Author Archives: Donncha

Three held over Omagh bombing.
I heard about the Dail efficiency reforms on the radio at lunch time. They’re going to introduce electronic voting, TDs will have greater access to ministers for questioning, and timetables have been changed.

I was at the dentist today. I have to go back on March 16th for fillings and maybe more, not looking forward to that!

why to use template-engines in state-of-the-art webapps? – Saw this on the PHP-Smarty mailing list and makes for interesting reading if you develop web apps.

Introduction to CSS Layout – As web developers we have been trained to see an <h1> tag as a way to make something bold and large, not as a way of marking it as a section header.

Hostel alarms were switched off by managers before blaze – An Irish woman was killed in that fire.

There’s been a spate of “car jackings” in the UK recently. Window film offers carjack defence says RAC

Brits round-up including some photos of the stars!

AA men take stranded driver to dying mother – They took him 320 miles! That’s customer service for you!

Woman’s car stolen as she chased mugger – Just when you thought your day couldn’t get worse 🙁

Microsoft music and movie player collects data on users – There’s also a posting to bugtraq and a link to a Microsoft response.

Webword links:
Does karma really exist? A news survey says it does!

One reviewers’ experiences reading 4,934 Pages of Franzen as an E-Book. “I found most of the typical complaints about reading e-books–that they’re hard to see, not tactile enough, impersonal, an eye strain–to be moot. I have been wearing glasses since I was five and my vision is now certifiably terrible (it’s corrected by nine diopters), so I would be particularly sensitive to any difficulties seeing the screen. But I had none.”

Wal-Mart trumps Moore’s law – “Today’s economic reality is that high-tech decisions made in Arkansas play a larger role in boosting America’s productivity than decisions made in Silicon Valley or Seattle.”

An issue that every man has to think about, Razor blades, and how much it costs to replace them!
I recall a comedian commenting that the big razor companies spent years developing a secret new razor blade, one that would be revolutionary, and they did! They added a second blade! wow! Soon after they amazed us again, this time with a razor with 3 blades!
Now I think that blades don’t last as long, and with 3 blades in each razor-head they’re more expensive. *sigh*

The Rise of Complex Terrorism was just linked from Dangerous Meta but I had read this article a few days ago and then lost the URL. Thank you Garret for linking to it!

Tips on using email. Unfortunately I know too many people that should know, but don’t, how to use email properly.

Remember Nebulas on your old 8 or 16 bit computer? I played this a bit on the C64. Here’s a Linux conversion called Tower Toppler!