Martello

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

I missed this one last week, but Vodafone have reduced their data roaming charges for the months of July and August 2011 to the same rates as you would pay in your home country. All we need now is for them to extend the offer indefinitely.

Source: Silicon Republic

Had some strange behaviour with DNS on Mac OS X earlier today. Made a change inside DNS and waited the required amount of time for the TTLs to expire. Then verified that the new IP address was resolving (using both dig and nslookup).

However, my system was still trying to use the old IP address when I tried a simple ssh or telnet command.

In the end, I discovered how to flush my local DNS cache, which fixed the problem. You can do this as follows:

$ dscacheutil -flushcache