After I found out that Waterford had moved to Kilkenny (thanks ILUG!) on Google Maps I became curious and searched for Blarney and found Blarney Stone Street in Tyler, Texas. Check out all the street names!
You could travel all over Ireland by walking up and down a few streets in that town! Dublin, Limerick, Ulster, Blarney. I have to wonder who named a street, “Irish Moss St.” Sounds like something you get at a garden centre!
You never know, I might visit Tyler in Texas some day.
Sometime last year Virgin sold it’s retail music business and was renamed Zavvi. The first I knew of it was when the Cork store had this strange forgettable green brand name plastered over the door. I could never remember the name, not a good sign for a retail chain.
They didn’t last long unfortunately. The notice above is displayed in their front window. The company appointed a liquidator on December 30th. If you go in there now they have some great sales. 30% off games, lots of DVDs and CDs slashed in price. Long queues at the cash registers though and I wouldn’t count on getting a refund quickly if they’re liquidating stock.
I just installed Synergy on my Ubuntu and Mac OS X laptops and now I can control both from one keyboard and mouse. It works fairly well, although I do wonder:
It’s easy enough to install, on Ubuntu the Linux version is already in the repositories, so the following will install a simple gui tool to configure and run a server.
aptitude install quicksynergy
That will install Synergy as well.
Run “quicksynergy” from a terminal, go to the “Use” tab and give it the IP address of your machine. Then enter the hostname of your second (or third or fourth..) computer in whichever direction you want. My Macbook is on the left.
Before clicking “Execute”, I downloaded the Mac OS X version of Synergy, untarred it and after reading the documentation, fired up the client with:
./synergyc -f 192.168.1.20
Moments later, the following message popped up on my Ubuntu terminal,
NOTE: CServer.cpp,278: client “donncha-o-caoimhs-macbook.local” has connected
Now I can move the mouse cursor off the left side of my Ubuntu screen and it starts moving on my Macbook!
I don’t think I’ll use it full time as I’d strain my back or neck typing on a keyboard in front of me and twisting my neck to see my Macbook but it’s a nice tool to have. Over WiFi moving the mouse cursor stuttered a small bit, so it’s unlikely you’ll want to do intricate pixel work with it.
I’ll have to try a day’s work with it to judge it properly.
A protest march in Cork today against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Plenty of photographers covering the event, I wouldn’t be surprised to see photos appear on Flickr soon.
A leaflet urged the reader to boycott Israeli products and listed many well known brands. Unfortunately if I was to do that I wouldn’t be able to use my Intel powered laptop, and I wouldn’t be able to use WordPress because Israeli citizens have contributed to it. Oh wait, you probably shouldn’t even use the Internet. Log off now please.
At the end of the march, the speaker pictured above told the crowd that there would be another march next weekend. Ominously he said all shops in Cork should not sell Israeli produce and whatever it takes will be done to force them to do that. He added that only lawful pressure would be applied, that “we must stay on this side of the law”.
How is that really going to hurt Israel? The produce is already bought and paid for by the retailer. Irish shop keepers are reeling from the worst Christmas sales in years and they want to put more pressure on them? You’re only going to hurt the local economy if you go ahead with that boycott. Insane!
I have so much sympathy for the people in Gaza and Israel. Innocent people get killed and maimed on both sides and the cycle of violence goes on and on and on and …
WP Super Cache version 0.8.7 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.
This release addresses some issues large or busy sites had with deleting expired cache files. Some sites generated so many cache files that there were two many files generated, even when those files were cleared out every hour. To fix that I limited the recursive function that deletes the files to 100 deletions at a time. That function is called until all the cache files are deleted (or strictly speaking, no files are deleted. That’s how the expired file cleanup works).
It’s also possible to set the garbage collection interval to 10 minutes now which will also help.
The Metal Slug series of games is over 10 years old now but I only came across them for the first time last year through MAME, the arcade emulator. The games are run and gun shoot em ups with great hand drawn graphics, and frenetic gameplay. You can read about the first game on Wikipedia.
Metal Slug is a series of run and gun video games first released on Neo-Geo arcade machines and game consoles created by SNK. It was also ported to other consoles, such as the Sega Saturn, the PlayStation, the Neo-Geo Pocket Color and more recently, the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS. There is also an anthology of the first 7 games in the main series (including Metal Slug X) available for the Wii, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation 2.
They’re great fun to play, and with an Xbox 360 controller hooked up to my computer the experience in SDLMame was as close to perfect as it could be. When I saw Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii in Gamestop and for only 25 Euro last weekend I had to buy it! All those games in one package, on one CD? How could I resist? Unfortunately I should have checked the reviews first. Metacritic gave it 73%, but the first user review points out the huge flaw that makes all the games totally unplayable.
Once you’re in a game, the default control has grenades set to motion control. If you’ve ever played a metal slug, you’d know that these games are hard, and require split second reactions. There isn’t time to shake the controller up and down. Fortunately there’s 1 control setup that uses the gamecube controller. But with just 3 buttons, it’s baffling why they couldn’t have used 3 buttons on the wiimote.
There are a number of different control configurations, but all are just as hopelessly bad as each other and I don’t have a Gamecube controller. A shame really because they’re arcade perfect conversions. As they should be. Credits for the game include M68k emulation so I presume the exact same code is running on the Wii. Why oh why did they screw it up with a crap control system?
If you really must play Metal Slug, the first game in the series was also released on the Wii virtual console and supports the classic controller. There’s also SNK Arcade Classics Volume 1 but besides Metal Slug it doesn’t seem to be a good value compilation.
Even though the control system is all messed up in the Wii version of Metal Slug Anthology, I’m glad I could support SNK in some small way. Back to SDLMame for me though.
Update! This morning I played Metal Slug on the Wii using a knock off Gamecube controller and it rocks. Sure, you still have the lengthy loading times at the start but otherwise the controllers are fine. Here’s the controller screen and a shot of my “Gameexpert” Gamecube controller. Bought that in Zavvi at a knock down price!
Happy new year! May 2009 be even better than 2008!
PS. I shot this with my Canon 50mm 1.8 and it kicks the ass of the same image I shot with my Sigma 18-200 zoom (not surprisingly). Donations for “Donncha’s fund to buy L series lenses” should be sent to ..
VirtualC64 is a new Commodore 64 emulator for Mac OS X. It’s a promising project, let down by the fact that it’s still in beta but by the looks of things development is moving at a steady pace.
When you first run the emulator it will ask you for C64 roms: basic, kernal, chargen and vc1541. Ironically, you can find all these roms inside Vice, another C64 emulator. Look in /Applications/VICE.app/Contents/Resources/ROM/. The 1541 ROM is DRIVES/dos1541.
Loading a game or demo is as easy as dragging the d64 or t64 image into VirtualC64. When you do you’ll see a dialog like this.
“Flash file into memory” works great for single load programmes but multiload could be a problem. I tried Armalyte. Mounting the d64 as a disk didn’t work. I couldn’t type anything. Loading the first file on the disk by flashing it brought up the crack intro but failed to load. The neat integrated debugger (click “Inspect”) showed the emulator had died doing jsr $2020 and unfortunately at 2020 was another jsr … ($20 is the character code for a space if memory serves, and the machine code for jsr was $20, so memory was full of spaces!)
Blue Max worked much better, as did a 3D Pool game I tried. the crack by Remember included the documentation and again using the debugger I watched as the programme checked for the various key presses. Geeky I know but it brought a smile of recognition to my lips. Here’s that debugger in all it’s glory. Anyone familiar with the C64 should recognise the code beginning at 1AA0. (I had to look up what D016 does. It’s the screen mode. I had completely forgotten. It’s only been 16 years.)
One thing it has going for it over Vice, is a real fullscreen mode. The current version of Vice uses some dodgy resolution changing in Linux (that I rarely got to work properly without screwing up my desktop) and I couldn’t get to work in Mac OS X at all. Fire this baby up in fullscreen mode and you’ve got your very own C64 laptop! Cool or what eh?
As luck would have it VirtualC64 has blown a fuse just as I finish this post. If you have a usb joystick plugged in and activated in port 2 it does strange things. First the keyboard wouldn’t work, and flashing a file didn’t run it automatically. Then the keyboard sort of worked but the left arrow character appeared for most key presses. Odd stuff. Unplugging the joystick and restarting the emulator fixed that problem.
Even my Bits ‘n’ Bobs demo worked in it! (Bah, all my screenshots failed. They only show white. I wonder if the emulator does strange things to the Mac while emulating mixed video modes? I mixed character and video modes in the screens I tried to capture, ah well.)
VirtualC64 is a very promising C64 emulator, and it’s GPL too! I’ll certainly be keeping an interested eye on it, and I wish Dirk and the other project members the best of luck with it.
I’ll always remember Christmas Day 1998. Ten years ago on the night of Christmas Eve we returned from the Regional Hospital without our mother and my father without his wife.
I was in Kerry 2 weeks before when my father rang with the news my mother had collapsed. A massive aneurysm in her brain had burst. She spent the next 15 days in hospital, sometimes awake and able to talk, but most of the time drowsy or asleep. The day before Christmas Eve she suffered another hemorrhage. An emergency operation was carried out to insert a stint in the blood vessel and stop the bleeding but unfortunately the operation was not a success and the stint failed. Machines whirred and beeped by her bedside. She had aged so much overnight. We all said our final goodbyes.
The last conversation I remember having with her was telling her that we had decided on the Christmas gift we were going to get her. Despite her drowsy questioning I didn’t tell her, because it would be a surprise for when she came home. I hold on to that memory of sitting by her bedside. I don’t want to forget it.
We’ll visit her grave later today. Today is a sad day for my family and I but it’s also a celebration and a chance for my family to get together. We have so much to be thankful for. I know my mother would have adored Adam. Have a great day today!
The world is in recession, and it’s even affected Cork. The city was busy but it’s been much busier in previous years. Every second shop had a “Closing Down sale” or “50% off sale” sign. Usually you have to wait until the January sales. It’s great that prices are down, but depressing what it means for the economy. I heard that many stores on North Main Street have already closed their doors.
Construction work still continues in the center of the city though. I bet the developers of those sites are not looking forward to the job of selling floor space to retailers. The Elysian, tallest building in the country, is practically empty since it was opened officially a few months ago.
Besides the maddening crowds, collectors for Share and other charities were out in force. At least that’s one thing that hasn’t changed. The streets were packed with people, but the queues in the shops weren’t that long.
Bully’s on Paul Street was excellent as usual. Their ground floor tables were all taken but they have a first floor restaurant I never knew existed! We got a nice table away from everyone, it was a nice reprieve from the crowds and sounds outside. Their Bully Burger is well worth sampling too. Yum!
Continue reading “Recession in Cork”