praxis makes perfect

Culture Shock

Robert Keogh — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 19:14:54 +0000

I graduated from Trinity College Dublin in Genetics which involved learning Fortran77 and writing DNA analysis s/w (back in the days before Perl hit the Bioinformatics scene). As a kid I’d always tinkered with computers, writing BASIC programs on my Atari 800XL, all the way up through undergrad I’d always kept a foot in both the science and computing camps (why I didn’t apply for Comp Sci instead of Natural Sciences baffles me, the ignorance of youth perhaps?).

About 12 years ago I finally decided that research was not for me and began to teach myself the neccessary skills to make the switch. I began learning HTML, Perl and Javascript and looked around for a project to get my teeth into. The first HTML project I worked on was a fansite for Iain Banks, who at the time was hands down my favourite author. I invested alot of time and thought into the site over the many years I maintained it. This was back in the days before any WYSIWIG editor existed (and years before there was a decent WYSIWIG editor) all I had was BBEDIT, a retentive dedication to consistancy and endless patience. I learned a tremendous amount and met some really cool Banks fans.

As my free time shrunk and Banks stopped writing anything worth reading my interest and ability to maintain the Banks fansite evaporated and I stopped maintaining it. I tried to find someone else to take over and several people expressed an interest but nothing seemed to come of it despite handing out archives of the site. The domain phlebas.com expired (it’s still parked) and I went on my hectic but merry way. Life got very busy and hasn’t slowed down until this year, moved around the country, got married, worked in some startups. I didn’t have time for my personal side projects, they atrophied and withered on the vine, eventually ending up as an archive on a CD that has sat on my shelf lo these many years.

Today I was wandering the web and I came across a site that had an archive of my Culture Shock site, some flaws and missing files but almost entirely complete. It inspired me to dig up my copy and wandering through it brought back many good memories and many late nights meticulously editing the scores of files on the site to be syntactically, stylistically consistant. Given the flaws in the archived version I figured I might as well make my complete and original - if dated - copy available again.

Please enjoy Culture Shock - a site dedicated to Iain Menzies Banks.

The vote gap between Unionism and Nationalism

Robert Keogh — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:05:50 +0000

The days of Northern Ireland with a Unionist majority are drawing to a close. Elections for the past 30 years show one thing and one thing only - the end is nigh. The number of votes that Unionism has in excess of Nationalism has shrunk from 272,000 in 1973 to 55,000 in 2005. Click on the image for a full and readable version. The data used to compile this graph was obtained from Nicholas Whyte’s excellent Northern Ireland Elections site.

Anto and Finton - Nucentz

Robert Keogh — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 02:15:17 +0000

A couple of months back my brother forwarded me a link to what is one of the funniest youtube video I have ever seen Dublin Rap Song. It is a comedic rap between two Dubliners from the “posh” Southside and the “working class” Northside. I’ve shown it to several of my american friends and had to translate the accent for them before they could appreciate the pure brilliance of this piece. Someone on the youtube site requested the lyrics but youtube claims that comments have a limit of 500 chars and the lyrics are about 2500 chars. I tried cutting the lyrics up into 500 char bites but youtube rejected those as being too long too. So here in all it’s glory is almost all of the lyrics - there are couple of bits I couldn’t make out for sure and probably some other errors.

Without further ado the lyrics, enjoy:

yo yo yo
anto story by

(ye ready, ye ready)
(ye fucking ready?)

my fro can gro i know
so gerrup outta dat

dutch gold i’m told is old
so gerrup outta dat

five blokes, ???, no joke
so gerrup outta dat

drinkin, boozin, suburuzin is what i do
so gerrup outta dat

12 years of school is a load of bollix
12 minutes to rob me new car’s hydralics
rippin down the motorway looking for mullingar
stopped for a drink but ended up with a bar
munchin and cruisin, smoking and boozin
fucked off me face reminiscin of susan
i’m quite an ugly prick
so i’m not one for choosen
beggers can’t be choosers
so i take what i can get

coulda been my bird with a 20 stone ???
with a set so big they’d smother you to death
i once left a granny with a dirty saggy fanny
she told me she was thirty and her first name was annie
she gave woppah head cuz she took her teeth out
but the dirtiest thing was her feet in me mouth
toenails orange and crooked as fuck
to trust my luck me dick’d get stuck

an unlucky bastard
a fucking disaster
but at the drinking
i’m the master
blackcurrent vodka, malibu and coke
nod your heads and just toke on your smoke

deseigner cloths, drama shows, bravo
gerrup outta dat
vienetta, polo sweaters, playing checkers
gerrup outta dat

my best friend wears ralph lauren and drives a benz
gerrup outta dat

private yachts, lots of dosh
but i’m not posh
gerrup outta dat

4 years at blackwork, then i went to clongowes
i’m smoking pot but it’s not as if my mom knows
went to morocco, daddy bought me bongos
now i drink strongbow and snort coke up my long nose

my bird is always on a beach in a bikini
while i’m making a pot of tea with a panini
i hope that one day i’ll lose my virginity
just year i graduated from trinity

i thought vinnie jones was great in lock stock
i wish i knew a bloke like that from foxrock
fresh out of D4, money i see more
i like to go shopping with my main man igor
we go to marks & spencers, park the cars
and whip out mom and dad’s barclay cards

it’s like riding a bike or flying a kite
and i’m a pure bred south sider for life, roysh

that’s right

shut your mouth you fuckin eejit
you go back to where ever you came from you, you petty commoner
get away with all your fucking money,
the state of ye fucking, ye fucking idiot ye

well i drive nicer cars and wear nicer clothes than you
yeah well i rob cars, ye bollix

“I’ve got more taste in my penis.”

Robert Keogh — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 20:02:02 +0000

“Body Bags 2.”
“Oooh, that’s imaginative. I’ve got more taste in my penis.” Lee Donowitz True Romance (1993)

We have all been hearing the long loud laments from Hollywood about declining attendence, blah, blah, blah. With these forthcoming gems of cinematographic is it any wonder?

Die Hard IV
Ghostbusters III
Indiana Jones IV
Jurassic Park IV
Rambo IV
Rocky VI
Terminator 4

Hollywood is making it so easy for me to stick to my commitment not to contribute money to the MPAA. The greed, avarice, theft and generally despicable tactics of the MPAA/RIAA and their members over the decades compounded by their recent assault on consumers fair use rights have led me to adopt a simple, pacifist and legal protest. I absolutely refuse to purchase any movies or music firsthand. That’s about 100 movies and 250 albums a year that no longer go to these companies bottom lines. And I don’t have to sacrifice anything, between Netflix, Amoeba Music and Acquarius Records I get all the second hand media I want.

If you want to persnickety I am making indirect financial contributions but I have sacrificed nothing and I have dramatically decreased the cash flow from me to them. Neener, neener, neener.

Update I was thinking about this later and my numbers are wrong it’s more like 60 movies and 150 CDs a year. The vast majority of my purchases are from indie labels and although I don’t keep a list of the “good” and “bad” labels there are bands for whom the wait for the second-hand bin is far too great a torture and I stray from my line of purity. Oh forgive me, Jeebus.

This post reminded me of a guy I went to college with (Chris Troy) who once told me that buying two CDs a week would get old. Well if you ever read this Chris, I’ve been buying 3+ CDs a week since June 1994 and it hasn’t got old yet.

Your Netflix Ratings

Robert Keogh — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 05:10:42 +0000

I really love my Netflix account. I’ve been using it for years and at this point I’ve rated almost 3000 movies. Granted just over 900 of those I never, ever want to see and most of those I wish had never been made - but hey that’s enough about me. I enjoy toying with data like this, amalgamating it and proffering it for view by friends and strangers alike.

The other day I decided to abstract my ratings data from Netflix and a cursory Google search turned up some previous work by John Ressig and Devanshu Mehta. Naturally, it was not going to be as straightforward as downloading someone else’s hard work and running a script. Netflix has changed the Login URL and Ratings page URL, as well as the HTML format of the Ratings page since these packages were written. So I figured it was time for me to try my hand at updating the requisite code.

I decided to add a few enchancements such as abstracting the URLs and regexp to a config file. Provide the functionality to capture the retrieved data in a database (PostGreSQL) if the user so desires. Cleanup the codebase and apply several of Damian Conway’s best practices.

I highly reccomend downloading Devanshu’s package as it has several python scripts that garner additional meta-data from Netflix. Devanshu has also gone to the trouble of documenting many of the basic steps required to get your environment set up, check out his blog article for the instructions. The file my code generates is in a format compatible with his. Download and have some fun.

Road Fatalities and Unionist Propaganda

Robert Keogh — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 15:41:38 +0000

Reading through my Irish News email (courtesy of Jay Dooling) I came across this Belfast Telegraph article discussing road traffic safety in Ireland (Republic Roads Are Amongst The Most Deadly In Europe). The Unionist Pravda is taking these tragic events are trying to spin an anti-Republic line.

A survey by the RAC Foundation found that drivers from
Northern Ireland were twice as likely to have a fatal car
crash in the Republic as at home.

While the overall UK¹ per capita death rate is two-thirds that of the Republic of Ireland, Northern Irelands’ is right up there with the Republic. Someone should send them a calculator and then instructions on long division.

	The South	The North
Population	4,234,925	1,685,267
Fatalities 2005	396	135
Per 100,000	9.35	8.01

¹ International Road Accident Fatality Statistics for 2003

Orange Hall Attacks - Timeline

Robert Keogh — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 22:28:17 +0000

The MIT software development group Simile have created several interesting semantic web applications of which their Timeline javascript application recently caught my eye. I am very interested in alternate representations of data that yield a more holistic overview allowing the detection of patterns and relationships that are not easily visualised in flat text tables and the various bar/pie charts that hithertofore have been the gold standard. I want to be able to navigate the data in a manner akin to a mini-interweb, observe the types and nature of the relationships between related and disparate data sets but I get way ahead of myself.

Of course, one really needs sets of data to get realise this goal and boy is garnering that data tedious - as illustrated by the abandonment of my CDDB project soon after code completion.

Thankfully there are many people out there generating datasets of interest and making them available. One of those is a list of Orange Hall attacks during the course of The Troubles that Fair Deal a blogger from Slugger O’Toole has compiled. I have taken this database and ported it to Simile’s Timeline application Timeline of Orange Hall attacks.

Charlie Haughey - Honoured Paramour

Robert Keogh — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 22:42:59 +0000

In Lima, Peru in the Miraflores neighbourhood there is a park by the ocean where lovers congregate to watch the rapid and often impressive sunsets - Parque del Amor. Why there is a statue of Charles Haughey there I do not know, why he’s lying atop some floozie is somewhat more puzzling. Should the Dept. of Foreign affairs get involved?