sending the occasional personal one, I really do spend a lot of time just writing to people.

People ask me how I type so fast. It’s because from when I sit at my desk at 9AM until I leave at 5PM, my fingers simply never stop moving. I’m quite surprised that I don’t have some kind of Repetitive strain injury (RSI). If my fingers ever get damaged I’ll be completely screwed. Not only do I depend on them for work, I depend on them for music as well!

Fortunately, it wasn’t my fingers that gave out on me this morning. It was my brain.

I had just enjoyed a very nice cup of coffee and I was responding to an escalation. It was one of those very simple things. Check that system to make sure nothing has gone wrong with someone’s profile. It was a two second job. I opened up the response and typed out the usual explanation as to why the person’s access was likely broken. As I try to do all the time, I had a quick read back over it to make sure there weren’t any crazy errors. I can only say that I was stunned. If my 5 year old niece had written such a badly formulated message with so many grammar mistakes I would have been shocked. I am amazed I could write such rubbish! It seriously made no sense. What’s worse is when I tried to think of the correct words for the response they just wouldn’t come! I had to delete the entire message and start again. What would take me seconds to write took me five minutes because I had to be very careful with every single sentence.

That’s just not right!

Fortunately my brain has begun working again but I don’t like that feeling at all.

Maybe it’s just because I’m tired. Regardless, it’s not allowed to happen again. Got it?

Planning and updating.

Jul 26, 2011 | , , , , , ,

I’m still mulling over a few ideas that will completely change the way this blog is used and many of these ideas will likely result in the end of the blog as you know it. I’ve been held up though due to accessibility related challenges. I just can’t seem to find the right kind of software.

There are quite a few things happening behind the scenes as well. Around this time last year, I changed from a VPS to actually hosting my own server. This year, I’ve purchased an even more powerful machine and the plan is to extensively update all of the software that is used for these sites, Microsoft Exchange, the VOIP server, the backup server and the file server. With any luck and probably a lot of money, I’ll be able to expand the technology I use to really take advantage of the high availability, clustering and fault tolerance that is available in many of these systems. This will mean that I should be able to sleep at night without worrying about a single patch bringing down the entire system!

I’m thinking of changing from internal SAS based storage to Network attached storage to reduce costs but increase the overall capacity of the file server. At the moment I’m running very low on space because for every file, Email, website or voice mail that is written to a disk, it’s also written to a backup server. This means when I buy one 300GB SAS disk, I need to buy a second just for backups. Even with compression backups take up a considerable amount of space on my network.

I’ve been connecting my VOIP PBX to Blueface, a VOIP phone provider in Ireland. They are incredibly reliable and their prices are very reasonable. I couldn’t be happier with their service but one of the reasons that I do all of this stuff is to be able to learn in an environment that isn’t pressured. It might be time to look at alternatives just to have the experience of connecting to different services. To that end, I’m looking into connecting a Skype account to the VOIP server. This may or may not have any benefits. I think it will be cheaper to buy other international numbers and it might allow for connectivity with Skype computer to computer calls but at the moment the idea is in its very early stages.

The other thing I need to think of is ongoing costs, cooling and noise. I’d love to run two servers in parallel but this is a costly hobby. The price of electricity is not something I need to be too concerned with at the moment but if I add another server into the mix it will increase by about forty or fifty Euro a month. That’s not something that I can really justify. I’m thinking of a few alternatives to get around this while still having reasonably high availability. The first possible solution is to get one server fully set up. Buy a NAS box with about 10TB of storage and set a backup job to copy a snapshot of each virtual machine to this. The file server will also be based on this NAS so if the main server goes down it should be possible to bring another server into the mix very quickly. The other server will be set up with the same virtual host software. It’s most likely going to be HyperV. I’ve based the virtualization on ESX over the past year or two but I’d like to get more exposure to HyperV so it’s worth a shot for a while. I’ll segregate this server off onto a private network with only one connection for restores from the Network attached Storage (NAS). Every week or two, I’ll power on this server and restore the virtual snapshots onto this second server. With a bit of testing I’ll be able to ensure that the restores have worked. Because they’ll be on a private network they won’t have any impact on the live network. The result is that if the main server goes down, I’ll be able to bring up a second server instantly or if it’s crucial that it has the most up to date data then it will be up after a few minutes when the snapshot has been restored. Assuming wake up on LAN works on these network interfaces I should even be able to start this second server remotely and restore the snapshots easily.

It would of course be much nicer if I could cluster both HyperV boxes with Microsoft’s version of VMotion so that if the first server went down the system would automatically fail over to the secondary server. That’s probably not going to be possible though.

The second consideration is heat. Servers generate heat and in turn use more energy trying to cool down. Of course, in a perfect server environment an array of air conditioning, dehumidifiers and fresh air vents would be used to keep the environment at a perfect level for servers to run effectively but that’s just not an option in my kind of environment. For god sake, I’m running them in my house! At the moment, I have a specific location where all the CAT5 cable is patched back to. This works quite well with a single server but there are still occasional problems with heat and air flow. I have a plan that will greatly improve the situation but it has taken a long time for it to happen. Again, it’s all money. Basically, I’ll be moving the servers out to a shed that’s attached to the house. This is easy to reach via cable and with some work, should be reasonably easy to ensure a consistent temperature and reasonably good air flow and humidity. The worry is that it will get too cold during the winter so some insulation is required before I proceed.

By moving the servers out here it will also help with the noise issue. After years of listening to computers all day I have almost filtered out the noise however I’m aware that it’s not a comfortable situation for some people to be in when a server is quietly humming away in a house.

So, there you have it. For all of you who think I’m insane, you’re absolutely right however, even insane people often have perfectly logical reasons for their actions. For me, working on this kind of thing at home allows me to take full control of the set up, configuration and support of all of these systems. This gives me a great understanding of how it all works. With any luck, when I go for promotions in my current job or in years to come, when I look for a completely new job then I’m hoping it will stand to me. I’m also incredibly lucky but also very unfortunate with the environment I work with every day. It’s very diverse and complicated. Because so many people depend on it there are tools for managing and monitoring everything. This means that if functionality is needed, a hugely complex enterprise tool can be found and implemented. This slightly spoils me. It means that I don’t really have to think of ways of stitching things together or making work-arounds to make systems communicate with each other. If I knew I was always going to work in this kind of environment where anything is possible then I’d be perfectly happy with this. However, things might change. I might eventually work in a much smaller company where tools like SCCM, SCOM, Netbotz, What’s up gold and even backup exec or data protector simply cannot be afforded so scripts and free applications need to do the same job. I think it’s important to show that I’m just as comfortable with the small environments as I am with the enterprise level systems.

The other side of it is that by working independently on different systems I get to find accessibility problems in my own time. More importantly, I get to solve these accessibility problems in an environment that isn’t pressured. I can then bring these solutions with me into work and apply them when their needed. It’s very important to me that I do not let an accessibility related problem get in the way of me doing my job independently and efficiently.