July 2008 Archives

Whoever is behind XKCD is a genius.

Today's gem is pure geek, but linux zealots will appreciate it (click to enlarge):

TshirtHell like to push the boundaries with their tshirts. They're not the rudest and crudest tshirts available, but some of them can be pretty "interesting".

Their latest addition for kids is simple, yet brilliant (click to enlarge)



They're also running an $8 sale at the moment (sizes and styles are limited to what they have in stock)

If you've spent any length of time in Spain you cannot escape the Moorish influence. While the more obvious traces can be found in Andalucia, with Granada's Alhambra, the influences on both culture and language run a lot deeper.

Jason Webster's book Andalus attempts to explore the legacy of the Moorish conquest of Spain and its legacy hundreds of years later when the relations between East and West are strained once again.

It makes for an interesting read, as the author explores not just Andalucia, but many of the other Spanish regions in search of answers to questions about Spain's past, present and possible future.

Penguin are giving away books - the only catch being you have to write a review of the book you get within 6 weeks of receiving it.

More info on their special holiday reading site

Since my blu ray player is a US import I have to be very very careful about which discs I buy.

I either choose US region or multi-region discs, since there is no easy way to make a blu ray player recognise all discs (yet!)

Unfortunately Amazon haven't updated their website to take into account the Blu Ray regions.

Any film released on blu ray will end up with a DVD region listed beside it, which is, of course, incorrect. The silly thing is that Amazon's site has all the information on regions for blu rays - it's just the item display that is showing the wrong data.

It's a shame, but at least Amazon actually show the disc region, whereas a lot of the other sites don't even do that much!

Dublin airport seems to be going from bad to worse.

First off they had serious issues with their radar which led to flight cancellations and general chaos.

Now they're having power outages!

Cork airport suffers from fog quite often, while Shannon doesn't have as many international destinations as the other two, so where does that leave us?

I don't like watching single episodes of TV shows, which is one of the reasons why a Sky+ box makes sense for me. The other problem I have is that I forget which evening or time a programme is showing!

During the week the Stargate Atlantis Season 4 boxset arrived from Amazon, so I spent most of yesterday watching it. Funnily enough Season 5 has started airing in the US already, so I was able to watch the first two episodes of Season 5 shortly after watching the grande finale of Season 4.

If you want to check which version of Ubuntu is installed on a machine run the following command:

On Debian the command is:

The redhat equivalent, which would work on redhat derivatives as well, is:

When I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago I spotted several large billboards from the local authorities advocating the use of condoms and safe sex.

I don't think I've ever seen similar ads in Ireland.

Now I'm not a big Digg user, but this post caught my attention.

It seems that Ireland is the most expensive place to have sex, since the price of condoms is so insanely high.

Ireland's small business association, the SFA (bad choice of acronym!) are trying to grab headlines at the moment with their latest madcap idea. The SFA's Patricia Callan was on morning radio today advocating that Ireland's minimum wage should be slashed by 1 euro.
Why?
Seemingly doing this would somehow "save the economy".

So who exactly is paying a minimum wage anyway?

Who is on a minimum wage?

Wouldn't doing something about the cost of a loaf of bread or litre of milk be a little bit more useful?

Drawing parallels with other EU states is dumb, as you aren't comparing like with like.

Since I post to more than one blog it may appear at times that my activity here is pretty low key.

Over on FilmReviews.ie I've posted a couple of reviews of films I've seen recently including:
Wanted
Hancock
Alatriste
Incredible Hulk

While over on my domain news blog I've posted a few short posts about updates and some more in depth ones like the one the IEDR annual report

The company blog hasn't been that active recently, but I am trying to post to it a couple of times a week. We've been rather busy with the new rollout chez Blacknight, so my energies have been focussed elsewhere (fixing websites to read in English without boring people to death takes time!)

I've also got a few more project ideas in the pipelines, though whether I'll get the time to do anything about them is a totally different matter. (Pipelines is anywhere between vague idea and fully functional website and covers everything in between)

Either IrishDev has gone bang whallop, or they're having serious issues with their site. It's been giving a 403 error for the last few days for me, while others are reporting that it's been like that for a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile Silicon Republic have unveiled a new site design. I'm not sure if I like it or hate it, but I honestly don't understand why they have the big white space at the top left of all the pages. It looks really really odd.

In totally unrelated news the submission form on Armchair.ie is finally working again! The captcha has been removed, so I'll probably get inundated with spammy junk, but at least the genuine links will also get through!

Geek humour can be silly at times, but this one is pretty good!

Between my mother moving house and my grandfather's passing I've been forced to go around the country collecting possessions. In amongst the Spanish and French literature I found a few boxes of cassettes, but of course I don't have anything to play them with....

So what tape deck should I get?

I've also recuperated my vinyl collection, but again I've nothing to play them with.

I've been to the cinema twice in the last couple of days.
On Friday night I went to see Hancock in Kilkenny, while last night I went to see Wanted in Carlow.

Both evenings people came into the cinema several minutes after the film had started. I'm not talking about the adverts or trailers, but the actual film itself.

They wander in then spend several minutes standing around trying to find somewhere to sit and talking as well.

End result being that your film viewing is disrupted.

Grr!

Grandad ruined my afternoon. Well he didn't really, but he did reduce me to fits of laughter.

One of his recent posts is based on search engine queries (adult content advisory I guess).

That hurts!

I checked my own stats from January 1st 2007 to July 4th 2008. Seemingly over 286 thousand visits from search engine users with over 86 thousand keywords / phrases!

What were they looking for? If you skip the mundane stuff there's very little else left.

There seem to be quite a few people looking for "porn" and "bizarre questions". They might want to hook up with the people looking for "irish sex sites".

The rest of the search queries are really really boring. Maybe I should spice it up or something?

Paul has put together a couple of Ubuntu packages to fix ICQ support in Pidgin

I think I've had my ICQ account since 1994, so that beats Paul by 4 years :)

If, like me, you use pidgin as your IM client on Ubuntu, you may have been experiencing issues connecting to ICQ today.

There's a patch available here, as well as a discussion of the issue.

As I don't use ICQ too heavily I may just wait until a new version is released

I posted about the Comreg public consultation on dotIE on my domain blog the other day, but I feel it's worthwhile to mention it here as well.

No matter what your opinion is about the IE namespace NOW is the time to make your opinion known.

The consultation paper covers the background of IEDR and then goes into a number of key topics with questions on each one.