Author Archives: Donncha

‘Always on’ Internet plan for 19 towns – The government will fund 90% of the cost “to connect homes, businesses and schools to existing broadband networks.” I like how they say, “existing.” They haven’t been able to do this in the major cities so far, so why do they think they can do it where the infrastructure isn’t as well developed? Of course, they probably mean Eircom hi-speed aka ISDN. *sigh*

Two days.. Two whole days our net connection at work was down. Argh!

Abortion Referendum Wrap-up
The referendum’s been and gone. It was narrowly defeated yesterday. There was just 10,500 votes in it.
Now that it’s over, the major parties have vowed to enact legislation to cover abortion in Ireland. The Taoiseach has stated that he thinks it’s impossible to legislate for every issue the NO side campaigned for.
To further muddy the waters, Dana, who was in the NO camp, says she will fight abortion legislation every step of the way. I wonder what did she think she was voting for when she voted NO..

I saw “A Beautiful Mind” last night. Good film, it was the first time I saw Russell Crowe on tv and didn’t think of him as the Gladiator.

Tow boat madness – Thanks Owen for the link.

If you use MSIE, don’t go here: http://www.liquidwd.freeserve.co.uk/ – It runs cmd.exe on your computer! Apparently anyway, it doesn’t work in Linux.

Peoples Republic of Cork – everyone knows the real capital of Ireland is Cork. This is where I live. hehe.

I got a few trapped emails this morning containing the K-Lez.E virus. It masqueraded as email from F-Secure!

Brian’s looking forward to Global Operations.

How Will History View Richard Stallman? via enger.priv.no

My star sign is Sagittarius. Do you believe in the stars? I read my star sign in the newspaper when I think of it, but I’m a skeptic.

List of PHP related vulnerabilities at Security Focus. (from Web Kreator)

Yes, yes, yes. Joel has a great prose style and in Nothing is as Simple as it Seems he’s onto a winner again. When asked how long something’s going to take, I’ve learnt to add at least 50% on to what I think it’ll take. Software projects always take longer, somehow. No matter what fancy tool you have, a sheet of paper and a pen can pay dividends faster than you might realise.

Plenty of good stuff on Meryl.net – it’s a blog powered by Movable Type
I like the simple design of My 2p

I’m really glad Galeon has tabs, I’d have about 20 windows open now. Galeon is now my browser of choice on Linux.

I want to look at b2 sometime.

Jodrell had a page where you could find out the playboy of the month when you were born. It got slashdotted. Ha! Another Galeon user too!

Is Nirvana gone? I spent many hours there..

I used to be a part of the demo scene. It seems like ages ago. It was.
Phew! Thanks Brian for linking to my old demo scene website. God, it’s an awful site, but a mine of history for me. I get very nostalgic when I run old demos I wrote over 10 years ago. *sigh*
Back then I coded on the ol’ C64, made lots of friends in the scene, both in Ireland and abroad.
Way back around 1989 I bought a book on assembly coding on the C64. I’m almost 100% certain it was in that bookshop in Paul St. in town (Sorry Martina, I don’t think Waterstones was open then!). I sat at the bus stop, in the warm sun, waiting for the bus to come, and flicking through the book, thinking to myself, “no way, this stuff is way over my head.” I’m really glad I stuck with it. I liked it because it was close to the metal. There weren’t any fancy APIs, it was just plain assembly and an action replay to debug.
I’ve gone to the other extreme now, doing all my work in PHP and Unix scripting languages. I’d bawk at having to write anything in even C nowadays! Maybe.. I want to do some sort of demo coding again, nothing fancy you know, but just to keep myself familiar with my roots. Stay posted. Links to demo stuff to follow!

Google bombing – not sure where I found this link, but it’s good. I remember Proinnsias telling me something like this with regards to mailing lists. If you stick the URL of your website in your sig, and you post to lots of mailing lists, your site gets associated with the topics you discuss.