Not quite, but a fanciful idea. Apples are a good source of vital nourishment, probably worth keeping in mind when we’re stuffing our faces with chocolate and being generally glutonous!
Author Archives: Donncha
Spam Spam Spam, Come on up and get your spam!
Here’s an updated list of recent spam to this list. It’s updated every few minutes so you can see a snippet of the spam that’s being deleted automatically here by Kitten’s Spaminator and diligent updating of keywords. Go wild!
I need to think about this a bit more. WPMU supports multiple blogs, run by multiple different people, all of whom can update their spam word lists. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a “I trust the following blogs” list so that spam words can be shared between blogs?
Slightly related, I started using PEAR Cache to cache frequently used database calls. Stuff like the “last posts” and other plugins now use that. It’s working very well and load on the server has gone down!
Oh, and when you’re updating to the latest CVS version of WordPress, a database table has changed. I ran the following to update my tables:
cd wp-inst/wp-content/blogs; for i in *; do echo "ALTER TABLE wp_"$i"_users CHANGE dateYMDhour user_registered DATETIME DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL "| mysql wordpress_db; done
Flying Home for Christmas?
The world’s airports are going to be thronged over the next few days with people returning to their families and homes for the Christmas holidays. Here’s a sight that lots of Cork people will be familiar with!
gingerbreadCPU.jpg (JPEG Image, 800×717 pixels)
First we had the USB Mince Pie, now the guys in Taiwan have come up with a gingerbread motherboard. Looks good enough to eat! Yummy! (Thanks Padraig for the link!)

Santa's Flying In!
Only a few more days left and Santa will be flying around the world. Here he is landing at Cork Airport for a quick look around!
Can I Speak With The Eircom Account Holder?
Just got a phone call…
Me: Hello!
Caller: Hello, can I speak to the Eircom account holder?
Me: Err, speaking.
Caller: Hi, my name is Laura and I’m ringing from Tele2 in Donegal and I want to tell you about our ..
Me: Haha, don’t bother, I’m not even with Eircom any more!
Caller: Oh! who’re you with?
Me: Ah, UTV Talk.
Caller: oh, we can’t compete with them, they’re one of the best!
Me: Yeah, goodbye!
* Names have been changed.
So, Go to UTV Talk for free calls at off-peak times to local, national and UK numbers, and use Telestunt if you’re ringing abroad or mobiles. Definitely the cheapest phone calls in Ireland!
Delicious Photography Links
Via Thunderbird’s RSS reader…
- Unphotographable: an account of pictures missed
- Couloir.org: Resizing, Fading Slideshow Demo
- Unrelated News
- AutoStitch :: a new dimension in automatic image stitching
- Chicago Photobloggers
- Fair use of photos on blogs… the photographers speak out.
- Infrared Photography With a Digital Camera
- Near Infrared Digital Photography: A Tutorial
- Make your own recursive picture and animation
- The Atget Rephotographic Project similar to Chicago Then & Now
- Celeb Photos on Flickr
- Freefoto.com blog
Too much of a good thing?
Back in the day, I’d get a CD and I’d listen to it. A lot. A CD was a considered purchase – if I was going to make the effort to go to the store and spend my hard earned money on it, it was going to be worth it. In the car, at the gym, at work, at home – I’d listen to it everywhere. The first few listens usually couldn’t be at work, because I’d be listening. Once my brain knew the album, then it could become soundtrack to whatever else I was working on.
I get that feeling all the time these days, although when I look over photographs I took only a few weeks ago I’m quite often pleasantly surprised at how fresh they are!
Get Langer into the Collins Dictionary!
Ray D’Arcy and co of TodayFM fame held a poll today to decide what word we, the listening public, would like to see in the next edition of the Collins Dictionary. The clear winner of the poll was the word langer! According to the Cork Slang Dictionary, Langer is defined as “A disagreeable person.” but can also be applied to a fool or idiot.
So, go login to the Collins Word Exchange site and submit “langer”!
After doing a quick search, looks like “langer” is already there:
Langer noun
Bernhard. born 1957, German professional golfer: won the US Masters Championship (1985, 1993)
But don’t let that stop you, looks like there’s already a discussion started on the site!
While I’m on the subject, check out the excellent langerland.com!
Update! Looks like we succeeded somewhat – it’s now in the “living dictionary definitions”:
langer noun Irish (Derog. slang)
1. a fool; an idiot
2. (Slang) penis 3. adjective langers extremely drunk
Workflow: Filing and Finding Your Images
Right, a quick check shows I have some 24GB of photos. That’s a lot considering they’re all jpg files and not huge raw images!
Anyway, I have my own system for archiving at home but it’ll probably need to be reworked – I’ve another 250MB of photos to copy over from my camera yet no space left! I think a combination of storing original images on DVD, and smaller images on my PC for easy browsing will be most useful.
For more ideas, About.com published this good article describing ways to sort and archive your photos. His point about re-reading 2 year old media is good, and hopefully in 2 years time, larger capacity DVDs will be widely available! 🙂
