On Friday our good buddies (and design partners) at Pride Design (www.pridedesign.ie) flipped the big switch and put the new Cully and Sully website live, www.cullyandsully.ie.  We have been working closely with pride on the C&S site revamp and are very happy with the outcome.  The site is built using drupal 6 and involved quite a bit of hardcore Content Management System work which kept us both happy and very busy!!

Check it out and let us know what you think - www.cullyandsully.ie

Ever wondered where the term ‘broadcast’ comes from? Well according to a programme on the Beeb called ‘Victorian Farm‘ (which i’ve been watching!) it has slightly startling rural roots - it seems that it originally referred to a method of sowing seed by hand where the sower casts handfuls in a broad arc across his body as he walks - hence he’s broadcasting! Apparently it was _the_ method sowing seed before the first mechanical seed drills became available.

PS. The Victorian Farm is an interesting and mildly amusing programme in which a group of experimental arciologists dressed up, lived and worked on a ‘Victorian Farm’ for a year - well worth a look if it’s repeated which I’m sure it will be just like all other television these days!

Congratulations to our good buddies and award-winning web design & development partners over at Pride Design, they have just flipped the big switch and put their new website live - nothing like a new website for the new year!

They tell me that there is still some tweaking and tuning to do on the site and that they will be getting around to in the next week - but once again congratulations and well wear!

I am about to embark on a little research, I intend to compile a list of resources in Ireland for Irish Software Engineers and Developers. I want to include and bodies, websites, web forums etc. that provide a genuinly useful service to Developers and Engineers in their day-to-day work and in developing their careers in general.

I intend to steer clear of the large for-profit training outfits and that we all know and love and instead focus those resources that really have something useful to offer while not charging a small fortune (times being what they are).  I’ll be checking all around the country, not just in Dublin.

Once I have the list compiled I will post it here, in the mean time if you would like to suggest a resource please post it here or email it to me - Thanks!

The Register writes today about a new report which details the ‘25 most dangerous’ programming errors - a list which was compiled by 30 organisations.  Very interesting indeed, nothing unexpected in the list really, but I reckon that a full review of it in the light of ongoing and recent project work could be very  worthwhile.

 It certainly calls into question the whole ‘if it builds, it works!’ paradigm of software development

Our Linksys NSLU2 NAS finally died after a long and protracted fight to keep it on its legs and serving.  It has been acting up for a month or two now and now simply refuses to boot unless there are no drives plugged in (that’s not much use!!), I have a feeling that I could probably get it up and running again with freshly formatted disks etc., but I couldn’t really be bothered as I have wasted far too much time on the thing already.

It is only two years old, and although it is a very useable and low cost NAS solution I think that due to the shocking manner of its demise I couldn’t possibly recommend that anybody uses it at all!  My opinion has been backed up by the people to whom I have since talked, their Linksys NSLU2s suffered very similar fates at eirily similar ages.

Anyway, as the attached disks are formatted as linux ext3 volumes I just plugged them into a spare mini-ITX ‘black box’ type PC that we had here and installed a very slim and cut-down version of Debian with Samba.  A few quick fsck’s later confirmed that there was no damage to the volumes (phew!) and in an hour or two the disks were back on the network and stable.  A very acceptable gratis stop-gap solution thanks to Debian and a spare PC!

Here is an interesting article about the economics of human CAPTCHA ’solving’ in India. $2 for a 1000 reads, that’s a lot of squinting at wavy, almost impossible to read letters to the dollar, can’t be good for the health! Apparently it’s part of their ‘data processing’ industry!

We have finally got around to launching our new Technical Support Service for Irish Web Designers - a service designed to take care of the occasional programming and enginering aspects of a Web Designer’s Web development work, leaving them free to concentrate on the actual Web Design and Delivery.

This is a local service provided by experts in Ireland - so fast response times with the minimum of  administrative overhead are guaranteed.  This service is designed to be as useful for very small tasks (perhaps just an hour’s duration) as it is to larger tasks.

More details can be found here…

The register have posted an interesting list of Pros and Cons for Microsoft SIlverlight - agree or disagree, love it or hate it - it’s going to be in interesting time!

Personally I think that anything that gives Adobe a run for its money can’t be all bad!!

The Register Reports that the recently released OpenGL 3.0 specification has left many GL gaming developers threatening to defect to MS Direct3D, it seems that many of the promised additions and new features did not get a look in to the long awaited (3 years!) 3.0 Spec.  It has been promised that 3.1 will remedy this situation - but this has not yet done much to appease the seething developers!