Archive for October, 2006
Fireworks – I’m glad something works
I'm just sitting here at the moment watching the 9 o'clock news and in particular an article on the attitude that will be taken towards fireworks this Halloween. In addition to listening to the news I'm also listening to the incredible racket outside of fireworks going off in all directions. I think that the no-tolerance attitude is failing somewhat as the fireworks have been exploding for nearly 4 hours solid now and all from the same direction. I'm not making light of the problems that the Gardaí face in policing this issue but maybe it's time that we reviewed our attitude to [...]
Feck the Government
Today I went for a run, gym-bound as the weather was less than I was willing to put up with. Whilst puffing my way through several kilometres on the threadmill my thoughts unwittingly turned to politics. I got thinking about how much I always wanted to run a marathon and then how I should do it for charity. From there I chose my charitable cause, as always, to be the fight against cancer - like so many others I too have lost family to this awful disease. Then I got thinking about the state of cancer care in Waterford and exactly how little the government are doing to help the people around [...]
Aaaaaaahhhh Again
It's rarely that I follow up one of my own posts within 24 hours but when it's something that I am incredibly passionate about then exceptions will always exist. This morning I noticed that my last post had already been tracked by podcasting.ie and I was delighted to see such a fast pick-up. Sadly however, having just listened to the podcast that was supposedly influenced enough by my posting on road deaths to have referenced it, I was horrified. Now don't get me wrong, I am always happy to be referenced but if somebody gives a reference then surely some of the original content should be [...]
Things that make me go… Aaaaahhhh!!!
Those who know me, those who read my blog, and those whom have come within earshot of me will know well, my feelings on the media farce that is young drivers and young anything else that causes a problem. This last week has seen more carnage on our roads and I was not surprised to see the headlines. The Irish Times (October 23rd) lead with "Four men aged between 19 and 21 were killed" (this was a two car collision, the cause of which was unknown and the fault of which could only possibly be attributed to at most 2 people). Also in the same edition of the Times "Young drivers to be target of [...]
Coverlipse
Been looking around now for a while for a nice way to track coverage through the IDE rather than having to run a separate build every time I want to check something. Up until now I have been making do with a 30-day trial of the omnipotent Clover. However, I've finally gotten a chance to try out the eclipse plugin known as Coverlipse (installable by pointing your eclipse site update manager at http://coverlipse.sf.net/update/). It integrates reasonably well with eclipse and although it runs a little slower than the Clover plugin it provides pretty much the same data and poses little overhead [...]
Web Rage
Just when you thought you were safe behind your PC from the various dangers of road rage, shopping rage and good old general rage - they bring you WEB RAGE! Yes, in today's news from the BBC is a story about two men who exchanged insults in a chat room that resulted in one of the men driving 70 miles to attack the other. Not really a spur of the moment reaction. You would think that after a 70 mile journey across the UK the assailant would have come to his senses, sadly not... source: BBC NEWS
Hasta la Vista
Paul W has a valid point in his posting today on Microsoft's Vista licensing model. I have heard others talk about it previously but the proposed license structure is simply unworkable. Basically the activation strategy has been taken one step further and severly limits the number of times you can change your hardware before forking out for new a Vista license. As Paul says, tell you families, friends and go further, tell the community. No matter what your flavour of OS, this could set an awful and worrying precedent. source: Life is grand ｻ Vista licensing
Ireland off the hook
An unadapted subject line from The Register. For some reason or other the EU has decided to let Ireland away with not providing location information for callers to emergency numbers (e.g. 999 or 112). The national authority for Ireland has spoken and assured the EU that the service is now available - apparently this was enough to make up for years of non-compliance. Perhaps when the EU heard about the huge physical line monopoly they simply forgot about all other charges... source: The Register
Pimp or Pump?
It's more than often that the ramblings at The Register provide me with cause for a giggle or two but the problem posed in this latest post is mind blowingly hillarious. What it all boils down to is the ultimate question, "Does pimping a blow-up doll infringe upon your country's prostitution laws?" source: The Register
Putting Things in “Prospective”
We were lucky enough today to secure the services of Tom Raftery, to give us an overview of blogging in a business capacity and to advertise the power of blogging to a mostly vanilla audience. During Tom's talk he spoke about the importance of "prospective search" for tracking information being published about you in blogs and other RSS publishing platforms. More importantly Tom spoke about the value of tracking competitors in a business capacity to see what they are up to and try to gain an edge that way. This was a topic that I have often practised but shamefully never spoken about. It was [...]
