Hehe.. 3 blades not enough?

The Onion has an “interview” with the CEO of Gillette who says, “We’re Doing Five Blades.”
Remember Frank in the Comedy Club? “Gillette spent years in development, working hard at their new razor.. What did they come up with? The 3 blade razor!” Ah yes, you had to be there. I bet he wishes he never appeared on Bosco but fancy that, he never mentioned that on-stage.. 🙂

What Digital Camera?

My father’s finally in the market for a digital camera. After many years using a Pentax SLR he has seen the light and wants to take the plunge into the digital world!
He saw that the Nikon Coolpix 3100 was available from Argus at a knock down price of €320 or so. I have no idea how good that camera is so I fired up Google to find out. A review of the camera compared it unfavourably to the Canon PowerShot A70. A review of that camera looks very promising, especially for my dad, who’s used to the manual controls of an SLR. Dpreview also compare the Nikon to the Canon which was useful. Looks like the Canon has the edge on picture quality.
Unfortunately, the Canon A70 is priced at €500 in Argus! So much for the two cameras being similarly priced!
This morning I asked the guys on for camera sites that ship to Ireland and the prices on technikdirekt.de, cam-ireland.com and even amazon.de are much better than high-street Irish prices. (Well, duh! Surprised? Nope!)
Here’s some more reviews of the Canon A70 for future reference from DCRP Review and Steve’s Digicams.

Desmond Tutu Interview

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is in Ireland for a major conference on AIDS this week. There’s been a huge increase in the number of cases in Russia and elsewhere in Europe and Asia and delegates from 55 countries are meeting to discuss this.
Desmond Tutu was just interviewed by Marian Finucane this morning and it’s the first time I’ve heard him interviewed at length. Wow. What an eloquent speaker! He’s had a varied life, and the interview was a reminder of the the horror of Apartheid. The contrast between South Africa and Europe couldn’t be greater, he recounted his experiences in London, where Bobbies on the beat called him and his wife, “Sir”, and “Madam”, and Cape Town where a curfu for blacks meant he couldn’t walk on the street at night!

Stuff that caught my eye today..

I’m reading “Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)” by Al Franken (thank you Mark for the lend of the book!), and while it’s a good read, Al is a little too glib for my liking. That’s why I went searching and found, this which I’m certain I’ll be told is a right-wing nutcase website, but just goes to show that neither side of the Republican/Democratic battle are to be trusted!(In Al’s defence, I’m really enjoying his book, but he’s preaching to the converted here..)

Very, very silly discussion about which is better: 3MP or 5MP cameras. The author of a linked article suggests that there’s no appreciable difference between both types of sensors. I just wonder if he’s ever tried to print out either in a large format..
This thread proved enlightening. There’s a small symbol at the bottom-right of the Sony F717 camera that wasn’t explained in the manual. It’s simply to show the user that he can use the jog dial to change camera settings.. Sony manuals do need more work from their authors. Here’s more on the same and other manual stuff.

CSS Playground and Well-Designed Weblogs: An Introduction are on my reading list tomorrow. Thank you delicious for pointing me there.

Interesting explanation of MVC here and although based in a JSP world it’s simple and to the point. Then again, maybe MVC isn’t right for PHP development. (I certainly don’t agree, most of my new projects at work use MVC now and it’s a God-send for keeping file size down and organising code!)

Oh yeah, look for me on Orkut.. I’m the only donncha on there! 🙂

b2++ – 0.8

Finally, a new release of b2++! This is a minor release, putting the features we’ve been using here on blogs.linux.ie into a release for wider distribution!
New in this release:

  • Comment Moderation: Every comment, pingback and trackback must now be validated before they’re displayed. Bye bye comment spam!
  • Referer Blacklisting: You can add any referer in your backend to a blacklist. The next time someone visits from that site the referer doesn’t show up on your site.
  • Minor bugs with the smilies in b2edit.
  • Added Pirate Speak plugin by Dougal Campbell.

If you’re upgrading from b2++ 0.7, then download the upgrade package and copy the src/ directory into your b2++ install and run the upgrade script. That’ll update your database tables properly.
New users should of course download the full b2++ package.

New users: b2++ 0.8 tar.gz | zip
Existing users: b2++ 0.7 -> 0.8 upgrade tar.gz | zip

Horrific Accident in Dublin

Almost exactly a month since I reported that 5 people were killed on Irish roads, 5 people were killed, and 17 injured in Dublin when a bus toppled over into people waiting at a bus stop on Wellington Quay in Dublin. Now it appears that CIÉ were warned two weeks ago of how dangerous the location was. What does it take for a large bureaucratic organisation to fix things?