It turns out that ABC in the good old USA will be releasing all their new prime time shows in both the Spanish and English languages. This means a lot, as it implies that they are finally accepting the fact that there is a reasonably sized Spanish only speaking audience that they need to address.
Of course when we compare it with the muppet in Ireland who insisted that the Irish language is now a full language in the EU. This means that every document has to be translated to Irish. There must be a translator who can speak Irish in most major meetings that are being held in Brussels. As a side note, many meetings are held using only English and French, as these are the two ‘base EU languages’.
Previously to this, Irish was a second-tier language, some documents were translated to Irish, and there was no need to have an Irish translator at any of the meetings.
Honestly, I think it is one of the biggest wastes of money that the EU has to go through. There will probably be no Irish job created for this as most Irish translations are performed in the lower-cost translation countries such as Spain.
Another side-effect is that all the place signs in Gaeltacht areas are only in Irish. All very fine and well you might say, the locals will know the names themselves and the tourists will be able to guesstimate the translation from their maps which are all in English. The problem is that a lot of Irish place names have no connection to the English name. The English names are colonial names, the Irish names are the real place names. Virtually every sign in the country is bilingual until you reach the Gaeltacht, then it all fades to pure Irish.
Newstalk 106’s quote of the week.
From the Newstalk 106 web site.
Restaurant critic Helen Lucy Burke joins Damien Kiberd on Wednesday’s Lunchtime Show and caused a lot of listeners to nearly choke on their chicken rolls by revealing some rather disgusting facts about the production of chicken…
Damien “What kind of practices are being used in relation to the production of chickens?”
Helen Lucy “Lets start with the food they’re giving them. Now, I can’t state what every chicken raising station over here is giving them but I can tell you what the New York Times has recently exposed the American Chicken Industry as giving them. It consisted of – ‘Mad Hen’ here we come – the ground up carcasses of chickens themselves; the feathers, the beaks, the bones…”
Damien “They’re turning the chickens into cannibals basically…”
Helen Lucy “Yes. They’re also giving them the mechanically removed meat from beef carcasses. And then, just to round it off into a nice little cocktail that everybody would appreciate, it’s held together with dollops of cow dung. Cow Shite.”
Damien “You’re winding us up”.
Helen Lucy “No!”
A note for those who care
SATANISTS! This weekend is your last chance
to conceive if you want He Who Walks Backwards’
child born on 6/6/6. Any later and to be out then
he’d be premature and perhaps a bit weedy.
Thanks to Ruairí for the reminder.
[Listening to: 09/08/05 Majority Report – Air America Podcasts – Majority Report – Air America Radio (1:53:20)]
Old Grey Mare
The memory ain’t quite like it should be, I’ve got this slight problem with the protocols around the 20-25 mark. It’s 20, 21 for ftp, 22 for ssh, 23 for telnet and 25 for smtp.What I’m wondering is who’s on 24? Apparently this port has fallen off the protocols use list. It’s been taken by the any private mail system, which I don’t think exists. Considering it’s one port shy of smtp, that kind of explains it just a tad. The only problem I’ve never encountered anything legitimate that has made use of this port.
Dodgy power supplies can cause problems with network switches. Given a choice, I’ll take a level 2 over level 3 switch for local networks. The reason is quite simple – when you have a level 2 switch when the power fluctuates and the switch resets it doesn’t have the annoying tendency to reset all the effing network connections on the network; whereas with the level 3 switch it has the annoying tendency to tell everything on the network that the connection has been reset. A bit like the Sun network terminal servers – the default configuration causes them to send a ‘brk’ to each of the connected machines if they are switched off and on. The best workaround we had when we had to move an NTS was to unplug all the machines, move the NTS and plug it back in. Because the machines weren’t sent to the OK prompt, they were able to work just fine for the 45 minutes it took to move the NTS.
iTunes text artifacting
There’s a small visual hiccup with the latest iTunes (version 5). I don’t know if it’s my use of ClearType for the display, or what, but when I retab into itunes it seems to suffer from the artifacting until a repaint is forced.
These images have been doubled in size from what’s on the screen. The first one has the ghosting/artifacting.
The second doesn’t have the ghosting.
It’s not me, I’m certain I can see the artifacting, I’m almost completely convinced that it’s cleartype, as I had a similar problem with gvim and, of all things Delphi when I used TrueType and OpenType fonts. The fix for that software was to use a fixed-face font.
Ok, that’s definite then. I installed the Microsoft ClearType tuning wizard, and poked the configuration until I was happy with it and I can’t see the artifacting any more. What I’d like to know is why Microsoft don’t ship this in the control panel, because damn, but it makes me much happier with cleartype.
[Listening to: Cracked Actor – David Bowie – Aladdin Sane (3:01)]
New ‘features’ with iTunes 5
In the beginning there was the iPodService and the GearService. Along with the iPodService, there was the iTunesHelper, which in theory speeded up the launch of iTunes (yeah right), but is really to allow the ‘auto start iTunes when this iPod is plugged in’ option to work, along with supressing the auto-start handler for the iPod when it’s plugged in. Later releases of iTunes stopped shipping with the GearService, which meant one less thing running under the hood, but now iTunes 5 ships with a new feature: ‘Bonjour Service’. This is zero configuration networking in action. My problem is that it’s another Network service running on my machine. I’m of the impression that every open port is another potential way in for crackers and other not-nice people. The feature of talking from one iTunes library to another was embedded into the application, but now a large piece of this feature has been handed off to this new service.
[Listening to: 09/07/05 Majority Report – Air America Podcasts – Majority Report – Air America Radio (1:53:15)]
Scariest creatures in TV
Well before the Borg, well before the Replicators there were the Daleks. These without doubt were the single scariest monsters in TV history. Over many years they unleashed their own brand of hell on the universe. These creatures were without mercy, without emotion and with one thing on their minds – the extermination of anything living thing other than themselves. They upgraded themselves constantly, but the constant for the Dalek was the shape they held, and their plunger and gun at the front.
Their creation is explained in the Dr. Who tale Genesis of the Daleks. After a thousand year war a scientist by the name of Davros created the Daleks as a container for the Kaled race, or at least what was going to become them after several million years of evolution. This scientist was not happy with the fact that the creatures were going to still possess such trivialities like emotions, so he genetically modified them to eliminate all emotion. The result was then governed by a computer program built into the machine that was a Dalek’s exoskeleton.
Of course all creators get their just desserts. Given a program which only permitted the Daleks on top of the food chain, they of course decided that as Davros was inferior, he must be exterminated.
The final destruction of the Daleks was supposed to have happened at the end of the great time war, where the Daleks and the Time Lords fought for the ultimate salvation of the universe. This of course was scotched by the 2005 Dr. Who episode Dalek which tells the tale of the last of the Dalek race. If there ever was an episode that deserved an Emmy, that would be the one.
As for me, practically every time I hear the refrain ‘Exterminate, exterminate’ it sends a shiver down my spine, for it means that they are coming, and you’ld better pray for the Doctor.
[Listening to: Katamari Damacy – Lonely Rolling Star – – (5:44)]
Slow on the pickup
While I was nosing around the Adobe Updater software (just getting to the program), I notices that it was using the boost thread library. Boost is a collection of peer-reviewed, portable C++ libraries. They have a threads library that works for several several platforms, helping hiding some of the yuckiness of the platform specific issues (and believe me there are quite a few).
[Listening to: Comedy in Music, Part II, Requests (a-j) – Victor Borge – Live (!) (14:25)]
Softice Detection
Short, C code:
bool
IsSoftIceLoaded() {
HANDLE fh;
fh = CreateFileA("\\\\.\\NTICE", GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE, FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE,
NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL, 0);
if (fh != INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) {
CloseHandle(fh);
return (TRUE);
}
return (FALSE);
}
If you want to detect a regular debugger, then you can use IsDebuggerPresent(), it’s part of the PSDK.
The 3 variable Funny Test
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the Cutting Edge |
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CLEAN | SPONTANEOUS | DARK Your humor’s mostly innocent and off-the-cuff, but somehow there’s Your type is the most likely to appreciate a good insult and/or broken bone and/or very very fat person dancing. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: David Letterman – John Belushi 
The 3-Variable Funny Test!
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My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid |