What a day!

Wow, hell of a day. So many cool things going on today it’s impossible to list them all. I would like to say that Fred stole the show with their performance, but I was glad things were running late otherwise I would have missed the gorgeous Micha from Slovakia! Here’s a big hello to the Slovaks in the crowd, they made the day with their cheering and enthusiastic flag waving and general mayhem! hehe.
*phew* Wacked.

Mac GIMP? Mac Crap?

You’ve probably already seen this review via the mention on slashdot but I couldn’t let it go by without commenting on it. In the usual Slashdot manner I haven’t read the article yet so I’m not going to defend the Mac version of the GIMP.
All I’ll say is that every photo I publish here is processed using the GIMP. It’s not substantially worse than Photoshop for many tasks, just different. Personally, I can’t stand using Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I don’t like the way they work, they’re not intuitive to me. I like the GIMP right-click to do everything approach. *shrug*
Different strokes for different folks.
Later… This made it to the GIMP User mailing list too. (but the archives are broken.. sorry!)
Here’s an interesting tip I gleaned from that thread:

Well, when you press the TAB key while in Image Window – all other GIMP windows will disappear (except for other image windows if you have multiple images open).
If you press TAB again the Toolbox will appear, after pressing it next time, all previosly hidden windows will come back.

Macro Digital Photography

In the last few weeks I’ve taken to macro photography in a big way. It’s a whole different world out there in the microcosm of flowers, insects and strange textures, where depth of field is measured in inches rather than feet and your subject is likely to have 6 legs rather than 2!
For the budding macro photographer, here are links to tips on the subject. I’ll be looking at some of this over the weekend!

Linux: Tuning Swappiness, eh?

Via slashdot, I thought this thread on how swappy Linux should be would be informative but it appears to be very subjective.
I tested with swappiness set high and low, along with Mozilla FF, Thunderbird, xchat and mgt, I opened 3 2560×1920 images in the GIMP and performed a few operations on each. Neither setting affected performance much, except that with swappiness set high it may have been a little slower. That said, the GIMP maintains it’s own cache, and I have that set at 256MB.
I have swappyness set to 10 now. Not sure if that’s good or bad, or whatever.. *shrug*

May Day Celebrations in Cork!

There’s lots happening in Cork tomorrow!
On May 1st, the EU expands from 15 to 25 members with the addition of many East European states. Ireland holds the rotating presidency of the European Union and as such, we’re hosting delegations from the incoming states in various cities and areas around the country!
Cork is hosting the Slovak group, and it looks like tomorrow’s going to be a busy day in the city! Even better, Fred are playing on a stage in Patrick’s Street just after 5pm! (Thanks Donnchadh for that link!)

Commission advises against use of e-voting

Woo! E-voting (as it is in Ireland) has been turned down by the commission that investigated the issue. There were many concerns about security, secrecy and privacy but in the last few weeks nothing was heard from opponents of the system.
The Government has been running a campaign advocating e-voting, and it has over-simplified the issues (“Press a button”, “We’ve had plenty of practise”, etc..)
Hopefully the Government will clean up their act and implement a good system, and maybe it won’t cost €40m next time..
More on RTÉ and Labour Party website.
Later… Cullen rules out use of e-voting in June! Yay!
later Still… slashdot picked up on the story, along with OT posts as well, lol.