SMS from Mount Kilimanjaro

This morning I got an SMS from Patrick J. Cassidy The text reads:

"17 hrs to ascend and descend Kili.
Starting 23:30. shattered".

BTW, the photo below is not from Mt Kilimanjaro, rather from a ski trip to Austria last year :-)

From Skiing in May...

Congratulations!!!

Faschingsdienstag Parade in Heidelberg

It was a wet day in Heidelberg today, but we set off regardless into the city centre for the annual Faschingsumzug. Liam was dressed in his crocodile suit as seen in a previous post (and for which he nearly won a prize at yesterday's Kinderfasching event.

From Faschingsdien...

The other kids were dressed up too, here's Liam's friend Greta

From Faschingsdien...

and his cousin Celina

From Faschingsdien...

also present were various Schwabs, including Heike's brother Hans-Günther, who got to ride in the first car this year in his new official position of 1. Vorsitzende of the Kurpfälzer Trabanten.

From Faschingsdien...

Despite the nasty weather we had a good time. Liam was filmed by local TV station RNF, but we couldn't find any coverage of it on TV this evening :-(

SMS from Mount Meru

View Larger Map

On Saturday I got a text message from my father, sent from the top of the 4,566 metre high Mount Meru in Tanzania (not to be confused with Mount Meru in Algeria or Meru Peak in the Himalayas). This is his training climb for Kilimanjaro, which he's aiming to climb this week.

We wish him luck!

Geni Family Tree

I've been a user of Geni.com for a while now, and my (recorded) extended family now numbers 134, due mainly to the efforts of my uncle Peadar. It's a great way to keep track of all the Cassidys all over the world, as well as a tool to show my kids the generations before them.

Although not generally accessible without invitation, Geni recently introduced a sharing feature, allowing me to show below my "immediate snippet of family tree.

View more of Macartan's tree  |  Get your own family tree at Geni.com

Anyone reading this and related to me who has not yet got an invite, let me know :-)

Liam the clapping crocodile

Here's a video of Liam clapping along to singer Liane at the Kurpfälzer Trabantan's Prunksitzung.




He wasn't the only one who was impressed with the evening's entertainment. Rosalie outed herself as a hard-core Mickie Krause fan by squealing along excitedly to "Finger in Po Mexiko".

As well as the video clip, there are a few photos of the eveining on my Picasa gallery. I particularly like this one of Liam with a clown whom he didn't quite recognise as his aunt Tina:



For comparison, here she is without the clown makeup



It's not hard to understand his confusion :-)

All in all it was a fun night for the whole family.

Google Analytics

As this blog nears its first birthday, I thought I'd share some of the Google Analytics statistics from the last 12 months. Although Google Analytics is far from perfect, as it misses all the RSS readers, and anyone like me who runs NoScript, it does provide a pretty graphical view of traffic.

The visitor overview below shows that throughout the year we're averaging about 10 visitors a day, with the obvious spike in interest after Rosalie's birth in July.




The dashboard view below for the last month bears this out with some interesting stats on Pages/Visit, average time on site etc. Of course, the accuracy of these figures are limited by the manner in which they are gathered - for example a single visit may be read for a while, but will always be recorded as 0 seconds if the next page is off-site, but these are standard deficiencies in web analytics.




One graph I always like to check out is the Map Overlay, below the city view is shown. This blog has been viewed on all continents, and from 52 countries. A warm welcome to all readers in Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Chile, United Arab Emirates and Senegal. Just why there was a visit from Quantico, Virginia, USA is still a mystery to me - what interest could the FBI, Marine Corps or the Drug Enforcement Administration have in me? Surely not my harsh stance on copy protection mechanisms for Digital Media :-)




On a lighter note, it's fun to see what browsers visitors to this site are using. Internet Exploder remains the top weapon of mass distraction, but at just over 33%, Firefox is gaining ground.




BTW, it's not depicted here but the OS split is 94%, 5% and 1% for Windows, Mac and Linux respectively. There's still some work to do for Linux on the desktop ;-)

Secure your USB Stick

If like me you like to carry sensitive data around on a USB stick you'll know the following two facts:

1. It's incredibly useful to have your data with you.
2. It's only a matter of time before you misplace the USB stick.

In order for this to be not a drama, you need to have the sensitive data encrypted. I've been using truecrypt for this purpose for a while, and it's a fantastic solution, with one major drawback - you need administrator privileges on the host machine - mostly not possible on client sites.

So I was glad to hear on the latest Security Now about omziff, a little non-installing app which can be used to encrypt and decrypt files. Simply download the exe, encrypt your sensitive data, pop the encrypted file plus the omziff.exe file onto your USB stick and you're good to go.

The feature set is not large, but what's there is done well. All the major modern open encryption standards are covered (e.g. Blowfish, IDEA, Rijndael, Twofish), and make no mistake, encryption with one of these algorithms is safe.

An extra feature which I really like is the shredder, which eliminates your sensitive files from the host machine after use, by writing random characters over the disk space multiple times. This is a program to help you sleep at night :-)

Apps for a new machine

As mentioned in the previous post, I just got my hands on a new Lenovo laptop courtesy of my new employer, and I thought I'd post details on my priority apps that I installed asap. And to you, Mr Concerned-IT-Helpdesk-Guy, please look away now...

1. Firefox: Unlike 62.84% of visitors to this site, I do not like to use Internet Exploder for browsing. I appreciate that version 7 is improved, and it's not as unsafe as it once was, but I simply prefer the Firefox experience. BTW, extensions NoScript, Foxmarks, Googlepedia, PasswordMaker, Cookiesafe, GSpace and GUtil are as important to me as the original program.

2. Google Pack: A bit of a cheat this, as it includes many must-haves such as Adobe Reader, Google Earth, Picasa, Skype, Google Photos Screensaver, etc. A no-brainer, though I don't take the browser toolbar or the spyware stuff, as I prefer other options for those.

3. iTunes: I listen to a lot of podcasts, and it's simply the best PC experience to doing so. One downer is the migration of iTunes playlists and account from one computer to another - not as nice as it should be.

4. PureText: This little app is just so elegant, it's no wonder Microsoft never thought of it themselves. Don't you mostly prefer just to cut and paste text, and not the surrounding formatting junk? Especially between Office apps, this is great. Cannot recommend highly enough.

5. FreePDF XP: The kind folks in the IT department included a PDF generator in my software load, but it doesn't measure up. FreePDF simply works in a simple, intuitive and useful way.

There are other apps which I'll install over the coming weeks and months, but these are to me the important ones. If you know of further great apps and/or Firefox extensions, please let me know in the comments.

New Year, New Company, Old Job

I wisely took holidays up till Monday 7th January, so I can enjoy the full benefit of my children's colds. When I do go back I'll be working for sd&m AG rather than Capgemini Deutschland GmbH, and yet I'll be doing the same job.

The key to this conundrum is that the Telco unit, of which I am part has been integrated into sd&m, a more technology-focussed subsidiary of the Capgemini group. The integration has been going on for a few months, the official handover happened on 01.0.2008.

It's going to be an interesting time ahead, merging a consultancy unit into a bespoke software development company. My feeling is however that the two companies have more in common than they realise, and that it'll end up enhancing both portfolios. Time will tell.

In the meantime, I'm glad to say that my laptop has been specced up considerably from the Capgemini model. The minor downside is that I now have a German-language OS and Office apps.

2007 - a review

Since this blog is nearing its first birthday, I thought a review of 2007 would save me the trouble of reviewing the first blog year ;-)

One event which hit us pretty hard in January was Hurricane Kyrill, which damaged our roof. The roofer took his sweet time to do the repairs, but fortunately this was covered by our insurance company. January did have its upside though, my sister Fiona had her third boy, Oran, who has proved to be a most agreeable little chap.

In February we attended an assortment of Fasching events including the TraBü Ball and Albertus Saal Prunksitzung. I like to think that I'm well integrated into German society because I can withstand such punishment to my sense of humour ;-)

Skiing was not a family option this year due to pregnancy, but I did manage to get in a weekend with my father in Mayrhofen in March, which was fun. Then over Easter we visited Amsterdam with Hans-Günther, Tina and some other Kurpfälzer Trabanten. This was a lot of fun up to the train home, when Liam got sick after a dodgy sausage. Suffice to say he used up 4 sets of clothing on the way home, and Tina never asked for the towel back which we wrapped him in for the last hour.

Heike and Liam celebrated their birthdays in April. Liam had taken possession of his main present of a Laufrad early, but it was only by about his birthday that he really began to master it. Google "Youtube Liam Laufrad" to find video evidence of his antics.

By the time summer came around Heike was not enjoying the heat. So there was relief as well as joy when Rosalie arrived on the 16th July. The high point of this year for us as well as the traffic on this website.

In August Corina and Christoph got married, and over various weekends Doireann, Aedamair and my parents visited us. Then, after only six weeks, Rosalie's status of youngest grandchild was usurped by Alannah Conneely.

The last few weeks have been pretty busy -we were over in Dublin at the end of November for my 20-year school reunion, then two weeks later the whole Cassidy clan descended on Heidelberg for Rosalie's christening. Then Xmas, which was great for the kids, Liam got the hang of the whole present-opening thing pretty quickly.

These are just the highlights, I encourage you to trawl through the blog for further tidbits.

We wish you all a happy New Year!

Macartan, Heike, Liam and Rosalie

Rosalie's Christening

From Rosalie's Chr...

Rosalie celebrated her christening last Sunday, and I finally got around to posting some pictures to the Picasa Gallery today, 6 days later. I am a miserable excuse for a parent ;-)

The whole weekend was great, especially as our normal sleepy existence was spiced up by house guests from Dublin, London, Erlangen and Barcelona. In the end 6 extra children, 7 extra adults and one extra dog came to stay. This was all too much for my parents, they wisely decided to stay at the nearby Hotel Heidelberg.

Thanks to all who turned up to help Rosalie celebrate, not least her Irish aunts and cousins who travelled so far. Also thanks to Ralf, who spent his time photographing anything that moved, as Heike and I didn't get much time to use our camera much.

Do you know this bird?

From A Peahen who ...

This peahen found her way into our garden a few days ago, and seems to have made herself at home. And yes, those piles on the wall are hers. I'm not sure how to discourage her from this behaviour (short of letting Electra into the garden at the same time, and the results of that might be even messier).
Anyone have any advice on how to move on vagrants?

School Reunion

I've just uploaded my photos of the 20-year reunion from the St. Michael's class of '87, they are to be found in full here. The statistics were good, 50 turned up from the year (of originally 90) and 20 from our class of 30.
I had a great time, and enjoyed catching up with all my old classmates, most of whom I hadn't seen at all in the intervening 20 years. As described in a previous blog post, they have all gone on to lead productive lives, and all seemed in good form.
One culture shock for me were the interminable speeches made by officers of the Past Pupils Union, blathering on about rugby and African missions. Those guys need to stop drinking the Holy Ghost Kool-Aid.

IPTV

I'm halfway through a Capgemini seminar on IPTV, and thought I might sketch my thoughts.

The positive first. There's a lot going on in the group with regard to innovative video services. Capgemini has been involved in some ground-breaking work in developing the architecture and business models which are now hitting the European market. Personally I'm a late entrant, I've been involved in the T-Home workstream for just over two weeks, but my employer is well positioned to capitalise on the market demand.

The grim reality second. Everything we're doing is currently "classic IPTV" - more succinctly, a defensive play by telcos to capture back some market share from cable companies who are bringing triple play products to market.

Somehow I find this defensive position depressing. What is the value of a me-too service? I was keen to get an insight into the workings of Hulu, Joost and Miro. Instead I learned that IPTV "requires" the following:

1. Live "regular" TV.
2. Streamed and encrypted content
   
3. A closed network.

I don't believe these propositions for a minute. Let's take them in turn.

1. Live TV is an artifact from a broadcasting era. There is no good reason why you and I should both choose to watch "Desperate Housewives at 20:00. Video should be on-demand, any other model is an unnecessary encumbrance. In a model where delivery servers need to scale, simultaneous delivery is in any case suicide.
   
2. Streaming and encrypting is expensive. Why bother? Digital content will be copied and pirated regardless of any effort to the contrary, why handicap yourself trying? Instead, we should lower the bar to progressive download a la Apple TV.
   
3. A closed network is required to ensure Quality Of Service. A noble goal, one might think. However, turn the tables, and it means that your friendly neighbourhood telco will not give QoS guarantees for a third-party video service. Suddenly your promised 6 Mbit/s bandwidth becomes a number you're guaranteed not to exceed, rather than a goal to achieve. This fails the "Don't be evil" test miserably.

What's the upshot? As I've said before, the digital media market will continue to fragment. Telcos will find their niche, together with the Internet pure players, cable companies and other aggregators/etailers such as Apple iTunes, Walmart, Amazon, etc. The successful players will be those who add sufficient value or advertising, and established telcos will survive by girth alone.

I for one won't be signing up for a repeat of today's television experience, but thankfully I'm not representative of any known target group ;-)

Conservapedia Statistics

Much love to Rebecca Watson for this tip about Conservapedia (here a link to my blog post from earlier this year for those who missed it).

Check out Conservapedia's usage statistics:

Most viewed pages

1. Main Page‎ [1,953,451]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,827,374]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [518,416]
4. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [460,254]
5. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [432,120]
6. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [422,619]
7. Homosexual Couples and Domestic Violence‎ [374,478]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [332,269]
9. Homosexuality and Anal Cancer‎ [294,892]
10. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [294,250]

Is it my imagination or do these guys have a bit of a hang-up about sexuality?

BTW, the further invitation to view Conservapedia's description of evolution is a little more depressing. People believe this stuff? And vote? Scary.