Author Archives: Donncha

Sony DSC-F717 – tried it?

I spent an hour yesterday between Microcenter and Circuit City comparing prices of laptops and cameras. I came to the sorry conclusion that there’s not much to differenciate them. Best Buy is about the same price range. They’re still cheaper than Irish prices though! Especially in the digital camera market. I saw so many laptops and cameras yesterday my brain got a bit frazzled. I’ve decided to forego buying a laptop at this stage (as I might be able to get a loan of one..) and one camera that caught my eye is the Sony DSC-F717. Reviews are for the most part favourable even if the camera isn’t perfect. There was an auto-focus issue with earlier models that was almost 10 months ago. There’s some good prices to be found, but I’d like to hear if you’ve had experience with this camera. I’d also love to hear of sites offering accessories at more reasonable prices!
Update! Here’s an excellent review from photo.net

Images of Chicago

Here’s the first few pics. They’re all drastically cut down to fit here!


Taken at North Michigan, from the river. The building in the foreground is the Wrigley Building. The background building is the Chicago Tribune Building. It’s famous for it’s unusual architecture! Thanks to Ark/#LUNI for the corrections and additional information.


This is the guy who gave us a tour last Sunday. As you can see, it was a beautiful day! Got quite windy out on the lake though! You can see the L (elevated train) travelling across the river in the background.


A lock seperates the Chicago River from Lake Michigan. This is the inner lock.


While waiting for the lock to close behind us I snapped these kids looking at the local wild fowl.


This is part of Navy Pier – a huge tourist attraction in Chicago.


A sailing ship approaches Chicago. You can see some of the downtown skyline, voted the second most beautiful skyline in the world (Sydney got first place). I think that’s the Sears Tower in-between the sails..

More pictures to come!

Rush hour horror: Woman dragged under train

Last night after work I walked down to Washington/Wells to catch the L home. At the station passengers were turned back by officials and told to go up to Merchandise Mart. No explanation was given as to why. Not being completely familiar with Chicago yet I walked north, following the train line and took a wrong turning. As I approached State/Clarke I saw a policeman directing traffic across the river, and noticed ambulances and that the road was blocked up ahead. I had the radio on (NPR – loud music after work irritates me!) and as I turned around I heard there had been a “pedestrian accident” on the L. I walked too far unfortunately, reaching the Green Line station at Clinton before consulting my map and turning back and north to Merchandise Mart. There we were told that no trains were heading south (back into town) but trains were running north. A train pulled in 5 minutes later, and everyone on the outbound side of the train station was told that the train was going north again. We all rushed over to the other side and headed home. I saw at least 3 south bound trains stopped on the brown line.
I heard on the train that a woman had been dragged under the L at a station, but I missed the news last night. Here’s the story from the Sun Times. Poor woman, really bad accident. 🙁

Linux Is Not Ready For the Enterprise

This opinion piece is so misleading I don’t know where to start! Luckily I don’t have to because a brief thread on LUNI has reasonable answers to this analyst’s questions and asertions.

It also seems that the MySQL client libraries are now released under the GPL. This causes a lot of problems for producers of non-GPL software and is an artifact of the license. This may even impact on PHP bundled support for MySQL as PHP 4 isn’t available under the GPL.

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