Monthly Archives: May 2008

Italian Ice cream in Blarney

The first ice cream store in Blarney opened it’s doors for the several weeks ago with a special offer of free ice cream all day but I didn’t stop by there until today.

The store is Il Gelato and it’s around the corner from the main square in Blarney. If you’re in the area, you owe yourself the chance to try out their delicious produce. They offer a range of flavours from the usual vanilla, to chocolate, mint, strawberry and a few other unusual ones. I bought a large tub of chocolate and strawberry. Disappointingly, I thought the tub was quite small and too expensive until I tasted it. It must be the richest and creamiest ice cream I’ve ever tasted! We were after dinner in the Blarney Castle Hotel but I had room for dessert yet I could barely finish the tub!

We all enjoyed our ice cream, and even Adam got a taste of it, despite my earlier protestations that he wouldn’t taste ice cream until he was much older! I’m glad his first taste of ice cream was a good one.

A large tub is €4.80 which seems expensive, but it’s worth it. Delicious!

Fifty years with WordPress

Ah yes, them were the days when we had to type blog posts on quaint old keyboards. Can you imagine it? You actually had to write everything letter by letter. Today’s thought entry systems are so much more convenient don’t you think?

That there Matt fella is still the youngster he always was. He may not be quite as fast on his feet but that embedded camera in his skull sure takes some snazzy photos. My camera gives me a headache, especially when the lens doesn’t focus fast enough. Great to see that mind blog integration stuff working out for him though. I can’t believe blogging has come so far in such a short time.

Oh wait! Fifty? It’s only been five. Where have the years gone? Matt noticed that I officially joined the WordPress team 5 years ago today! At the time I was working on the predecessor to WordPress MU, b2++ that was running on Linux.ie Blogs. It was a sometimes hard slog. MU was always on the sidelines of the WordPress community and somehow it escaped the attention of the vast majority of people online. I noticed many surprised voices when people found out what was running on WordPress.com!

Two years later and Matt starts Automattic and I come on board to work on WordPress.com and I’ve never looked back. The GPL licensed WordPress and WordPress MU go from strength to strength.

As a final note on this rambling post, if you enjoy using WordPress, head over to gnu.org and read their philosophy page to find out what influences Matt and Alex and everyone else who contribute to GPLed software projects.

WordPress Stickers and Badges

WordPress Stickers and Badges

This was a nice surprise. While enjoying a lovely meal in the Castle Hotel in Blarney a courier rang me with a package. I wasn’t expecting anything but luckily he was close by and I met him in front of the local Garda station. Brimming with excitement I ripped open the package sending stickers and badges flying everywhere. Some landed in my burger, a few badges in my wife’s quiche and the baby grabbed a sticker or two before they fell on the ground.

No, I’m joking, but I did get a jiffy bag with a nice portrait of (most of) Automattic in Arizona and quite a few badges and stickers.

Before you ask, I’m not sending anyone any. I’ve already promised stickers to one person who’s been waiting a few months, and John probably thinks he’ll get his badges and stickers this year but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was him. Sorry!
On the other hand, if I meet you on the street, I may have a supply of badges and stickers in my camera bag so don’t be afraid to ask. I will of course have badges and stickers to give out at the Doneraile photowalk next month. If you’re around the area, feel free to join us exploring and photographing Doneraile Park!

They're twittering the Mars landing

I had completely forgotten about Phoenix, the mission to land a robotic craft at the North Pole of Mars. I was reminded by tehnosailor who twittered about the @marsphoenix Twitter account.
Follow that account to hear the latest news from the team in Nasa! They’ve also linked to related movies and pages about the mission. I’m watching the one about the last 7 minutes now. Exciting stuff. Good luck guys!

2,913 followers right now. I wonder how many more they’ll have by the time of the landing?

I think this must rate as the coolest use of Twitter, ever!

Mac OS X Leopard and Nokia N73 Bluetooth Problems

When I got my new Macbook a few weeks back I thought I could use the Bluetooth functions to browse and copy files from my Nokia N73. It worked just fine on my previous Macbook, an old 2 year old machine destroyed by a cup of tea, so I wasn’t expecting any problems.

Unfortunately it seems that Mac OS X Leopard and the latest firmware of the Nokia N73 just do not like each other. No matter what I did, I could not get the Macbook and N73 to pair. The configuration tool stopped every single time on the “getting more information” part of the wizard. I’m not the only one experiencing problems. There’s a long thread on the Apple website. Both Apple and Nokia have been informed and are aware of the problem but I suspect it’s something in Nokia’s latest N73 firmware.

I have a card reader, now to find the SD sleeve that came with my Sony Ericsson phone. Nokia didn’t include one with their phone.

PS. does anyone else find the keyboard of their Macbook isn’t as responsive as it should be? I have to really hit the y and Enter keys to make sure. It is very annoying!

You're looking so silly Wii Fit!

Judging by the reaction on Twitter, Wii Fit hasn’t been a big hit with my friends there. When Mario Kart Wii came out there was much excitement. I happily twittered when I bought my copy, others replied asking what the game was like, or that they were going to buy it the next day “for their family”. Lots of fans there.

So, you’ve bought Wii Fit. Have you filmed yourself and put it on Youtube yet? Are you brave enough to? 🙂

Of course, Wii Fit has sold over a million units. There must be a Wii Fit user reading this. Is it really fun? Will it last?

The demoscene comes to the Wii

Woohoo! Someone in the demoscene has cottoned on to the homebrew efforts on the Wii. ExistenzE is probably the first demo to appear on Nintendo’s Wii Console.

ExistenzE

It’s all thanks to the Twilight Hack which allows developers to run their own unofficial software on the Wii. Basically, the game “Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” has a bug in it and developers took advantage of that to load other software without Nintendo’s blessings. So far a lot of the software released has been technical or not very interesting to your average gamer, but Quake has been ported to the Wii, as has SDLMame (updated download) and other emulators.

I was excited at the prospect of playing Mame games on my Wii until I realised how much it relies on the host CPU. The Wii’s brain isn’t that fast a performer. I wonder how it would handle emulating an arcade machine and throwing sprites and stuff around the screen. Anyone tried SDLMame on it? (Apparently it uses Linux as a host OS to run SDLMame. That’s cool!)

Are ifoods.tv clueless Web 2.0 spammers?

ifoods.tv

Sorry ifoods.tv, just because you’ve been nominated for best Web 2.0 Start up in Europe is no reason to spam members of the Irish blogosphere.

They didn’t even do it very well, leaving Tom Raftery‘s email address in the To: field and attaching a Word .doc file with the text, “Please Find attached press release” in the body of the text. I mean, come on, Web 2.0 my arse. If you had a clue you’d have built up a following on Twitter just like Pat Phelan or Paul Walsh. You would have got us interested in what you do.

Get thee back to Web 0.1

Edit Michele has blogged about them too. Love this quote,

You may have been nominated for an award, but it obviously wasn’t in marketing or email usage based on the rubbish you sent me today and the way you sent it.

Jetpac, as you've never seen it before

This is one for the Speccy fans out there, especially Walter and Conor. Jetpac is a simple shoot em up released by Ultimate Play The Game in 1983 on the ZX Spectrum. Apparently there’s a C64 conversion too but it was never as popular on that platform. In 1988, Ultimate: The Collected Works was released. Pictured on that page is a review from Your Sinclair that looks very familiar. I remember reading that issue. Can’t believe it’s 20 years ago! The first time I played this game was probably at a friend’s house when he bought that compilation.

Here’s the original 1983 game in all it’s glory. Revel in the single colour sprites, and simple but addictive gameplay!

And here’s the Xbox version, called Jetpac Refuelled. Totally mad stuff! Updated graphics but same great gameplay.

If that isn’t enough to wet your appetite, you can now play Jetpac in your browser! Head over to this freeonlinegames page and start refueling that ship! Oh the excitement!

(Yes, yes, it doesn’t seem as good these days. Our expectations of what games do have risen so high that retro gaming really is a niche that appeals to those that grew up with the games. Oh well!)

Edit Yay. Jetpac+3 on c64.org. Must give it a go later!