Category Archives: General

I moved the Gnome task to the top of my desktop. It works much better up there for a number of reasons.

1. When new windows are opened, especially dialog boxes, the window manager doesn’t know the size of the window sometimes. If the task bar is at the bottom of the desktop the dialog box may disappear under it. (This is a frequent problem with the GIMP)
2. I spend a lot of time writing into a terminal window. The cursor is often at the bottom of the window. The taskbar was annoying and distracting when I was trying to concentrate and write code.

Did anyone else get up at 4am last night?
My alarm on the mobile was set for 3.30am, it went off, I grabbed the phone and somehow switched the phone off and dropped back to sleep. I woke at 4:01am and switched the mobile on again. Got up, looked out the window, saw clouds, cursed, and went back to bed… zzzzz.
I hope others had a better night!

User Interface Engineering Article — Users Decide First; Move Second – get rid of those DHTML menus! Users don’t like them!

From this report on the Leonid Meteor Storm comes this graph of activity times over Dublin. I just hope the cloud doesn’t obscure our view!

More Criticism of Relatively High European Interest Rates – Ireland doesn’t have any control over interest rates, we gave up that control when we decided to join the Eurozone. A lot of people are now thinking we shouldn’t have joined as our inflation is running at more than twice the European average (it’s over 4%), and the recent publication of the book of estimates has just added fuel to the fire as cutback after cutback was announced.
On the other hand, here’s a positive rebuttal of the above article. Let’s wait and see. Hmm, that person has an interesting blog.

A Night of Shooting Stars – On November 18 to 19, Earth slams into two Leonid dust trails. The first was shed by Tempel-Tuttle in 1767, seven orbital revolutions ago. The second dates from 1866, four revolutions ago.

Meteors from the 1767 stream will peak around 04:00 Universal Time (UT) on November 19. To convert UT to EST, subtract 5 hours, changing the date if necessary. Subtract 6 hours for CST, and so on. This works out to 11 p.m. EST on the 18th.

So, I have to get up at 4am. I’m going to be a bit tired at work tomorrow!

dvd::rip works very nicely! I left it ripping a DVD overnight and came back to find a nice 700MB avi ready for burning onto CD!

A nightclub promotion, shagtag, was due to be held in Mayo but was banned by a District Judge. I tried searching for a news article about it but there’s very littel online except for one on unison.ie (linked above in the Google search) which requires registration. Here’s a realaudio interview with the promotion sponsor.

This is what all the fuss is about, the shagtag promotion is on at The Gasworks in Cork and these are pictures of fliers doing the rounds..

Very innocent I think you’ll agree…
(To avoid confusion if you’re not Irish or from the UK, here’s what shag means!)

The last time I bought a 56k modem, it used the V.90 standard but I’ve seen modems in shops that are advertised as supporting a new V.92 standard. Here’s a report on what V.92 actually is and includes a link to an updates page which was only updated a short while ago so it’s probably current.