taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Guinness in Ireland dodges a bullet

May 10, 2008 at 8:59 am

Phew! The rumours were untrue. Diageo will not be closing down the Guinness brewery in Dublin 8, and will continue brewing the black stuff in Dublin 8, thankfully:

Diageo is to close its breweries at Kilkenny and Dundalk, significantly reduce its brewing capacity at St James’s Gate and build a new brewery on the outskirts of Dublin under a plan announced today.

The company said it would invest EUR 650 million (£520 million) between 2009 and 2013 in the restructuring.

The renovation of the St James’s Gate brewing operations is expected to cost around EUR 70 million and will see the volume of Guinness brewed there fall from around one billion pints a year, to just over 500 million.

This plant will serve the Irish and British markets and will be based on the Thomas St side of the site. The company said this would ensure that every pint of Guinness sold in Ireland would be brewed here. Approximately half of the 55 acre site will then be sold once the five-year project is complete.

Around 65 staff will remain in brewing operations at St James’s Gate with about 100 others due to transfer to the new Dublin plant. Although the company has yet to announce the exact location of its new brewery, the company says it will have a capacity of around nine million hectolitres, or around three times that of the refurbished St James’s Gate site. This new brewery will produce Guinness for export and ales and lagers for the Irish market.

Diageo said when the two Dublin breweries are fully operational in five years time it will transfer brewing out of the Kilkenny and Dundalk breweries and close these plants. This move will result in ‘a net reduction in staff of around 250′, the company said.

The company employs 800 people in its brewing operation and a total of 2,500 in the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Diageo said these two plants “do not have the scale necessary for sustained success in increasingly competitive market conditions”.

The company said it would offer those employees relocation opportunities where possible. Those for whom relocation is not possible will be offered “a severance package alongside career counselling”.

Operations at its Waterford brewery will be “streamlined” as part of the re-organisation leading to “some reduction in output”. the current workforce of 27 in Waterford would be reduced to ‘around 18′ but Diageo was unable to confirm the extent of the output reduction.

The company says the St James’s Gate site it proposes to sell and the Kilkenny and Dundalk sites have an estimated value of EUR 510 million.

The Guinness Storehouse, which receives around 900,000 visitors a year, will continue to be based at St. James’s Gate.

The company estimates it will incur one-off costs of EUR 152 million during the restructuring and says this would be treated as an exceptional cost in the fiscal year ending in June 2008.

Paul Walsh, chief executive of Diageo said: ‘Over the last twelve months we have conducted a rigorous review of our brewing operations in Ireland. It examined many options and I believe it has identified the right formula for the long-term success of our business in Ireland and for the continued global success of the Guinness brand.’

“Our ambition is to combine the most modern brewing standards with almost 300 years of brewing tradition, craft and heritage.”

Guinness has been brewed at St James’s Gate for almost 250 years. Guinness extract produced at the Dublin site is exported to more than 45 countries.

Tags: beer, brewing, dublin, dublin-8, guinness, history, ireland, st-james-gate, thomas-st

# Comments (3)

Merry Spamiversary

April 27, 2008 at 11:27 pm

Peter G. Neumann at the RISKS Forum notes that Last Friday was the anniversary of the sending of the first e-mail spam:

[Thanks to Mike Hogsett for noting this event, and Brad Templeton for recording it.]

What is allegedly the very first spam message was sent roughly 30 years over the ARPANET.

In seeing this, Mike was amused because he works with some of the people it was addressed to, of whom a few are still at SRI: NEUMANN@SRI-KA, GARVEY@SRI-KL, MABREY@SRI-KL, WALDINGER@SRI-KL and some of whom are retired: ENGELBART@SRI-KL, NIELSON@SRI-KL, GOLDBERG@SRI-KL (I am always amused when some of these old ARPANET addresses show up in today’s incarnations of spam.)

Also somewhat before Mike’s time, Geoff Goodfellow, Eric Kunzelman, Dan Lynch, and many others at SRI were instrumental in the evolution of the ARPANET.

Also included in the enormous enumerated TO: list (historically interesting in itself by not having been suppressed!) are Bill English (who was the catalyst for much of Doug Engelbart’s innovations being transitioned from SRI to PARC), Dave Farber, Irv Jacobs, Bob Metcalfe, Jon Postel (who by then had moved from SRI to ISI), three Sutherlands, and Lauren Weinstein, to name just a few.

Happy Birthday, Spam! Sorry I cannot wish you many happy returns.

Tags: arpanet, history, spam

# Comments (3)

“What’s New” archaeology

March 31, 2008 at 9:31 pm

jwz has, incredibly, resurrected home.mcom.com, the WWW site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, as it was circa Oct 1994.

Edmund Roche-Kelly was kind enough to get in touch and note this link – http://home.mcom.com/home/whatsnew/whats_new_0993.html:

September 3, 1993

IONA Technologies (whose product, Orbix, is the first full and complete implementation of the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or CORBA) is now running a Web server.

An online pamphlet on the Church of the SubGenius is now available.

Guess who was responsible for those two ;)

I was, indeed, running the IONA web server — it was set up in June 1993, and ran Plexus, a HTTP server written in Perl. IONA’s server was somewhere around public web server number 70, world-wide.

The SubGenius pamphlet is still intact, btw, although at a more modern, “hyplan”-less URL these days. It’ll be 15 years old in 6 months… how time flies!

Tags: archaeology, history, mosaic, nutscrape, web, www

# Comments (5)

A historical DailyWTF moment

February 14, 2008 at 5:02 pm

Today, in work, we wound up discussing this classic DailyWTF.com article — “Remember, the enterprisocity of an application is directly proportionate to the number of constants defined”:

public class SqlWords
{
  public const string SELECT = " SELECT ";
  public const string TOP = " TOP ";
  public const string DISTINCT = " DISTINCT ";
  /* etc. */
}

public class SqlQueries
{
  public const string SELECT_ACTIVE_PRODCUTS =
    SqlWords.SELECT +
    SqlWords.STAR +
    SqlWords.FROM +
    SqlTables.PRODUCTS +
    SqlWords.WHERE +
    SqlColumns.PRODUCTS_ISACTIVE +
    SqlWords.EQUALS +
    SqlMisc.NUMBERS_ONE;
  /* etc. */
}

This made me recall the legendary source code for the original Bourne shell, in Version 7 Unix. As this article notes:

Steve Bourne, at Bell Labs, worked on his version of shell starting from 1974 and this shell was released in 1978 as Bourne shell. Steve previously was involved with the development of Algol-68 compiler and he transferred general approach and some syntax sugar to his new project.

“Some syntax sugar” is an understatement. Here’s an example, from cmd.c:

LOCAL REGPTR    syncase(esym)
        REG INT esym;
{
        skipnl();
        IF wdval==esym
        THEN    return(0);
        ELSE    REG REGPTR      r=getstak(REGTYPE);
                r->regptr=0;
                LOOP wdarg->argnxt=r->regptr;
                     r->regptr=wdarg;
                     IF wdval ORF ( word()!=')' ANDF wdval!='|' )
                     THEN synbad();
                     FI
                     IF wdval=='|'
                     THEN word();
                     ELSE break;
                     FI
                POOL
                r->regcom=cmd(0,NLFLG|MTFLG);
                IF wdval==ECSYM
                THEN    r->regnxt=syncase(esym);
                ELSE    chksym(esym);
                        r->regnxt=0;
                FI
                return(r);
        FI
}

Here are the #define macros Bourne used to “Algolify” the C compiler, in mac.h:

/*
 *      UNIX shell
 *
 *      S. R. Bourne
 *      Bell Telephone Laboratories
 *
 */

#define LOCAL   static
#define PROC    extern
#define TYPE    typedef
#define STRUCT  TYPE struct
#define UNION   TYPE union
#define REG     register

#define IF      if(
#define THEN    ){
#define ELSE    } else {
#define ELIF    } else if (
#define FI      ;}

#define BEGIN   {
#define END     }
#define SWITCH  switch(
#define IN      ){
#define ENDSW   }
#define FOR     for(
#define WHILE   while(
#define DO      ){
#define OD      ;}
#define REP     do{
#define PER     }while(
#define DONE    );
#define LOOP    for(;;){
#define POOL    }


#define SKIP    ;
#define DIV     /
#define REM     %
#define NEQ     ^
#define ANDF    &&
#define ORF     ||

#define TRUE    (-1)
#define FALSE   0
#define LOBYTE  0377
#define STRIP   0177
#define QUOTE   0200

#define EOF     0
#define NL      '\n'
#define SP      ' '
#define LQ      '`'
#define RQ      '\''
#define MINUS   '-'
#define COLON   ':'

#define MAX(a,b)        ((a)>(b)?(a):(b))

Having said all that, the Bourne shell was an awesome achievement; many of the coding constructs we still use in modern Bash scripts, 30 years later, are identical to the original design.

Tags: bourne, c, coding, constants, dailywtf, define, gross, history, macros, sh, shell, software, unix

# Comments (8)

I recently came across my record at the Commodore Scene Database, and was happy to find that someone had found and uploaded two demos I had written, back in my days as a member of the C=64 demo scene between 1988 and 1990:

(I was a member of the groups ‘Excess’ and ‘Thundertronix’ / ‘TNT’, going by the handle of ‘Mantis’.)

With the help of CBA, I was overjoyed to track down another long-lost demo, my crowning achievement on the platform:

Rhaphanadosis

If you’re curious, feel free to go read those wiki pages or download the .d64’s — they run fine in VICE, the Commodore emulator (amazingly). If you’ve only got time to check one, check Rhaphanadosis; it’s much better than the others.

I’m very impressed with VICE. As far as I can tell, it’s perfectly bug-for-bug compatible with the real hardware, playing all of the demos perfectly (apart from a little additional speed due to differing hardware performance). If you haven’t already got VICE set up, bear in mind that after installing it, you’ll need a copy of the C=64’s ROM images; here’s a local set.

Also, the Commodore Scene Database is pretty awesome — it’s a full-scale IMDB-style setup, tracking the history of the Commodore demo scene in massive detail. Nice work guys!

The demos were written 100% in 6502/6510 assembly. I developed them using an Action Replay cartridge’s built-in monitor; it had an assembler, but one which didn’t support symbolic addressing. In other words, every piece of assembly used hand-computed branch offsets, and every variable and subroutine was tracked — on paper — by memory location, rather than using symbolic labels. If you want to know what the monitor was like, the VICE built-in monitor is almost identical!

I wrote these when I was 16; part 4 of Rhaphandosis notes the date as being 20 May 1989.

It’s interesting reading the scrollers, and doing web and CSDB searches in follow-up to see what happened next — one of the other Excess members, Raistlin is now Robert Troughton, a successful game developer in the UK with several major titles under his belt.

A Google search for Thundertronix finds a copy of “sex’n'crime” zine, issue 17, July 1990, which notes:

one of the new groups formed in 1990 (jm: slightly off, I think) is THUNDERTRONIX, better known as TNT. they are based in ireland and are doing very well for themselves. they have, in my mind, one of the best coders in the uk, namely MANTIS. he is currently coding a game with many new routines, etc… hopefully he should get some demos out soon!

woo! Er, unfortunately that game never went anywhere. ah well. ;)

BTW, it’s funny reading my scrollers in those demos. At the time, I was convinced that the c=64 was a dead platform — yet here we are in 2008, and there’s still a thriving demo scene on the Commodore. Incredible!

Tags: c-64, commodore, demo-scene, demos, hacking, history, life, teenage

# Comments (6)

Four Things

February 20, 2006 at 10:37 pm

I don’t do silly blog antics much, but I got tagged by Mat for the Four Things meme. Looking around, it is indeed a bit more interesting than things like the usual LJ quiz, so why not!

I wrote this on the plane from LA to Dublin, which may have affected some of the selections in 4 places I would rather be right now at least ;)

4 jobs I’ve had:

I was Iona Technologies’ first employee, and stayed there for no less than 7 years. I got to see the company grow from a handful of people, most of whom weren’t getting paid (hence how I wound up as the first employee ;), all the way up to a 300-strong multinational, while the company itself formed a core of Ireland’s mini dot-com boom. That was fantastic fun, and educational to boot.
my Dad’s gun/fishing/sporting-goods shop. Was it really a good idea to have a teenager working near firearms? At least I wasn’t the one who unplugged the fridge where the maggots were kept, so that they all hatched over the course of one weekend…
A horrible teenage job — picking tomatoes. I can still feel the orange dust under my fingernails every time I smell fresh tomatoes :( I didn’t last very long at that at all.
writing an Amiga-based kiosk system for virtually no pay whatsoever, at the age of 18 or 19. Ah, exploitation.

4 movies I can watch over and over:

Koyaanisqatsi — it’s dating a little now, since every ad agency through the 90s ripped it off. But still, the invention of a new format. I remember looking at the 405 freeway in LA, and thinking “looks like something out of Koyaanisqatsi” — of course, it was.
Princess Mononoke — either that, or Nausicaa. I just love the way the characters are coloured in shades of grey, rather than black and white.
the Lord of the Rings trilogy — oh dear I’m a hopeless Tolkien fanboy.
Spinal Tap — pure genius.

4 places I’ve lived:

Melbourne, Australia; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The Secret Lives Of Us;
Newport Beach, CA; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The O.C.;
Dublin, Ireland; no annoying TV drama — so far
University of California Irvine, CA; while Irvine itself is the most soulless suburban hellhole I’ve ever visited, living on the UCI campus is quite fun by comparison. Take about 1000 grad students, post-docs and lecturers from around the world; put them all in the same square mile or so; remove all fun (and bars!) from the surrounding areas; watch them make their own entertainment, or go mad.

4 tv shows I love:

4 places I’ve vacationed:

Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal; we trekked our way up to there, then trekked back down again. Unforgettable. I really want to do another Nepal trek as a result
car-camping around the Australian state of Victoria; they have some fantastic national park campsites, which most tourists overlook
learning how to dive in Ko Tao, Thailand; great setting, great dive sites, pretty cheap too!
Yosemite; amazing, world-class natural beauty. Californians don’t realise just how lucky they’ve got it ;)

4 of my favourite dishes:

A good Thai green curry
Laos-style green papaya salad with sticky rice
a good meaty cassoulet, from Fandango in San Luis Obispo. At least, that was the tastiest meal I’ve had in recent months ;)
Mangosteen — the queen of fruit, according to the Thais. I could, and probably have, eaten hundreds of these

4 places I would rather be right now:

spending New Year’s Day with a bunch of friends in rural West Cork or County Galway; until I moved to the US, this was one of my favourite annual traditions.
the Stag’s Head Bar, Dublin, in the snug, again with a bunch of friends
sitting on the grass outside the Pavilion bar in TCD, on a sunny summer’s day (hmm, that’s a lot of bars!)
Chiang Mai, Thailand

4 sites I visit daily:

4 people I’m tagging:

Tags: four-things, fun, history, life, memes, weblog

# Comments (6)

Web-browser style history for the command line

January 11, 2005 at 5:35 am

Code: Here’s something I came up with recently — it’s actually an evolution of the idea of pushd and popd, as included in BASH. To quote the POD docs:

cdhistory is a perl script used to implement web-browser style “history” for UNIX shells; as you use the cd command to explore the filesystem, your moves are remembered, and you can go “back” through history, and “forward” again, as you like.

Download the perl script here.

Tags: bash, code, evolution, history, idea, perl, pod, popd, pushd, script, something

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