Category Archives: General

Are you thinking of visiting Ireland? You should take a look at RipOffIreland.org before you do. It’s a sad state of affairs but Ireland is one of the most expensive places to live in Europe. There’s no denying that, but don’t believe everything you read online too. This site was mentioned on Red FM last night and some of the stuff said was simply speculation and opinion.
Also of interest is Irish Fuel Prices.com, ‘a site which monitors fuel prices from around the country.’
Lots of other good links via Google too.

There’s a new release of this email security tool out now. This is a recommended upgrade as it has filters for some of the newer exploits out there.

I was sick and out of the office on Friday, but this morning I was shocked to discover 40 spam emails in my inbox! After moving them into my ‘SA training folder” I checked my spam folder – 577 emails! wow! Almost half of them were from Thursday night and Friday.
Then I checked my CorkLUG mail queue. 289 emails. Lots of them were viruses, but the majority were spams.
How much personal mail did I get? (outside of mailing lists, automated bug reports, crontab output..) 5 emails.
Add on to that 841 viruses, or 125MB of email caught by my mail server..

Kasia’s having a rough time of it with comment spammers, but I like an idea expressed in the comments of this post. Print an image containing text that the user must input to submit their comment. That’ll stop bots spamming your blogs at least. There’s also lots more good info in the comments there.
Update! But it’s not good for accessibility reasons. 🙁
Thanks Alex for that link.

SSH bouncing – connect 2 boxes behind natted firewalls. This would have been handy when I was in Chicago!
Hey! that site runs on WordPress too!

If you use spamassassin you should disable Osirusoft as it shut down last week and now returns true on all requests! Thanks Kasia!

Fascinating page from the Wikipedia on the Irish Language. Starting from an overview of the different dialects found around the country to the history of the language it finished by discussing the Irish language used today.

In spite of all the efforts since Ireland achieved independence (some critics claim because of those efforts) the Irish language is in rapid and perhaps terminal decline… The death of the Gaeltachtaí would make a break forever between Ireland’s cultural past and identity and its future. All sides… …agree that such a loss would be a cultural tragedy of monumental scale.

Interesting article via #linux on irc.linux.ie.
No Mark, just because I spent some time in 2 Apple Stores, I’m not going to buy a Mac! I was impressed by the different types of people using the machines though, everybody from a Mac geek wearing a ‘Mac Inside’ tshirt to a musician in a corner to a middle aged couple fiddling with a desktop machine.

If you’ve spent any time at all in Chicago you may have come across 103.5 KISS-FM. I listened to this station all the time and now I can listen at home too! They have a streaming media page but it links to a popup full of javascript. If you’re running Linux it probably won’t be very useful. However, here’s the url you should feed to mplayer, xine, or your favourite Windows Media player..

http://ccdig.liquidviewer.com/wksc

Well, I’m off shortly to meet up with some distant relations here in Chicago. AFAIK, several of my great-grand-uncles moved to the States in the 20’s. Some moved to Chicago. I’m looking forward to meeting Pat and Linda tonight!
I took lots of photos at the weekend – The Chicago Air and Water Show was on over the last two days. Whatever about trying to capture the flight of a baseball, trying to track a figer jet as it zoomed past 400 feet away at 650mph is practically impossible!
I’m almost 100% sure I saw cloud form on the tail of one jet as it flew at that speed. Isn’t that what happens just after they go super-sonic? The bi-planes, and Hurricanes were a lot easier to photograph, and if I have time tomorrow I’ll post some pictures here.