www.sliabh.net

Seamus K - Irish tech industry expat living in Sweden.

Category: General (Page 14 of 15)

Conspiracies – it’s hard to keep them secret

27th January 2016 / / 0 Comments

I see my one time drinking buddy David Grimes made the front page of the BBC (and a lot of other places) with his paper on the how possible is it to keep a conspiracy theory secret for any length of time.

He cleverly user data from some real conspiracies (NSA Prism, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) forensic scandal) to model the likelihood that a secret held by many will eventually come out.

And then he applied that to some of the big “popular” conspiracies – that the moon landings were faked, global warming is a conspiracy amongst scientists, and that pharmaceutical companies are concealing a cure for cancer.

The model shows that it would be impossible to keep such large conspiracies under wraps for any length of time. But then what would you expect. Think of all the trivial persona; secrets you are aware of that have gotten out. And then think could thousands of people keep massive things quiet in defiance of their conscience like – We have a cure for cancer. We lied to the world about the moon landings. We are causing deceiving the world about climate change, just so we can get some research funding. The moon landing one always struck me as particularly daft, as you would need the Russians (ostensible “losers” in the race to the moon) to keep quiet as well.

And like all good scientists Dr Grimes used his work to make some predictions. To keep something like the moon landings secret for nearly 50 years the would need a group of conspirators of about 250 people. Considering how many were involved just in running each of the Apollo missions it’s farcical to maintain there is a great secret here.

There is great scope for future work here. Looking at some other real failed conspiracies would refine the model and allow for better estimates. And then I want it applied to some other great conspiracies. Not we can at last figure out how big and how extensive is the reach of the Illuminati, and the Elders of Zion! My bet is the size will come out to be around 0-1 with the greater probability of the lower estimate 🙂

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Excuse the mess

26th January 2016 / / 0 Comments

I am playing around with some structure stuff. This will be cleared up later today.

The plan is to have a full menu with:

  • Blog – with everything, including my tech posts
  • Tech Blog – a category with just the tech stuff
  • Pictures – specific photo stuff
  • Travels – stuff from my world travels.
  • About page

I am debating a static home page. But I think the blog one will be fine. If you want to know what this is all about then you can click on “About”. Simples.

 

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Driving home for (after) Christmas

22nd January 2016 / / 0 Comments

The route is set. My 0600 Sunday departure time is planned. The Rostock hotel room secured for Sunday night. The ferry to Gedser in Denmark at 0600 on Monday is booked, and I am banking sleep. I just need to load the car, hit the road and head 1800km north to get back to my place in Sweden.

driving Vienna to Stockholm

On the way down before Christmas I took the long road with my father – we didn’t take the ferry. But that adds 350km to the trip. We took two and a half days (including time lost for fog from Dresden to Prague and on to Vienna. I should do the return in two.

On Sunday I will do 871km from Vienna to Rostock. My splits should be:

  • Vienna – Brno: 2 hours
  • Brno – Prague: 2 hours
  • Prague – Dresden: 1.75 hours
  • Dresden – Berlin: 2:25 hours
  • Berlin – Rostock: 2:25

The following day

  • Rostock – Gedser (by ferry): 2 hours
  • Gedser – Copenhagen: 2 hours
  • Copenhagen – Malmo (by The Bridge) : 0.5 hours
  • Malmo – Jönköping: 2 hours
  • Jönköping – Stockholm: 2.5 hours

All that assumes no problems with the weather, breakdowns and so on. But the real risk to my times is refugees. The Swedish and German governments have effectively suspended Schengen. They have re-instigated border checkpoints to look for refugees. Over Christmas we saw the big tailbacks that result when we crossed from Austria to Germany on the way to our ski resort.

Still a 15-20 minute tail back I can deal with. 18 hours of boredom on my own might be a different case!

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Blogging for work

22nd January 2016 / / 0 Comments
A blog post I did for work.

A blog post I did for work.

I have been blogging and producing content for work in the past few years.

Some of the highlights are the posts on Ericsson’s Industrial Cloud group over at LinkedIn. There is a blog post I wrote on the massive growth in data being stored in the Cloud and what Ericsson can do to help.

And there are a few videos floating around of me talking at conferences like this one on the economics of NFV at the OpenStack summit in Paris.

Blogging for work is a bit different, and not just because of the longer review process, and the nit picking over your grammar, spelling and punctuation. You need to have a much clearer idea of why you are writing, what it is for, how it will help people, and what you want them to get from the post. There isn’t time for random nonsense (like I can put here). And you need to make sure that the material should tie into everything else that is being published on the topic.

It ads a considerable amount of effort to the process. And certainly robs it of the spontaneity that personal blogging has!

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sliabh.net – why am I back blogging

22nd January 2016 / / 1 Comment
Working on the PC with crocodile and vodka tonic

Working on the PC with crocodile and vodka tonic

I had a few reasons for wanting to restart this blog. The first one is for fun. I enjoy writing, but I don’t get to do enough of it. In the last few years Twitter and Facebook had replaced this blog as where I was putting things on the internet.

Twitter can be fun to write for. But quite often you want a lot more than 140 characters.

Facebook allows you more words, but most people don’t read much more than is in a tweet. I saw a recent recommendation of picture and just 250 characters for the best engagement there! My Facebook audience is pretty restricted as well, as I have less than 40 “friends” and little interest in making my profile public.

I also would rather my content was fully public, on my own platform, than controlled by Facebook and monetised by them. They recently surveyed me on what I thought of their privacy options. I noticed that all the choices they offer only allow you to control what your contacts and the public see. You have almost no control over what Facebook do with your content (and it is yours) and activity. BTW I am a big fan of Max Schrems.

Then there is the thing about the social and engagement side. I am as guilty as the next person of occasionally obsessing about my likes, re-tweets and favorites. But that’s so shallow really. So I am going back to the basics – Am I enjoying writing. And are people getting some benefit from what I am writing. That is easily measured by site traffic, and people commenting on what they see.

The only other thing I need to sort out is work. My current role is a bit higher profile. And I have even been blogging for work. I want to write a bit about technology and the cloud world, but I am not sure whether that will work alongside some of the other content that will be here. A separate work blog may be needed as well.

For now the plan is to post something, big or small at least once a day. Few posts will be over 350 words. I will post on my usual eclectic range of interests – technology, history, sci-fi, current affairs, business travel, the places I get to visit at work, and reflections on life from someone whos own life is pretty non-standard 🙂

Anyway. It is good to be back!

 

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My site to-do list

21st January 2016 / / 0 Comments

Things I need to do to tidy all of this up:

  • Finish tweaking the theme (currenly using Hemingway) – Done  for now.
  • Fix the site settings, including checking:
    • Comments – Done
    • Spam filters – Done
  • Add an “About” page for the blog – to clarify why am back here – Done
  • Add an “About” page for me – placeholder in, er, place. I need proper content.
  • Add a side bar with some links – Done
  • See can I migrate the old posts to this site
  • Add a decent photo/image sharing widget – Done I think. I have added NextGen Gallery. Let’s see how it works later.
  • Social media integration – Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook – Done. Sharing icons added.
  • Decide if/how I will use this for work
  • Add some permanent pages, and remove the current sample one – In progress.
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