In the morning session, the upset of the tournament took place when Jamie Jones managed to claw back a 3-1 deficit to beat the reigning world champion John Higgins. I did watch the match on TV though, and you could see from Jones’ face how much it meant to him, definitely the biggest win of his career, he’ll go on to play Andrew Higginson in the next round.

Ding Junhui managed to put away Ben Wollaston with the help of two centuries, 4-2. Though he managed 2 centuries, the rest of the game wasn’t Ding at his best and he’ll hope to improve in the next round where he’ll play Mark Selby

Stephen Lee then continued his good form to beat Micheal Holt 4-1.

The first match I saw was Robertson vs. Lisowski. The match started in quite exciting fashion, with both players putting in a few very decent safety shots. Robertson went ahead in the first frame but Lisowski managed to come back and draw to force a respotted black.

It looked like the black would go down after a few shots but Robertson missed a relatively straightforward shot to keep the game going. Robertson eventually took the frame and looked relieved to go 1 – 0 up. A fluke by Lisowski in the next frame wasn’t enough and Robertson held his nerve despite some poor play to go 2 – 0 up. The 3rd frame showed signs of what Robertson is capable of, when he took a few tricky reds to close up the frame, still, there were poor shots from each player and the match wasn’t looking like a classic.

Lisowski showed his frustration by breaking up a bunch of reds in the 4th frame, but tt ended up being to his advantage, as he was able to capitalise on the positioning of the balls to win the frame. 3 – 1, could we be in for another upset like earlier on in the Higgins game?

No. No we weren’t. Robertson sealed the deal in the next frame. In the post match press conference, he summed it up nicely, he said he didn’t play well, but a win is a win, you can hear his press conference in full here - http://soundcloud.com/moniquelimbos/ptcgfneilrobertsonr2

Next up was Perry vs. Dott. An interesting prospect and a tough one to call. The quality of snooker started off somewhat better in this one, with Perry taking the first frame. Dott replied instantly with a nicely taken red, and although he stumbled across the line, he made the score 1-1.

Next frame was Perrys with a well taken 84, which could easily have been much more than that, making the game 2 – 1. The 4th frame was a drawn out affair, ending up with both players exchanging safety shots on the green. It was finally decided when incredibly Perry, while escaping a snooker, not only potted the brown but the white as well, allowing Dott to clean up and level the match 2 – 2. By this stage the game had already gone on over an hour and it was looking like a long night ahead in the Bailey Allen Hall.

The next frame went back and forth, with a 67 from Perry enough to take the frame and go 3-2 up. The crowd getting slightly thinner as this game wore on.

The final frame should have finished earlier, when Perry had just to pot a single red to put the frame beyond doubt, but he missed it, something which seems to be happening a lot in this competition. Dott still needed a snooker to win the frame and he couldn’t get it, Perry taking a red to finish the game 4-2.

He’ll face good friend and pratice partner Neil Robertson in the Quarter Final. In the post match press conference he mentioned his disappointment that it has to be his friend Neil, but that’s the way it is. The while conference can be heard here - http://soundcloud.com/s-an-otuathaigh/joe-perry-post-match-press

That’s all for today, looking forward to some good games tomorrow, O’Sullivan is playing, as are Trump and Selby. Should be a cracking day.

Covering the competition for an actual radio station instead of just going to it as a spectator has its perks, not least of which, I have a press pass for the competition allowing me to use the media room, attend press conferences and most importantly, all the matches.

Most of our coverage can be found at http://twitter.com/flirtfmsport where we’re live tweeting all the matches, and reports are broadcast on Flirt FM throughout the day. I covered a few matches today, and I’ve decided to post my reports on them while they’re still fresh in my head.

Mark Davis vs. Tom Ford

This will officially go down as the first professional snooker match I’ve seen in the flesh. I quite enjoyed it it has to be said, though I would have loved to have had the dulcet tones of Steve Davis and Ken Doherty in my ear, BBC aren’t covering this event unfortunately, and Eurosport aren’t doing earpieces for the crowd for commentary.

Nonetheless, it was an interesting game. Davis raced ahead to a 2-0 lead and looked quite confident, but let Ford back into the game slightly during a scrappy 3rd frame. 2-1. After that though, Ford never really looked into the game at all, and Davis took a couple of very sweet long pots along with a break of 72 to take it to 3-1. It was a messy next frame with a good bit of safety play but Davis wrapped it up in the end.

At the press conference afterwards, Davis mentioned that he really liked coming to Ireland and would love to play more tournaments here. He also set out his stall by telling us he’s here to win, and will be very much going for it this week.

Xiao Guadong vs. Dominic Dale

This match I was very much looking forward to. I interviewed Dominic over the phone last week and found him to a really nice guy to talk to, I asked him a few questions to get a 5 minute interview and afterwards we just chatted about snooker for a while. Naturally I wanted him to do well.

Standing in his way was up and coming Chinese player Xiao Guadong. The pair have met once before with Dale winning and when Xiao arrived it was clear that there was something wrong with his left (bridging) hand, as it was heavily bandaged. All signs looked to be pointing towards a Dale victory.

However, someone didn’t send Xiao the script and from early on the Chinese player showed that he is capable of potting balls from anywhere on the table, sinking some delicious long shots. He started nicely with a break of 71 to take the first frame but showed maybe a small bit of inexperience by missing a straightforward black in the second, allowing Dale to level the match.

The momentum then shifted back to Xiao, he took the third 58-15 and then put in a very impressive 80 to make it 3-1. Dale still had some fight left and an excellently put together 72 left the game 3-2 giving Dale fans (like myself) some hope. It wasn’t to be though, Dale allowed Xiao an easy opener and he didn’t need to be asked twice, wrapping up the 6th frame and the match. 4-2 the final score.

At the press conference, Xiao explained (in somewhat shaky English) how he broke his hand, seemingly while sleeping. He was advised to take 3 months off, but disobeyed doctors orders to come and play the tournament. Seems to be have been worth it though, as he has a match against Judd Trump to look forward to on Friday.

Ricky Walden vs. Matthew Stephens

My report on this one will be short, because the match itself was short, a mere 45 minutes, Matthew Stevens never got a handle on the game and Ricky Walden looked very impressive, clocking up breaks of 66, 130, 95 and 131 to hammer Stevens 4-0.

After the game Walden was in a confident mood, saying that his break building is his strong point, and if his safety play goes right, he can beat anyone. Rightly so in my opinion, a very impressive performance and definitely someone to watch. He faces O’Sullivan in the next round and it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if he was to send the Rocket home.

Joe Perry vs. Fergal O’Brien

This game turned out to be the exact opposite to the one preceding it in terms of length, frames lasting on average 30 min+. It was a tough, grinding sort of a game with plenty of mistakes from both players. Unfortunately for the large expectant crowd hoping for an Irish win it was not to be, with Gentleman Joe taking the game 4-0. It could hardly be called convincing however, and if O’Brien had taken even a fraction of the chances presented to him it may have been a different story. To the disappointment of the crowd, O’Brien couldn’t buy a long pot and while he was in the balls repeatedly played out of position, or worse, rattled shots off the jaws to hand frames to Perry.

The real crushing blow came in the 3rd frame where O’Brien was well ahead, in fact, Perry required snookers. Perry played a few excellent safety shots and got right back into it with snookers on the blue. Any ball would have secured O’Brien the frame but he was again let down by his long potting and Perry took the frame on the black ball winning by the narrowest of margins.

Losing a frame in that fashion was never going to do O’Briens confidence any good and although he rallied well in the 4th frame with a 42, a 74 from Perry secured the win. Both players will be disappointed with their performance and Perry will know he’ll have to improve if he’s to challenge Graham Dott on Thursday evening.

So that’s it, those are the games I covered today, I wasn’t around for Lisowskis exciting 4-3 match or Stephen Lee’s convincing victory over Martin Gould, but the World Snooker site has reports on those if you’re curious, done up by the excellent Ivan from World Snooker.

I’ll be at some of the games for the rest of the week, and you can follow our coverage at http://twitter.com/flirtfmsport and likely here too in the evenings after the matches.

For the 20th birthday of the Linux kernel, Microsoft have made a video wishing Linux happy birthday.

My first reaction to this? That’s pretty nice, at the end of the day, there’s no reason we can’t be friends just because of a difference of opinion on the best way to develop an operating system. In fact, I’m surprised Microsoft was relaxed enough to let this out, good on them.

The top comment on the Slashdot post about the video?

It begins with, “I read this as a slight against Linux…” and goes on to say..

I think the general philosophy that has clearly been reiterated by the Linux community is there is absolutely no room for trust in Microsoft. They are a convicted monopolist and have called upon everyone to view Linux as a cancer. They continue to use their patents to extort payment from large and small with bogus insubstantiated claims against Linux. They are the company that uses embrace extend extinguish. This animation represents the same underhanded intentions.

Do these people ever turn off?

First stop is finegael2011.com, the official site of the 2011 Fine Gael election bid. Though recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it had been hacked, as on the front page there was a poorly coded flash game which seems to make fun of Irelands political figures, including Enda himself (link). Enda is the protagonist and his catchphrases, complete with dodgy Mayo accent, include : ”Tax that!” (to Labour candidates), “Cheapest bank bailout?” (to Brian Linehan) and my personal favourite, “It’s the economy stupid” to Gerry Adams. Bear in mind, Kenny spouts these when you kill other politicians by throwing Fine Gael logos at them.

This comes on the heels of the recent cringe worthy Valentines Day Fine Gael eCards that popped up on the site on February 14th. Create yours here. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when that one got approved.

Finally, and most egregiously, whomever manages the party’s Facebook page has been deleting posts related to the issue of gay marriage. Instead of coming out, if you’ll pardon the pun, with their official line and meeting questions head on they have fanned the flames of a controversy that the party scarcely needs at this important stage of the campaign.

It seems that Fine Gael has taken its first baby steps into the world of Internet canvassing, and with it has come eCards, flash games and censorship. Maybe next time around they’ll plan with a little more wisdom and try to use their online presence to engage with voters and invite some debate on policy and issues, instead of just on who can get the best score in their infuriating sidescrolling platformer.

1. Create your mount point, sudo mkdir/media/windows
2. Add a line to /etc/fstab, the one below is for a Windows HDD, with the main partition being sda2 (you can work this out by graphically mounting the partition through nautilus and then running df -h)

/dev/sda2 /media/windows ntfs-3g user,fmask=0111,dmask=0000 0 0

Save /etc/fstab then you can run mount /dev/sda2 to mount the drive. It should mount automatically at /media/windows from now on.

It seems most companies treat customer service and after sales support as a chore, when in reality it’s an opportunity. Too many companies see the sale as the end of the road, when it’s just the start. After sales is when a company should be showing a customer why they were right to buy whatever the product was, and turns a customer into a loyal customer.

The Wrong Way

This isn’t always the case however. Most people who know me, know that I’m not a big fan of Apple products. It may come as a surprise that I used to love iPods, and had an 40GB iPod 4th Gen. It suffered badly from the infamous ‘click of death’ and had to be sent back multiple times to have the hard drive replaced. It was massively frustrating. It was eventually resolved by the problem reoccurring a few days after the 30 day repair warranty, which resulted in the customer service reps refusing to even speak to me on the phone. I’ve haven’t bought another Apple product since (excepting picking them up for others in the US). These days I’m told that Apple support is now the best around, but that bad experience put me off their products and it’s what I remember.

The Right Way

On the other hand, I got a set of Shure headphones as a gift last Christmas (thanks Cian..) and loved them, for a year they’ve had heavy use. Last month though, they developed a fault so I contacted customer support. As it was a gift, I didn’t have the receipt, which wasn’t a problem, the serial number proved that they were still under warranty. Sent them back, and a brand new set arrived after about a week. Emails to the reps were answered quickly and the whole process was painless. I’m delighted, and next time I go to buy headphones, take a guess as to what brand I’ll be buying..

The Other Way

“Shane” I hear you cry, “Apple can’t be blamed for hard drive failures, they’re the least reliable of all computer parts.” I know, as an Electronic Engineer I understand that products have problems and break all the time. It wasn’t the actual failures that irked me, it was the attitude of the customer support who treated me as an irritant and didn’t seem to want to help. It is possible to handle hardware problems properly though.

I have a Dell XPS laptop,  the M1330, which contains the Nvidia 8400GS graphics chip. Do a quick google search for the words “nvidia dell” and you’ll see why this is a problem. Mine has failed 3 times now. This could be a big rant about how terrible this is, but Dell win back points by how they handle XPS support. When the laptop breaks, I phone Dells 24 hour XPS support line, and they send out a repair guy (we’re on first name terms now, nice fella) with the  replacement part and you’re back up and running in 24 hours. I love it, even if there are problems with the product, they fix it promptly and with minimum fuss. Since something like a laptop is so essential, you can’t beat a bit of piece of mind, I wouldn’t be able to function if I had to send it away and wait a couple of weeks to get it back.

If you want people to buy from you more than once, invest in your customer service. It’s not hard to gain lots of loyal customers, who’ll defend your products to the death and recommend them to all their friends. It’s something that in theory is relatively easy to get right. Common sense and empathy go a long way, couple that with prompt communication and you’re set.

This took a while, so it was late when I went to bed. That left me with a conundrum, I wanted to install Ubuntu as soon as it came out, but I also wanted to sleep… Hmm..

The solution? I wrote a script. The new Ubuntu release is immediately announced on the Ubuntu Release Blog as soon as it propagates through the mirrors.

So, I wrote a shell script to run on the CompSoc servers that wget’s the Ubuntu Release blog RSS every minute, computes an MD5 sum of the page and checks has it changed. Since the next post to be published would be the release post, I would know immediately when the release was official.

To alert my sleeping self to this fact, I had the script send a text message to my phone using the meteorsms program when it detected that the post was up.

I then set my text ringtone to be something particularly loud and irritating so as to wake me.

I knocked this together in about 5 minutes, so I was pretty surprised when, at 11.37, exactly 1 minute after the blog updated, I got the following text.

Immediate Ubuntu plus a Sunday morning lie in. Success.

Code for the script below and it can be downloaded at this link

#!bin/bash

#Delete any previous dw's
rm index.html?feed=rss2

#Get file
wget -q http://release-blog.ubuntu.com/?feed=rss2

#Compute first sum
oldsum=$(md5sum index.html?feed=rss2)

#Infinite while loop
while true; do
rm index.html?feed=rss2
wget -q http://release-blog.ubuntu.com/?feed=rss2

#Compute new sum
newsum=$(md5sum index.html?feed=rss2)

if [ "$oldsum" != "$newsum" ]
then
echo $oldsum
echo "changed to;"
echo $newsum
echo "at"
date

#Send text message
meteorsms -m "Ubuntu out!!" me
exit
fi
#If md5s are the same, sleep for a minute and try again
sleep 60
done

To transfer money from one account to another, you have to set up a ‘benificary’ on the site. The procedure was as follows; Enter all the details, then wait about 4 days for a letter to arrive in the post with a code to enter online.

Waiting for the letter to arrive means it takes ages to set up an account which is infuriating. That’s why I was delighted to see they’ve changed the policy when I logged in today, now instead of sending the code in the post, they’ll text it to you. Finally, they’re catching up with other banks online services. Great, saves loads of time.

So, I put in my phone details to register for the service. Now, to confirm my registration, they’re going to.. send me a letter.

The inspiration for this post comes from reading a similar post by my friend and former CompSoc compatriot Nathan Shaughnessy. You can read his blog post here.

Basically, there’s a few things that were nice to have in mind in relation to your final year project, and this is to pass them along to others that may be going through the same process soon. Since I did Electronic and Computer Engineering, this advice will likely be of most use to Engineering and IT students, as the procedures are for the most part very similar.

First thing to note, nothing changes when you go into final year, you don’t change. Looking ahead to 4th year, I expected myself to really start knuckling down more, going out less and generally becoming more studious. Wishful thinking to say the least.

Arguably the most important part of final year is your final year project. It is weighted differently in different disciplines, and for Civil Engineers, it most certainly isn’t the most important part, but in my case, the FYP is worth 12 out of a total of 60 credits. It’s the single most important subject that’ll be listed in your results, and because it is weighted so heavily, it is great to bring up your average.

Since the project is worth so much, it’s important to get it right. This isn’t just about writing up your thesis in second semester, it starts from the 1st of September. By now you’ll likely have a pretty good idea as to what you are good at and where your interests lie, it’s crucial to find an FYP that you’ll like and won’t hate working on (in general at least).

You do this by first of all deciding which supervisor you want to work under. Talk to older students and ask them how they found a particular supervisor. Things to look for in a good supervisor are, you get along, s/he’s committed to meeting you at least once a week, s/he will keep you on your toes and their area of interest is something you find interesting. In general, heads of departments are too busy to make good attentive supervisors.

When you’ve picked your preferred supervisor, email them and ask to meet with them. Find out what they have in mind for final year projects. Make sure it is very well thought out with real, concrete goals. Ask yourself, if I take on this project, and sit down tomorrow, how do I start? In my case, I was approached by a supervisor with a suggestion for project that sounded very interesting, but it wasn’t very clear exactly what I had to do. I didn’t really know how I’d start it, and neither did the supervisor, so I decided against it. Instead I went with another supervisor and a project that had clear goals. I knew that I had to go out and use a particular code library to develop a particular algorithm. I could start right away.

Project goals always take longer than you expect. Always. Don’t aim to have your project work finished on the last day. Ideally, aim to have most of the work completed by the start of the second semester. It sounds early, but there will be delays, and the end of March creeps up really quickly when you get into second semester.

Once you are given the goals for your project, it seems like a massive job altogether. The way to get through all of it is to give yourself a goal for every meeting with your supervisor. Every week, have a few things you want to get done, and do them. You aren’t going to get ‘in trouble’ for not sticking to them, but if you do, your supervisor will be happy, and you’ll stay on track. Start each meeting going over what you have done in the last week, and don’t leave the meeting until you have a very good idea of what you need to do for next week.

In my case, this meant many late Sunday nights trying to get stuff done before my meeting on Monday morning. I got much of my best work done at about 2am on a Sunday, which isn’t ideal, but it worked.

Setting and meeting weekly deadlines is difficult, because problems crop up. The most important thing to do is not to cover up your difficulty. Lying and telling your supervisor that things are fine is the worst thing you can do, as you’ll just fall further behind. You aren’t going to lose marks for getting stuck, and your supervisor is an expert, they’ll be able to help you work it out.

At the start of the year, figure out what the deadlines are for various reports and presentations and note them. This way you won’t be caught, as most of our class were, with a couple of days in which to do a progress report after Christmas.

On the topic of Christmas, exams are over, in many cases, you’re finished with subjects for good and you should have a relatively small workload. Use this time to get a load of project work done. I took the first week and a half off, and then worked on my project for a few days I literally got about 75 percent of the project finished in that few days. It left me in excellent shape for second semester and my write up.

Your thesis write up is quite daunting at first. Looking at a couple of old theses that ran to well over 100 pages didn’t help. Don’t worry too much about quantity. Mine ended up being around 50 pages, and it was fine.

Your supervisor is essential in your write up, let’s face it, you have no idea how to write a thesis, I didn’t either. I still don’t. Your supervisor, on the other hand, does. They see several every year. Go to them early and get tips on how to go about writing up, layout, sections etc.

In conclusion, the key to a successful FYP is steady and consistent little bits of work. There’ll be slow weeks and weeks where you get loads done, but if you keep chipping away, it’ll work out in the end.

I got pretty lucky, I enjoyed my project (most of the time), had a great supervisor and had loads of help from some very knowledgeable post grads, I was encouraged to submit an actual research paper to a conference and somehow it got accepted. Then to top it off, I won the best final year project award for ECE. The 85% grade helped bring up my final grades immensely.

There are some crucial things at the start that you need to get right for your FYP to work out well, most importantly, pick something you want to do, and a supervisor you can work with. Get those two basics right and you really have no excuses not to get on well.

Well, the release was delayed at a very late stage, due to a show stopper bug found in the installation process. The bug can be found here – https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/570765

Basically the problem was with the migration assistant which helps carry over settings from already installed OSes. If the migration assistant found some material to carry over to Ubuntu, the GRUB menu would appear without entries for the other operating systems on the PC. For new users of Ubuntu, this would be a scary experience as they’d believe that their other OS was gone. There are a couple of easy fixes, but it was decided that the best fix was for the new version not to ship until this bug was fixed.

The Ubuntu release team, wisely in my opinion, decided to respin the official ISO’s for Ubuntu 32 and 64 bit so that this bug is not present in the final release.
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IncidentReports/2010-04-29-Late-respin-for-bug-570765)

This means that the release has been delayed for a few hours, but will still happen at some point today (Apr 29th). By all accounts (watch http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1463554&page=1
for up to date info) we’re not too far off an official release, so get your torrent clients ready, and please seed generously.