Tag Archives: Holy Shmoly

If you go to www.itsyourmoney.ie as the radio advert recommends you’ll be redirected to the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority website.
Some good info there, if a little general and basic. I like their reports however.

This morning I read with interest a review (The Guardian Newspaper, Review Section, Friday last) of “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life”, a biography of the great man by Walter Isaacson. The reviewer was mostly positive but bemoaned the lack of critical examination in the book.
The review ends with the following quote,

“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

This quote is taken from his speech to the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. and the reviewer finishes with the quip,

“Alas, these prophetic words of the great sage are not included in Isaacson’s biography. They might have unsettled American readers, who cannot bear very much reality.”

Fortunately for us, the speech is online, and as the EU draws ever nearer to creating it’s own constitution it’s worth taking a look at the complete text as the quote above doesn’t do it justice.
And the title of this post? I copied the reviewer’s title. It refers to the fact that Mr Franklin was a very successful business man and lead a colourful life!

Yes, I’ve redesigned. No, it’s not finished yet! Template is from Stu’s excellent site.

This bug/flaw could be serious if you run Mozilla on Windows XP. It lets web pages run any program without user intervention. There’s a fix so go download it! You can take some consolation in the fact that not many blackhats are going to exploit a browser with 1% share of the general Internet browsing population however!

Jeffrey Veen shows a simple usage of the wget command that’ll retrieve media from remote sites. If you’ve used wget at all you’ll be familiar with the options he uses.
What’s more interesting is the wget-curl blog that lists recipies for downloading images and audio. Good news for all you hungry media consumers out there!
I found 3hive.com via Jeffrey’s post above. I’m enjoying a few tunes by The Hold Steady right now. Go listen!
Much Later… And this page will be very handy for ripping mp3s from web pages!

The Spamassassin Rules Du Jour is an invaluable bash script that’ll update commonly used SA rules from various sites. Put it in /etc/cron.daily/ to have it run once a day!
I have SA fairly well trained already so it didn’t make much difference to my setup but it’s well worth installing especially as new classes of spam appear!

I missed it the other night but Fred played in the Lobby on Friday night to promote their new single.
The good news is that the single is available from their homepage to download and Fred will be the featured “rising band” on Tom Dunne’s show on Today FM.
Damn, wish I had known they played in Galway too, although it was last night.. Could I have driven down to Cork and gone to work this morning? hehe.

It’s not for a few days yet but happy birthday Kevin! We all had a great day and it was great to meet old friends again!

Mark Twomey provides excellent coverage of the goings on at Tech.Ed in Amsterdam!

Militant European Linux users nearly started a fistfight with members of the Windows 2003 Server team when a FUD war went wrong. (The Microsoft definition of Open Source being somewhat different than the Linux community’s definition of Open Source.) The OS propagandists usually never come to blows as they all know that their arguments are only so much crap, but there were some very steamed up techies scurrying around the halls after a heated discussion or two today.

Microsoft’s Services for Unix guy was fun, asking assembled crowds how many of them were Linux/Unix developers who felt like fish out of water, laughing when most of the hands went up and saying that this was the safest place for them to be right now, or at least it was until the roaming packs of guys in the MSDN T-Shirts were sluggish after lunch and couldn’t chase them all that fast.

More on the Bush interview from boingboing! I also read in the Irish Times that a member of the Irish Government defended the interview by Carole Coleman. I’ll have a look for a link later..
Much Later.. Rymus has more, including a letter to the Examiner from a US citizen.