Martello

In my endless pursuit of different ways to enjoy LEGO products, I found the following free mobile apps in the Android app store (a.k.a. Google Play).

• LEGO Creationary - Excellent series of build and guess games, created by the LEGO Group themselves. A bit heavyweight in terms of performance though.
• myBrickset: LEGO Set Guide - Allows you to search for LEGO sets by number and create a catalog of the ones you own (or want to own).
• LEGO Instructions - Lots of simple LEGO sets for younger children, complete with interactive step-by-step instructions.
• LEGO Scans - Quickly peruse through over 4,000 LEGO sets by name or theme (but no instructions included though).
• LEGO Minifig Collector - Search and browse through the full series of Minifigure collections. You can also tell the app which ones you have and it’ll then tell you which ones you’re missing (a potentially expensive feature).
• Lego Mini Figure Identifier – Very clever app for helping you identify which minifigure in inside the package before you buys it. However, LEGO have made it a lot harder to use this app since Minifigure Series 5 onwards so bring a microscope with you if you intend to use this app.

Have a Bash command you like to use a lot but need to parse some JSON data from another script? Here’s a quick inline Python command you might find helpful:

COUNT=`jscript.sh|python -c "import json; import sys;
  data=json.load(sys.stdin); print data['count']"`

Just substitute the name of your other shell script (jscript.sh) and the JSON index (count) as appropriate and you’re all set!

Oh, and of course, join the 2 preformatted lines above also – these are just split because by WordPress theme was truncating the single-line version.

I’ve had reason to capture rather a lot of screen shots in recent weeks and find the following Mac keyboard shortcuts very useful:

There are lots of other variations on the above, which are described nicely  here.

This one’s been bugging me for several weeks so finally got around to finding a proper solution. Basically, if someone sends you a PDF file with some photos in it, the chances are they didn’t think of reducing the picture quality (in the original document) before creating the PDF. As a result, the PDF file can end up being enormous, for no obvious reason to the reader.

While I managed to find out how to tackle the problem from inside the likes of Microsoft Word (better options in Office 2011), I am often without the original document, so what to do there (on a Mac)?

Well, as it happens, Mac Preview does have a way of doing this which I found out about here, and while it worked well for me (PDF files were mostly text with 2-3 pictures anyway), I have seen comments on the above article questioning the quality of the resulting file. Still, it may work for you too.

If you’re around the Waterford area on Wednesday, 14 December 2011, why not come along to the annual Food & Wine Tasting Evening at the Grand Hotel and sample a wide variety of beers, wine and local food – all for just €8.

This is a fundraiser in aid of two local schools (Gaelscoil Philib Barún and Holy Cross National School) and is sponsored by Hickson’s Centra, Tramore.

Remember: Grand Hotel, Tramore – Wednesday, 14 December 2011 – 7:30pm – 10pm – €8 per person

Hope to see you there.

My first job in the IT sector was as Technical Support Engineer at Eurologic Systems, an Irish-owned data storage company, back in 1992. I can still recall working with a SEAGATE ST512N (a 5.25″ hard disk with a whopping 12MB capacity) and later on taking delivery of our very first 3.5″ 1GB hard disk (the now famous SEAGATE Barracuda).

However, I also recall some of the former Mentec/DEC guys lamenting about how they used to clean some 300MB DEC drives (one platter at a time) that took up most of the room (way before my time of course).

And so earlier this week, almost 20 years later, I read with interest about Oracle and Sun’s new third-generation storage appliance (based on their 128-bit ZFS file system) which once again takes the form of a huge cabinet-like disk drive that looks like it would easily take up an entire room (ok, the rooms are much bigger now too but you get the point).

Of course the 20-year time gap isn’t the only difference as the new Sun ZFS Storage 7420 Appliance boasts a staggering raw capacity of 1.15PB (that’s 1,234,799,616 MB) along with a host of other equally impressive numbers.

This enormous growth in storage capacity easily trumps Moore’s Law (CPU capacity doubles every 18 months) and is more like a three-fold increase every 12 months. Nice ….. very nice!

FeedHenry is hiring again, with 5 open positions still available.

The type of stuff we’re into includes Cloud Computing, AWS, Node.js, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Chef, and all sorts of scripting languages and other exciting stuff.

Have a look at our Careers page for more details and why not drop us a copy of your CV.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about my favourite toy, LEGO, so I thought I’d correct that with a crazy LEGO fact that stuck in my mind this weekend while watching National Geographic’s special MegaFactories: LEGO. So here it is:

The number of unique ways you can combine 6 classic (2×4 stud) LEGO bricks of the same colour is an incredible 915,103,765

That’s over 915 million different ways! So, if like me, you had to find out how they came up with this number, there’s a great story behind it here, along with some great numbers regarding combining of larger numbers of bricks.

Other great facts from this same programme were:

• Over 50% of LEGO’s entire annual sales take place in the 2 months before Christmas each year
• The LEGO factory in Billund, Denmark is technically the largest manufacturer of tyres in the world (great table quiz question!)
• Worldwide, 7 LEGO products are sold every second

If you’re a web developer and would like to get on board the mobile app train, then you should check out FeedHenry.

Our cloud-based developer studio allows you to develop apps using familiar web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then build versions of those apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and Nokia WRT, all from the same code base. Registration is completely free.

Each app can also execute part of its business logic in our cloud. This allows you can change the key functionality of the app without having to push (time consuming and costly) updates to the app stores. It also means that you don’t need to provision any extra infrastructure to scale your apps to millions of users.

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff it does too so if you’d like to know more, head on over to http://www.feedhenry.com

You might also like to take a peek at http://www.aerlingus.com/help/aerlingusmobile – all built on the FeedHenry platform!

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who appeared on Ireland’s The Late Late Show earlier this year with his e-payments solution (Square), has raised US$100m in Series C funding, valuing the company at more than US$1bn.

Source: Silicon Republic