Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
05 2008
... to the roadworks happening outside my office. Thus far, all the parties involved in extending the Luas Line have spent 365 days creating havoc with traffic, generating noise and large holes in the ground, depleting the worlds tea stocks and generally making life just a little more unpleasant for all of us working here in the IFSC. Oh... I almost forgot... they have succeeded in laying all of approximately 30 feet of track, of the hundreds (if not thousands) required for the 7 minute journey time they're adding.
</rant>
posted at: 11:11 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Yesterday evening I had the privilege of seeing one Joe Satriani who rocked out in Vicar Street here in Dublin - and today I got to see my native Munster beat Toulouse in the Heineken Cup Final. Yay! :-)
posted at: 19:29 | path: | permanent link to this entry
This report from the BBC made me laugh out loud. I think everyone who has gone through years of education and examinations can remember the stress of walking into an exam, with the only slightly irrational fear that they will be unable to produce a single answer. How much more convenient it would be to live in a society that has so much fear and confusion surrounding musical copyright law, that the exam board just prints the answers on the back of the question sheet.
I do pity the poor students who glossed over the copyright statement, not realiseing that the answers were there for all to see.
posted at: 14:28 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry
I'm relatively new to the world of podcasts, but have finally found a number of them that I enjoy. Linux is my operating system of choice, and Amarok (on the eeePC) and RhythmBox (on any of my Ubuntu machines) provide all the RSS functionality I require. I can enter an RSS feed URL and it will merrily download any new episodes that appear.
But how do I listen to them? Specifically, how do I keep track of the episodes I've listened to and those that are waiting for my eager ears? One suggestion I've received from an iPod user is that iPod and iTunes keeps track of the number of times you've listened to tracks. This makes things simple since I can make a playlist in iTunes of Podcast tracks that have a listened to count of 0 (zero.)
But what if I don't want to use iTunes - or an blog-at-signal2noise-dot-ie - any suggestions, particularly those encompassing Linux and a Creative Nano. If the best suggestion is really really good, I'll even award a prize - along with publishing it here :-)
posted at: 09:13 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Congratulations to daren (Daren Nestor) who was voted System Administrator of the Year and to tyrion (Dave Dolphin) who was voted Society Person of the Year in Skynet, the University of Limerick Computer Society. Good work guys, and congratulations!
posted at: 21:53 | path: | permanent link to this entry
In response to some upgrade nonsense re Wordpress earlier I would like to point out that I'm still running blosxom (slightly hacked version, though still with some of the original code... I think... probably...)
I guess the problem with Perl is that it's so easy to make software work the way you want it to :-)
posted at: 16:10 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Tonight was random pintage night in the Porterhouse, Templebar - basically an excuse to meet Jan Lehnardt and chat about things CouchDB related and things categorically not CouchDB related.
A good night was had by all :-)
posted at: 23:17 | path: | permanent link to this entry
This week, I've been mostly...
...using Open Office to create pretty graphs. It has mostly worked very well indeed, but see if you can find the really obvious bug in the graph below. I've still not figured out how to fix it, since the data is correct - just the labels on the graph are a bit wrong. Suggestions to the usual blog-at-signal2noise.co.uk address.
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I upgraded one of my machines from Ubuntu Gutsy to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) the latest and greatest from the Shuttleworth camp. The upgrade manager tool reminded me that a newer release was available, and upgrading was literally as simple as clicking the provided button and answering a few questions along the way.
Of the (perhaps) five questions in total asked during the upgrade procedure, two questioned me about upgrading or keeping a configuration file that I had allegedly changed, though I'm pretty sure I never changed it. Diff'ing using the provided options in the upgrade menu allowed me to double check that there were no material changes and that an overwrite was permissible. The other questions were regarding configuration files I definitely had changed. While I couldn't find a way to accept some of the new changes and merge back in my changes, it was a simple job to make a note of the filenames and put my changes back in after the upgrade procedure.
While I've not tested extensively, it looks like everything functions after the upgrade, including wireless networking, X, etc. The one gotcha at the moment is that Firefox is upgraded to a version that is not yet supported by Foxmarks which means I can no longer synch bookmarks to/from that machine. I expect this will be rectified soon enough, and of course the bookmarks that were there previously are still there. The Foxmarks blog suggests that a version for Firefox 3 is in beta test, so I won't have to wait long.
All in all, given the not-so-large sample set of one single laptop analysed, I can say that my experience with Hardy has been good. ftp.heanet.ie has served out over a petabyte of data due to the upgrade being released, so I anticipate that we'll be seeing a lot of Ubuntu Hardy in the wild as of now.
posted at: 08:52 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
