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My progress reading in 2025
I set out with a simple goal for 2025 - to read 12 books to stop the endless doom-scrolling and being constantly stuck in the YouTube shorts algorithm. I somehow failed that goal in the best way possible - I managed to accidentally read 26. That’s an enormous return on my investment, which frankly, makes this the most successful project I managed all year. -
Project 300: 109kg to the Finish Line
109kg. 43 years old. Unfit. I have 300 days to transform my health and train for Nepal's 25km Fishtail Race. This is the start of Project 300. -
Debloating the Amazon Fire HD 8 (10th Gen)
Owning an Amazon Fire 8 tablet can feel like being trapped inside Amazon's ecosystem. The device, running its heavily modified Fire OS, is filled with preinstalled apps, ads, and constant prompts to use Amazon services. All of which slow it down and make it frustrating to use. Even blocking over-the-air updates is no longer possible, as Amazon locks users into its system. What should have been a simple tablet for kids ends up being a sluggish, ad-heavy billboard for Amazon's products instead of a clean Android experience. -
My opposition to the “Chat Control” proposal
I strongly oppose the EU’s “Chat Control” proposal, which would require scanning all private digital communications, including encrypted messages, without suspicion or consent. This kind of blanket surveillance undermines privacy, weakens encryption, violates fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter, and sets dangerous global precedents while doing little to improve child protection. -
Why I’m Suddenly Reading More (And Loving the Feck Out of It)
I'll be honest - I never thought I'd be that person. You know, the one always rattling off book recommendations, banging on about their latest read like it's changed their life, and casually dropping author names like they're old mates. But here I am. Somehow this year, I've found meself reading more than I have in ages. And I'm absolutely loving it. -
A Lament
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Rewriting My Relationship with Food
Growing up, I was a skinny kid; wearing oversized t-shirts, and a metabolism that ran like a greyhound. That all changed when we moved villages, landing in a place where my family ran an Irish pub and restaurant. Food was everywhere. Chips with everything. Rich stock in the gravy. Deep-fried this and farmer-portioned that. Slowly but surely, I started gaining weight - not out of neglect, but out of proximity. The food was often healthy but the portion sizes enormous. Ketchup on all the things, I ate everything at all times. -
Fatigue
Fatigue has become an unexpected guest in my life, sneaking in from all sides. And it's not the kind of tiredness a good night's sleep can fix; it's a deeper exhaustion that builds up from constantly absorbing things I just can't ignore. Politics, climate change, tech upheavals, endless news cycles, even my recent tango with dengue—it all piles on. Some days, keeping it together feels impossible, and I'm a hair's breadth away from throwing my phone at the wall. -
Hey Facebook, Two factor authentication is still important
In the latest swing of the 'convenience versus security' pendulum, Facebook seems poised to let users disable two-factor authentication (2FA) on certain devices, potentially undermining the bedrock of account security. What are they thinking? -
The Genetic Puzzle: Exploring the Rewards and Risks of DNA testing kits
The allure of genetic testing kits like 23andMe, with their promises of ancestral insights and health revelations, is undeniable. However, as we rush to decode our genetic blueprint, we must also confront the potential perils that come with it—from irreversible commitments and threats to personal privacy to concerns of data misuse and ethical questions about compensation. As technology and societal norms evolve, the future applications of our genetic data remain uncertain. Before delving deep into your genetics, it's imperative to balance the fascination with our DNA's secrets against the broader implications and risks involved. -
Some thoughts on GitHub Copilot - Your AI pair programmer
Today marked the technical preview of [GitHub Copilot - Your AI pair programmer](https://copilot.github.com/). It's something I've long been expecting ever since Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. -
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
I remember when Mandela was released. I remember where I was when watching the twin towers fall. I remember the feeling of hope when Obama was elected sworn in as president. I remember when the American people learned that their government was spying on its own people.
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The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula LeGuin
A slow start to this book. I was expecting the hero of the book to be front and center, similar to the previous Wizard of Earthsea, however I was surprised for his entrance to quietly happen halfway through. It was quite strange to experience Ged as an outsider but an experience I enjoyed. The old bait and switch with Tenar becoming the true hero protagonist.
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Software to make the world a better place
We want to ‘make the world a better place’. It’s a phrase I ‘secretly’ hate seeing in pitch sessions as it just simply sounds disengenuous. Making the world a better place and raking in big stacks are often at odds with each other.
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Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
A great book for any small business owner, something that many executives in larger companies could possibly adopt.
“If you build software, every error message is marketing”The advice by the founders is for founders, who want to keep their companies out of VC hands, small, lean and nimble.
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How to get the real ip of the client via ingress nginx controller on GCP
I’m writing this down here so that someone else can be spared the agony of solving this one.
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How to update Node Selector field for Kubernetes PODs in real time
So given the fact that we might want to use a really expensive node pool, you might need a GPU, you might need to use additional mememory and you've already deployed your deployments. Our recent case was to change a nginx ingress controller from a pre-emptible node (one that lives for less than 24 hours over to a stable node pool pool which has a much longer lifespan). -
The Forever war - update
Slow to start into this one but 40% of the way through it really picked up for me and finished it off in a few days. -
Domain transfer woes
So one of my domains, my main business domain vayu.com.au has been hosted with Crazy domains for the past number of years. I had been waiting for Route 53 to support AU domains and decided the week before it was due to expire was a good time to do so. Big mistake. -
Books I want to read in July 2019
The Forever War by Joe Halderman
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Books I want to read in June 2019
The Sparrow: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell So the synopsis I gave earlier in a previous blog post really doesn’t do this book justice. I really quite enjoyed aspects of this read, it wasn’t a slog by any means but there were points in the book where I had to do a double take, track back a chapter or two and realise that a single phrasing changed the entire storyline having missed it previously. Having been taught by a few Jesuits in my time and spent a lot of time around Jesuits I was quite interested in much of the scientific aspects of the Jesuit approach to faith. Definitely on my recommendation list.
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Books I want to read in April 2019 - update
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou Pretty great story about how a sociopath builds a biotech business, with the aid of her reality distortion field and buckets loads of cash dupes a lot of VCs and old retail giants in the process. Siemens did pretty well out of it though, Theranos was one of their biggest customers building an illusion on top of Siemens technology. Was a great read, the story is still on going with court cases and movies coming out. This yarn isn’t over by a long stretch.
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It's all about the data, stupid.
Knowing your task and knowing your data
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Joe Armstrong, RIP
Joseph Armstrong passed away yesterday. A computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems, the father of Erlang. RIP.
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Investor status, Unlocked!
For the past number of years I’ve been based with my wife in Kathmandu, Nepal. We relocated here soon after the earthquake, uprooting our lives in Sydney to return to my wifes country, a place she hadn’t lived in for over 20 years.
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Books I want to read in April 2019
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou By 2013, Theranos was valued at nearly $10 billion and even partnered with Walgreens to put their blood tests in stores around the country. The problem? Their technology never worked.
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The direction of Dev-ops
Container-based development will power the future of the enterprise. Containers And Functions-As-A-Service have become the defacto-norm in enterprise architecture.
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Look ma, no tracking.
I’ve been adding Google Analytics to each one of my sites ever since it launched. It was the defacto snippet of code in a simple partial that was on every custom landing page, every microsite. My clients never complained as it was always added in. Track everything was my mantra.
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i3 is awesome
Having been using the default OS of Debian / Ubuntu for the past 20 years I’ve slowly starting looking for alternatives. My goal was to reduce the load as much as possible on either my laptop or desktop at startup, preferring that my docker containers would use those resources instead. I’m not one of those folks who has compiz installed, please don’t offend my eyes.
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Pingdom - Marketing Fail
So a customer of mine had signed up with Pingdom as part of one of their projects. They noticed that they really were not getting any value out of the pingdom service so they cancelled the account.
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Asleep at the wheel
I feel like I have been asleep at the wheel, the past months have been a blur.
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React Native
The past month or so I've been reading up on React Native. React Native was open sourced about 2 years ago. React Native is an open source framework by Facebook which allows you to write Android and IOS applications using HTML like code (known as JSX) and JavaScript. -
Bandas in Nepal
Bandh usually translates directly to 'general strike'. Bandh is originally a Hindi word meaning 'closed', is a form of protest used by political activists in some countries in South Asia like India and Nepal. During a Bandh, a major political party or a large chunk of a community declares a general strike, usually lasting one day. -
Convox - Sunday morning impressions
Sunday morning browsing Hacker News brought me to Convox. Shiney! Lets dive in. -
ConX Jobs
So I've taken on a new project called ConX. I'm assisting with their technical offering. It's early days but it's a promising venture. -
Hard Choices
Hybrid vs Native, decisions, decisions -
Getting a phone network in Nepal
I’ve arrived in Nepal, I’m going to be here for the next 3 months. While here, I’m going to be staying with my wifes family in Kathmandu. I quickly realised that the Internet connection at the house simply was not sufficient. 128kbp or 256kbp, slow as a wet wick. This is through the Nepal Telecom.
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Ruby 4 secret_key_base
Something that caught be out week was the introduction of the secret_key base in Rails 4.
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Media Landscape talk
So last month I participated in a great session at Fishburners discussing the media landscape & tracking influencers.
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Farewell ABC
I’m sad to write that this is my last day at ABC. I started in ABC only last year and while it was only a short time I will look at my time at Aunty fondly.
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This is the first day of my professional life
I’m nervous. I’m writing this the day before I’m about to hand in my notice to my workplace. It’s a step that i need to take but one that I could never have contemplated making even one year ago.
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Some people
Some people come into our lives and quickly go.
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Value the important things
“Happiness is a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry under a shady tree” - Astrid Alauda
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A death while abroad
My wife and I have been living in Australia now for over five years. ‘An amazing experience’ we’d reply when asked about living here. However, it is definitely not without its downsides.
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Redis Pub/Sub and Rails 4 Live Streaming
So today I got to play a bit with the newly minded Rails 4 RC 1. A new feature is Live Streaming so I decided to see how it would work with redis publish / subscribe channels.
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Inbox Zero
One of the tricks I learned today was to turn on keyboard shortcuts for Gmail and auto-advance(labs). Auto advance automatically moves to the next message on the list after you have archived or deleted or actioned upon a message instead of returning directly to the inbox.
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Nginx error pages
A quick how-to on creating a custom 404 error page on a Nginx server.
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Working in cycles
Lately I find that I’m working in cycles. I get really excited about a project and will work 12 hours straight on it. Other times, the same project just doesn’t seem interesting.
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Death to a funk
Those who know me understand that I’ve been in a funk the past few months.
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James Clarke, RIP
CLARKE, James (Main Street, Kilcormac, Co. Offaly) Oct. 2, 2012, in the Midlands Regional Hospital, Tullamore, after a brief illness, bravely borne; sadly missed by his loving wife Helen, daughters Antoinette, Mary, Lorraine and partner Wil, grandson Sidney, son Jonathan and wife Kisu, brothers Hugh, Paddy and PJ, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, relatives and a large circle of friends. Reposing at his home today (Wednesday).
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Fuck you cancer!
My dad was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
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Entrepreneural video roundup - Hack Fwd
Since I’ve moved out of the city I’m getting to a lot less meetups lately. I have however been loading up a queue of videos to watch lately. My sister works at IDEO, a fantastic design company and a number of years ago she turned me on to Hack Fwd. Here are some of the gems that have been coming out of there.
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My daily commute - A train ride
An hour and a half to get there. Often two hours to get home. Frodo never took this long to drop off that ring of his.
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RubyMotion - It's on my Christmas list
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Startups in Sydney - help is always around
So today Forbes released their list of the top startup incubators that have been runnning in the US.
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The importance of the zone in the workplace
I love programming, it’s rare that a day passes that I don’t sit in front of a keyboard to write a few lines of code. It’s my job and my passion. It requires an immense amount of concentration, often I find myself so involved in the problem in front of me that I block out all other distractions. That is at least when I have a set of decent headphones. Today I forgot mine at home and it has been hell!
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30, am I past it?
It’s Anzac day. It’s also my birthday, Australia grinds to a halt.
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Evergreen - Beautiful Javascript unit testing
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Holy smokes I'm hitched
Fantastic news, I got married in March to a wonderful woman.
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Taking stock of 2012
My nephew Sidney was born!
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Thoughts about mentors
So you’ve got a mentor? Couple of pointers and tips for you.
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Ireland means business
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Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history.
Another interesting article from Michael Arrington today. Startups are hard. So work more, cry less, and quit all the whining.
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Bootstrap Xtra released
Bootstrap Xtra extends Bootstrap Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.
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Get 'er done...
“I had that idea years before they did it.”
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Programming is difficult...
James Johnson wrote earlier this month that “Programming has been difficult…(But Rewarding).
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Messing around with the Ruby IMAP and Mail libraries
So today I got to build a small little application that does the following:
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Kids can change the world as entrepreneurs
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Two books to read
Two books I’m really looking forward to reading over the next few weeks:
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What killed Smalltalk could kill ruby
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Thoughts on software engineering
I’m a software engineer. I’ve been calling myself one since 2003, my first application was built on a ZX Spectrum Sinclair in the late 1980’s. After working with a variety of frameworks over the past number of years I can realistically say that I have never been more excited about software design than I am now.