Sam's Blog

Google released its latest transparency report today. Normally, I wouldn’t bother looking but it came up in my Google+ feed so I was curious.

The statistics for the US are along the lines of what I would expect, however what surprised be most was the ones for Ireland.

Between January 2012 and June 2012 there were 34 requests for user account information from the government to Google

I’m not suggesting a conspiracy, I am just curious what this is about. There is no other requests listed in any other timeframe shown (2009 - Present). 

I guess my curiosity will have to stay as just that

So after my recent blog post about our difficulty getting our DUNS number we received one. It came as a surprise as we didn’t actually request one (perhaps someone noticed my rant).

The one problem we have though is it doesn’t work. Not because it’s an incorrect number but because Apple does not accept sole traders as valid companies. There are 3 of us working in the company full time but it’s registered as a sole trader right now due to our size and because it makes a lot of things easier to do.

So it seems Apple has made it difficult once again for small companies to release apps with their trade names. We’ve decided to register a developer account and release our app under my name, so it’s not hopeless.

I can’t understand the logic behind this and hope Apple see the light, because as it stands this practise is annoying and cumbersome

So I went to register a company account the other day and upon reaching the registration page for the developer program I’m asked for a ‘D-U-N-S’ number.

That’s odd. What’s that?

After doing some digging I find it’s a number distributed from D&B to registered businesses only. This seems like an odd form of verification, but it’s free so why does it matter?

I then tried to acquire one. Which I have still been unsuccessful in. My attempted were as such:

• Tried online registration: US Only
• Contacted Support: Given a US accessible only number
• Rang the Irish Office: Disconnected
• Rang Directory Enquirers: Company doesn’t exists in Ireland (even though they list an office)
• Found the Irish and UK online registration form buried in their website: Company not found
• Go to register company: Internet Explorer only I’m afraid

At this stage I’m likely to cry but if that didn’t push me over the edge, the next thing pushed me near to a mental breakdown

Registration time (Free): 45 days

45 Days! Why the hell does it take 45 days to get a number from a company I’ve never heard of, to put a FREE app on the app store as a company?!

The real kicker is

Registration time (€300): 1 week

Yup, 7 days if I fork over €300. No thanks I’ll wait. Fun part is in 45 days I’ll still have to wait for my developer license to activate and then for my app to be approved

If this doesn’t alienate corporations from producing iOS apps I don’t know what will

Join in the Hacker News Discussion

I will never understand how people justify charging for it. Here’s a code snippet of a website I recently started managing after a ‘Wordpress company’ went in and ‘built’ it

Savita Halappanavar should not have died. It was most likely preventable. So why did it happen? 

As Dr Jen Gunter writes:

1) Irish law does indeed treat pregnant women as second class citizens and denies them appropriate medical care. The medical team was following the law to avoid criminal prosecution.

2) Irish law does not deny women the care they need; however, a zealous individual doctor or hospital administrator interpreted Catholic doctrine in such a way that a pregnant woman’s medical care was somehow irrelevant and superceded by heart tones of a 17 weeks fetus that could never be viable.

3) Irish law allows abortions for women when medically necessary, but the doctors involved were negligent in that they could not diagnose infection when it was so obviously present, did not know the treatment, or were not competent enough to carry out the treatment.

This is simply unacceptable. That any of the above things could have happened. Ireland is no longer in the dark ages. We are no longer a poor and uneducated country. One of our biggest industries is Health Care and modern Chemistry was born in Ireland. So how could a country that has come so far do so little for a woman who was in need of life saving treatment.

The result of this is that instead of the world viewing us for our advances, they are looking at our failures. A failure that, if legislated, could have saved Savita’s life. This legislation should already be in place as the X Case paved the way for it almost 20 years ago. Not only that but it seems to be what the public want legislated.

The Government need to stop being so afraid of it and tackle the issue. It is horrible that somebody has to die for this issue to actually get off the ground.

Also a footnote for those involved in ‘Pro-life’ campaigns. Pro-life as a term is irrelevant when both parties die

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” 

~ Gloria Steinem

(Source: drjengunter.wordpress.com)

More informaion on our technical aspects soon

So I went ahead and followed the arch wiki to try and reduce the memory used by Chromium on my computer. All was successful except when I tried to add flags to Chromium on startup.

It seemed that GNOME Shell didn’t want to let me edit the icon in any way to add flags etc like I could do with oldschool GNOME.

After a quick search I found the file to be edited to accomodate this can be found here:

/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop

So I have been using arch for awhile now and have found a few issues, so here are the solutions I have found

• Problem:
Arch decided one day to delete the command ‘killall’
• Solution: 
  First of all you will need ‘pkgtools’ installed
  $ yaourt -S pkgtools
  Then you will need to update it
  $ pkgtools —update
  Finally you can use it to search for which package the missing command resides in
  $ pkgfile killall
  This applies to more than this situation and is useful for finding out what packages commands belong to for anything that has gone missing  

• Problem:
Running low on root disk space a lot?
• Solution:  
  $ pacman -Sc     -This clears the cache
  $ pacman -Scc   -This clears everything cached. Try to avoid using it
  Note: both of these commands will hamper your ability to do rollbacks. Especially the second one. Use with extreme caution and try to remove unused packages before resorting to this 

• Problem:
Chromium using /all/ of your RAM
• Solution:
  This one isn’t easy. I was surprised at the amount of memory Chromium was using with any more than 6 tabs open (if you have anything flash related open it makes it even worse). This link should help you out. It certainly helped me. Pay special attention to the section on Tmpfs. 

• Problem:
  Pesky *.conf.pacnew files
• Solution:
  $ find / -name “*.pacnew”         - This finds all pacnew files on your disk
  $ yaourt -C                               - If you use yaourt
  Executing the following script will also work (use gksudo and not kdesu if using GNOME):

  #!/bin/bash
  # pacnew-update - merge *.pacnew files with original configurations with meld
  
  pacnew=$(find /etc -type f -name "*.pacnew")
  
  for config in $pacnew; do
    # Merge with meld
    kdesu meld ${config%\.*} $config &
    wait
  done
  

I shall add more to this as more problems occur and I manage to fix them :P

Reddit contributors:

• karol_007     - Corrected me on ways to fix ‘killall’
• sporkexec     - Gave me suitable warning for clearing the pacman cache

So I followed through on two new years resolutions today.

1. Finally fix my blog (Tada!)
2. Delete my Facebook (14 more days ,it’s gone forever)

Hopefully the rest of the year is as productive