Monthly Archives: November 2002

Dublin Bus pilots real-time service – it’s also happening in the UK and elsewhere, but I don’t think it’ll help alleviate the traffic problems in Dublin. We Irish have a “must drive there” attitude, of which I’m guilty of too!

Why Red Hat Owns Linux – no they don’t, but this is still a good overview of where RH are and what might happen in the future. (from a business perspective)

The Register reports on a leaked internal document from Microsoft that touts Unix in Hotmail’s Win2k switch. Of course, that’s presuming it’s real, but the article is an entertaining read anyway.

Black Hole Breakaway: Supernova Gives Birth to Cosmic Monster – Fascinating. It makes me feel really small and inconsequential when I read stuff like, “There are two main types of black holes. The most massive variety anchor large galaxies; our own galaxy has a black hole that weighs as much as 2.6 million suns” and “Our solar system sits on a spiral arm in the outskirts of the main disk of the galaxy.”
Look out the window at life going by, it’s so busy but we’re just a little speck in terms of the larger galaxy! *phew*

Hot Babe Hot-babe is a small graphical utility which display the system activity in a very special way. When the CPU is idle, it displays a dressed girl, and when the activity goes up, as the temperature increases, the girl begins to undress, to finish totally naked when the system activity reaches 100%. Of course, if you can be shocked by nudity, don’t use it!

Apple and the Pirate Everyman – Apple and piracy.

Mark discusses mod_gzip. We’ve been using it for years at work and although it does have some minor problems with certain browsers (gzipped content sometimes doesn’t get unzipped).
All I can say is that our bandwidth usage is just a fraction of what it might be without mod_gzip.
Now, does anyone know how to make Java applets talk gzip? If we could feed gzipped data to our applets that’d help enormously.

Death by Spam – The e-mail you know and love is about to vanish. Nah, I don’t think so. Spamassassin catches practically all of the spam sent to my email addresses so my inbox is very spam-free!

Kamen takes his latest dream to TV – Inventor introduces new Stirling engine