You know, we never named our cat. I like to think it’s because cats are always half wild and you’re never sure what they’ll do. That’s certainly true for Puss. One moment you’re rubbing her soft fur, or scratching behind her ear, she’s purring and you’re relaxed. The next moment she has her claws into your wrist and her jaws are going for the flesh between your thumb and first finger.. ah.
Come to think of it, that pain doesn’t compare to the time she got caught up a tree in a gale. Yours truely had to go up fetch her down. As I dropped her down to my brother on the ground she did not want to let go of my hand at all!
She was a damn lucky cat too. While holidaying with my aunt, my brother and sister found her in Co. Cork up the side of mountain trail. She was meowing and thin and looking for food. For some reason they took her the many miles home to Cork. In the late Summer of 1989 we didn’t have a pet, never had one, and weren’t going to have one. However despite that, it was clear from the start that she adopted us.
“I want food!” “Give me attention!” “Go away, I’m tired!”
Such is the life of a cat.
Did I say she was lucky? She’s had her scrapes. On St. Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day) 1990 she jumped out of her box late at night. Unfortunately there was a fishing hook hanging down from the shelf above. She got caught in it and raced up the garden in great pain. When I heard the commotion, the meowing and the crying, I raced outside in pijamas, picked her up and cradled her as I took her indoors. The hook had lodged in her belly and her paw had stuck in the briars at the other end of the hook. I cradled her for what seemed like ages while my father rang a vet. I’m not sure at this stage did he call out to us, or did we call to his surgery, but he sorted her out. We continued to bring both Spring and Puss to the same vet for the last 14 years.
I rang home last Saturday to hear bad news. Unfortunately, Puss hadn’t been too well of late, she wasn’t eating, and was very lethargic. When I left for Chicago I guessed there might not be too much time left for her. I was right.
She was put to sleep last Wednesday. It must have been very hard on my father and brother to bring her to the vet, but it was the only humane thing to do.
Cats are known to be solitary creatures, they like their own company and shy away from human contact. Maybe that’s true in the wild, but I wouldn’t believe it for a moment when it comes to domesticated cats. Puss was part of the family, as was Spring.
Tag Archives: irishblogs
PHP – oo stuff
BDKR has a rant here about OO in PHP. I agree with some of what he says. There’s lots of bad code and design out there (I can’t promise to be perfect either!) but that permeates functional and procedural programming too.
I happen to like working with objects and structuring code in that way. It was a hell of a thing to get used to in college though, Before that I had done a lot of work coding in ASM on the C64. Actually having structures to work with was a real boon!
On a related topic, John mentioned a ObjectView, a PDF magazine about OO for developers. May take a look at it later.
Can your car roll uphill?
Good explanation of this strange phenomenon 🙂
Whilest there is this slope of 1 in 86 upwards from the bend at the Glen, the configuration of the land on either side of the road provides an optical illusion making it look as if the slope is going the other way.
There’s even a Wikipedia page on the phenomenon.
Gardaà prevent summons on Taoiseach
First I laughed at this, but then I though, “wtf! Why right do the police have obstructing a solicitor doing his job? Even if it is to issues a court summons to the prime minister of Ireland! This story has the scoop. (Thanks to Sharrow on IRC for the link)
[Solicitor John Devane] said he intended calling for a bench warrant for the arrest of both Mr Ahern and Mr Smith if they failed to come to the court on 12 June.
Spamassassin – Bayesian autolearn
Just noticed the Spam Assassin auto learn rules. Look up perldoc Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf and search for auto_learn, auto_learn_threshold_nonspam, auto_learn_threshold_spam.
I’ve changed the auto_spam threshold down, as 15 is probably a bit high considering the small number of false positives I usually get.
New SpamAssassin Out!
Version 2.55 of SA is out. The release notes are a bit terse, but the notes for 2.54 indicate this is a release worth installing. It adjusts some spam rules spammers were using to get past SA!
spammers have been targeting our nice rules to get themselves negative overall scores, so those rules are now much less strongly-scored. also added a “TOO_MANY_MUA” rule that will catch multiple user agent headers.
Go download it now!
The Oily Americans
A story worth reading for the conspiricy theorists among you!
For more than a half-century, American foreign policy dealing with oil has typically been manipulative and misguided, often both at the same time. The pattern of intrigue has ranged from U.S. officials’ secretly writing tax laws in the 1950s (so the Saudi royal family could collect more money from the sale of its oil and American companies could write off the added payments on their tax returns) to overthrowing a government that showed too much independence in handling its oil sales.
Linux to Symbian File Transfer – HOWTO
I finally got to see my phone’s filesystem from Linux this morning! I used p3nfs to connect my Nokia 7650 and Red Hat 9 Linux box. Here’s how.
- Login to your Linux box as root.
- Make sure you have the following rpms installed: bluez-libs-devel, bluez-libs, bluez-utils. They’re available from your local apt-rpm repository (just apt-get install them!) or from http://bluez.sf.net
- Copy the following lines to your /etc/modules.conf
# bluetooth stuff
alias net-pf-31 bluez
alias bt-proto-0 l2cap
alias bt-proto-2 sco
alias bt-proto-3 rfcomm - Start Bluetooth services:
/etc/init.d/bluetooth start - Create the bluetooth device if it doesn’t exist:
mknod /dev/rfcomm0 c 216 0 - Create a directory for the mobile to be mounted on:
mkdir /mnt/psion - Download p3nfs from the site above. Copy the nfsapp for your phone to your phone (you’ll have to mail it to your phone, wap, or bluetooth in Windows.)
- p3nfsd doesn’t compile on Red Hat 9, but it’s simple to fix that. cd into the nfsd directory, edit “mp_mount.c” and remove any mention of
extern int errnofrom it and add#include <errno.h>at the top of the file. Do the same in “mp_xmit.c” and compile usingmake clean;make - Follow the instructions in README.bluetooth.linux (find the BDADDR, bind to the device, and start the nfs app and servers.
- cd into /mnt/psion and look around your phone!
This is in fact more useful than the Windows tools I have. I couldn’t send images from my phone to my desktop software, and there’s quite a few of them. Using this, I simply went into /mnt/psion/C:/Nokia/Images/ and “mv”ed the files onto my PC!
There’s an “Installs” directory there too so I presume that’s where the .sis and .jar files go to install applications. Will test later. /me’s happy!
This howto wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable page Tom wrote about his own experiences. Thanks! And of course Google helped me compile p3nfsd!
$2 trillion fine for Microsoft security snafu?
Doubtful it’ll happen..
Microsoft’s latest security lapse with its Passport information service could trigger a $2.2 trillion fine on the company courtesy of the US government.
Microsoft on Thursday admitted that a flaw in the password reset tool of its Passport service could compromise the information stored on all 200 million users. It scampered to post a fix and is looking into potential exploits, but the damage to Microsoft may already have been done.
Who is Michael Savu?
So, I was browsing the QDB: Top 50 Quotes, and I came across this classic (warning, offensive language!). I wondered then, “Who is Michael Savu? Will his mom ever find the post?”
hehe.