Tag Archives: Holy Shmoly

I got an awful fright this morning when I heard this story on the radio. Martina and I took that same ferry many times when we stayed with my cousin on Staten Island.
I just heard on the radio that the pilot of the ferry may have fallen asleep. He’s in hospital after apprently trying to commit suicide!

Well done spammers, you finally discovered this site! I received 3 comment spams last night and others have been hit too. It was inevitable I suppose but now it’s time to take care of the problem.
There are so many methods of stopping this abuse of the site and they’ve been endlessly discussed in the blog world. I tried to pipe 2 of the spams to spamassassin but it doesn’t work too well unfortunately. Chances are, it won’t work when run as “nobody” either.
I’m opting for the method that keeps the CLUG and Webdev mailing lists free of spam: moderation. When someone posts a comment to your blog you will receive an email as normal with that comment, but it will also include a moderation link to validate or delete the spam. By default moderation will be turned on.
The next step would be a “registered user” mode so that regular visitors can register (with email validation) and post comments by-passing the moderation system.

But I’m a crap artist. Will someone please do better than this please? Those pictures took me ages, but they’re not very good!

So much to say but not today.

Some photography links and discussions:

• Apparently, the digital zoom on the Sony 717 is better than zooming and cropping in Photoshop!
• Don’t you hate shutter lag and autofocus time? They’re annoying, but at least the autofocus and exposure setup time for an action shot can be removed by pre-focusing. Unfortunately you’re still left with shutter lag. Here’s a long discussion about this issue.
• I read with interest an article by David Mc Williams in the SB Post last Sunday. In it he proposed that paying a mortgage is dead money, not paying rent. Yes, that’s sure to get up people’s noses!
• Keith Barry caught a bullet in his teeth on television in front of a crowd. Amazing illusion, however he did it. Never mind the dodgy looking site, navigate in. They’ve a recording of his appearance on the Late Late which is probably worth downloading just to see Pat Kenny have the sh*t frightened out of him!
• Film Degrain – a plugin for the Gimp. I tried this on one image and it worked quite well. It did make details a bit softer though so examine the photo carefully.
• I got 50 digital images printed by Spectra Photo in town. It only cost me €9.50 for 6×4 prints. Quality is very good and I’ll get more printed there as it’s a quick overnight service! (and a dial-up line can’t compete with the bandwidth of a CD dropped into a shop!)

Damn, typing html links on a keyboard with broken left shitft and ctrl keys is really awkward!
Later … I thought something was wrong. I counted the photographs I had printed and only 39 were there. The first 10 on the CD hadn’t been printed! (I had burned 49 images.. ls -l|wc -l counts an extra line at the top of the ‘ls’ output) I can’t wait to hear what excuse they give for this! *mutter*

Wow! Amazing photo of a “sofa-sized” fireball over Wales.

I read in the paper yesterday that a serious powercut hit Italy the day before. Granted, it was on Sunday that the powercut happened but I was shocked that such a major event escaped under my radar until Monday evening. UserFriendly is the first mention I’ve seen of it online, but now that I’m looking for it, I found it on rte.ie too.
There’s an expression here, “Ireland is closer to Boston than Berlin”. The reference is to economic policy but holds too for English speaking media which is sad.

Argh! Silly play on words in the title, sorry! hehe.
The new version of gaim, available through apt-rpm and other sources logs in to Yahoo. The gaim website says there may trouble ahead but it works right now at least.

So anyways, the moral of this story is if you want to get hits, pick a fight with someone and mention Macs a lot. 🙂

For ages I’ve had to use an internal winmodem (using the closed-source hcf drivers available online), but Owen gave me a USR external modem yesterday which I just replaced my old modem with. On booting Linux, Kudzu recognised that the internal modem was removed and configured the new external modem!
The only problem I had with kppp was a “NO DIALTONE” error in the log. Doh! I forgot to plug in the telephone cable!
The external modem is faster, apt-get runs at 5.9kb/sec instead of 4.4kb/sec, and there’s no annoying stutter when the modem dials.
Thanks Owen 🙂