Recent content on Cian Clarke - Technologist, Sailor, Photographer. Boston, USA / Waterford, Ireland
One of the key faecets of a functioning democracy is the ability to make an informed decision when voting. The European and local elections are both happening this Friday in Ireland. There are abundant resources available to find out about European election candidates - a relatively small pool of folks running, combined with very large electoral areas made this an easy problem to solve. Local…
One of the more tangible usecases of Generative AI of late has been the ability to vector-encode various texts, and run queries on them - most often as a very effective knowledgebase search. The technique du jour is something called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) - essentially, take a user’s query, retrieve the most relevant text from a large knowledge base, and pass the text plus the…
We had a problem all to familiar to development teams recently: Important feature needs releasing, but there is a backlog of pull requests which need reviewing. I decided to give GPT-assisted PR review another try. TL;DR - it’s promising but still needs work. The Output I ran GPT against some spike (i.e. crap) code used to generate some statistics for this website, and here’s what it…
For months now (ok - about 3 months), we’ve been confusing ChatGPT with the underlying model, GPT-3, and the things one can do with it’s API. There’s been a good amount of “Now with ChatGPT” in the conversational AI landscape when of course people mean using the GPT-3 API, but it’s always felt like a bit of a nerdy clarification. With today’s release of…
ChatGPT, and it’s underlying model, GPT-3 is all the rage right now - but how does it perform against “traditional” Natural Language Understanding (NLU herein)? I decided to pitch GPT-3 against the tried-and-tested approach for building chatbots for many years. For this test I chose Dialogflow, but similar results could likely be achieved with Lex, Dialogflow, Watson, WIT, et…
Time for a brief return to my past life as bundle-of-red-hair-jetting-about-on-a-stage tech evangelist, to share some thoughts on ChatGPT. I’ve lost track of the number of friends and colleagues who have reached out asking “Hey you work in AI, what do you think about ChatGPT”? The first thing I need to explain is that I’m an unashamed hipster. I was into ChatGPT /before it was cool/. That’s not to…
Speck Chronicles: Refit Begins In August 2020, Speck become my boat. After survey, I found myself with 11 tons of boat sat on the hard for just a few days, not leaving much time to complete any work that I wanted to do. There were a couple of important jobs to knock off that week: New bottom paint (the yard insisted on doing this - but the price was very reasonable) Get the prop off, and down to…
I had Owned Solitude, my 1987 Catalina 30 for 4 years - and after sailing that little boat some 3,000nm over the course of those four summers, it was a boat I found myself quickly outgrowing. It was when I found myself taking Solitude solo some 30nm offshore, regularly out in 30kt winds for shits ’n’ giggles, or PHRF racing, it was time to admit I was probably exceeding the “coastal…
In 2015, I ported this blog from Wordpress to an experimental new Node.js open source project known as Ghost. It was intended as a Wordpress replacement, and I found a neat way to embed this into the server-side rendering Express app which hosted my site - which was the style at the time. So what happened? Fast forward to 2017, and software moves on - fast. After a brief blooging hiatus, I…
Photos of Speck courtesy of the very talented Morgan
It’s been almost a year since my last trip to South East Asia, and my last adventure there gave me the bug. No - not the Novovirus I caught, but the yearning to return! When the chance arose to spend 22 hours travelling “cattle class” (as sales affectionately call it) to a city on literally the other side of the world, I did what any self-respecting wanderlust infected solution…
I’m typically drawn to technical pursuits (brewing, coding) so it wasn’t surprising when I took up sailing earlier this year. It started with just my own curiosity- I’d pore over books, forums, blogs, videos, and just about every other piece of information available on the topic. One thing I hadn’t quite anticipated was just how slippery a slope it would become. I’d…
For the first time in 11 years, I no longer own a car. Last night I sold my beloved BMW M3 with no intention of replacing it. I’ve become the quintessential millennial urbanite, and in true millennial fashion, I now present a first-world problem of epic proportions. Why sell, you might ask? Living in Downtown Boston means very rarely is it necessary for me to drive - so much so that I found…
I recently had the good fortune to spend two weeks in Australia on business. United’s fleet of new Boeing Dreamliners (my second 787 flight in the last few months) made for a relatively comfortable Sunday night 14 hour flight from SFO, all things considered. The flight was a red-eye, with wheels down in Sydney at 7am Tuesday (yes, Tuesday) morning - damned international date line. The taxi trip…
Today marks three years since I arrived in the States. I recored the first few weeks after my arrival with regular posts about my life, but after the first month, these posts dried up as I became more immersed in my life here. I decided this anniversary was a point to look back on the last three years, as much has changed since I first arrived. I’m a “Permenantly Landed Resident”…
After three days in Chiang Mai, it was time to head south to Krabi. Krabi We decided to spend a night in Krabi town before making the trek out to the island of Koh Lanta. We heard time and time again that Krabi is the best of the beach resort areas–not nearly as affected by the plight of tourism than the more populated Phuket. Well, I’d hate to see Phuket, because Krabi is a real dump.
After Cambodia, it was back to Bangkok for a few days. My travel companions from Ireland and the US joined me here, and our group traveled together for the rest of the trip. During our time in Thailand we visited the two largest cities - Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Bangkok Bangkok is a city as international as they come, with expensive shopping districts, where brand name clothing seem to cost even…
Cambodia was one of the last-minute portions of the trip I booked as somewhere to spend 3 days before the rest of my travel companions flew in. Of course, I was glad to visit the Angkor temple complex, but there was more to Cambodia than just this. Unfortunately, Cambodia seems like a country of contrasts. There’s a wealthy portion of the population who work for the people’s party,…
The temples of Angkot (Khmer for “Capital City”) are one of the most expansive in the world - with over 1,000 temples in the area in various states of repair. It was the largest pre-industrial city in the world, and it’s also one of the most popular tourist destinations in South East Asia - and for good reason. To start the day a-temple-ing, I set my alarm for 5.30am. Actually,…
Getting to Khao Yai After a night in an on-brand hotel in Bangkok to wash the jet-lag away, it was time to find a minibus going to Pak Chong, the gateway city to the national park north-east of Bangkok. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of mini-busses spread out over an area roughly the size of Boston Common. Destination names are written only in the Thai alphabet, and drivers do not speak…
Said Metal Tube - Boeing Dreamliner The least enjoyable thing about a trip to Asia - especially from the East Coast of the United States - has to be the travel to and from. First up is a 14 hour segment to Tokyo, the only consolation for which was the form the metal tube took - a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. I can see why this is considered the pinnacle of modern aviation.
IRC is the de-facto standard communication channel for Open Source projects. It’s perfectly suited, since the protocol itself is open, and has no ties or leanings towards any industry or commercial backers. Where it’s not so well suited is in the realm of corporate communications. Protocol Lacks Critical Chat Functionality The original IRC protocol had no built-in mechanism to protect…
I’ve been working on creating an API mapper for RedHat Mobile, the first phase of which involves a basic REST client. Part of the debugging output is a RAW view of the outbound HTTP request, and the incoming HTTP response, line for line - always a useful thing to have, since HTTP clients can inject their own content unbeknownst to us. Some googling of “mikeal request raw request…
Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to anonymise all data published. All queries were run by a third party who provided descriptions of the various AM tables - I do not have access to the data set. I cannot run queries on the database-can’t and won’t tell you if your partner was a member. The Ashley Madison leak provided an interesting insight into the seedy underworld of a cheater.…
In the day job, we find ourselves integrating with SharePoint all the time. As is typical with Microsoft technologies, SharePoint is not really renowned for it’s open APIs. “Share“point doesn’t really like to share. A SharePoint Primer (Skip this if you know about how SharePoint works) Here’s the basics I wanted to know about this product before I began integrating:…
Anybody who knows me will attest I have a strong affinity for Asian cuisine. My absolute favourite dish is a Thai Tom Yum soup (often also called “Hot and Sour Soup”, but not the Chinese style - which is awful). I’d always assumed that my substitutions were the reason it never worked out, or maybe I was missing some magic ingredient (..the right stock?), because my first two…
Password restrictions are a constant pain in the ass. Most startup hipsters get this one right, but for every cool new startup, there’s 10 websites with some archaic password restriction. Word Based Passwords The advent of password managers such as OnePassword have made it easier to have unique, compliant passwords for every site you visit, but password validation on these sites still sucks.…
Getting permanent residency status in the United States (a.k.a. a Green Card) can be notoriously difficult. The most popular route for technology workers is to have their employer sponsor the Green Card process after many years (probably at least 5) living in the US on a Visa. In exchange usually an extended term of service is expected with said employer. I went a different route. Some of the…
Last night, we enjoyed a sitting of the Tasting Menu at The Cliff House in Ardmore. What follows is my *best effort at recalling the dishes, and the experience at large. *Some dishes may be best described with the assistance of the maître d', rather than Cian after a Gin Martini. The Courses First, we started with an amuse-bouche of what was essentially a cream of onion soup of sorts. This also…
Our Cheesy On-Stage Selfie Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of presenting as part of a keynote session. I’ve presented lots before - almost weekly to smaller audiences as part of sales, and plenty of developer evangelism presentations too. I’ve probably presented to an audience of ~200 before, but today’s keynote multiplied that count 10x. The auditorium was standing room only. It’s interesting…
Like anybody with a background in technology, I’m inundated with unsolicited emails from recruiters. Most recruiters demand a sizeable percentage of annual salary for successfully placing a candidate, so it can be a very lucrative industry. The average Software Engineering salary in the Boston area is $85k[1]. A particularly effective head hunter charges as much as 25%[2]. That’s a…
 My current tap list BeerSmith seems to have established itself as the most popular recipe construction & inventory management system available to brewers. Unfortunately, this information contained within the product is not normally available to end users in an easy-to-consume format. I was interested in driving a website-based tap listing using…
 *Peltier Cooled Conical* It’s no secret that temperature control is one of the key steps to making great beer, and it’s something my process had been lacking with some time. I’d evaluated a number of approaches to this problem, with some important criteria. Whatever I chose had to be: Space efficient - 900ft2 downtown…
Having had my first exposure to Node.js in the very early days, I’d always had much conviction that it would be the next big framework-of-choice for many developers. From the very beginning, I’d used the Express framework to wire up various sites. I’ve built Client’s websites using Express, even an entire product - but my personal homepage always remained a javascript single-page-application, with…
Ever wanted to glean insight into how modern mobile apps communicate with their APIs, but not had the means? As a developer, it’s easy to see this information – all it takes is the right tools. A debugging proxy is a proxy server which is run on the same network as the mobile device. When we force web traffic thru this proxy, and install it’s certificate on the device, we see inside the…
**Days**: 3 **Distance**: 730 Miles **Hours on road**: 21 **(US) Gallons fuel: **39 San Diego When the need arose for me to travel to a trade show in San Diego, needless to say I was delighted. No amount of booth duty could stop me from exploring San Diego as best I could. I was incredibly lucky to be staying in the Manchester Grand Hyatt, on the 30th floor with the most incredibly views of the…
It’s travelled with me everywhere – 3 continents, 17 countries and 11 US states – and it’s never missed a beat. It’s photographed an exhibition worth of material, produced photos hanging on people’s walls, published in books and newspapers. It’s been bashed against rocks, weathered rain showers, and even a blizzard – and it’s still functioning like the day it left the factory floor. I should owe…
My favourite beer I’ve ever tasted is one produced in the very town I’ve lived in most of my life. I’m lucky one of Ireland’s foremost craft breweries set up shop in Dungarvan, and their Comeragh Challenger, when on cask, is the best beer in the world. It’s a tall claim, and also one difficult to verify. It’s only available on cask in a select number of locations in Ireland, one of which just so…
iBeacons, revealing the relatively simple innards iBeacons are a low-power bluetooth device Apple quietly release as part of the iOS7 launch recently. They’re the Apple alternative to NFC, a small location aware device which developers can use to track user’s proximity to a location, and trigger various actions in a mobile app. Potential use cases include payments, exhibit information, proximity…
When I first started brewing, I was convinced it’d only be a means to cheaper IPA. The micro-brewery explosion in Ireland wasn’t yet a thing – IPAs didn’t line the shelves of beer stores. I was entirely sure I’d continue to buy IPA-ready kits with hopped malt that I just added yeast to, and that’d be that. The Early Days ~2009, pretty sure this was a stout After a while, I found most results were…
I’ve been a big fan of a local MA brewery’s smoked black lager for some time now, certainly one of my favourite local brews. It’s one of those few beers that tastes fantastic on draft, but still bottles really well too. It’s even better still on nitro – stout-like colours, some roasted notes and creamy mouth feel make beer gas the best way to enjoy this beer. I decided to try brew a clone of this,…
Europe’s ultimate budget airline, Ryanair, has been the carrier of choice for much of my European travel. I’ve flown multiple times to Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris – all for less than the price of a nice meal. I say I’ve flown these places – really, I’ve flown to within two hours drive of these cities, and figured it out from there – Ryanair isn’t known for renting stands at premium…
When flights from Boston to San Juan present themselves for $180, it’s hard to resist – I couldn’t. With the flights setting the precedent of a cheap getaway, it was straight to AirBnB for accommodation. While I was completely set on a $60/night rental with a distant coastal view, the pictures of Juan’s beachfront apartment, for a little more, that sold me. The Accommodation I ended up staying in…
I first started skiing shortly after I moved to the US, and I’ve been hooked on this sport since my first run down the mountain. My first opportunity to ski didn’t occur until the tail end of the 2013 season, and I didn’t get the chance to do much in the waning days of winter, but I’d definitely caught the bug. Mid-way thru this season, I was the lucky recipient of a pair of skis donated by a…
This year, St. Patricks Day in the United States has been mired with a controversy that’s been brewing for years, perhaps exasperated by the recent RTÉ coverup of #Pantigate [1]. The New York parade has received most coverage – with calls for Irish Politicians to boycott the parade unless issues surrounding allowing LGBT rights movements to participate in the parade. A similar storm has been…