Blue Cheese

Muck - not man's best friend

2006-03-27T11:16:00.000+01:00

Take one garda station and, with no funding, turn the field around it into a car park. Don't bother with the traditional elements of a car park, they're so old hat. Just let the guards park all over the grass until it turns from a pleasant shade of green to a disturbing shade of brown.

From time to time, when there's a slightly higher risk of actually losing cars in the ensueing swamp, rope off the worst affected parts and hope people can figure it out for themselves.

After years of neglect, try to replace the communications tower which involves bringing in several diggers, a large crane, a generator and some other heavy equipment.

I'll leave it to your imagination what happens next but I will say that the driver of the digger definitely deserves a payrise. He's spend more time hauling cranes, lorries and equipment from six feet under the muck than he has doing actual work. Maybe thats his actual job :-)

If you

2006-02-25T19:52:00.000Z

If you think that attacking and injuring gardai, trapping people too afraid to go outside, doing thousands of euros of damage to property, lighting bonfires beside the spike, burning out cars, looting shops, rampaging through shopping centres, undoing the work that has made O'Connell St a street to be proud of, closing the city centre for most of the day or anything else that we saw that was in any way patriotic or republican, you're more moronic than I can ever explain. I'll give you a hint: if you come down here equipped with cans of petrol and iron sticks, you're probably an idiot.

Perhaps the love ulster campaign was a big pile of crock but it was a perfectly orchestrated pile of crock, designed to make the self-proclaimed republicans react exactly the way they did. Like puppets on strings, they bussed down here, banged a few drums and a bunch of scumbags danced to their tune. Well done, you're defended Ireland against the loyalists by thrashing our capital city and embarassing us in front of the North, England and the rest of the civilised world.

I have equal amounts of contempt for people who went into the city centre to shop today. No, it's not right that people from another state should come down here and keep you out but if you looked up from your little world and paid a little more attention, you wouldn't have been caught in the middle of it. There's a big bad world going on around you.

A tribute to pizza

2006-01-24T10:12:00.000Z

The cornerstone of most DCUers diet, the most reliable place for a decent meal, the worst in scumbag cars but the best in pizza - it could only be Mizzoni. It's never too early, too late or too expensive to pick up the phone and have a tracksuit-clad northsider race to your door in their souped up Nissan Micra complete with the latest in broken exhausts but making up for it by carrying the best damn pizza in Santry.

You can understand then, my confusion when after repeated attempts to ring last night, all I got were connection errors - the horrid buzzing sound that indicates the phone network has given up the ghost. After ruling out all the other possibilities (Meteor being shit again...), I pulled on my hiking boots and trekked up Shanowen Avenue to collect the pizza by hand. Stopping several times along the way to rest and try ring again, it was a terrible journey followed by the sight of well... nothing. Shutters across the doors and windows, no collection of tinted-window cars outside, no cloud of cigarette smoke... nothing.

Could this be the end? Will DCU students by forced to order from the likes of Dominos, Apache or worse still, learn to cook for themselves? Will alumni events be times when the old folks describe that wonderful hovel that used to supply the best student food in town? Rose tinted glasses all round I fear. Will unemployment among the 1l owners skyrocket as a result?

Thankfully no. Someone emerged from the shuttering, took one look at our concerned faces and reassured us it was only an oven problem and they'd be back in business in a day or two. My relief, as you can well understand, is unending.

As an aside, I can now give Dublin Bus the two fingered salute and ride my newly purchased bike to work, safe in the knowledge that I'll be able to put back on all that weight by eating delicious Mizzoni pizzas!

Eddie Rockets

2006-01-19T11:16:00.000Z

It might be overpriced, overhyped and a little on the slow side but it does taste good and it's sooo close to UGC. Their smartie desert is well worth the wait :-)

Scary people

2006-01-11T09:59:00.000Z

Magnet Networks. I got the guided tour yesterday complete with maps of submarine cables, retired optical amplifiers, cavernous rooms full of telco equipment, racks of satellite equipment, routers, switches, image encoders, encryption boxes, more power, backup power and generators of power than you can shake a stick at and enough jargon, TLAs and abbreviations to make even the most hardcore of engineers sick.

These people make the Russian Cold War paranoia seem like common sense in comparison. Muliple (trans-Atlantic) sites, redundant power supplies, redundant generators, enough UPSs to keep the machines in juice and the engineers in coffee and more bullet-proof glass than your average securicor van.

My head is still spinning...

Worth reading:

Mother Earth, Mother board

Amateur hour

2006-01-09T11:05:00.000Z

This photo was taken from Clontarf Road looking towards Eastpoint at 8.30 this morning. Adding a 512MB memory card to Charlenes Olympus C480Z really did make a big difference. No longer limited by the paltry 14 meg internal memory, I can now snap away to my hearts content. Full size, full detail photos anytime of the day and night.

Happily, I noticed yesterday that the adverts on the side of the loop line bridge in the city centre are finally coming down. Apparently this bridge is worth €500,000 a year to Irish Rail but in a swap with DCC, were given permission for 13 other billboard sites around the city. It's fairly disgusting at the moment but hopefully they'll make a nice job of restoring it. The city centre has improved so much in the last few years it's hard to believe.

In a move which has shocked many, well... maybe just me, UGC (now Cineworld) has abandoned its long-time advertising partner, Pearl and Dean in favour of Carlton Screen Advertising. No more catchy music (Asteroid, apparently) and reels swishing round the place, the familiar-to-many brand coming out of the flames is now the first thing UGC patrons will see. Already ten employees of P&D have lost their jobs and there is talk of regulation in a market where CSA holds a 76% share.

And thanks to Wikipedia:

Unusual facts about Cineworld

At least one of the Cineworld cinemas plays host to a church on a sunday morning. Whilst cinemagoers continue to watch movies in the other screens one London church hires a couple of screens for its lively worship. Is this setting a new trend?

The needs of the state

2005-12-20T15:37:00.000Z

It seems the unthinkable has happened. A strike by 33,000 members of the New York Transport Workers Union has brought the city to a standstill. The behemoth that is the NY Transit system is grinding to a halt for the first time since 1980. Trains that once ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, buses that meandered ceaselessly and kept New York running have returned to their depots. Weather conditions well below zero are only making matters worse.

What is interesting from all this is the way New York has planned for such an event. With a little foresight and a lot of hard work, New York is dealing with a problem that would cripple lesser prepared cities. Their two pronged approach is split into determent and reaction.

Under the state's Taylor Law, it is illegal for public workers to go on strike. Workers who break this law face exceptionally stiff penalties - two days pay docked for each day not worked. It also allows the state to sue the union for bringing about such a situation.

Union afficionendos will be preparing fire and brimstone speeches denouncing such a harsh regime, claiming it denys the workers rights, begins the race to the bottom, yada yada yada. The flip side is that seven million passenger journeys each day are safeguarded by a state that puts the needs a city over the needs of a few. It forces the unions to negotiate sensibly instead of waving their magic strike card in the air every time they want some attention. City officials calculate that the strike will cost $1.6 billion in the first week, clearly something which outweighs the complaints of a few irritable workers.

The second half of the plan, one which would give the most organised Irish civil servant heart burn, is the meticulous planning for the doomsday scenario. Car pooling and park and ride areas have spring up all over the city. High occupancy vehicle restrictions immediately swung into place to make sure people use them. Any vehicle carrying less than four people is inspected by the transit police and denied access to the Manhattan area. These rules are applied ruthlessly by necessity - every bridge, every tunnel and every junction into Manhattan are checked.

Central corridors are being closed to private traffic, ensuring they remain clear for emergency and priority vehicles. Lane reversals occur twice a day maximising the throughput into the city in the mornings and out of the city in the evenings. Taxi charges are amended, limiting the impact on people traveling long distances which would otherwise have been done by subway or bus.

More importantly, the general public are being informed and asked for help. Schools and businesses are being asked to stagger their opening and closing times. Companies are asked to organise car pooling for their employees. Maps of cycle lanes are being distributed. The list goes on.

The sheer depth of the organisation is stupefying - it's far beyond anything the Irish government could ever dream of and all for an event that no-one thought would ever happen.

Transport 21

2005-11-02T17:32:00.000Z

From the Platform 11 Forums (registration necessary)

To Minister Cullen
Department of Transport
Co. Mayo and Uranus

RE: CASP and SDZ's - Why Bother?

Dear "Minister",

Can you please explain to me how the largest section of railway ever to be opened in the history of the state (Ennis-Claremorris) was sanctioned yesterday by the Government without any land/strategy use development plan, without any strategic planning or all the other other restriction that Cork, Fingal and Meath were subjected to in order to have some minor rail extentions from the exsisting network?

Minister Cullen, we had since 2001, the Stategic Rail Review, The CASP programme, Platform for Change, and the McCann Report itself. What was the reason millions in taxpayer's money was paid for these reports, if Mayo is not subjected to the same examination and due planning and rail viability process all the other regions of the country must follow in order to get a few miles of track reopened?

Why did Cork City and County Council bother to follow guidelines if it is a free for all for Mayo? Why did Adamstown have to be subjected to intense development phases restrictions and delivery, if a handful of Mayo residents can snap their fingers and get a rail line reopened to Claremorris with greater urgency than the Interconnector in our nation's capital (that's Dublin in case your unsure), even though 4 previous reports (including McCann's) stated otherwise?

How come extending the line from Midleton to Youghal is off the agenda, Athlone to Mullingar is "unviable" according to yourself only last week, and Limerick gets no communter rail service, but opening up a rail line to a vast section of rural rail line to Claremorris (a small town with three active rail lines already running into it) gets higher priority that the rest of the country?

Just tell me why all the guidleines, reports and previous condtions which were stringently applied to Luas, Adamstown, Dublin, Cork, Meath and Kildare for some reason do not apply to Mayo were rail transport development is apparently, "by request" only.

I just want to know that's all. It is really bothering me. I am confused and unsure where and when planning and transport development begins and ends and what guidlines actually apply?

Minister Cullen, on the 6 One News on RTE last night you openly stated that "the people of West on Track implored me to reopen the line to Claremorris and I did just that for them" - so are we to assume that the rest of the country can just ask you and they will get what they want as well? Is this how is works now?

Forget about all them planning and land usage guidlines which your department imposed on several other councils around the country. Or is it that there is a special papal dispensation for Mayo? And if so, how does all this tie in with the West of Ireland's polticians, lobby groups, professional whingers and local newspaper editor's impression of themsevels as being second class citzens when they have their own special santa running the Department of Transport gives them what they want just by asking for it?

You went to the Midlands last week and the people there asked you to reopen the Athlone to Mulligar line and you said "no". But a week later you go Mayo and you say "yes" - even though the Mulligar to Athlone line is far more viable and would sit into the Transport 21framework more logically than Ennis to Claremorris. So from this I am assuming that all rail lines in the West of Ireland are viable to you and your department, and that all rail lines in the rest of country range from "so-so" to "unviable" according to the Martin Cullen Rail Viability Evaluation Scale?

I think I am a fairly intelligent man, but yesterday left me most confused. I no longer understand the rules of the game anymore. Except to say. If Platform11 implored you to fast track the Interconnector, would you? If the people of Navan implored you to fast track Navan without any further studies, would you? If the people of Cork presented you with a technical report and viable recomendation for the Midleton line to be extended to Youghal, would you do it for them? What if they just forget the due process, consultants and planning stuff and like Mayo just "implored" you to do it?

You see Minister, this is why I am so confused. I need to know - what are rules and do they apply to everybody? Please Minister Cullen, I am "imploring" you for just the answer to this mystery and nothing else. So that those of us who want to see viable rail development in Ireland know where we stand and will know how to go about lobbying for it from now on.

Thanks
Thomas Sheridan - Platform11
c/o Planet Earth.

Not really getting there

2005-11-01T08:49:00.000Z

We're not there yet, but we're getting there - or at least Irish Rail think we are. I'm not quite sure where "there" is, but it certainly isn't Belfast. This Halloween I became one of "those" Dublin people who runs for the country at the slightest hint of a bank holiday weekend. Unfortunately those more practiced than me made their move first and booked out all the trains leaving me with a choice between Ryanair and Belfast. So, Belfast it was and having heard great things about the Enterprise and not enjoying recent bus journeys, we headed to Connolly to make our escape.

Linking the two cities Belfast and Dublin, the Enterprise is a fast, high quality rail network for business people, tourists and other rail travellers.

The new trains, capable of 90 mph, complete the journey in just over 2 hours. Standard class passengers enjoy a level of comfort and facilities similar to the Eurostar. In the superior class, First Plus, passengers experience an unequalled level of comfort and service.

The website makes it sound promising but beware innocent ones, all is not as it seems.

To begin, a pair of return tickets costs an amazing €96! Surely at such a price, we'll be travelling in Premier class, waited on hand and foot and given our own private carriage? Nope, down to bog standard class for us which admittedly is quite comfortable. Which is just as well because we suffered what the Dart CTC would like to call a "timetabling issue" and got stuck behind a commuter train all the way into Belfast. Oops... our 2 hour journey just became 2 hours and 30 minutes. No worries, at least it was comfortable.

The return journey was much, much worse. With no explination at all, the Enterprise trainset went missing, leaving us with a much older and very much in need of retirement Translink loco. There were more than a few jealous glances at the restored steam-train sitting alongside us at Belfast Central. Inside was no better: broken toilets, flaking paint, moss growing in the intersections between the carriages and the "cafe facilities" were two cardboard boxes sitting on the floor of the rear carriage, stuffed with crisps and sandwiches and manned by a crew member who spent his idle time avidly studying a train timetable.

If it had been only two hours, I might not have cared too much. Unfortunately, we crawled all the way from Belfast to Drogheda. At least the 'trains passing as speed may cause air turbulence' signs gave me an ironic giggle. From Drogheda to Dublin we increased the speed from sub-snail to something approaching walking pace, only to drift to a halt as we hit the Dart line and limp the rest of the way to Connolly. Our express service stopped for so long at Clontarf Road that people waiting for the next Dart actually boarded. A painstaking 2 hours and 50 minutes after departure, we fell onto the platform and boarded a comparatively effecient Dublin bus all the way home.

And now the exercise for the reader. Is three hours a normal time for a journey to Belfast? Why would anyone use this excuse for a train service when the bus is faster and cheaper? Aircoach currently schedule two hour services for €12 return. Bus Eireann schedule for just under 3 hours and charge €15.

Commuting is hell :-)

2005-10-17T13:44:00.000+01:00

Especially when this morning's "commute" consisted of:

45 minute walk across Reims to the train station
2 hour train journey to Paris - smokers urg
15 minute hike between train stations
35 minute RER Metro ride to the airport
15 minute shuttle to the terminal
90 minute flight to Dublin
and finally two Dublin buses from the airport to Clontarf

Man, I should get a raise for being this committee to work! It's been 7 hours since I got up this morning and I'm still going strong. Any attempt at doing real work this afternoon might result in a head-on-keyboard incident :-)

Incidentally Terminal #1 at the Charles de Gaulle is quite possibly the worst airport I've ever had the misfortune to navigate. It makes Dublin Airport (yes even the grotty old wing) look like a magnificent success in planning and organisation. Also Notre Dame is more fantastic than I had ever expected but boo to the absolutely huge crowds waiting to ascend the Eiffel Tower, I didn't stand a chance but it was still magnificent from the bottom.

Lastly can anyone explain to me how the people who delayed the flight by nearly half an hour because they managed to put their passports into their hold-luggage managed to do that? Impressive display of stupidity there.

Photos....

Life sucks

2005-10-13T10:07:00.000+01:00

Or more specifically life.dcu.ie, the new student website which went live a week ago and which will be formally launched tonight in the New Bar. I don't see the point in launching a site that isn't finished and, make no mistake about it, life is nowhere near finished.

Many moons ago, Adam Buckeridge and Eoin Campbell put a site on Redbrick which had a calendar of events in DCU and photos for those events. It quickly became a hit and earned itself the title Ents.dcu.ie. Amid a flurry of activity and some choice photos of a wet t-shirt competition, the site became an overnight hit and gave DCU the appearance of activity and life. Unfortunately, things went wrong somewhere and the site was pulled.

Last summer myself, Riona Judge McCormack (SPC Chair) and Paul May (SU President) banged heads and came up with the idea for a new ents website which would be formally run and which would replace the defunct DCUSU.ie site and the SPC and the SCC sites. It would be a clean sweep and fantastic things would come of it. The name was chosen from the cheesy nickname I had given the SPC site a year earlier.

And now we stand, 18 months and a substantial amount of cash later and we're about to launch a half-assed attempt of a site. I could happily forgive the design flaws (light text on a white background), the minor bugs (spot all the \\\\' all over the place) and the several month delay going live. All those things will be fixed in time.

What I cannot forgive is the blatant abandonment of most of the original specifications. All the reasons that we decided to 'go commercial' have been ignored. All of the reasons that forced us to pay someone instead of doing it ourselves seem to have gone out the window, leaving us looking silly for paying for something that we probably could have downloaded free from some obscure Eastern European warez site which also hosts a Russian Rent-A-Bride website.

1. The site is hosted off-campus but with a dcu.ie domain name. Never mind that we slow the site down and generate heaps of unnecessary traffic - the site just doesn't work because none of the computers that are told not to go through the proxy for *.dcu.ie sites can get to it. Score +1 for connectivity.

2. Tying everything into the college LDAP server was a main point for the project. No more account maintenance hassle. We're only halfway on that one because while students can use LDAP, the back-end is completely separate. Yey for finding someone to create, update and delete several hundred accounts at the start of each year.

3. Nothing is integrated. The events calendar and gallery are completely separate, so finding photos of that hot girl you saw wasted at last night's Redbrick Freshers Ball is going to require some in-depth searching. Give yourself plenty of time though because the Flash gallery they used takes more time to flip between photos than your average reader of the Book of Kells.

Want to talk about the event on the forums? Find your own way there because the forum lists all the clubs and socs in the college on one page. Its a hefy scroll but its still better than the joke of a menu they have on the front page. It's like trying to maneuver through a narrow doorway while drunk but without the ensuing hilarity.

4. The search function doesn't believe in three letter words - this is unfortunate if you're looking for your clubs AGM or your society happens to be called AMS or EMS. In the end, its completely academic because it doesn't search the entire site anyway.

5. There is no way for clubs and societies to have their own website on the site. Given the often atrocious websites these people design and then fail to update, it was a priority for the project. Now they're left with one page of text which they might, in a few months, be able to update once someone sits down and creates all the accounts necessary to let them do it.

I'm not going to go on any more. The current forum quote on the front page says it all:

A week off

2005-09-23T09:48:00.000+01:00

Okay so it was only four days but it was well worth it. Things I learned:

- Planes can land with wheels pointing the wrong way and still make it safely to the ground.

- Churchill: The Hollywood Years is quite possibly the worst film ever. I still can't believe I wasted 75 minutes of my life watching this tripe when I could have been doing something productive like watching paint flake.

- Pennys are evil incarnate. 20th September is no time to have most of your Christmas stock on the shelves. They didn't even bother with Halloween unless I missed it sometime last June!

- Andy is a wuss and couldn't follow through with his dastardly plan to kill my plant, entrusted to his care during my time off.

- Dublin Corpo rank only slightly higher than the RPA and Martin Cullen on my list of hated people with no backbones and no interest in public transport. No roads closed, no free transport (except for a few free tickets given out), no cycling initiatives, nothing at all because *ahem* it would make the traffic worse.

Rant about res

2005-08-25T11:16:00.000+01:00

Funny post in this thread ranting about res on boards.ie

Its good to wake up laughing

2005-08-24T09:08:00.000+01:00

Satnav fingers bungling burglars
(c) Lester Haines, The Register

In the great British tradition of "rob someone's house then leave your mobile at the scene", two London men have been jailed for burglary after the satnav system in the vehicle used for the blags stored the addresses of every house they hit.

Ian Bansie, 33, used his work's motor to ferry 31-year-old accomplice Steve Warrington to ten homes in Reigate, Surrey, completely unaware that the satellite navigation system was dutifully keeping a record of their crime spree.

Bansie will now spend the next 32 months in a place where satnav is of limited used - at Her Majesty's Pleasure - after Guildford Crown Court jailed both him and Warrington, the latter for an immobilising four years.

Trinity is in the way

2005-08-22T13:31:00.000+01:00

Trinity is in the way
Frank McNally
(c) Irish Times November 6th, 2004

When - a few years ago - this column proposed a radical solution to Dublin's public transport problems, involving the demolition of Trinity College and its relocation to a green-field site near Leixlip, the suggestion was not completely serious.

But you can never underestimate the power of an idea. And it was with a mixture of pride and alarm this week that I noticed my proposal is gaining ground.

First comes news that the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) may consider "moving the wall and railings" of the university to accommodate a Luas link-line. The RPA doesn't go so far as to suggest moving them to Kildare. But then again, if I were it, I'd start modestly too.

Next comes a letter to this paper suggesting that the line could run through the campus. And while this too falls well short of my proposal that the university be levelled at short notice, and over an August bank holiday weekend to minimise student protests, it would also set a precedent for the gradual erosion of the college. Next thing you know, Dublin Bus might be eyeing the croquet lawn for a city garage.

Meanwhile, also this week, lamenting the practical difficulties of combining tramlines with bus routes, Garret FitzGerald summed up Dublin's unique traffic problem better than I could.

"Trinity College is in the way," he said.

It wasn't always. When it was built, Trinity was deliberately located outside the city. Unfortunately, Dublin has been heading east ever since, and the college would never get planning permission now. But there it stands, in de middle of Ireland's busiest streets, its well-contented belly sticking out into College Green, nudging unwary pedestrians into the path of oncoming cars.

I quite like the idea of running Luas through the campus. It could probably be done with minimal damage, and the loss of only the cricket pitch, the rugby grounds, and - with a bit of luck - the arts block. But the genie is out of the bottle now; it's probably only a matter of time before the brutal logic of my original proposal wins out. I'd still favour the August bank holiday.

IF THE RPA doesn't do for Trinity, the relentless spread of women's clothes shops will. Already, some of the international designer chains must be targeting the Provost's House, with its unique "footprint" at No 1 Grafton Street, and the Luas stopping just behind it (soon). Surely its retail potential cannot go untapped forever.

It's blindingly obvious

2005-08-19T10:18:00.000+01:00

Today's Washington Post leads with a sob story about the price of gas in America. It's hardly surprising that Americans are suffering given the recent price hikes in their most popular product so they're on the hunt for a solution, each one more laughable than the rest.

Senator Schumer in New York suppors releasing oil from the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve which, as others have pointed out, is not the reason those reserves are kept. His plan to try to flood the world market and drive down prices would leave the country with little or no reserves for national security and would only have a temporary effect. Others want the Congress to drop the federal tax on gas but oops... just before they finished for the summer, they passed the largest ever transport bill all of which is paid for by gas tax.

And so, if they can't reason a way to drop prices, they adopt the bullying approach. Lobyists have suggested investigating the oil production companies for any sign of a cartel that would be keeping prices artificially high while others want the government to pressure oil producing countries into lowering price. Clearly a publically desperate America will only strenghten producers power and give them no incentive to lower prices.

Of course, there is one way to ease the pain but most Americans will never think of it. Drive less and take public transport. I'd be shocked if they did.

Sometimes it happens

2005-08-16T09:10:00.000+01:00

Black lanes with white lines, white lanes with red lines, red lanes with white lines, little pictures of buses, bicycles, wheelchairs - whatever it takes to convey the principle of 'this is not a car lane', it all seems moot when you see the number of drivers anxiously eyeing the rear-view mirror, looking cautiously around for any sign of danger and then ploughing into the bus lane and zipping past all the other motorists who are too lazy to do anything about it. Social conscience my ass.

This morning was different though, a mere 300m from the Collins Ave/Malahide Road junction and my faith in law and order was restored. Just as a young lady though she'd got away with it and screwed over all the other drivers, the long arm of the law suddenly sprouted from behind a bus stop, extended right across the footpath and seemed to completely block the road in front of her. I've never seen the long arm of the law so well... long.

I'm not sure what happened next but, in an ideal world, the guard would have wandered happily around her car, making her sit and stew inside. Perhaps a quick examination of her tyres and a breath check to find any possible reason for her car escaping her control and throwing itself onto the mercy of the bus lane. On finding none, the guard would then make her stand on the side of the road to be derided by other drivers, while he inspected her reg plate, tax disc and insurance for any other signs of miscreancy. Finally he would inform her of her offence and issue her with a fine, a smattering of points and a slap across the wrists.

Scary America

2005-08-15T12:19:00.000+01:00

The true measure of the greatness of any society that holds liberty, equality, and due process sacred before the law, is not how it treats its citizens in time of peace and tranquility, but how it treats them in time of strife when it is all to easy to smother liberty in the name of preserving the Republic. [watchblog.com]

It is hard to imagine that America would look kindly on a foreign government that demanded the right to hold some of its own citizens in prison, incommunicado, denying them access to legal assistance for as long as it thought necessary, without ever charging them with a crime. Nevertheless, that is the position that George Bush's administration has tried to defend in the courts [The Economist]

Once admired around the world as the land of democracy and freedom, America has changed for the worst. In the name of security, the powers of the police, the military and the defence forces have grown beyond belief. The powers that be can strip away a person's security, freedom and constitutional rights. They can, and do, perform acts that any other nation would deem reprehensible.

Maher Arar, a naturalized Canadian citizen asserted in a federal law suit that United States officials plucked him from Kennedy International Airport when he was on the way home on Sept. 26, 2002, held him in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and then shipped him to his native Syria to be interrogated under torture because officials suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda.

Syrian and Canadian officials have cleared Mr. Arar, 35, of any terrorist connections, but United States officials maintain that "clear and unequivocal" but classified evidence shows that he is a Qaeda member. They are seeking dismissal of his lawsuit, in part through the rare assertion of a "state secrets" privilege.

Judge David G. Trager of United States District Court prepared several written questions for lawyers on both sides to address further, including one that focused pointedly on Mr. Arar's accusations of illegal treatment in New York. He says he was deprived of sleep and food and was coercively interrogated for days at the airport and at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn when he was not allowed to call a lawyer, his family or the Canadian consul.

"Would not such treatment of a detainee - in any context, criminal, civil, immigration or otherwise - violate both the Constitution and clearly established case law?" Judge Trager asked.

The reply by Mary Mason, a senior trial lawyer for the government, was that it would not. Legally, she said, anyone who presents a foreign passport at an American airport, even to make a connecting flight to another country, is seeking admission to the United States. If the government decides that the passenger is an "inadmissible alien," he remains legally outside the United States - and outside the reach of the Constitution - even if he is being held in a Brooklyn jail.

Even if they are wrongly or illegally designated inadmissible, the government's papers say, such aliens have at most a right against "gross physical abuse."

You can read the entire story on the NYT website - it makes for some scary reading. The change in attitude is best summed up by Dennis Barghaan, who represents former Attorney General John Ashcroft, one of the federal officials being sued for damages in the case. He argued that Congress and recent judicial decisions tell federal courts "keep your nose out" of foreign affairs and national security questions, like those in this case.

nnnnnnnggggttt

2005-08-12T12:23:00.000+01:00

Maybe they saw the stupid, pointless and quite possibly illegal BA strike in Heathrow and wanted to prove that nothing was below them or maybe they're just the greediest people in existence but this morning's announcement that they want a €20,000 bonus for operating trains that are two carriages longer is completely unbelievable. I hope they a) don't get it, b) get fired and c) rot in hell. Perhaps I'm just bitter and twisted because after 17 weeks training they already earn almost €50,000 but that's just me.

Useless fact

2005-08-11T08:49:00.000+01:00

Considered one of the most car-dependant cities in the world (and briefly living beside the 101 I can attest to that), this factoid about LA might surprise you:

Los Angeles once had the world's largest rail transit system with 1100 miles of track and 2800 scheduled trains each day. Rail lines and cable cars ran up and down every major street in Los Angeles and its suburbs.

In the period after World War II automobile prices dropped, freeways were built, and General Motors et al. purchased urban rail lines across the United States. According to the General Motors streetcar conspiracy, General Motors and a number of conspiring corporations were responsible for the closure of the rail lines. [Wikipedia]

Silliest email sig ever

2005-08-08T10:26:00.000+01:00

I've seen some silly email sigs in my time but this one from Bank of Scotland takes the biscuit:


Bank of Scotland (Ireland) the business people.

Business Banking: click on
http://www.bankofscotland.ie/bus_banking/index.htm

Property Finance: click on
http://www.bankofscotland.ie/property/index.htm

Motor Finance: click on
http://www.bankofscotland.ie/motor/index.htm

Commercial Asset Finance: click on

http://www.bankofscotland.ie/commasset/index.htm

Treasury & Investments: click on
http://www.bankofscotland.ie/treasury/index.htm

International Consulting: click on
http://www.bankofscotland.ie/inter/index.htm

Or e-mail us at  mailto:info@bankofscotland.ie

Bank of Scotland (Ireland) is part of HBOS plc. and is regulated by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority

E-Mail Disclaimer

The information contained in this message is confidential and is
intended for the addressee only. If you have received this message in
error or there are any problems please notify the originator
immediately.

The unauthorised use, disclosure, copying or alteration of this message
is strictly forbidden. This mail and any attachments have been scanned
for viruses prior to leaving Bank of Scotland Ireland's network.

Bank of Scotland Ireland will not be liable for direct, special,
indirect or consequential damages arising from alteration of the
contents of this message by a third party or as a result of any virus
being passed on.

Bank of Scotland Ireland reserves the right to monitor and record e-mail
messages sent to and from this address for the purposes of investigating or detecting any unauthorised use of its system and ensuring its effective operation.
****************************** *****************************************************

Attempt number two

2005-08-05T12:19:00.000+01:00

This mornings exciting episode in the life of mark was lost due to a slight operational difficulty on the part of ESB. My annoyance at losing my blog was offset slightly by being paid to sit in Insomnia and drink hot chocolate for the last two hours. I am somewhat mollified. I'm also amused by the poor soul on boards.ie who was on their treadmill when it happened :-)

Last night saw the climax in the house buying story. After being unceremoniously packed into the back of a glorified horse box and shunted around north Dublin for thirty minutes (yes, we got slightly lost but I was locked in the box so in no position to give directions) I managed to dislodge myself, my girlfriend and and assorted collection of boxes, bags, furry things and furniture. Judging from their expressions as I clambered out, I think I've made a good impression with the neighbours. Certainly a lasting one.

Sadly, I don't have time to enthrall you with details of the unpacking, suffice to say we rescued the essentials: a pizza cutter, two crates of Coke (thanks Keith), an NTL cable and the slightly larger than expected race-car track which was given to me by Charlene many moons ago. It now takes up the entire living room, encroaches on the kitchen and is threatening to leave only the windows for ingress and egress.

If you're not already having palpitations from the excitement of it all, I'm sure you'll survive untill Monday when Barry has had time to flee to Germany and upload the photos of the house, the surroundings and the unsuspecting neighbour who probably thought it was safe to bend over to check her postbox. It's probably best for all concerned that he's leaving the country soon.

Planet Redbrick

2005-07-26T12:20:00.000+01:00

Another new service has been "launched" by Redbrick this month, Planet Redbrick. Combining all the feeds from the Redbrick blogs, it's an interesting mix of Apache conferences, political rantings, Anime, and blogs about blogs. Probably not for the faint hearted but its a nice way of bringing the community spirit back into Redbrick.

Dublin Bus

2005-07-26T12:07:00.000+01:00

It's interesting to see that the Department of Transport has agreed to fork out the €2.8m Dublin Bus asked for to upgrade their on-bus security camera system. Buses will soon (but not too soon) have up to eight digitally recorded cameras on board. Spokeswoman Gráinne Macken said "security on public transport has now come to the fore and we’re thinking of it in a way we haven’t before" [RTE].

It's interesting because although DB are pushing this as an anti-terrorist measure, to keep us all safe from the crazies in the outside world, it's actually something they've been planning for several months. [BreakingNews.ie] Cameras to watch the drivers, cameras to watch the passengers, cameras to catch the smokers at the back of the 13A and (also mooted by DB) cameras to record registration plates of cars using the bus lanes. It's all gravy baby and now they've cleverly offloaded the bill to someone else. Hurray :-)

In other news, Ireland's fourth mobile phone network, 3, will launch this afternoon. It should be interesting to see how they compare to the existing networks.

Another world

2005-07-11T16:05:00.000+01:00

It's not a very disputed fact that judges in Ireland are slightly removed from the common man's world. Usually they manage to hide it quite successfully. Once in a while the little voices in their heads come screaming out, obvlious to the sensible side screaming after them to stop, and showing just how removed they actually are.

I'm sure I don't have to describe the current situation in Mayo where five men (but no women because that would be a PR nightmare) are in jail because they protested against Shell and their shiny new gasline. I'm sure the ins and outs of the case are debated on many a blog so I won't even start on that but in today's hearing in the high court, the judge came out with this:

the men are in contempt of court... if someone has a problem with a court order then they should come back to the court, not breach the order. [RTE]

Of course he's quite right, under the letter of the law. The men protested, Shell sought an injuction (instead of dealing with the problem directly) but the men continued to protest, causing them to be in contempt of court. The judge, quite correctly, expects them to take the legal approach and protest their cause in court.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, any such action would costs hundreds of thousands of euro and move at approximately half the pace of a dying snail. In the end, it would probably be unsuccessful since the government long ago gave Shell carte blanche to grab whatever land they deemed necessary. It's a funny old world.

Security through stupidity

2005-06-24T10:48:00.000+01:00

From skippy.net:

I purchased a Dell server today for work, through our account representative at Dell. At the end of the order process, just before confirmation, the Dell representative said: "Federal law requires that we ask what will this server be used for?"

I asked, incredulously, "Why the hell does the federal government care?" to which the Dell representative replied "PATRIOT Act".

I certainly feel a lot safer knowing that terrorist are on their honor to tell the truth when buying servers from Dell.

This post prompted more than a few examples of the US government's oddities when it comes to national security. Tammy's reply says it all really:

Silly questions abound, all to cover people’s butts. When I moved to the US in 1992 (from Canada), one of the questions on my green card application was

“Do you, or any member of your immediate family, plan to violently overthrow the government of the United States or assasinate any elected official?”

Not only did they have checkboxes for “yes” and “no”, but they had a blank space labelled,

“If you checked ‘yes’, please provide a detailed explanation in the space below.”

I never figured out what kind of explanation would make them give you a green card anyway.

Slashdot in a nutshell

2005-06-21T18:10:00.000+01:00

Link

Like a herd of cattle

2005-06-08T16:49:00.000+01:00

is the only suitable description for the aution I attended last weekend. Rana reccomended that, with the upcoming house moving and furnishing, I should go along and see what sort of bargins I could find. A very interesting experience it was too - over five hundred people crammed into a wholly unsuitable conference hall in the Great Southern Hotel being corraled and shouted as by a loud, ignorant and well on the way to being decked Liverpudlian and his team of equally vocal and fairly intimidating 'assistants'. The phrase 'All gone, all gone, stop making a fuss' will ring in my ears for a long time to come.

After the usual array of kettles, toasters, deep fat friers and battery rechargers, they produced the real goods: 48" Plasma TVs, 1000 Watt Home Theatre Systems, 49kph remote control cars, remote control planes, HiFis and much more. It took a lot of willpower to stop myself buying at least one of everything ;o)

Unfortunately they went to the same school of economics as the Ticketmaster management and adopted the same approach to charges. After adding a cumulative 15% commission, 21% VAT and 5% for credit cards, nothing was quite as cheap as it seemed so in the end I settled for a rather boring but somewhat fierce-looking knife set. Colour me ready for culinary battle :-)

NTL Customer service

2005-06-08T16:47:00.000+01:00

From TheRegister:

NTL is not known for its customer service. Actually that's not fair, it has a reputation for appalling customer service. But even its low standards were breached back in September when customers phoning one of its call centres were greeted with a rather rude recorded message. Callers were told: "You’re through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a f*** about you. We’re never here. Just f*** off and leave us alone. Get a life." The message was removed but not before several hundred customers heard it

After an urgent investigation the ISP tracked the call to the house of Ashley Gibbin, a 26 old year taxi driver from Teesside. He was charged with sending a grossly offensive message and faced a possible six month sentence.

Yesterday Gibbin was cleared of the charges because a magistrates court ruled the message was not offensive enough. Gibbin told the Sun newspaper that he'd been on hold for an hour trying to order broadband when he cracked and started hitting buttons at random. This enabled him to change NTL's welcome message to something he felt was more appropriate. Hero.

A spokeswoman for NTL told the Reg the message was only available for a few hours on a Sunday morning and only people in the north-east phoning to register faults would have heard it.

A brief interlude

2005-05-30T12:18:00.000+01:00

I'm too tired and in pain to blog (house moving, even for other people, is the worse toture method ever!) so here's a short mail from brother Keith about the perils of using internet tickets on Bus Eireann:

I arrived at whitehall bus stop about 15 mins early, bus finally arrives with Captain Thickwit at the helm. Looks at the printout like it's about to grow fangs and chew on his jugular (which i almost ended up doing) and eventually drags his brain into motion enough to hit 3 buttons.

Of course the ticket computer declares the ticket's costing €28 when it says €25.20 on the printout so what does he does but totally ignore my scientific babblings of THE INTERNET and DISCOUNT and crazy numbers such as 10 PERCENT and proceed to whip out his mobile (I say whip out...10 minutes later job it was really) and tell it all its troubles. Presumably some someone higher-up on the evolutionary ladder in bus aras assured him I WAS NOT in fact an international finance fraudster, which only took about 5 minutes, so the thought process must have been on overdrive at this stage; he asks for a student card which took him so long to scan I can only imagine how many lifetimes it would take for a decent issue of the Sunday Times and then finally prints out the ticket after muttering under his breath faster than a fucking horse racing commentator.

So I go to sit down, imagining the ordeal to be over when he swings round *just* as I sit down and asks me to come back up. So back up to him I go, he points out the line that the ticket must be issued on the date of departure and point at THE DATE IT WAS RECIEVED IN YOUR INBOX.

So, after I'd recovered myself from the loss of brain cells just being in the vicinity of this guy, I checked to make sure he didnt have a family member picking insects off him and then eating them. None there, strangely enough, so I pointed out the departure date (cunningly disguised by putting the words Departure Date in bold right beside it. Crafty devils..) at which he proclaims "Grand so!" like there wasn't a thing wrong in the world and horses away on down the road. Without checking his mirror I might add.

Seriously, David Attenborough's missing out on some killer footage here.

So pretty much an average day travelling with Bus Eireann really...

Good to hear the work's going well though, I'm semi busy here, which is why this took so long, also i'm smarming like a politician to every IT type that walks past (or tries to) for a proper computer. it's only a matter of time before they crack.... o_0

Irish thinking

2005-05-10T16:01:00.000+01:00

I think I have discovered just how odd and completely out of touch with reality the Irish way of thinking has become. This paragraph is taken from a report to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport about the proposed metro from St. Stephen’s Green to Swords via Dublin Airport.

Since 2000, Iarnrod Éireann has managed very large projects (approximately €300 million per annum) and has stated that it has met all its targets. This can be attributed in large part to the new environment of competition for funding from LUAS and Metro projects. The competition for passengers (now using buses) that will come from LUAS is providing a further incentive for CIE improvement. It would be regrettable if the abandonment of the Metro project were to reduce the incentives currently driving CIE forward.

So basically, because CIE are competitive, effecient and not stupidly idiotic when it comes to planning (unlike the RPA), they should not be given any big projects because it would make them complacent.

*shakes head*

Houses, signs and eh.. fans

2005-05-09T10:13:00.000+01:00

Things learned over the weekend:

1. South Co. Dublin has a rampant hatred of both Dublin city and signposts. Driving anywhere south of Blackrock results in instant confusion when faced a complete lack of signposts, oblong shaped roundabouts (with no signposts), one-way roads, roads that appear to be one-way roads and still no signposts. They're clearly in denial about the existance of anywhere outside Dalkey/Killiney. I guess that's understandable.

2. Trying to make my (hoover-like) computer quieter by fitting a 120mm fan was completely unsuccessful. Not only has the case no screw-holes for anything bigger than an 80mm fan, but now I've got two fans going full speed all the time *sigh*

3. Buying houses is a major pain in the ass. It helps a lot that I've got parents who are willing to put their money where their mouth is but still, gah! So many forms, so many phone calls, visiting people, mortgage meetings, more forms, house viewing, more froms. It now appears that I have bought a house so I guess I'll know in a few days whether I'm a quarter of a million euro in debt for the rest of my life. Oh joy ;o)

Bureaucracy

2005-05-06T12:56:00.000+01:00

Bureaucracy is undoubtably spawn of satan. It shouldn't be hard to make things work but companies seem to excel at being inept and making it hard to fix their problems. Network engineers would love to implement a firewall as impenetrable as the one companies put around the staff who actually know what they're doing.

Three years ago when I was a wet-behind-the-ears student on work placement, I worked for a pseudo semi-state called Enterprise Ireland. On my first day I was presented with company numbers, department numbers, phone numbers and instructions on who to ring to sort out my taxes. After just one phone call (no transfers, no queues and no 'your call is important to us'), I regurgitated all the details at the nice person at the other end of the phone and was assured it would all be looked after. It was all so easy, a little too easy and I couldn't understand everyone's complaints about the Revenue service.

Four months in I noticed I was getting paid less each time and rather than suspect the Civil Service of being stingy, I rang the tax office who politely informed me that I wasn't registered and was paying emergency tax. Several phone calls, multiple transfers and a lot of arguing later, it emerged they had no record at all of my first phone call and quickly sorted it out. By registering me for the wrong company. *sigh*

Last year myself and Abi moved into our new house in Beaumont and were immediately accosted by a member of An Post informing us that we didn't have a TV license and had 2 weeks to sort it out or be brought to court. A quick chat with the landlord and we unearthed an in-term license for the wrong address. Attached was a letter from An Post correcting the address and apologising for the mistake. Happy that we were compliant, we forgot all about it until our first threatening letter. No problem, one phone call to a nice man named Eamon who said that he had a record of the license and all was fine. His reccomendation: ignore the letter threatening to bring us to court.

Several months later we got our second threaning letter informing us that we had been "detected" using an unauthorised TV and still had no license. It took a total of 34 seconds to file it away under L for last night's leftovers in the bin.

And speaking of bins, we just got a bill from Dublin Corpo waste division addressed to some crazy spanish lady who hasn't lived in the house for 2 years asking for payment. This despite me ringing several times to give them all the numbers, barcodes and lables I could find on our bin and threats of non-collection if we didn't register but they still managed to get the name wrong.

I mean really... none of this is more than data entry. It might not be fun but its definitely not hard by any stretch of the imagination. Get your act in order, especially when you're threating legal action or no bin collection (I'm not sure which is worse).

Gmail Threading

2005-05-05T11:21:00.000+01:00

Gmail is the mail-client do jour, much heralded for its advanced threading support, massive quota, asynchronous AJAX coding and general all-round goodness. Using the Gmail search engine to search mail from indexes rather than at search time was another major improvement. It's still one of the best examples of a web application around and sits nicely between local application and webapp, with the advantages of both.

A major change was the switch of focus from individual mails to conversations. The inbox is no longer a list of all the mails you've received, possibly filtered into folders but now it is a list of conversations. Mails can be tagged by one or more keywords into pseudo-folders making it easier (and slightly more logical) to find and organise than traditional MUAs.

At first it seemed like a refreshing and much more usable way of working and I was quite impressed and quickly forwarded all my mail accounts to Gmail. Over the past few months, I've accumulated over 9,000 conversations, nicely tagged and easily searchable.

Lately I've been banging my head against an invisible wall. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but something was wrong. I was trying too hard to read my mail the way I want. Perhaps its just my training as a software engineer but I actually like a tree structured mail view. If you're in a conversation with more than one person (three way conversations or mailing lists are a major trench of my mails), then Google's way of doing things quickly makes following individual threads of conversation hard to follow. People who jump all over the place or strip out all of the mail they're replying to, become lost in a sea of sequential mails.

About the time I realised what was bugging me, Google outsmarted me and added a POP server to the Gmail system so I took a day out last week to download all my mail to Thunderbird, my mail client of choice at the moment. My first problem is that 9,000 conversations to Gmail turned out to be over 26,000 mails which took a large part of the day to download. For some reason, Thunderbird also stopped for a break ever 1000 mails and had to be gently nudged back into action.

To my dismay I found that Thunderbird's threading support is well... pants. It appears that it sorts mostly by subject and then date so I was immediately confronted with threads of completely unrelated mails all with no subject or Re: Hey. A quick hunt on Google gave me some arcane settings to embed in a text file, buried ten folders deep somewhere. However it was to no avail and my inbox was completely unusable. All 26k mails were deleted and unfortunately I hadn't ticked the leave mail on server option so my POP inbox is more or less empty, making it difficult to try any other mail client.

The Open Source people will now be gritting their teeth, asking themselves why I don't just use mutt (but I like my GUI...) or, better still, download the source to Thunderbird and fix it myself. Maybe if I didn't sit at a computer all day coding, I might but I don't think it'll happen any time soon. Can I be the only person who wants a GUI and proper threading support?

The Enterprise

2005-05-05T09:20:00.000+01:00

is very nice, very swishy and just a slight step up from the Dart. I'm very much in favour of trains that pick me up where I am and bring me non-stop to my destination. There should be more of them.

Unfortunately the reason for me travelling in style was to attend the removal in Drogheda of the mother of a long time friend, John Bolger. My thoughts are with him.

And they're off

2005-05-04T11:01:00.000+01:00

The great house buying plan is gathering speed (and not moss as I would have liked). Over the bank holiday weekend at home, my parents wore my down, my arguments disregarded and my opinions devalued. When the parents are on a mission, resistance is, in the clichèd line, futile. I am now fully convinced of the merits of house buying and the evils of rent.

Aspirations of living the easy lift cast aside, I spent yesterday evening jammed into rush hour buses and running from bus stop to bus stop in a search of shelter from the rain. My search eventually took me to a two bed apartment in a beautiful managed estate called Larchhill, in north Santry.

Half way between the Swords Road and the Malahide road, 5 minutes from the it-aint-Dundrum-but-it-works-for-me Northside shopping centre complete with swimming pool, 15 minutes from the slightly more upmarket Omni Centre, it also has a direct bus service to work (27B) and DCU (17A) . More importantly it's downhill all the way to work so cycling ahoy, even if the return trip will kill me. I've even drawn you a map with DCU and Larchhill artistically marked with lovely red splodges. Thank you MS Paint.

Hurray... cheap at twice the price so now all I have to do is get a mortgage (*shudder*) and hand over the cash. Dear God, I'm getting old. On the upside it does mean I can move house in a few months and then never move again. Ever.

Former TD arrested

2005-04-28T09:50:00.000+01:00

Gardai have confirmed that a car was stopped just outside Naas, Co Kildare and a man was arrested under Section 49 of the Road Traffic Act for driving under the influence of alcohol, and later released. They said the man was taken to Naas Garda station and later released. Samples have been sent to the Medical Bureau of Road Safety.

The man turned out to be former minister, Jim McDaid, who was apparently returning from the Punchestown racing festival on Tuesday night. A lorry driver had spotted him at some time between 10pm and 11pm driving on the N7, heading from the direction of Dublin towards Kildare. The TD turned left on a slip road from the N7, heading for Newbridge, and came to Newhall roundabout. There, he turned right and drove the wrong way around the Newhall roundabout before going up the wrong side of the dual carriageway known locally as the Newbridge Road.

Other vehicles, which met the TD's brand new Volvo, were seen swerving to avoid the car. At one stage an ambulance also met him, flashing its lights. Staying in contact with the gardai, the haulier continued on his side of the dual carriageway and flashed lights to alert vehicles coming from the opposite direction. Finally, the haulier was able to get to the Togher roundabout in advance of the TD and used his truck to block two lanes and halt the car's progress.

The haulier then got out and removed the keys from the ignition of Dr McDaid's car. A plainclothes Garda, who had also joined the pursuit, made the arrest before uniformed gardai arrived. An eyewitness who observed the TD when his car was finally stopped said: "He was civilised but at the same time he did not know what he was doing." He described him as being "very, very drunk". He added: "If he had met an articulated truck there would have been phenomenal damage."

Details of his arrest emerged as Taoiseach Bertie Ahern made a plea in the Dail for motorists to drive responsibly and with care for others over the bank holiday weekend. As Junior Transport Minister in November 2002, McDaid spearheaded the Government's anti-drink driving campaign. At the launch of that campaign he warned: "Some drivers still choose to ignore our drink driving laws and as a result innocent lives are destroyed." He said the National Safety Council's campaign, called Shame, sent a forceful message that drinking and driving carried high-risk consequences. The then minister said drink-driving was not acceptable at any time of the year.

Slashdot... the biggest collection of stupid people

2005-04-27T17:30:00.000+01:00

After several hours trying to decipher the why my smartcard randomly takes a disliking to my encrypted data and starts disabling files all over the place, I decided to take a break and check out Slashdot, a site I go to for comedy rather than actual information. Breaking the ./ tradition of reporting news at least at day after the rest of the world, there's an article about the A380 test flight this morning, followed by the usual moronic comments.

My god... stupidity at this level should be terminal. I'm not sure how these people manage to function in their daily lives without doing themselves harm. Apart from the usual bout of anti-Windows, anti-Europe crap, there then follows a discourse on why the A380 is bound to fail. I'm now convinced that ./ has the greatest collection of avionics developers, aviation engineers, economics professors and prophets the world has ever seen. There is no other explination for their supreme knowlege about everything.

(#12359664) That will be a record number of 1600 smouldering corpses!

(#12359554) Any word on whether they're using better glue than on the A300-600 and A310, or at a stronger vertical stabilizer?

(#12359389) Now over 500 people can be hijaked at once...I just don't see the demand for this plane in this day and age

(#12359345) It has such a large fuel tank, and it's being bought by Arabs. This could lead to another 9/11 I'm afraid.

(#12359224) Until Airbus fixes their maintenance procedures passengers might see more things like these when they fly Airbus aircaft

Thankfully at least one or two people had the sense to point out that:

(#12360223) Remember to that it is the burden of the *carrier* to provide aircraft maintenence and Airbus is only the authority on how maintenence should be performed.

(#12359799) Interesting considering that the Airbus A330 and A340 have had *ZERO* fatalities during their entire life.

(#12359305) gee, i am glad you brought this up.. maybe the Airbus engineers didn't think about this! You just saved thousands of lives! You are great. I think we should hug.

Stupidity, unfortunately, cannot be overcome that easily, leaving us with this gem:

(#12359179) Seriously, was this monster created because Airbus saw a genuine need or was it created just to try to one-up their evil, American rival? If it was created for the former, they probably need to do more market research. If it was for the latter, they need to fire their entire marketing/PR department. Given the current market conditions of the airline industry plus the rising cost of fuel oil, this plane is the wrong design in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In summary:

(#12359376) Who cares? Can't you just appreciate it as a very nice piece of engineering? This is the most negative website on Earth! If you believe the comments on this site, everything posted here is either going to end the world, be a dismal failure, or a mixture of both. I'm going to need to start taking valium before reading comments

Putting on a show

2005-04-27T11:41:00.000+01:00

I'm sure there were lots of nervous people with knotted stomches this morning in France when the A380 was rolled out for its first ever flight test but everything seems to have gone okay so far. Over 50,000 people gathered nearby to watch what some are calling the biggest event in the aircraft industry since the launch of the Concorde. Apparently it'll be going into service next summer after the test programme is complete with the first route being Singapore to London Heathrow. Man I'd love to be on it, at least in their three-part configuration.

It's a little bit funny...

2005-04-21T11:56:00.000+01:00

England might be well-known for many things: green fields, the queen, Queen, some very odd celebraties but they are definitely not known for their expertise at road building. I'm not quite sure where this is but I hope I never, ever have to attempt to drive around it. The name is particularly appropriate.

And if you think I'm joking, here it is from above:

And in action (sort of):

Earth Cleansing Fails

2005-04-19T09:48:00.000+01:00

Amid yesterdays torrential rainstorm, reports are already surfacing that there are survivors in some parts of north and central Dublin. The deathtoll is still rising and it is believed that most of west Dublin and the costal regions, where storm defence mechanisms failed, were completely devastated by the incident.

Weather experts called the event an "anomaly" and are still examing satellite data to discover how it hit without warning. The Minister for Bad Things Happening, Mr. Johnny O'Toole, is expected to resign during todays sitting of the Dail, currently planned for a nuclear bunker somewhere in Leitrim.

Although several lines of investigation are being followed, among them Sinn Fein, Eta and Osama Bin Ladan, the most likely candidate for this terrible attack on the climate of Ireland is one Robert Dagg, a twenty-three (23) year old trainee accountant from Mayo. Motives for his attack are as yet unknown but a source close to the extemist said in a statement that he was well known for his hatred of Dublin, in particular one Mark Boyle who's whereabouts since the incident are still unknown.

Meanwhile a rescue operation is underway to save a group of five very special children from Ballyferma'. They used their knowledge of the buoyancy of Dublin coco wheelie bins and the traction and mobility of a Tesco shopping trolly underwater to build a Macgyver-style escape pod and are currently floating somewhere on the Liffy. Campaigners are already calling for the introduction of Water Safety and Wheelie Bin Usage classes in primary schools.

Bus Eireann Online Tickets

2005-04-19T09:22:00.000+01:00

I've never bothered to use their online ticket sales service before (I've never had a credit card before) but when my brother decided, in his wisdom, to commute from Dublin to Drogheda for his work placement, it seemed to be the perfect solution. A lovely 10 trip ticket was almost half the price he would have paid on the bus. After a fairly painless process (credit cards are sooo much fun) an email with an uber-secret MAC was dispatched my way. It seemed too good to be true.

Not so bright-eyed and bushy tailed, my brother made his way to Whitehall at 7am and duly handed over his papers when the bus arrived. In a scene somewhat resembling the airport check-in in Meet the Parents, a button bashing ensued as the driver tired, and failed, to get the Wayfarer to accept the code. One free bus trip later and my brother headed to Busaras Drogheda to try again. More button bashing until the helpful girl decided that she couldn't print the ticket because it was Dublin-Drogheda and not the other way round and told him to try it on the bus back.

Yet another free bus trip (because yet again it failed to work) and he made his way past DCU in rush-hour traffic to Busaras Dublin where at least one person seemed to know what he was doing, printed his ticket, offered no apology or explanation and sent him on his way, back into still-rush-hour traffic back to DCU.

Hurray for making a mess of a (relatively) simple system. Back to paying the driver cash at the door I guess :-( It doesn't bode well for the imminent introduction of smartcards, a system which they've already decided they will bastardise and make a mess of:

In line with the government decision to introduce smart card integrating ticketing, the new system will support the use of smart cards. The company said its system "will not depend on the introduction of the Rail Procurement Agency card scheme, which has been given the mandate for a multimodal card scheme. As the system's phase one will be capable of supporting smart card ticketing, Dublin Bus can introduce its own smart card (phase two) for its exclusive use on its own services, and when other smart card systems come on stream Dublin Bus's system is fully compatible to incorporate them" [more]

Sigh.

Motorist battered by frozen sausage

2005-04-19T09:21:00.000+01:00

A motorist is recovering today after his nose was broken when a frozen sausage was thrown through the open window of his car, ambulance service officials said.

The 46-year-old man was driving near his home in South Woodham Ferrers, Essex, when the “bizarre incident” occurred, said a spokesman for the Essex Ambulance Service.

“He was driving his car when the offending item came through his open window and hit him on the nose,” said the spokesman.

“The man said he was making his way home after work and had the window down because it was such a nice afternoon.

“He said he saw a car coming the other way and felt a searing pain in his nose. He managed to stop his car without hitting anyone else at which point passers-by came to his aid.

“His nose was undoubtedly fractured and he had lost quite a lot of blood … he decided not to go to hospital but has been left with a very painful and swollen nose.

“I feel very sorry for him – it must have been an incredibly lucky or unlucky shot to get the sausage through a moving car window. I have never seen or heard of anything like this before.”

Police said they were investigating the incident on Monday afternoon and wanted to hear from anyone with information.

East! Anon!

2005-04-18T14:51:00.000+01:00

And so my bosses fled the country in search of a land where living is cheap, papers are mandatory and the weather is a little colder. Russia. They brought with them the fruits of my labour (and my blood, sweat and tears) to show to some interested parties so Friday night was an interesting time, trying to install software on a laptop when it patently didn't want to be there. For the forth time in as many months, the same piece of software has tripped me up at the last minute, after performing without problem with ages. Gah!

[If you click on the link, you'll see our lovely website has now been completely replaced and you should no longer feel the need to throw up. :-)]

After that, a weekend of rest and relaxation was in order. First up was Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, which was actually quite funny and enjoyable. This was followed by the much better, The Interpreter which was one of the best films I've seen in months. Shot mostly inside the United Nations headquarters, it's a political thriller with very strong hints to Mugabe and his regime. It's well worth going to see and thanks to my UGC Unlimited card, one I'll probably go back to see again.

As an aside, while I was there, I saw the trailer for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I can't believe they made a film from this, probably one of the most twisted books I've ever read but I can't wait to see it. Kudos for the trailer too - it's very amusing in its own right and royally takes the piss out of other trailers.

And lastly, my shiny new DCU / AIB / Visa card arrived last week so I (predictably) christened it by buying the Cisco CCNA book (and Ross O'Carroll Kelly's, PS I Scored the bridesmaids). I've been meaning to start studying for the CCNA exam for some time now, hopefully having the book will make me get my ass in gear.

It's all over

2005-04-10T14:26:00.000+01:00

Hurray... after almost a month of planning, plotting, designing, buying, rehearsing, curtain hanging and dashing about in the dark, the musical is finally over. With almost everything that could have gone wrong happening (leaks in the roof, a double booking of the venue, equipment going pear shaped and the disturbing lack of a set designer or sound tech) it all came together in the end and ran relatively smoothly. Well no-one died and several hundred people saw the show over the course of its run.

We did, however, decide that the Venue is a cruel, traitorous joke perpetrated by people who are watching over us, cackling inanely at our misfortune when trying to do anything there. Having no backstage area, no storage area, trusses that are too high to reach without performing some definitely not Health & Safety approved feats of acrobatics and entrances that are too small to allow a scope to enter the room only begin to make life awkward. A maltreated sound system that the sound techs patently refused to use, a lighting rig which defies common sense, randomly chained or hot lighting channels, trussing which sways madly and isn't secured properly... the list is endless.

One upside is that Music Soc and the SU both liked my stage design (minimalistic is probably the best word) and want to keep it that way for upcoming shows and the Summer Ball. Yey :-) It also meant that it only took a mere three hours to clean up and get out on Friday night, by which time I was ready to fall asleep on the nearest horizontal surface. No more 18 hour days, hanging from the ceiling wondering when my curtains will fall or how I'm going to get a chez long or elevator door to do my bidding. I'm going back to work to the reliable and and (mostly) relaxing world of programming where I definitely don't have a deal with prima donna cast members.

Patriots

2005-03-23T14:07:00.000Z

They may the world oldest democracy but they come closer to losing the title with every day that goes past. It's just over four years since the crazy USA Patriot Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) was signed into law and it is obvious to everyone with a brain that it was excessive in almost all regards. A law which allows government agents to search a property without a search warrant and allows them to demand private personal records treats all its citizens as guilty until proven innocent.

Now a group called Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances [more] is campaigning to have some of the Act repealed and is asking congress not to renew the parts of it which expire this year. This flies in the fact of the current president who relies on a reign of fear and terror and needs the act to show that he 'saving America'.

In defense to their argument, the President said the Act was essential in preserving the security of America and the provisions were used sparingly and judiciously. His less than diplomatic ex-attorney general instead said that people who questioned the act were "you were aiding and abetting terrorists."

What sort of country is that where people who exercise the right to free though are branded aids to terrorists?

A great big....

2005-03-21T09:10:00.000Z

cordon was drawn around the area bounded by East Wall Road, North Strand, Portland Row, Summerhill, Parnell Street, Capel street, Parliament Street, Dame Street, College Green, College Street, Pearse Street and Grand Canal Quay which most of you will recognise as the greater part of the city centre. The reason: Skyfest, Dublin's annual blowing up lots of explosive in honour of our national saint. Without going into detail, they did a great job of blowing sh*t up, making loud noises and having a great time.

Other than that my weekend was filled with the nightmare that is the musical. Trying to organise a 14 set, 20 change musical in a venue that was designed to be as difficult as possible to work with with almost no equipment and nowhere to hang it from is proving to be much more difficult that I'd imagined. Ever.

And lastly, when going for a walk yesterday, we found a park, in central Dublin that I never knew about. Just off the top of Parnell Square and hidden at the end of a slightly derelict street is the Blessington Street Basin, an old lock build in the 1800's to store water brought into Dublin by the Royal Canal. It's not beautiful like Stephens Green but its almost unknown and has a tranquil quality for that.

And now its back to smart cards and crypto....

Formula 1

2005-03-18T10:02:00.000Z

I stopped watching Formula 1 about two years ago. I could never be described as an avid fan, but it was one of the few professional sports that I could happily follow for an entire season. Apart from the speed, the technology, the danger and characters like Eddie Ervine, there was always the (semi-Irish) Jordan team to support and the possibility of multi-car high-speed (but non-fatal of course) accidents to liven things up.

Lately though, I just don't care enough to sit through two hours of cars flying round the same track, stuck in line, possibly over-taking once or twice, but not making much difference because, at the end, of the day, good old Schumacher is going to win. In fact, he's won so many races and spent so much time at post-race press conferences, that his English is nearly perfect. Thinking back to the dour-faced young man with the very stilted English just a few years back, its a complete turnaround. He's even learned to relax and smile now and again.

No matter how exciting the sport is, it's very hard to work up any enthusiasm for it, if you know who's going to win before they ever take the tires out from under their super-dooper extra-warm tea-coseys. Last year Ferarri won the Constructors Championship by over double the next team's points. What's the point?

This years sees a new season, a fleet of new rules designed to change the nature of the game (one engine per weekend, one set of tires per weekend, changes to the qualifying days) and the first race promised a new era of Formula 1 when Schuey crashed off and let someone else win. I know its an isolated incident and he'll probably win every race for the next 10 years to make up for his transgression, but there's always hope.

Or rather there isn't because, you see, unlike some other teams which can at least pretend to be in it for the sport, Ferarri are firmly all about the money and the winning. Last season, the rest of the teams signed a testing agreement, to limit the advantage bigger teams have over smaller teams. Or more specifically, to limit the advantage Ferarri have over everyone else.

Ferarri were having none of itand patently refused to sign any testing agreement that didn't give them an increased allocation compared to the rest, pretty much negating the point of the agreement in the first place. The entire thing has fallen by the wayside, with Ferarri not only refusing to sign the new agreement but also stating that they will breach older existing agreements as well, leaving the other teams to bemoan their lack of infinite cash and issue disappointed press releases claiming that Ferarri will "destabilise Formula 1" and give them an "unequal advantage over all the other teams".

Oh well, back to my extreme knitting then while Schuey and his Formula 1 buddies destroy another season with endless boredom and predictability.

Yesterday

2005-03-18T09:58:00.000Z

was St. Patrick's Day in Ireland so we celebrated in style:

Gardaí from Store Street in Dublin said they arrested 70 people yesterday and that this was much higher than normal. In total more than 100 people were arrested on public order offences yesterday in Dublin city centre.

There were several violent incidents on the DART yesterday including an assault, vandalism and fighting. Two trains had to be taken out of service after windows were smashed. Gardaí and the ambulance service were also called to break up a fight between around 25 people on an evening train.

The worst of the violence saw two men stabbed at a house in the Artane area of the city, while a 26-year-old man suffered a serious cut to his head in the Ballyfermot area.

Lately

2005-03-16T11:18:00.000Z

I've been incredibly busy. So much so that I haven't really blogged for ages. In fact, I haven't really done anything except work for 10 to 13 hours a day, five days a week :o

On the upside, my company now has a fully-implemented biometric windows logon application on a contactless platform. Basically we replace the Windows GINA which does password authentication, with a custom one which uses a password-derived key and redundant fingerprint biometrics to safely store the users credentials on a Philips MiFare DESFire Contactless smartcard. I'm quite proud of it because it's our first contactless application and my first commercial project as a developer.

The rush on the project was to get it ready to go to NACCU, our main trade show for the year. After a few minor glitches and some very late nights coding, all went well and we have a number of interested (and high-profile) buyers so it was worth it in the end.

Other than that, myself, Charlene and Paul May rigged the sound the light systems for a European Business/Music Soc soiree in the Hub last night. After a very intensive two hours of last minute changes, rehearsals, technical problems, stolen equipment and a keyboard that appeared out of nowhere just before the show started, it went really well; almost completely sold-out and great, very participatory audience. Congrats guys, it was a great night and thanks for the chocolates :-)

[P.S. The court case over the Carlton Cinema site on O'Connell St finished yesterday with the judge finding in favour of Dublin Corpos CPO so hopefully something can finally be done with that eyesore. Congrats to the person who came up with the idea of covering it with the Quirekeys cyc but now its time to be replace by something better.]

Earthquake in Tallaght

2005-03-15T12:22:00.000Z

I'm sure it won't win me any friends but this post on Boards.ie was terrific, just what I need after working 13 hour-days for the last week.

RTE NEWS FLASH

A major earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale has hit Tallaght in the early hours of Tuesday 2nd December 2003.

Epicentre: The Square Shopping Centre.

Victims were seen wandering around aimlessly muttering "...bleedin story?", "aaaaawrigh' bud" and "fUUUcksake".

The earthquake decimated the area causing approximately €30 worth of damage. Several priceless collections of mementos from Crete and Santa Ponza were damaged beyond repair. Three areas of historic burnt out cars were disturbed.

Many locals were woken well before their welfare cheque arrived. The Tallaght News reported that hundreds of residents were confused and bewildered, still trying to come to terms with the fact that the damage had not been caused by illegal means.

One resident - Alexis Crystal Duffy, a 15-year-old mother of 5 said "Ih was such a ****in' shock, me little wan Chardonnay Mercedes cem runnin' into me bedruem cryin'. Me youngisst two: Tyler-Morgan n Megan-Brooklyn slept tru ih all. Buh I was still shakin' when I was watchin' ****in'Rikki Lake leh-er in the ****in' mornin"

Apparently though, looting, muggings and incidental crime did carry on as usual.

The Irish Red Cross has so far managed to ship 4,000 crates of Strongbow, Dutch Gold, frozen pizza and John Player Blue to the area to help the stricken locals.

Rescue workers are still searching through the rubble and have found large quantities of personal belongings, which include welfare books,jewellery including thousands of sovereign rings, many large medallions and Hash leaf ear rings from Elizabeth Duke at Argos and fine Bone China from Tommy's Wonderland of Value.

HOW CAN YOU HELP

This appeal is to raise money for food and clothing, parcels for those unfortunate to be caught up in this disaster. Clothing is most sought after, items most needed include:

* Fila or Kappa baseball caps,
* Hoodies (any type)
* Tommy Hilfiger tracksuits (his and hers)
* Nike/Adidas Shell suits (female)
* White sport socks Rockport boots and any other items usually sold in TK Maxx.
* Anything from Magic or Unique Boutique.

Food parcels may be harder to come by, as refrigeration may be a problem, but are needed all the same. Required foodstuffs include:

* McCains oven chips
* Heinz baked beans
* Goodfellas Frozen Pizza
* Coke/Fanta
* Strongbow Cider
* Smirnoff Ice.
* John Player Blue 15's. (unmarried mother handy pack)

And remember that your contribution counts!

Just 22c buys a biro for filling in the compensation forms and bookie slips. Just EUR5.00 buys chips, crisps and blue fizzy drinks for a family of 9. Only EUR6.00 will pay for a packet of 20 Major to calm the nerves of those affected.

Note: Please do not send tents for shelter, as the sight of such plush accommodation is unfair on the population of the local halting sites.

How Stupid Can You Be?

2005-02-24T09:15:00.000Z

In the move from 2000 to XP, Microsoft changed the way Windows starts up. Services were moved, orders and dependancies were changed and many of the services now start while you're logging on or using your computer, meaning the average machine may only take seconds to boot. In case, even this is too slow and you can hear the nano-seconds fly by, PC Magazine wrote an acticle just for you: How to make Windows XP start faster.

Dear God, don't ever read tripe like this. The article basically lists services that can be stopped from loading at boot time. Most of them are mundane such as the DHCP client, Fax service, Indexing service and Infrared monitor and can be disabled safely. The genius comes with these:

Automatic Updates: This service enables Windows XP to check the Web automatically for updates. If you don't want to use Automatic Updates, you can disable the service. You can always check for updates manually at the Windows Update Web site.

Yes, why bother automatically downloading and installing those patches. They're not needed anyway, especially if you have a firewall protecting your machine.

Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing: If you do not use these features, you can disable them.

Oh no, there goes the firewall. Who'd need one of those? Maybe a machine thats not connected to the internet. But wait, isn't this article *on* the internet?

After advising people to turn off the two basic protection mechanisms, they then pull the floor out from under them by:

System Restore Service: This service allows you to use System Restore. If you have turned off System Restore anyway, you do not need to turn off the service. If you do, you turn off System Restore.

Once all the viruses and worms have gotten past the turned-off firewall and exploited all those holes that could have been patch if Automatic Update was turned on, there's no way of rolling back the machine because System Restore has been turned off.

Good advice there!

Bash.org

2005-02-23T11:42:00.000Z

A worldwide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was:"Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?" The survey was a huge failure...

In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant.

In Eastern Europe they didn't know what "honest" meant.

In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" meant.

In China they didn't know what "opinion" meant.

In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" meant.

South America they didn't know what "please" meant.

And in the USA they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant

Holiday

2005-02-23T09:57:00.000Z

It's only two days before the big trip and the weather has extended its icy grip from Germany to Ireland. All over the city, motorists are inching along at 2mph should that be 3.126kph since the big changeover?) and AA Roadwatch are advising them to drive even slower. The ever reliable points on the northern rail line are out, causing the usual 45 minute to 1 hour days. Commuters in Trim are stranded as Bus Eireann are treat a lorry jack-knife like a union picket line. Even Leitrim is experiencing problems and the news headlines report that two people have died in crashes in Dublin and Cavan :o(

In other news, a quick look at Yahoo Weather (courtest of Andrew) shows that however bad it is here, its going to be much, much colder over there. Currently standing at -2° and snowing heavily, it may reach a high of 0° later on today! Later on in the week and into the weekend *waves hands around in a Michael Fish sort of way* it will drop as low as -7° though crazily, the snow will end long before that happens. After watching The Day After Tomorrow, I'm fully expecting several feet of snow covering people, buildings and anything else that gets in its way. Some rapidly freezing walls and a ship sailing through the streets of Neuss would be an added bonus but probably unlikely :o)

Energy Saving Initiative

2005-02-22T11:59:00.000Z

Average annual energy savings of 3.3% have been achieved by four Dublin-based colleges as part of a new University Energy Management Bureau initiative. The Bureau, called e3 and launched in 2004 by Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI), unites four Dublin third level institutions, in an effort to reduce their annual energy consumption.

Servicing Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and University College Dublin, e3 aims to achieve a 10% reduction in collective energy consumption over three years. In 2004, the Bureau’s first year of operation, overall energy savings of 3.3% were achieved, representing a total cost saving of €119,895 or 976 tonnes of CO2 emissions. [more]

Hurray :-) Apparently DCU have done quite well out of this, by both getting finance from the SFI to cover the cost of the monitoring equipment but also by saving quite a bit of money from it. The change from ESB to Eirtricity should save quite a bit more, as well as the obvious environmental advantages.

There's always a downside to these and things are never quite as they seem. I'm sure installing a newer, more-effecient boiler in the Gratten made quite an improvement but turning off the heating in some buildings at weekends (leaving them freezing cold on Mondays) and locking other buildings after 6pm and at weekends (restricting people's abilities to work out of hours) were the other measures they employed and I'm sure they won't be issuing press releases about them!

I'm all for saving money, especially with the three Dublin Universities aiming to lose between 5 and 10 million euro this year, but not at the expense of practicality.

AIB

2005-02-22T11:53:00.000Z

AIB Bank makes €3.8 million in profit every day, its latest results reveal. The figures for 2004 show that AIB had the biggest profit for any Irish bank at €1.4 billion. The bank's chief executive, Michael Buckley, said that the firm had already repaid €15 or the €50 million (of the over-charges) to its clients. [more]

Wow, thats an insane amount of money for a bank to make! By total co-incidence, a promotional pack arrived for me today from Permanent TSB who are on a big drive to get customers of AIB and BoI to move over. With my graduate account expiring in a few months (thank you AIB for not recognising my masters course), I think I'll be having a good long look at TSB, especially with their no-fees banking which I like the sound of a lot!

DMCA Making Sense

2005-02-22T11:32:00.000Z

Like a bad smell creeping in under the door, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act was passed to help the Hollywood Corp. sue even more people for copying their music and films. The act further restricts the right of Fair Use and more importantly, makes it illegal to use or publish any work which may compromise cryptography or other means used to secure copyright.

For example, CSS was designed to protect DVD content from illegal copying. Every DVD player (or software) has a licensed set of keys which are used to decrypt the content on the disc. Noone licensed the keys to produce a software player for Linux, so a programmer in Norway set about breaking the encryption to write his own player. Under Fair Use, he can watch the DVD anyway he likes because he bought the right to do that. However, the licensing terms means that unless he has a legal DVD player, he cannot. Under the old rules, what he did was okay. Under the new rules, he has breached DMCA.

What is worse, even though he doesn't live in the US and didn't commit a crime in the US, if he ever sets foot on American soil, he can be arrested for it.

As an aside, the act also means that no American can research cryptography schemes without fear of being arrested. White hackers who test encryption algorithms for weaknesses, cannot publish their results. This can only be a bad thing as security through obscurity becomes more prevalent.

Of course, once such a far-reaching act is passed, it's only a matter of time before someone finds new ways to abuse it. Lexmark tried. They used an encrypted RFID tag on their printer consumables which makes the printer reject any non-Lexmark products, effectively ruling out competitors products). When a small company called Static Control Components found a way to break the cryptography and produce their own "compatible" products, Lexmark won an injuction and took them to court.

Obviously this is a blatent abuse of DMCA, but the Judge, Karl Forester, granted the injunction and it was over 18 months before it was lifted. Now the Sixth Circuit court has also denied their application to appeal so it looks likely that their childish antics will be put to an end.

Better late than never

2005-02-16T09:03:00.000Z

One of the things I really liked about college, well DCU anyway, is the spontaneity and freedom to do whatever pops into your mind. It's not like school, or work or anywhere else really because an idea can pop into your head and you can just do it. If you can sell your idea, other people will gladly help you do it.

Feed the world was one of those ideas. While a group of popstars were (badly) re-recording Bob Geldof's Feed the World, a group of DCU students decided to do the same. With some help from the Media Production Society, the President (a much better sport than the old one), the Helix, Communications and Marketing Dept., Hub Management, the SU, the SPC, the SCC, a group of societies and clubs (yes the list does go on a bit), they re-recorded the entire song and showed it at an inter-socs Christmas Party.

Is it cheesy? Yes.
Corny? Definitely!
Great fun? Yes.

Go see it here: DonalMulligan.net

Ambulance clamped at Dublin Airport

2005-02-15T09:03:00.000Z

A company fraught with management changes, union problems, relentless government intervention really should try not to step on other people's feet until they get their own house in order. Breaking News this morning reports that an an ambulance was clamped in an ambulance bay last Saturday. Yes folks, we have reached a new low of clamper behaviour.

Reports this morning said the Lifeline ambulance, which is contracted to health boards and a number of Dublin hospitals, was parked in a designated ambulance bay while waiting for a patient who was inside the terminal building.

As the crew met the patient, the ambulance was clamped, even though Lifeline vehicles have been using the parking bay for six years.

Apparently though, this was the work of a renegade clamper with a grudge against ambulance drivers; rather they had been instructed by the new Dublin Airport Authority to clamp the ambulance. Not one to stand down from a confrontation:

Dublin Airport Authority has defended the incident, claiming the ambulance bay was reserved for "life and death emergencies only". It said the ambulance should have driven to the short-term car-park, where it should have waited for the patient.

Cullen plans €6bn Dublin transport plan

2005-02-14T08:57:00.000Z

Transport Minister Martin Cullen is reportedly planning a €6bn 10-year transport package that will include the construction of a second terminal at Dublin Airport and an underground metro line linking the airport to the city centre.

It also reportedly includes the reopening of commuter rail services between Dublin and Meath at a cost of €156m, the expansion of services in Co Kildare at a cost of €400m and the building of an underground line between Heuston and Connolly Stations at a cost of €1bn.

Elsewhere, this morning’s reports said the plan envisaged the replacing of toll booths on the Westlink bridge with pay-as-you-go and billed charges. [BreakingNews.ie]

I know I should be applauding the government for spending so much money on infrastructure but somehow I just don't believe it'll happen. Firstly, its just one man's dream and it has to be passed by the cabinet who, of course, will find a million and one other things they'd rather spend money on. The list is endless: farmers grants, more roads, trips to Australia to taste wine, compensation to taxi drivers for making them compete for work with... other taxi drivers, a few trips on the government jet, etc.

Secondly, we have to get through an election which means it'll probably be stealth bombed as soon as that's over.

And finally, even if miracles do happen, it'll get so quagmired down in consultants reports, "experts" opinions, legal objections, more consultants reports, under-funding problems due to inflation and yet another bout of consultants reports that'll never happen anyway.

Except for the changes to the Westlink Bridge which probably will and will end up with NTR having another 100 year non-negotiable lease.

Google Maps

2005-02-10T13:41:00.000Z

Google have released Google Maps, another nice little webapp which once again shows just how amazing those guys are at developing solid, enhanced UI, applications on the web. An interesting discussion about how it works can be found here.

And since we're here, this is a map showing where I lived in LA (Hollywood Bungalows, in the middle of the Hollywood hills) and the route I took to get to work each day. Or alternatively, from the Bungalows to the Westin Bonaventure Hotel with its lovely rotating bar on the 35th floor.

A Nerd?

2005-02-10T09:29:00.000Z

Phew :-)

Never read

2005-02-10T09:04:00.000Z

a tale of things that can go wrong in a job you've never done before. It'll only make you more nervous than you already were.

I discovered this when I subscribed to a stagecraft mailing list to see if I could get any ideas for my upcoming role as Stage Manager in Drama's musical. The first few days were fine: mundane mails about lighting, actors (and how to deal with their oh so sensitive ego's), stage construction and so forth. Then the populus decided to share their experiences of the ones that didn't go allright on the night:

The other truck is late, the driver just called.
He's only a block away, but he's going to be delayed.
He rear-ended a police car.
A parked police car.
In front of the police station.

On opening the stage manager gets hit on the head with a metal pole and goes to the emergancy room. this after 3 other technican already went to the emergancy room during tech week.

Years ago I was LD for a show that was coming to Portland on 2 40-footers. One truck showed up on time (half an hour early, even!)... the second? No idea where..... eventually the dispatcher finds him... he stopped for the night in Creswell, OR (south of Portland).. when he woke up, either looked at the wrong itinerary, got his wires crossed, ran out of methadone, who knows... instead of continuing north to Portland he heads south to Phoenix, AZ. He was in Sacramento by the time the dispatcher found him. (8 hrs from Portland.)

About twenty minutes to curtain, I'm hanging out backstage working on mapping out the next week or so, when in through the stage door someone comes calling for help, saying, "A lady's fallen down the stairs and we need some help." I figure, it's January, someone slipped, no biggie,
and go outside to see if there's anything I can do.

At the bottom of the (mostly unlit) ~13' concrete stairwell leading to the basement rehearsal room, lies a very elderly lady. On top of a collapsed wheelchair. Her face is split open, she's incoherent and shocky and showing signs of a possible fractured skull, and the temperature is hovering around freezing. About a half dozen people are standing around looking at her, and it's obvious I'm the only person around with any sort of first aid training. And then it takes twenty
minutes for the police and ambulance to arrive.

It turned out that the equally-elderly husband didn't see the stairwell, and pushed his wife in. It also turns out that he was injured as well, having dove into the stairwell to try to stop the chair...but we (the two singers who were off that night and I) didn't see his injuries until he took his hat off and sat down. Eventually, we loaded the two of them up on the ambulance just as the house TD came out for an update. We brought the curtain up only about 15 minutes late...

The Beverley Hills police show up in your lobby complete with dogs, drawn guns, and men dressed in bomb disposal suits to inform you that Moluccan Separatists (huh?) have phoned in a bomb threat because several Dutch "royals" are attending the performance that evening. And the police need you to show them pretty much everything in the theatre that might disguise an explosive device...and explain everything to them as you go.

...and, an hour later, when you ask when the supposed device was scheduled to go off, respond (way too casually for *my* tastes): "oh, about a half hour ago!".

42

2005-02-10T09:01:00.000Z

Maybe this is old news, but I just found this last night:

For anyone who's ever read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, do a search on Google for 'the answer to life the universe and everything'.

Its nice to see a company that can at least pretend to be be fun and flexible.

Out with the old

2005-02-05T14:02:00.000Z

After five months, we've lost our first house mate. Nothing Big Brother about it, she just ran out of money, up'ed and left. Renting in Dublin is a bitch. Anyway, welcome to our new housemate: a Nigerian girl, student accountant, working in Next in Blanchardstown and studying accounting in DCU. Hope it works out for her :-)

In other news, Tesco (after a month of waiting) turned down my application for the credit card. To be even more frustrating they went into detail about how they use a scoring scheme to evaluate customers but continued by saying they won't tell me why I didn't get it. Apparently having a well-paid, stable job with a reasonable amount of savings makes me an unacceptable risk >:o Back to good old AIB an DCU, we'll see how far I get with that application.

And now I'm back to work for a wee bit before heading into town to see RTE's The Panel being recorded. Should be good...

American Cheerleaders

2005-02-03T16:52:00.000Z

The American cheerleader is a very stereotyped image: tall, blond, long legs, fit body, no brains, etc. I always assumed that it was somewhere overdone but reading reports of a fight in a basketball match in Alabamha reinforced it.

A fight broke out in the stands of a girls' high-school basketball game, forcing police to fire Taser stun guns to stop it and clear the gym. Witnesses said the melee, involving dozens of fans, began in an upper deck and spilled onto the floor. Police hit some participants with Tasers, which can incapacitate a person with an electrical jolt. Three adults and six juveniles were arrested and are to be charged with assault, disorderly conduct and refusing to obey an officer.

Over 100 people were involved is this seemingly random incident, but it is best summed up by Prattville cheerleader Cherish Cartee:

"People were screaming and running. Girls lost their cell phones. Keys got lost. It’s something I will never forget."

2005-02-03T09:14:00.000Z

From trusty AA Roadwatch:

RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC: Beaumount Road is still very congested this morning going on to Collins Avenue and further on to the Swords Road. Take an alternative route if you can. There are the usual heavy volumes on the [...] Malahide Road approaching Fairview.

Dear god were they right. The impending annual visit of our investors forced us all to be in at 9am, substantially earlier than our usual arrival sometime between 9.30 and 10.30. Assuming the worst and leaving plenty of time, I left home at 8, saw the 20B coming down the Beaumont Road but still had to wait another 15 minutes for it to meander its way onto Collins Avenue. We had barely pulled off when we got caught up in the snarlup emanating from the Malahide road junction and assumed our parking position. 20 nail-biting minutes (and one decent book) later, I abandoned ship and walked to work from there, having covered an amazing 400m.

Rana, assuming the worst, pointed out that as soon as I got off the bus, it would be sure to extricate itself from even the worst traffic and race past me, leaving me in its dust. However it was not to be, even fate could not beat the traffic this morning and so, on my 25 minute walk down the road, the bus never came within sight of me. Perhaps I should send a rescue team to look for it?

And so, with the Celtic Tiger: Part 2 in full boom, it took me an hour to travel the 2 miles to work. Yey for the 1.8 litre Turbo Injection no-airbags-as-standard "Leg" :-)

Security through obsecurity is no security

2005-01-31T16:32:00.000Z

It's an old mantra in security that you cannot use obscurity as a means of security. There are many ways to strengthen a cryptographic algorithm, but keeping its process a secret isn't one of them. Making it harder to attackers to discern the process only slows things down.

The stream cipher used in GSM, already weakened to make it more feasible for agencies such as federal or police to break was one major example. That was several years ago, long enough for the lesson to be learned, but the Register has a story today of a cipher designed by the veritable Texas Instruments, being broken.

The attack against Texas Instruments DST tags used in vehicle immobilisers and ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system was identified by experts at Johns Hopkins University and RSA Laboratories. The algorithm used in TI's DST tags is an unpublished, proprietary cipher that uses a 40-bit key. Using a black-box reverse-engineering method, the team were able to unravel the algorithm used in the DST tags.

Democracy

2005-01-31T16:24:00.000Z

A U.S. judge ruled today that the changes to the procedures used in America to arrest and incarcerate suspected terrorists, is unconstitutional.

District Judge Joyce Hens Green also ruled that the Guantanamo prisoners have constitutional protections under the law.

She ruled that the procedures implemented by the US government to confirm that prisoners are 'enemy combatants' who are subject to indefinite detention violate these prisoners' rights to due process.

This has been long needed and serves as a reminder to Warmongerer Bush, not to stoop to the same level as the people you're fighting. If you claim to bring freedom and democracy to other countries, then you'd better make sure not to disregard it in your own country. In fighting evil, the greatest threat is becoming the very thing you claim to hate.

WTF?

2005-01-26T15:31:00.000Z

There are some pretty strange people on the Internet but this has to take the biscuit. Posted on comp.object:

Hi everyone,
I was trying to build an antenna in C++. I don't know where to start. can anyone help me?? if there is some code that would be even better. I don't care about the type of antenna as long as it
communicates.
THanks
Shastri

Undeterred by answers such as:

Antennae are hardware. C++ is software. You have an insurmountable problem with the fundamental nature of your toolset.
But it might be possible...

and

A German computer magazine posted a software solution that could turn the mouse chord into a radio antenna once.**
Regards

robert
** It was in an April issue...

he tried to clarify his request:

Hello,
I know its not trivial. But what i wanted to do is create a
class in C++ named antenna. I would treat that as an object and write
the functionality to it. Is there any way that it could communicate??
Thanks for the earlier reply
Shastri

It's hard to know what to say to people like that. I think it's suitably summed up with:

You can do that in HTML. Why use C++ for that?

American Security

2005-01-26T10:19:00.000Z

Message from messiah@carbon on pts/363 at [ Wed 26/Jan/2005 10:18:56 GMT ]

You should check out cnn.com:

Talk about an overuse of the word terror, its everywhere. Two stories to note: they are talking about installing anti missile devices on commercial airlines. At a cost of $11billion!

Then there is another story about viruses, and somehow they manage to get the word cyber terror in there and tell about how terrorists COULD gain access and ya de fuckin da. I really hate the media they have over there. terrorists could use your toothbrush against you and put a listening device in there, so it can record the songs you sing in the shower letting, which could lead to them finding out top secret passwords, and attacking the countrys systems.

Hummm, got a lot of buzz words in there :o)

Sports For All?

2005-01-25T20:26:00.000Z

After several years of waiting, DCU finally got round to building their new sports complex (but not their website) featuring an all new gym extension and the ever popular swimming pool (mistakenly labled as being 50mm on maps for a long time). Unfortunately, even though building work finished several months ago, financial problems meant that the gym was never kitted out and political problems meant that the pool has been left idle. Disagreements abouts funding for the complex, how it should be managed and what sort of pricing strategy should be used all led to this.

Now, with a new company formed (Campus Sport) and a new CEO, the sports complex is ready to roll on its last deadline: February 7th. Unfortunately, with mere days to go, the college announced its next move. Not having the guts to put a single name forward, lest they be personally blamed for the mistakes of many, it was left to the SU President to explain events to the college body:

Governing Authority has already stated that students would be given maximum levels of access, and that a service level agreement would be drawn up. Unfortunately, this agreement has not materialised, we were not consulted on pricing, and our suggestions were also ignored.

The board of management for the Sports Complex (on which students have no representation) has proposed a flat fee of €195 for 12 months membership. This appears to be a reasonable fee for membership of equivalent commercially run facilities. However, we think that very few students (and staff) will be able to pay this lump sum up front.

We have suggested a more equitable payment scheme, breaking the year into three 4-month sections (Oct-Jan, Feb-May, Jun-Sep). Members would either pay between €70 and €80 per period OR the full 12-month membership of €195. This scheme was rejected without a good explanation other than the facility's need to break even.

We're not happy that students will be asked to fork out nearly €200 in a lump sum. We are VERY concerned about this attitude towards students. We've all been waiting for this facility for a long time, but students on INTRA, semester abroad students, final-year students and most postgraduate students will be discriminated against by this inequitable policy.

All this is very frustrating. For a long time DCU seemed to be making the right steps, winning Sunday Times Best University, actually recognising extracurricular activities instead of pretending it didn't exist, building new res blocks (although charging extortionate rates for it) but this is crazy. No student (or at least very few) will pay upfront for a facility that may or may not use. If nothing else, it will discourage students from ever using it.

Bad form, DCU, bad. This seriously needs a re-think.

Sweet Charity

2005-01-25T14:51:00.000Z

After my brief forray into musicals last year with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, it appears the crazy people in DCU Drama weren't completely traumatised by the sight of me with electric power tools and have asked me (after much nagging) to help out with this years, Sweet Charity.

More frighteningly, I'll be moving away from the technical side of things, which I'm still learning, to take up my role as Stage Manager. This is something I've never done before and never even thought of doing. The poor soul who took a siesta from her nursing degree to do the job last year disappeared shortly after the closing night party and hasn't been seen since. The official excuse is that she was offered a place with the Bull Alley Theatre Training Company but this has never been confirmed.

It would appear that I have a lot of work to do, beginning with booking time off work and finding out what on earth a stage manager is supposed to do... dear god, what have I got myself into this time? I might have been able to pick up the art of follow-spot operator at little or no notice last year but SM might prove to be just a little more challenging.

Roadworks on O'Connell Street.... really?

2005-01-21T17:30:00.000Z

AA Roachwatch reports thats from this Saturday, 22nd January, there will be roadworks on O'Connell Street as part of the repaving and realigning of the road.

Hurm... maybe the good folks at AA haven't been in our fair city centre lately but there have been roadworks (and footpath works?) almost continuously for three years, ever since they started work on the Luas and the spike. Do keep up guys...

We're coming!

2005-01-19T16:45:00.000Z

After last years holiday blitz (Germany in February, Scotland in August and London in November) it's time to start thinking about escaping this crummy Irish weather and taking a break from it all. (read: work)

To that end, we're putting plans in motion for a trip to Neuss, Germany at the end of February. That should give us enought time to save up for the flights and accomodation, suffer the weather a bit more and hopefully raise contact with remote base: Planet Barry to let him know we're invading his life for a weekend.

Barry if you're out there: "We're coming! So you'd best start to check your phone for texts and maybe read your email or you're in for a big surprise when we show up :P".

For those of you who don't know, Barry was a CA-head back in the good old days. Ever faithful to Unreal Tournament, PHP and flirting, Barry has since left us for err... different climates, taking up a job as a network admin and general computery guy in Neuss. I spent a weekend with him last year, filled with UT, Quake 3, Scrubs, steak, dog racing and very little sleep. This year John M and Andrew are accompanying me (i.e. they came up with the idea and I'm tagging along) so it should make for an interesting weekend :-)

Problems...? Yes we have a few

2005-01-19T10:25:00.000Z

This morning on my daily wander from the bus to work on the Clontarf Road, I noticed the traffic, which is usually woeful at best, had taken a turn for the worst and stopped moving. In the ten minutes it took me, the two lanes of city-bound traffic moved not an inch, blocked as far as I could see in both directions. Only a few taxis and a small number of enterprising motorists who spotted the end of the bus lane hours, managed to nip by the jam and into the city. Unfortunately, absolutely no buses managed to meander their way onto the bus lane during this time.

It's not for lack of trying that the traffic situation in Dublin hasn't improved. In the last few years, we've seen a new department (Dublin Transport Office), a new traffic control centre, a network of bus lanes, a light rail system, huge improvements on the Dart (albeit by closing half the network down at weekends for three years but you know what they say about omlettes), car pooling initatives and countless other measures.

But somehow the traffic just gets worse. Sure the constant construction work of the luas and port tunnel doesn't help. But there has to be another reason.

Attitude.

Irish people are among the most car dependant in Europe. Both Dublin and Los Angeles have the same problem - an excessive reliance on the automobile caused by an underlying feeling that public transport, in whatever form, is for people who can't afford to drive.

You start your working days saving up for a car and then as soon as possible you sacrifice everything to be able to drive to work, drive to the shop and drive for the sake of driving. It doesn't matter if it costs an arm and a leg to buy, tax and insure your pride and joy. It doesn't even matter if a multitude of body parts won't cover the cost of parking in the city. Once you have a car, you have status. You're no longer a no-one. You can safely surround yourself in your sheet metal, as you sit in carparks like Pearse Street or the M50, looking down on the people who are getting the bus or the train to work. At least they're getting to work!

Until people here start to think like regular folk in other cities and take public transport when it's viable to do so, traffic problems in Dublin are here to stay. In the meantime, like cigarette smokers, we can continue to penally tax the life of out them and squeeze the roads for all the bus lanes, bicycle tracks and rail tracks we can. They'll complain, but they'll sit in their unmoving cars to do it while the rest of us move about.

Battle of the titans

2005-01-18T15:28:00.000Z

They're unimaginably big, ungainly as hell and a pain in the ass for airports around the world, but Airbus are betting their future on the A380. This monster jet, most closely described as a SuperGuppy on steroids, will become the largest production plane ever built. For a mere $28 million dollars before bulk discounts, you get a fuselage with two full-length decks, wingspans that are compared to football fields, fuel effeciency meaning flights up to 8,000 miles long and a capacity for over 800 passenger. Of course, Airbus will tell you about the swimming pools, saunas, offices, bars and other optinal extras that could be fitted but it seems unlikely that any of those will ever happen.

Building an €11bn plane is no easy feat and Airbus have faced more than their fair share of problems.

Chinese airlines tried to use the carrot and stick approach, ordering a large number of the jets but tieing the order to the EU's revocation of the arms embargo placed on them for their disregard for human rights.

Neighbourhood and church groups objected to the company extending their runway at Hamburg delayingt testing of the freight version of the plane.

Airports have been forced to spend millions upgrading their runways, clearways and terminal facilities to support the new jet and some have lagged. LAX, whose upgrade will cost $53m, is still behind schedule.

This is the catching point for the two manufacturers. Boeing believe that the market has moved from the hub/spoke model to a point to point one. The former occurs when people fly between large airports and then transfer to smaller planes to fly directly to their destination. The latter, more popular with customers who dislike the inconvenience and unreliability of connections, involves flying direct from one airport to another, with no changeovers. To this end, Boeing have all but dropped plans for their extended 747 and instead are concentrating on the 7E7, Dreamliner which carries about the same capacity as the 747 but in more comfort than before.

Airbus have taken the opposite stance and see a jumboliner like the A380 being the ideal solution to crowded routes and busy airports. By replacing two regular jets with one A380, the airline pays less to airports who benefit from having an extra gate free and can start making money sooner because of the A380's reduced warm-seat/breakeven ratio and increased effeciency.

Only time will tell which company has the adopted the right strategy but Airbus certainly have an uphill challenge. The project needs to sell 250 of the jets at full price - 315 realistically - before it breaks even and had only reached 149 by the time the lauch was held yesterday.

Adapting

2005-01-17T14:49:00.000Z

One of the things that helped me adapt to the less exciting and involving working life, is money. I'm not all about the money (Andy has that position) but it's nice to be able to treat yourself from time to time without feeling guilty.

This morning I picked up a copy of Michael Connelly's latest book, The Narrows. I absolutely love his books. After being given one as a random present last year, I've bought (or been given) almost all of them now and I can't just put them down. He has an amazing way of making you empathise with the characters no matter what they do or what they're going through. The principle lead, Harry Bosch (named after a slightly eccentric and very depressed 15th century Dutch painter) is a very Dirty Harry character - full of flaws, slighly tactless in his methods and very short-tempered with anyone who gets in his way. His manta of 'everyone counts or no-one counts' constantly puts him ill at ease with the upper tiers of LAPD and in particular with Irving and IAD.

Having ploughed through five of them in the last two weeks and thoroughly loved Angels Flight, I'm putting aside John Grisham's Runawa Jury which I bought yesterday to make a start at this. Hopefully I'll have a long bus journey home this evening :-)

Totally offtopic, while I was uploading the photo for this entry, I found some photos in my crap folder that Colin (grimnar@redbrick) showed me of a truss failure in a concert hall in Germany. I really don't need to say how much it reminded me why LD/LT's are so pedantic about safety.
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

To me

2005-01-17T14:17:00.000Z

Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Well yes, Saturday (that's the 15th ye forgetful wasters) was my 23rd birthday and hard as I try to ignore it, people keep on telling me I'm getting old. Just because I've left college, am in a permanent job, have a pension, savings (of some meagre kind) and am in the process of seeking a driving license of the provisional kind and a credit card, does not make me old. Well not that old anyway.

Celebrations so far have been minimal, a night on the town (well the mighty town of Cavan) with Mr. King involving food, alcohol, cinema and more alcohol. Unfortunately the bulk of the alcohol came after the film meaning I was sobre during the muck that is Team America: World Police. I suppose if I was more drunk, I might have found it funny. If I was in a mood to think more, I have drawn some parallels between the film and the complex social interactions that we call war.

Mairead has informed me that she deserves (and wants) a night out on the town. She even rang me to tell me so I guess she must mean it :p Apparently she sat her Banking exams on Saturday so I guess thats reason enough for a drink. And speaking of exams, I'm now joining the league of DCU graduates who can sit back and laugh at all the harried and stressed students starting their exams this week. Best of luck to ye!

Finally, because this post has to have a point of some kind, I'm interested in sitting the Cisco CCNA exam sometime soon. Griffith college have offered to teach me the necessary for a mere €2,900 which is mighty nice of them but I'm looking for something a little cheaper. So the questions that I want you *points vaguely in your direction* to answer are: is it possible to sit the exam without taking the course (and pass), is it hard, where can I sit the exam and how much will it cost? And I suppose, if I want to stay in development for the next few years, so is it worth doing Cisco exams? Your time starts now...

Slashdot

2005-01-14T09:53:00.000Z

I've met some very moaney people in my time. [1] After a little while, you learn to live with it and tune out their moaney-ness and so, life continues as normal. The people that are hard to tune out are the opinionated, moaney ones. They're always so right about whatever it is they're complaining about and there's absolutely no arguing with them cause they're too busy moaning to actually listen to you.

A few years of reading the Redbrick boards [2] I thought I'd met some of the most opinionated money folks I'm ever likely to meet. They'll moan about everything: computers, software, lecturers (that lecturer was so wrong, I mean, how could they be so wrong?), the weather, the news, America (I can't believe they're going after Saddam), Iraq (I can't believe they haven't found Saddam yet), 9/11, oil (I can't believe America wants more oil), inflation... the list is endless. At least when they're moaning about computers or software, most of them have half a clue and underneath all the bitching, complaining and 'yer ma' retorts, there might even be some semblance of intelligence.

Slashdot users, on the other hand, have none of this. They're they most opinioned, moaney group of people I have ever seen. No matter what news article is posted, the discussion always instantly tangents off into a windows vs linux debate that I don't even need to describe to you. Even if the article was interesting, the amount of people trying to read it from Slashdot invariably brings the site to its knees, removing the last vestige of use from the site.

This morning saw an article called: Windows Longhorn to make Graphics Cards more Important pointing out (the bloody obvious) that when Longhorn eventually comes out, it will need a decent graphics card to be anyway useful. Instantly, the Slashdotters jumped to the attack of Microsoft for possibly wanting to making use of GPU's to make computers nicer to use. *sheesh* The crazyness of it all...

"Some secretary working on a memo or letter doesn't really even need Windows. LaTeX could do what Word does for those tasks much better and much more efficiently. Raising the bar on what graphics card her machine has, just so that menus can be rendered, is moronic."

followed by possibly the best (but admittedly slightly wrong) response:

"Wah. Wah Wah. Wah. Stop making me buy a video card, don't force me to conform to your new technology. Wah. Wah.

You know what we call you people? Fucking Luddites

Everyone should just conform to your ideal then, LaTeX for secretaries! Fantastic. How about instead of paying more for people to learn how to use LaTeX they spend that extra money on, oh, I don't know a Video Card so they can run Microsoft Word."

Of course, they were quickly obliterated by all the people pointing out how intuitive and easy to use Latex is. Yes, yes.. of course it is.

What's even more disappointing is that all these technophiles missed the point that by the time Longhorn is eventually released (looking 2007 by now) the graphics card necessary will probably be below entry level. It's called progress but I'm sure someone will tell me how wrong I am.

[1] Some might say I'm one of them... but they'd be wrong.
[2] Private Usenet system on a college society server

The Weekend

2005-01-10T10:36:00.000Z

	Message from montoya@carbon on pts/335

      /¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Whos your daddy? ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯	) jeez, you and your on ice shows  (

      ) you realise theatre comes in non (

      ) artic varieties? :P              (

      \__________________________________/

After spending most of my Christmas holidays in bed doing nothing and being very bored, I decided to make the most of the weekend and actually do something.

Saturday brought Napoleon Dynamite to UGC. A film genre I'm usually wary of - the film that leads you though the principles' life without having a story to tell or anything to focus on - it's not my favourite type but this was more enjoyable than most. I'm still very unsure about it though; watching a few weeks of life in a house full of crackpots, a slightly oddball Mexican, a dune-jumping Grandma and breast-enhancing, scamming Uncle isn't my usual weekend form of entertainment. Its got a heart-warming ending though so its hard to criticise it.

For a more rounded cultural experience, I saw the Wild Rose Ice Theatre's production of Cinderella on Ice in the splendid Mahony Theatre in the Helix. Having been to two Disney Ice shows before, my expectations might have been slightly biased. Because it was in the Mahony and not the Theatre, I did expect it to be aimed at a slightly more mature audience than the Disney shows. I have to admit, it was truly amazing - the ice-skating was as you'd expect from the world's best ice-skaters and one Olympic Gold Medalist, the acrobatics was truly terrifying (watching someone hang from the ankle of another who is hanging by the knee onto a rope three stories off the ground is not for the faint hearted), the music although not live was enjoyable but overall the show lacked the atmosphere and sense of entertainment that Feld/Disney On Ice shows have. I guess its that Disney magic ;-)

And for those of you who were wondering, here's how they prepare the ice stage.

How not to test airport security

2005-01-04T17:44:00.000Z

In a hilarious example of just how disorganised airport security is, Bruce Schneier's blog highlights two comical situations where it all went horribly wrong.

The first is when a routine training operation in Newark resulted in police being unable to find a bag in which they had hidden a fake bomb. Despite the fact that a scanning machine warned of the bags contents, staff were unable to find it in time, before it escaped into the wilderness of international air travel. The bag was later recovered in Amsterdam by alert (and presumably forwarned) staff. [more]

The second, and more scary, example tells of two police officers in Charles de Gaulle who hid a small amount of explosive in a random passengers bag. A sniffer dog successfully located the bag but the unfortunate officers lost the bag when they went to fetch a second dog. The bag has never shown up since, even though the airport attempted to inform all the airports to which planes departed during the time. [more]

Its good to know Bush's attempt to scare-monger the world has worked. We'll all much better off.

It's all over

2005-01-04T10:39:00.000Z

My first Christmas as a worky person has passed and thanks to a cold that kept me bed-bound for most of it, it passed very uneventfully. Its amazing how you can still be sleepy after spending almost a full week in bed with nothing to do but sleep and plough through the various Michael Connelly books that my parents and girlfriend bought me.

Obviously spending so much time in bed, I've hardly any news at all (something Andrew will hate me for) except that I'm now no longer a fan of electronic components in cars. On the way back here, the onboard computer detected a (non-existent) fault in the engine, shut it down and then refused to let the engine start again. *sigh* Didn't help that it happened on the Sunday between New Years Day and the Monday bank holiday so Peugeot's Assistance were unable to do anything but tow our car away. Big shout to the folks we bought the car from, Fitzpatrick & King, for bringing us out a spare car, making sure I was returned safely to Dublin.

Last night was spent watching Joey (the disappointing Friends spin-off), Scrubs (never a let down) and eating pizza with Abi and Gar. Not a bad way to ease myself into 2005. Lastly, if I'm not the only one who is finding it hard to return to the working life, check out the Interactive Fridge Magnet and after a strong coffee, How Tower Cranes Work.

A blog entry of sorts

2004-12-20T17:07:00.000Z


Message from elpres@carbon on pts/266 at [ Mon 20/Dec/2004 17:04:40 ] ...

             ==  SmartCentric: Dirty deads, done dirt cheap!  ==

             = http://ann-dee.blogspot.com/                    =

             =                                                 =

             = there you go cock knocker                       =

             ==================================================*

EOF

And there yo go, Andy (after much cajoling) has joined the blog world. If today's lunch conversation is anything to go by, he'll be blogging pure drivel and his futile attempts to kill me. Betcha can't wait :P

Rise of the machines

2004-12-17T15:11:00.000Z

More sinister than Poltergeist, more threatening than a natural disaster and scarier than my karaoke singing, the time has come to recognise the threat to the human race from computers. It is true that some of the greatest threats are our own fault (C++, Unix and Windows 95 spring to mind) but we must see that computers have evolved and and are seeking our destruction. One only has to look at the ever-trustworthy El Reg for proof.

A middle-aged Frenchman has become the latest victim of murderous technology after his car exploded as he activated the central locking system. [more]

A traumatised Frenchman is shaken but otherwise unharmed after his Renault Vel Satis kidnapped him on the A71 motorway in central France and subjected him to an hour-long 125mph terror ordeal. [more]

A 51-year-old woman was yesterday subjected to a harrowing two-hour ordeal when she was imprisoned in a hi-tech public convenience. [more]

It only merited a brief report on Yahoo! yesterday, but the story of the teenager-eating Madrid telephone kiosk further confirms our suspicions that the eventual rise of the machines and the subjugation of humanity is only a matter of time [more]

In the last few weeks, three Citaro bendy buses - articulated single-deckers championed by Livingstone and built by Mercedes subsidiary Evo Bus - have caught fire without apparent reason. The first two incidents were at Edgware Road and Camberwell. The third targeted exclusive Park Lane on Saturday. Mercifully, there have been no casualties, so far [more]

For three weeks terrified residents of the small village of Canneto di Caronia in Sicily have become the front line in the war of annihilation between humanity and Terminator-style roboappliances, battling for their very survival against spontaneously-combusting TVs, fridges and cookers which have damaged twelve houses and provoked a full-scale evacuation of the hamlet. [more]

Beware.

You cannot be a criminal and a republican activist

2004-12-13T09:57:00.000Z

Everyone knows that polititians talk a lot. Its their job. Talk enough to get elected. Talk while you're elected to get re-elected and then, if they're lucky, talk enough to publish an autobiography after they're finished. When you talk that much, statistically some of it has to be rubbish but I've never heard of rubbish like this. Gerry Adams, under pressure to make some effort to get the IRA to publically decommission, said that:

"You cannot be a criminal and a republican activist. You cannot be involved in any criminality and involved in republican activism."

I'm sorry Mr. Adams, but you're dead wrong. Whatever the reason for their actions, they're still criminals. Robbing banks, killing people, possibly even selling drugs, I'd classify them all as criminal actions.

I need a new phone

2004-12-09T16:31:00.000Z

Ever since my upgrade kicked in a few months ago, I've been looking for a new phone. I'm not overly picky with it my phone, I just want to make phone-calls and send texts. A calendar would be great, infrared would be nice and a radio a luxury. What I don't want is a camera (I already have two and I'm sure no phone can compete), a video camera (wtf! Why?), Java games, polyphonic ringtones (regular ringtones are irritating enough), WAP or 3G (whatever that is). I really don't want a clamshell phone either. I just want to pick up my phone and make calls.

And since I don't want all that rubbish, I'd like a decent battery. One that can last for at least a week between charges.

As it happens, I already own a phone that does all that. My trusty Nokia 6310i, the last of the real phones. Its served me well for 28 months but as with all good Nokias, it's well past giving me subtle hints that it's time to upgrade. Meantime between battery failure or crash-reboots is down to days. Going into lifts means I have to turn it off and back on again to regain network coverage and the power button, reticent and shy at the best of times, has slumped so far into the case its actually a chore to turn my phone off.

I've been looking around at other phones but there are none that suit my tastes. As all the people on this site say, the 6310i is just a perfect phone. Can anyone help me?

Reviewed by Yanick Pierce from Australia on 27th Aug 2004
This phone is a work horse - Just works and works. I have had it for 2 years without problem and make 80 calls a day (take 40 calls a day) and it is brilliant. The slim design fits in the tightest jeans and the phone memory is excellent - Nokia says it can hold 500 "names" - well I have 500 names & numbers and the "phone memory" is still only 57% utilized. Chuck it , knock it, beer face it - it works! Great phone - however beware! The new phones on the market have truly bewitching offerings (video / music / camera / 24 function swiff army knife / breath analyser / length of dick measurer etc)but these are marketing trinkets only and virtually junk compared to the solid practical offerings of the 6310i. Smoke & mirrors or the real McCoy - your choice!

What Am I Listening To?

2004-12-09T13:44:00.000Z

Take a little Justin Timberlake, some Blink 182, Papa Roach and some Hip Hop. Stir in three guys with dubious names: will.i.am, apl.de.ap, Taboo and a lady called Fergie. Add in a few untoward references to George Bush and Pinoccio and a potentially controversial song about getting retarded. Finally mix in some bass, a little more bass and a whole lot of beat and you've got an L.A. group who, since first hearing them in Citywalk in 2003, have remained one of my favourite
bands.

[Current track: Black Eyed Peas - Elephunk - The Boogie That Be]

I can't believe we're still talking about this

2004-12-08T11:56:00.000Z

Several days on and the government is still talking about releasing the killers of Detective Gerry McCabe in an effort to bribe the IRA to publicly disarm, something they're blatantly not going to do anytime soon. Couched in phrases like "only in the framework of complete decommissioning" and "not without compliance from the IRA", they're trying to hide the fact that they are willing to cross the line and release the killers of a Garda.

The IRA have always claimed that, when arrested and interned, they are political prisoners of war and as such should be released as part of the peace process because the 'war' is over. Pearse McAuley, Jeremiah Sheehy, Kevin Walsh and Michael ONeill are serving ridiculously short sentences (only 11 - 14 years) for shooting a Garda while robbing a post office.

Not freeing Ireland from the 'oppressors', not helping to create a 32-county Ireland. Not even having the brains to avoid shooting a guard.

Cop-killers.

Criminals.

Why are manhole covers round?

2004-12-07T09:45:00.000Z

This may require some thought. You take your squares, for instance. A square cover you can tip up on edge and drop through the hole on the diagonal, if you follow me. Similarly with ovals. A circular hole, however, will defy the most determined efforts in this regard. (Bear in mind that there's a lip around the inside of the manhole that the cover rests on; this effectively makes the diameter of the manhole an inch or so less than that of the cover.) This means manholes are one of the few things in the universe that are absolutely goofproof.

Kinda reassuring, except for one thing. A circular manhole cover isn't the only shape that won't fall into the hole. A cover shaped like an equilateral triangle won't fall in either. The main objections to be raised against a triangular cover are that:

it would be pretty tough to roll

the corners might tend to pop up when cars drove over them and

it would look stupid

Regarding point #3, someone has written me claiming the English have triangular manhole covers. 'Nuff said.

Almost forgot.

Point #4. Circular covers, in addition to the won't-fall-in angle, have the advantage that you don't have to get the corners lined up when dropping them into place, saving God knows how many thousands of seconds of valuable time. Originally I wrote this as "man-seconds," to which I added the hilarious remark, "OK, worker-seconds, but how many female sewer workers have YOU seen?" Caught no end of flak from numerous defenders of insulted female sewer workers. Guess I won't try THAT again.

Anyway, it seems to me that round has got to be the shape of choice. That said, we don't have any definitive statements on this subject from the Manhole Cover Research Institute. We cannot entirely discount the possibility that the covers are round because someone at the dawn of modern civil engineering discovered he could draw them by tracing around the outside of a penny. But good enough for now.

Disney On Ice

2004-12-06T11:50:00.000Z

It always seems to be cold and windy when I'm walking down the docklands for the annual trip to the Point Depot for the Disney On Ice show. The Point always seems to be just that little bit further away each time I walk to it and the tickets are always that little bit more expensive. None of it matters a damn when I walk past the front curtains, around the ice-rink, near to the stage and under the multi-tonne lighting and effects rig.

I'm constantly amazed at just how good these shows are. They might be aimed at keeping kids happy long enough to extract huge amounts of money from their parents wallets (Come on, €9 for a programme and €7 for candyfloss) but they are so well pulled off. The ice-skaters are superb (more-so because they're wearing those silly but amazing costumes), the choreography is astounding and, of course, the lighting and effects are awesome. Even thinking about where to start designing an lighting programme for a show like that is mind boggling. Any show with a squeezable toothpaste lorry, suspended traffic lights and an extendible truss with inflatable aircraft wheels has my vote!

I'm off to cry over the lighting board in the Hub in DCU and try not to think of it as a Fisherprice 'My first Lighting Board'.

GRA fury at Taoiseach's intentions for McCabe killers

2004-12-01T15:13:00.000Z

The Taoiseach announced today that he would consider the release of the killers of Garda Gerry McCabe as part of the renewed effort to secure peace in Northern Ireland. Not surprisingly the Garda Representative Association has reacted unhappily to this news.

After several years of seemingly abortive efforts to bring normality to the North, I'd be more than delighted to see some sort of agreement on how to progress from here. In the last few days a lot of work has been done to move it along and a lot of commendably concessions will be made by all sides.

However, there are some concessions that should never be made in the name of peace. Excusing the murderers of a member of the national police force is one of them. Releasing someone who killed an un-armed guard should never, ever, ever be contemplated by a democratic society.

The reasoning behind this is simple. An economic market works on trust. People holds pieces of paper (bank notes, bonds, t-bills) and believe that they are worth something. Everyday they work or trade to gain more pieces of paper and so long as everyone has faith in the system, it continues to work. If, for some reason, people's faith is broken, the system enters a depression.

Democratic societies are much the same. As long as everyone follows some basic rules, everyone believes in the system and society functions. Occasionally it becomes necessary to prod people in the right direction to encourage the rest to follow the line. If you let too many people break the rules, the system falls apart. Releasing someone who kills the people who keep the system stable is a bad precedent to set.

What sort of place will Ireland be if we achieve peace at a cost of letting murders roam the streets?

Band Aid Dilemma

2004-11-30T13:58:00.000Z

Yesterday's release of Band Aid's revamped version of the, ahem, classic Do They Know It's Christmas has put many charitable souls in a bit of a quandry. The fact is, you want to help the Sudanese refugees by supporting this excellent cause, but the single is, well, crap.

I have to say, having heard the single a few times and much as it pains me, it isn't exactly great. Especially after growing up hearing the original every Christmas. Oh well...

Don't read this, it's important

2004-11-27T13:45:00.000Z

If there's one thing I hate, its users. Fine we all know computers are hard to use and you'll never hear me disagree with you. But everyone knows they're hard to use and that software is unreliable as hell. If you buy a computer and expect it to be as reliable as your car, then you're in for a shock. If you're not up to the level of looking after your computer in moments of unpredictabiliy, then maybe you should consider not owning one.

Home users who blatently don't know how to use a computer and don't want to learn, shouldn't buy one. Go buy a Playstation, an X-Box or something similar but don't dare buy a PC and then complain when it doesn't work because you've saved space by deleting the windows folder (several times over) or uninstalled programmes by deleting the Program Files folder.

Ditto for people who join committees and have no intention of doing any work anyway. You'll easily spot these people because their names will be on committee lists but you won't recognise them. They're the ones standing around doing nothing before events while everyone else works their asses off to make something happen. Or the types that come with conditions, ie they'll be on committee but have a list of things they won't do: early mornings, late nights, talk to members, check names at the door, be useful in any way, etc.

In the end, they cause more trouble than they're worth because they neither know, nor care about what's going on. They take on work but never do it. They never read committee mails and then complain about not being told. Occasionally they even think they're being useful (because doing nothing is always useful) and volunteer themselves for a more important position.

*vent, vent, vent, vent*

Why do these people join committees in the first place?

*vent more*

And why do they return to join the same committee again?

Unix Hating

2004-11-27T13:17:00.000Z

I've been allowed to temporarily abandon my Solaris login project while I continue working on other things. Before my brief respite, I was (as usual) using Google to try to find any useable information about Solaris and why nothing works for me. (Why oh why, oh why, oh why when I tell it to install the Developers OS install, does it not consider vim, gcc or make suitable components?) After a long hard day of Googling, I came across this little gem, the Unix Haters Handbook, a 10 year old 360 page satirical look at all of Unix's (many) faults. I love it!

And seeing as MySQL on redbrick has been down all night, co-inciding nicely with my morning dedicated to doing work on my webapps, it's been providing me with some light entertainment.

In other words, every feature that is new in Unix (as opposed to being copied, albeit in a defective or degenerate form from another operating system) is so arcane that it can be used only after years of arcane study and practice.

Beshoffs and Smart Cards

2004-11-17T15:31:00.000Z

A quick post-post-lunch flick through the news reveals two things of interes.

Firstly Beshoffs on Westmoreland street is on fire, prompting the fire department to close the entire street just ninty minutes before rush 'hour' starts. As my boss points out, the first thing anyone in Dublin (both of you who read this) will think is 'Oh my god, that's going to screw up the traffic' and not 'Oh no, I wonder is anyone hurt' ;-)

Secondly, the Dublin Transport Office are pressing ahead with their integrated smartcard public transport card plan, the much mooted plan to convert all Luas/Dart/DublinBus tickets to contactless smart cards at a cost just shy of €30M. Although they've been talking about it for years now, I'd still be surprised if they manage to get phase one (roll-out on the LUAS lines) done before their deadline of the end of this year. Still there's always hope.

Quote of the week goes to the Independent for describing contactless cards as "working in much the same way as groceries are checked at supermarket tills".

By the by, they're planning on eventually integrating it with a similar system in the north which means that we could soon have a transit card spanning then entire country since public transport outside Dublin in almost non-existent.

Meanwhile my personal battle to get Solaris to talk to non-Sun approved cards continues.

Man About Dog

2004-11-17T13:44:00.000Z

Every so often films sponsored by the Irish Film Board surprise me. With such a (comparitively) small talent pool, they do occasionally come out with some terrific work that should definitely be seen by the masses.

Man About Dog is one of those films that convinced me how great they are. After a slightly long 'short' called An Dìog Is Fada about Sonny Murphy's hopes of Olympic medal for Ireland in LA-1932, the film got off to a terrific start and just got better. From the selling of the trailer to the van break-in, right through to the high speed chase between the gypsees and the losters down the Dublin road (loves of bread as a weapon..?), this film had me in tears of laughter all the way through.

Go see it.

Work

2004-11-16T15:13:00.000Z

After being on the SPC for a year and seeing the masses of paper, the hundreds of photocopies, the scraps indicating that money (often thousands of euros) has been allocated and the Post It notes to remind each other to query something later on, it's hard to believe the system works so well and that each year clubs and socs successfully allocate and spend next half a million euro on extra curricular activity.

In an moment of inspiration and blind stupidity, I volunteered to make a web-application to do it in a slightly more organised fashion. (It's not possible to be any less organised.) Never before have I shot myself in the foot so violently but I'll know for again. After six months of php, sql, javascript, xml and sheer torture, an application which can track everything from committee members details to swipe card lists or requests and correspondence to socs ball tickets and room bookings has been reveiled and looks like to get the go-ahead.

Unfortunately even now the bug list is 'substantial' with vast tracks of the site not working in anything outside of IE6 and not even then all the time. Of course the most enjoyable bugs are always the more random 'features'. These include all of Redbrick's submissions going to Canoeing instead of the SPC and pages which adopt a sometimes-we-do and sometimes-we-don't approach to working normally. More irritating is when the users suddenly see a problem in the underlying system and assume its actually a fault in the application. Thankfully I got round to installing a bug tracking system courtesy of the MySQL team.

The moral of the story: never volunteer for anything and if you do, keep it simple. GMail-style client-heavy web-applications for financial reporting should be left to people being paid to do it :-)

Another week, another post

2004-11-15T09:16:00.000Z

It appears its Monday morning again, after an uneventful weekend at home. Unusually for me, I was wide awake mere seconds after my alarm went off at 7am and, to continue the miracle, actually in work at 9am. It might be a sign that this is going to be a good week, or it might just be that I b0rked the project that's supposed to be installed on my boss's laptop today for a demo in the states tomorrow. They do say pressure concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Getting slightly ahead of myself, I see the Christmas tree was erected on O'Connell Street last week. Its only slighty behind the street lighting on Hentry Street and Grafton Street which have not only been up but lit for several days now. God bless their little hearts for being in such a rush, I could have sworn it was only November.

If there's one good thing coming out of this Christmas, I suppose it would have to be charity. It turns out that Bob Geldof hasn't actually gone away just yet. He's back and co-ordinating the re-release of Do They Know It's Christmas. Just like the good old days, he's plugging at governments the world over to give back the VAT returns from its sales. It would absolutely make my Christmas to have a song like this number one after the turd and muck we've been given for the last few years; Bob the Builder (2000) and Mr. Blobby (1993) to name just two. Bring back Mistletoe and Wine I say :-)

Smoking Ban

2004-11-10T15:37:00.000Z

Unfortunately we weren't the first place in the world to institute a smoking ban , but we definitely brought it to the fore by being the first country to do so. Its not exactly ground breaking territory but it is nice to see Ireland leading the pack on something like this.
Now Scotland has seen the light and will be joining us!

Scotland is to follow in Ireland's footsteps with a national workplace smoking ban of its own.

It follows a visit to Dublin in August by the country's First Minister to see our legislation in action. Jack McConnell and his Cabinet have been convinced of the positive effect on business and public health by the ban both here and in New York.

He announced the decision in Edinburgh in the last half hour.