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hello peter
I am a little scamp from moore street
that likes to suck on wet socks
that have been left to stew on my grannys corns
but fear not. Although this may seem like drunken gibberish I have only had one wee beer you are a good lad and I promise not to melt your face

I was saddened to hear that Magnus Magnusson has died at age 77. Most of us remember him as the quiz master for mastermind. A fiendish quiz show for the real swots.

Young dermot was consulting the Ipod Oracle, so I decided to do the same.
You have a set of questions you ask. Put the player in random and based on the songs that come up you answer the questions and put in a comment.
The List of questions are hidden here:
The Complete List of my answers are hidden here:

I always feel that hope when I see the day the earth stood still. How I would like our options to be that black and white.

It was Dermot and Lindsay's wedding over the weekend. It was a great event, and I'll get to uploading my pictures as soon as is practical. They're a bit larger than usual and ADSL really puts the capital A in Asymmetric. 100mb upload to come soon, and tomorrow I'm helping someone clean out their house.

'Freak Show' is up for an Eagle Award. Rob is one of the two main people in Sub City, which is without doubt the best comic book store in Dublin.
Vote please!, make us proud.

Brian has this habit of sending out emails with a bunch of attached pictures/embedded power point presentation/something using up lots of bandwidth.
Finally an email that only weighs in at 5k (damned html email). It contains a link to pictures. Now if only he would not have his website in a notes database. It just makes me cringe when I see it. It's so... wrong. There's no other word for it.

You Are Teal Green

You are a one of a kind, original person. There's no one even close to being like you. Expressive and creative, you have a knack for making the impossible possible. While you are a bit offbeat, you don't scare people away with your quirks. Your warm personality nicely counteracts and strange habits you may have.

I went to the cinema last night with the full intention of seeing V for Vendetta. It's not the same as the graphic novel, but I think that it hit the spot in terms of what's happening in the world today. I enjoyed it and would recommend it for other folks. A bit schmaltzy at the end, and missing the point that 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose'. Go, see, enjoy a bald Natalie Portman.
IMDB link.

I was driving this evening from Cork back to Kerry, so I was unwilling to participate in the drinking of many, many pints. While heading for the car at about 10.30 in the evening I noticed a few very unsteady people, but it didn't remind me of the worst excesses of previous years. It was bitterly cold, which probably kept people indoors and out of trouble. Pubs haven't let out yet, so the storm is probably on the way.

There i am reading rec.humor.funny and I encounter a ROT13 joke. I can't find the ROT13 button/choice in the menu structure of Thunderbird. Has this arcane skill been lost to us? <sarcasm>I must compose a letter of complaint to the Times. I think they should know about such an egregious omission</sarcasm>.

Medium Pudding Mixture:

• 4oz. Margarine
• 4oz. Sugar
• 2 Tablesp. Water
• 6oz. self-raising flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 Teasp. salt
• Flavouring

Method:

cream fat and sugar, beat in the whisked eggs, stir in the flour and salt with added water, Steam or bake.

For Marmalade Pudding:

Add one large tablesp. of marmalade to the foundation mixture. Steam and serve with Marmalade sauce.

To Steam:

1. • use a steamer over a pan of boiling water.
   • Have a well fitting lid.
   • Keep water boiling and steaming all the time
2. • Place the pudding basin in a saucepan with boiling water.
   • Water should come half way up the sides of the basin
   • Keep the water boiling, and as it boils away, fill up with boiling water, but do not wet the top of the pudding
3. Steam in a pressure cooker, according to instructions.

Time for steaming is about 1.5 hours for a pudding made from 6-8oz. flour.

Turning out: A light pudding breaks easily, so loosen it gently from the sides of the basin with a flexible round-ended blade, which should be pressed against the side of the basin, not the pudding.
When loose, cover the basin with a hot dish and invert quickly.
A good pudding may be marred by careless serving and enhanced by dainty dishing.

To Bake:

Use a pie dish, cake tin, soufflé tin, fireproof dish, ring mould, small moulds or deep bun tins.

Grease well.

Line the base of any flat-bottomed tin so that pudding will turn out easily.
Bake in a moderate oven (350f or No. 4)
Small moulds may be baked at a slightly higher temperature than large ones.

Time required: 30-40 minutes for large and 15-20 for small moulds.

Today was of course christmas dinner, but over the last few days (yesterday included) I've been struggling with an upgrade to SuSE linux 10. I stupidly installed the commercial version, instead of the open one. X doesn't work correctly (swapping VTs crashed the X server - this is apparently a bug with Xorg when compiled with gcc 4.0.2 [laptop dell inspiron 500m, 855 intel graphics). fixing the missing packages took a while. The only reason I noticed was that xgettext was missing. Turns out that there's a bunch of packages missing (ncft, gettext-devel). For someone who cares about having a decent ftp client and be able to use xgettext (I mean what the fuck are you people thinking - do you even care about the rest of the world. You pretty much can't compile a single open source project without xgettext).
Anyway, rant over for the time being, on to the fixes. I made use of a page on the jem report, which got me a convenient set of Yast sources to add the missing packages.
A partial fix for X was to download the fairlite x drivers, the problem is that I lose 3d acceleration. Lose one thing, gain another! Frustrating to say the least.

and a round of applause... He got engaged. Good for the both of them.

Or: Gyles Brandreth shame on you!
on the generic complaints program 'Room 101' on the BBC, he claimed that phrase's origin was from the Houses of Parliament where they have a pair of red lines separating the opposite sides of the room. The problem is that it is a slight confusion. He was mixing up the 'Thin Red Line' phrase and the toeing the line definition. No-one in the houses of parliament would have been bare-footed, so they would have never 'toed the line'. The origin of the phrase is most likely military or naval, where people were required to line up at various times for inspection. Convention claims the navy, as most common crewmen on a boat were bare-footed.
The lines in the House of Commons themselves are actually quite thick, and are positioned two sword lengths apart from each other. The principle being that you stayed behind the line during a debate, and thus could not attack your opponent on the opposite side. Such was the animosity of the two sides during certain periods of England's history that this principle was created, and it is still adhered to.
The origin of 'Thin Red Line' is slightly different. In the mid 19th Century there was an understanding between officers and men that British Infantry would never be asked to stand and face an enemy onslaught in less than three ranks, four was more common. The retreat would be sounded rather than allowing this to happen. At the Battle of Balaclava on October 25th 1864, Colin Campbell's 93rd Highlanders (Argyll and Sutherland) stood in just 2 ranks and faced a Russian Cavalry charge. It was here that the phrase originated.
There is a similar, but not identical phrase 'Coming up to Scratch', which refers to the scratch line that bare-knuckled boxers were supposed to get to before resuming fighting once they'd been knocked down. If they didn't come up to scratch, then they were out of the fight.

Joan Cosgrave passed away at about 8.15pm on the 11th September 2005. My condolences go out to her family at their time of loss.

Off on holidays to France today. I will try not to update this before I get back.
See ya later.

At the start of January I got a new phone. Less than a month later the phone, along with my jacket, was stolen in a night club - from the cloak room. After several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with the phone insurance, they refused to replace my phone. Wasted money, that insurance policy I tell you. Apparently because it was within a month of having obtained my phone, it was far more than a formality. I'll have to remember that in future.
On to new phones. I had a Sony Ericsson V800. Nice phone, but really bad battery life. I've been looking at the S700, which is a better phone (battery life-wise) but a friend was telling me of his new XDAIIs (an O2 phone). But you will lose 3G capabilities comes the cry. Lets kick in with a reality check here - 3G coverage in Ireland is cities and major towns only. Lets talk phone reception - I have virtually No coverage when I'm in the Castlegregory area with Vodafone. It has not improved in the last 4 years, while my little sister has had no issues with her O2 phones.
There is only one kicker. Calls abroad are covered in my minutes on Vodafone, which means that calls to the sister and others are significantly cheaper than they would be otherwise. If O2 would just stretch to that then I would completely swap over to them in a heartbeat.
Ah yes, geeks with their toys.

There was a phone call late tonight from someone that nobody recognized.
A very good friend of mine was killed in a car crash in Roscrea.
This brings to two the number of close friends I have who were killed in road traffic accidents.

Yesterday my next door neighbor called over. He's getting on in years, pushing on to 84 at this point. His problem was that he had seen some young lad in his house causing problems. We have a problem with local kids breaking into houses and robbing them blind, so a local kid in the house would not be totally surprising. The cops were called, people came, itwas al much excitement but no-one was found. About an hour later I left him, under the impression that we had convinced him that there was no-one in the house. About an hour later he came knocking on the door again. He again repeated that he had seen someone in the house. By this time my sister's boyfriend was visiting so we both went to the house and went through it with a fine tooth-comb. No kids. We're not completely convinced that there was anyone in the house in the first place, but we again feel that he deserves listening to again, just in case.
You have to bear in mind by this point, he is really agitated, and scared. It's an awful sight to see a person in such a state of distress, and we were trying all that we could to make him feel safe and secure.
By this stage he's spent the best part of the afternoon in the house, and I've been feeding him tea, and listening to his stories of the past. He's really really, really difficult to understand, the conversation is slow and painful, but I feel I understand what he's saying, even if it's not completely in one piece.
We seem fine until later in the evening. He arrives at the door at about 7.30 pm, absolutely scared out of his wits, saying that the kids have been in his house and have been harassing him when he was up town. I settled him down, he smoked a few cigarettes, had a couple of cups of tea, and I went next door, torch in hand making sure that there was no-one in the house. It took until about 10.30 before he felt he was able to go back to his own house, so I followed him in and practically walked him up to his bed, all the time assuring him that there was no intruder in the house and that I would be in the house for as long a it took him to feel happy. He insistede that he was OK, and practically walked me out of the house.
The next morning, I had my shower and no sooner had I the towel on my head then there was a knock on the door. He was there, telling me that there he had encountered three women sitting on the sofa in his living room, that he could not open the door and had rushed out to the house. Again, I settled him down; a cup of tea, and he smoked a cigarette. By this time, I had completely figured out that he was imagining the intruders in the house. Afger about an hour he left to visit one of the neighbors, and I went next door to have a look around the house. He had left the front door open, and had jammed the key in the back door. He had been so f**king frightened that he had left the house through the front door, which is something he never, ever does.
Long and short of it, he's gone dotty. It's only been in the last few days. The cause could be a change in medication, a reduction in the amount of booze he's drinking, seeing ghosts; I just don't fucking know. What I do know, is that if he has more visitors than the home help for a solitary half an hour during the day that he might not be in the situation he is in. I would hope to christ that it's just a temporary aberration, and that he'll be better soon. He's living on his own, he's lonely, and for some reason, I'm able to understand what he's saying better than a hell of a lot of other people, which makes me even sadder, as it only emphasizes the fact that while I've only been in contact with him for a short period.
It only exemplifies my statement. Hug an old person today, because they need it.

Well, I was performing the usual 'tech geek' duty this afternoon. I was fixing up a friend's computer. It was a real mess. It had originally been split into 4 FAT partitions (that's not FAT32), with a lot of wasted space on the disk. Using partition magic, I upgraded them to two partitions - one for the Windows 98, and the other for Windows 2000. Then I fixed the modem so it would work in Windows 2000 - it needed a driver download from the Gateway web site. Once that was completed I installed Zone Alarm (personal edition). That fixed an immediate problem - there was a computer somewhere on the Eircom network that was just barraging the machine with SMB packets - virus or hacker I don't know, but it was causing 100% processor utilization and was killing the machine while it was connected to the internet. Mairt was of the impression that the fan was internet noise. That confirms my opinion - firewall first, the rest is just ornamentation.
What was my charge for all this work? An Indian meal, complete with a bottle of beer! I really am cheap tech support.
Internet noise... what next?

Well We've been in the pub and we've arrved back to the house. It's the last night in the house for Tara and Nicky (and myself). I am of the no fixed abode problem, so I'm just following people from house to house (:-); not really.
I need to do something!

this is blatantly taken from another web site about credit ratings. It is in regards to inquiries about credit ratings reducing your rating - it turns out that it does, if there are more than 2 requests in a 60 day period it will affect your rating, but that this effect will expire after 12 months. I didn't realize that it can happen, until Dave mentioned it.

Oh well, the holiday is nearly over. I'm in the auckand office - I spent more than a few minutes ploughing through over 3000 new email messages. I judiciously ignored anything non-project related, which means that I only had about 1000 project messages to filter on top of the 3000 in my inbox. Buried in email? you bet.

During
Side - During

This is the pre bungie jump photograph of me about to jump off the Kawarau Bridge. Fun all round for me.

I've been able to play one MP4 video on the PC per boot of windows. Every subsequent time it crashed. It turns out that the intervideo mp4 video decoder was at fault. It was preventing me from enjoying the stalker trailer that gleb pointed me to.
The Solution? unregister the intervideo mp4 decoder.
How do I do that? pop up a command prompt using the run dialog, on the drive that you installed the intervideo software cd to \Program Files\InterVideo\Common\Bin. At the prompt type: regsvr32 /u MP4VDEC.ax, and it all works job oxo.

SmokeSkins Design your own covers for your cigarette packets. It's an interesting idea.

One of these days I'll actually pay attention to stuff like this by default - it turns out that you can run unsigned .NET code from the internet by default. under medium security settings in IE. I need to test this out as it makes for interesting possibilities.

Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.

AnandTech
AMD has been surging for the past year and a half or so and enthusiasts are pretty hyped about their x86-64 architecture. But the fact that enthusiasts (and some major manufacturers) are taking the Athlon 64/Athlon FX/Opteron plunge, Dell is still one of the more prominent holdouts:
Dell's stance on this is that they don't see a strong demand from their customers and thus won't consider AMD based PCs just yet. Dell's CEO, Kevin Rollins, makes it very clear that Dell won't be offer AMD based PCs anytime soon, by stating 'We're the most successful PC company on the planet and we don't have AMD'.
Pretty strong words there from Dell's CEO. He is right and Dell's sales have been up for the third quarter, but good times don't always last and relationships can be broken...
The real reason is, of course that AMD can't manufacture the chips in enough quantity for Dell, which is a shame, I'd love if Dell started selling alternates to intel boxes

The Daily WTF is a fine site pointed to me by Fintan. Some of the entries have me really saying WTF are they thinking of?

Solaris security suffers image problem - Apparently there's a buffer overflow with the Xpm library. It's just a shame that I don't use Xpm files for anything anymore - all the gnome applications use .pngs's and I don't think I've seen an .xpm file over the web in years - they're just too big for anything other than icons.

Well there is a family do happening tomorrow, so I had to book into a hotel for the weekend, and this is what I ended up staying in (because the B&B was booked out).

Rochestown Park Hotel in Cork City, Ireland - Luxury Hotel Accommodation and Conference Venue with Leisure Centre

I'm using an eircom wireless card. Quite easy to connect and get everything working - simply pick up the eircom wireless connection and you're away on a hack (pun not intended). The only problem is that I seem to not be able to access it from my room.

I have the sinking feeling that my housemate has fled the country just before everything comes together for his big drinks deal. If that's the case then I think I may be moving house within the week as there is no way on the planet I'm going to be around when the Gardaí and the Customs and Ex(er)cise people are bashing in the door to get what's theirs.
The joys of living with a wheeler dealer.

I have a course all the mondays of this week. It's a complete disaster for me because it means that I have to get to the office before 9am. I never manage to make it into the office before 9 normally, 9.15 is my time.
That said, I need to hit the shower now or I will be late. C'est la vie.

I was at home for the weekend. The weather was nice and I got some photographs of some flowers. Sad, I know. I need to get a new digital camera, as my current one is really poor, that and I want to take more prefessional looking shots.

Sometimes people tend to say something that seems quite innocuous, but it turns out to be quite insulting. How about this pearl:
It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus." --Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in George Tech's campus newspaper after the Internet worm

I'd like to know what people think this is