Some excellent portraits posted on STF today! The author gave them as an example of DOF, but I think he was looking at the wrong parts of these strong photos!
Author Archives: Donncha
Digital Photography and the GIMP
Here’s a good course for schools to teach digital photography skills using the GIMP! It is of course useful even if you are past that particular part of your life too!
ireland.com – Budget 2004
Budget 2004 is being delivered right now. As well as listening to it on RTE 1 you can catch highlights at the above url.
Cigarettes are up 25¢ per pack of 20, and petrol and diesel are up 5¢ a litre. Lots more to come…
iPod as Digital Photography Storage
Here’s an interesting review of a Belkin Media Reader that will plug into an iPod. (Thanks Mark for the link!) Great idea for a music player to do, and it looks like it’s been done well.
The lengthy time required to copy files over is worrying, as I shoot 5MP images to 256MB memory stick. Going by the time quoted in the article it would take 15 minutes to copy over one memory stick (and yes, I can easily fill that much space taking pictures of even one scene!)
There are other options out there, and many have been reviewed on dpreview and other photography sites. Here’s an overview of some of those options.
Maybe I’ll invest in the next year or so. The deposit on my house purchase was paid last Monday so I’m slightly cash strapped right now!
Oh yeah – great photo of a kite surfer on photosig!
Santa on IRC!
| <donncha> | anyone heard the “real santa claus” argument on Joe Duffy’s show? was comical 🙂 | |
| — | allmanj is now known as alllunchj | |
| <radagast> | donncha: go on? | |
| <donncha> | some shop is advertising that they have the real santa claus. Someone complained, they even argued about “what makes a real santa claus” !! | |
| <donncha> | even got the advertising standards people on! | |
| <donncha> | hehe | |
| * | aj is back (gone 00:03:10) | |
| <aj> | I am Santa, really I am | |
| <thomasb> | donncha: I think the consensus was you either had to be a fat man in a red suit in the north pole, or a 6th century bishop | |
| <donncha> | thomasb: *nod* I’m listening to some mp3s now 🙂 | |
| * | aj crosses off thomasb for not believing in me. | |
| <longword> | !seen abbot | |
| <donncha> | !seen santa | |
| <donncha> | no, I mean aj.. | |
| — | aj is now known as santa | |
| <donncha> | someone ring up Joe! | |
| — | abbot (bloot@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) has joined #linux | |
| <longword> | abbot, where have you been? | |
| <abbot> | out drinking with the bots. | |
| <thomasb> | !shot santa | |
| <diamond> | lol | |
| <thomasb> | !shoot santa | |
| * | abbot blows santa away with a wand of fireballs |
Disclaimer – No Santa, elves, reindeer, or any Christmas characters were harmed in the making of the above script. I do have to admit that the sanity of the Irish Linux Community could be called into question however.
MandrakeMove Announced
As seen on slashdot – a “run from CD” distribution from Mandrake has been announced.
What’s different about this one is that you can store your home directory on a memory of a USB dongle. I heard about this when I met the guys from MandrakeSoft a week and a bit ago.
Nice!
Incoming Spam
Here’s what my daily spam count likes like as of about an hour ago:
The time covered goes from Oct 10th to Dec 1st, and, as you can see the spammers were very busy at the end of November!
They are still busy in fact, but I removed several system addresses from our server – email to them is going directly to /dev/null. Spammers must be getting desperate. None of those addresses would have been listed on *any* website yet they received half of my spam. that’s the result of getting hit by Rumpelstilskin attacks so often.
Hey Americans – notice the amount of spam on Thanksgiving? *argh*
The site was down this morning..
This weblog was out of service for a while, but I fixed the problem – the site error.log gave unusual errors about reading xml data. The only place I use xml is in reading data from blo.gs for my blogroll.
Unfortunately their site is down at the moment and their xml feeds are unavailable.
I never checked if the “fopen” to connect to their server succeeded, so when the routine tried to read data in it barfed. Here’s a quick fix to function.blogroll.php if you have the same problem:
Line 49:
if( $blogroll_remote_fp == false )
return false;
IRMA sue CD WOW – illegal grey imports!
Sean Murtagh, head of operations at the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), and Jonathan Jones of CD WOW debate the legality of CD WOW’s operation in this radio recording. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it this morning, but the crux of the argument is that CD WOW is bringing grey imports into Europe from Hong Kong. IRMA says that their retail members are suffering because of the unfair and illegal advantage CD WOW have by operating out of a territory with lower costs.
I don’t know how they’ll sue. CD WOW are based in Hong Kong, IRMA is in Ireland. Guess their executives better not visit Europe any time soon!
A new report on housing in Ireland is out. It speculates that house prices won’t increase like they used to because of higher interest rates and a slow economy but we’ve heard that before. I can’t say if it’ll happen but I’m in the process of buying a house myself and, well, fingers crossed I’ll have an announcement here in a few weeks time!
That old SPAM problem
I’ve just done what I should have done a long time ago – cleaned up the system addresses on our company mail server. Gone are addresses like bin, daemon, adm, lp, mail, mailman, games, and amanda. “Amanda”? That’s our backup software and only ever gets mail from an internal machine. I’ll direct them all to /dev/null eventually, but they’re collecting in /home/amanda/spam.txt for the time being.
Looking at this morning’s 1.5MB spam I counted a huge number of mails to amanda, so shutting that off should alleviate problems somewhat.
Before a certain resident of Co. Galway comments, only one spam got into my inbox this morning! I just hate seeing /home/docaoimh/spam.txt being bigger than /var/spool/mail/docaoimh – perhaps I should subscribe to more mailing lists again! 😉