Terry Ng wrote to me plugging the WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition! There are a few participants already but there’s plenty of time to compete!
Author Archives: Donncha
Ni Gaeilgeoir Me
I watched the first two episodes of reality tv show, Ni Gaeilgeoir Me tonight. It’s on every night at 10pm for the rest of the week and I’ll probably tune in.
I do have to admit that I fast-forward through it on the Sky+ because I’m not a reality tv fan, but it’s fun to watch. It does help ma ta cupla focail Gaeilge agat but there are subtitles through the recorded bits to help. The speed dating as Gaeilge was brilliant!
I haven’t a clue what the two teachers are saying. That guy from Ulster is practically incomprehensible to me! The presenter, Aoife Ni Thuairisg, is great and she’s easy to understand however!
I think a special mention has to go out to Jenny Kelly and Jeannette Cronin. The former because I wouldn’t be watching it if the Ray D’Arcy show hadn’t got her on it, and the latter because of her infectious laughter throughout interviews!
The good news just keeps on coming
Xgl on a live CD
If you want to try Xgl to see what all the fuss is about, then you should download the Kororaa live CD. I downloaded the 441MB iso, burned it on CD and rebooted into Xgl.
Wow. All the eye candy looks great, the cube revolved when I switched desktops or dragged the background with CTRL pressed. Dragging windows from one side of the cube to another desktop was really cool, but not as much fun as watching a sticky window bend and deform as I dragged it!
As someone pointed out on digg, it’s not just eye candy. The openGL powered desktop uses my video card to move pixels around and feels responsive. I’m very tempted to upgrade to Ubuntu Dapper so I can install the Xgl binaries! (via)
Later… I updated my Ubuntu install to the latest Dapper release using apt-get dist-upgrade and after some minor fighting with a customized xorg.conf and following the instructions I have an Xgl powered desktop! Nice.
Slightly Later… I found a showstopper bug. It doesn’t do full screen image viewing. At least as far as gthumb or f-spot is concerned anyway. Gthumb just dies and F-spot displays a thumbnail in the corner of a grey screen.
Some people had the same problem playing movies and the solution was to use openGL as the full screen driver but I don’t think the same can be done with an image viewer, can it?
It’s alpha software so hopefully this will be worked around sooner or later!
InnoDB: Starting shutdown…
Calling all MySQL admins! When you’re working with InnoDB tables you may have noticed that MySQL takes an extraordinary amount of time to shutdown. Don’t panic! It’s normal.
InnoDB has extensive logs that it must run through and if your server is at all busy these logs can be quite big.
After you’ve started the equivalent of “/etc/init.d/mysql stop” it may not return for quite a while. Simply open another terminal and examine the system log. On a Debian or Ubuntu box, look at /var/log/daemon.log and you’ll see the “InnoDB: Starting shutdown…” message.
Now, go off and make a cup of tea because this could take a while. On a fairly large and busy database it might be half an hour or more!
Please, please, please don’t be tempted to killall -9 mysqld because bad things will happen! Even if your boss is looking over your shoulder, and you’ve promised that the company webserver will be online in 2 minutes, don’t do it.
However, cases where it is ok to kill the database with a “kill -9”:
- International terrorists are planning on robbing the World Bank and you’re the only secret agent who can bring down the database which will stop them.
- Lassie will be run over by the evil farmer who plagued the local village with his monster cows unless you can corrupt his database in time.
- Or finally, you like hard work and restoring from backups!
Ray D'Arcy and Co do OK GO "A Million Ways"
Real Life Simpsons Intro
The Real Life Simpsons Intro is great. They cut a few corners here and there but it’s a great little movie and a lot of effort went into making it as close to the intro as possible! via)
Work/Life balance day
I’ve been reminded that today is Work/Life balance day. Scott Adams had this to say on balancing work and life a few days ago.
Clashes in Dublin over loyalist march
Clashes in Dublin over loyalist march – burning cars, missiles thrown, vandalism and looting.
Yesterday a group of Unionists/Loyalists marched through Dublin in memory of all the victims of Republican violence. The Government hoped it would happen peacefully but I don’t think anyone really believed that.
I’m glad the Unionists didn’t march through Cork, it probably would have been worse.
If you recognise anyone in the footage or pictures, call Garda HQ on 01 6660000 or Crime Stoppers on 1800 250025. Thanks ElBlogador for those numbers.
This is covered in much more detail with pictures: 
- Indymedia, photo essay of the day (via)
- Dublin Riots on Flickr
- A picture tells a thousand words
- footage of rioters
- Dublin samples a Bite of Northern Ireland Troubles
- Three of those arrested aren’t Irish
- Todays Dublin Riots links to Dublin Riots Flickr pool
- I predict a riot (I’ve never voted for Sinn Fein anyway, this riot guarantees I won’t)
- Dublin Riot Photos
- Never been in a riot
- RTE reporter attacked and called “Orange Bastard”
- Video of a group of young men destroying a car. One wears the Irish flag over his shoulders as he smashes the side windows with a metal pipe. Very patriotic.
- The Dublin riots from a PR perspective
- Finally, a call for the return of the march to Dublin. See the comments there for a taste of how divided our nation is. I liked this bit: “an aesehole is still an arsehole, it doesn’t matter where he goes to church.”
A sad, sad day for Ireland.
The Sunday Times has coverage of the background and riots:
- Who let the mob run free?
- Under siege from ‘madmen’
- Torn and bleeding, Bird makes the news again – Charlie Bird, RTE journalist, was attacked by nationalist rioters and called, “Charlie Bird, you’re an Orange bastard”.
- Loyalists forced to retreat as riots halt Ulster love march
- Republicans told: ‘Do all in your power to stop it’ – “The text messages were sent out to republicans and sympathisers early yesterday: get to the GPO at 10am, they said. Between 150 and 200 people responded to the call, but they did not congregate so as to avoid coming to the attention of gardai.”
- Outcry over action of ‘thugs’
Here’s a video of rioters overturning a car and smashing it. Citizen reporting is alive and well. (via)
(links via Irish Blogs)
The Joker by kittens
This music video for the Fat Boy Slim cover of “The Joker” is brilliant! Featuring kittens, kittens and more kittens! So, so cute! (via Cute Overload!)