teh bigbro blog(tm)
Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
02 2006

Tue, 28 Feb 2006

Stuff what fell off the internet and right into me pocket guv'nor - honest it did...

http://osdl.org/newsroom/studies/EMA

For rather a long time, the dubious statistic of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) has been used by Microsoft to demonstrate that their solutions are cheaper to own and run. This survey is one of the latest that would appear to indicate otherwise.

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~huskerdu/riot/secretweapon0rt.jpg

In keeping with the Chuck Norris theme of yesterday... and the day before... and the week before that... etc. In a way, it's good to see Dublin people already laughing at what was a disgraceful carry-on in Dublin over the weekend.

http://appdev.guildglobal.ie/joke/it-wasnt-me-hofficer.jpg

There's always someone who has to take the bounds of comedy just one little step too far, isn't there? ;-)

http://www.daraghmcg.org/2006/02/28/pat-kenny-caught-out/

It's not often I link to other people's blogs - but this observation by our very own DjMagra as he listened to Pat Kenny this afternoon had me in stitches :-)

http://www.creativeireland.com/forum/ubb/Forum7/HTML/008122.html

And the comedy re the Dublin roits just keeps on coming. Some excellent photo-shopping going on here. Enjoy.

Things people pointed me at that I thought were useful...

http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/

Recovery Is Possible Linux resuce system. I've managed to recover a number of systems from various states of brokenness using Linux distros that boot from CD/floppy/USB key; from Damn Small Linux to knoppix, the ability to get a system up and running if the CPU and RAM work is invaluable for diagnosing other components. This RIP distro includes some useful tools for diagnosing and fixing problems.

http://planet.irishblogs.info/

An aggregator for Irish bloggers and their blogs. As something of a faux Irish person myself, I found myself getting sucked in and spending more time reading than I'd wanted to.

http://www.thesession.org/

If you play Irish music, or just have an interest in it, this site seems to be a growing portal to Irish traditional music, song and styles. The fora are well populated and consist of largely productive (or blatantly humurous and light-hearted) debate. The signal to noise ratio is high - long may it continue. The whole site is a testament how the internet can create and sustain a community. (Can you tell I'm pleased with this website? ;-) )

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi

Yet another version control / management system. This has a numebr of features that mean it's not likely to go away very soon though - http and ssh sync protocols, compression of the dataset, distributed running inherent in the design model, extensible in a controlled fashion with user hooks, etc. This could be the version control system for me (or you!) - I'll write more on this as I get more time testing and using it in anger.

Apologies to the readers of planet ILUG who have just received a deluge of blog posts from me, now that I have fixed my erstwhile broken RSS 1.0 feed. Now that I've sorted out my issues with RSS and my blog server, I've upgraded the feed to take the RSS 2.0 feed, so this should stop happening.
In fact, I've just noticed that planet has helpfully corrected the timeline of my postings and put them in correct chronological order. How useful :-)
posted at: 01:25 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 27 Feb 2006

I've made some more updates to my blosxom configuration - and the bosxom script itself. I'm starting to find limitations in how easy it is to represent blog postings the way I want them, without going to the effort of rewriting large chunks of perl. Niall has already questioned why I haven't yet moved over to something like WordPress or similar - my argument has always been that for my simple blogging needs, blosxom is light and sufficiently powerful enough - and I don't have the time / energy / will-power to migrate all my historic postings to a new blog engine.
I've hacked around what I think is a bug to get the html showing in RSS readers like Thunderbird and made a similar change in the RSS 2.0 feed I provide (Thanks to Niall again for that.)
Perhaps I'll look into some migration paths later this week. If anyone notices anything broken with my blog, please drop me a line. Thanks :-)

Addendum:: It's at this point that I realised I was testing on version 1.0.2 of Thunderbird and that version 1.5 supports RSS 2.0. One upgrade later, things work substantially better. Another great piece of work by the Thunderbird team.
posted at: 23:10 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

...FlirtFM and the Happy Hour. It was wonderful to listen to a good friend of mine (Sarah) talking as Gaeilge. Though her comment about being too cool to do a 60's style dance is clearly a blatant lie! LIES, I tell ya!
I'll be tuning in next Monday at 6:00pm to hear Sarah online again. Fun fun fun!
Check out http://www.flirtfm.org/ for more information on what Flirt FM has to offer.
posted at: 19:02 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 25 Feb 2006

Today we had a big Irish Trad session at the Cock & Bottle, a newly reopened pub just outside Bradford City Centre. Thanks to Sinéad for all the organising, to Peter, the Landlord for allowing us the use of his tap-room - and a huge thanks to all the many musicians who came along to lend their support to a new session by playing on a Saturday afternoon.
For anyone in the Bradford area next weekend, there will be another afternoon session on Saturday, 4^th March from (nominally) 12:00 midday until about 6:00pm. Entry is free, all ages are welcome and any traditional Irish players and singers are encouraged to come along and perform.
We're hoping to get a Monday night session in the same venue up and running over the next few weeks, so drop in on a Monday evening from about 7:30pm onwards and join in. If you have any interest in live traditional Irish music, you'll be made very welcome.

posted at: 22:00 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 21 Feb 2006

...makes surprisingly good ham'n'cheese toasties at 2:30am if you can't be bothered digging out your pig shaped sandwich toasting machine.
posted at: 02:44 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

...or maybe it's just the people I have the privilege of talking to... *cry*

dave says: brb got to poo
Gareth says: Thanks for that.
Gareth says: If you had wireless and a laptop you could chat with people and poo at the same time... just a thought.
dave says: well just like the poo i just had i dont like to hold anything back
Gareth says: I think you've just made my quotes page...
dave says: hahaha
dave says: wahoo

Mon, 20 Feb 2006

I run a number of blootbots for fun and profit (or one of these at least - I'll let you guess which) - one of which resides on #nonado. Today, a number of users decided to poke the bot and ridicule its limited command of the English language, reality and various other things. This made me laugh:

<bruce> !seen bruce
<spleenbot> bruce is currently on #nonado (7h 38m 26s). Has said a total of 70 messages. Is idling for 0s
<bruce> the bot is broken. I'm idling right now. Haven't done a tap of work in ages...
<zoney> tsk tsk

Further investigations, swapping of cables and rebooting neutron (one of my servers) more times in the last 4 days than it's ever been rebooted before would seem to support the theory that the secondary IDE bus on the PCI card I bought is rickered. I've got one more test and if that fails it's going back to aria.co.uk to be replaced with one that does work.
Did I mention that I was beginning to develop an acute loathing of PC hardware? *cry*
posted at: 12:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 18 Feb 2006

...Season 6 will be on BBC3 starting soon, according to the advertising. This pleases me greatly. w00t! :-)
posted at: 03:36 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 16 Feb 2006

I am beginning to loath PC hardware more and more. When I was younger and had the time and inclination, I was happy to while away hours poking at stuff to see if I could get it to work. Nowadays, my requirements are generally more than just making a computer work - I use computers as tools to do other things - so I generally just want them to work.
I installed some more disks in my fileserver last night; the same one that required multiple reboots, reseating of the RAM and resetting of the BIOS before if would even boot again.
This time, I got 2 more disks in without too much trouble - until I tried to read them, that is. One worked flawlessly. The other was recognised by a garbled string of nonsense by the BIOS, which then hung. Rebooting and fiddling with the cables made it work - a bit - but trying a read/write test resulting in lots of errors.
I suspect the cable I have is not good enough, or has a slightly loose connection on the second IDE connector, or something. It irks me that I have to spend more time debugging this when all I really want to do is have more disk space - which I've paid for.
Oh well. I guess if I really wanted trouble-free disk I'd get some managed storage - but I can't really justify the expense of that for my house ... yet ... :-)
posted at: 17:01 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Stuff other people found on the internet and thought they should show to me, honest ;-)

http://www.shartwell.freeserve.co.uk/humor-site/medical-acronyms.htm

A dictionary of medical slang, doctors' slang and medical acronyms - some are very very comedy. Yes, I've been watching Scrubs lately...

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/092105/someone-with-a-different-opinion.gif

Someone on the internet may have a different opinion to you. I don't know who put this up, but it made me laugh. This is probably a link I'll just keep on sharing with people, as the need arises. It goes nicely with the waaahmbulance link.

http://www.greenmanhumming.com/html/zoukornaments/

I've slipped a few days behind in my whistle practice, due to being away for two weeks. This site gave me a few ideas about ornamentation and may inspire me to break out and tune up my mandolin this evening.

Wed, 15 Feb 2006

Yet more joyous joys of the internet generation...

http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c100/lucky13romero/smoking8.gif

how excellent - made me laugh... but only because it's (basically) true.

http://www.badadverts.co.uk/ListReview.php?ID=102

I was introduced to the Branston Beans Ad at lunch with a colleague. His rant was surprisingly close to that presented on the badadverts website. This is a truly excellent review of a surprisingly bad ad.

Tue, 14 Feb 2006

Honest guvnor, they snuck off the internet and into my blog without me knowing... *cough*

http://www.unfortu.net/anagrammap/

A tremendously useful map of the London underground - if you want anagrams of all the station names. Hours of fun trying to decipher the real names of the stations if, like me, you only have the vaguest notion of the underground layout and are one of the annoying people that spends their entire underground journeys crowding around maps at the stations and in the cars to make sure I'm going in the right direction and don't miss my stop.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/%7Epennck/pboc/#

A quiz for all you boffins out there. Thanks to Matt from The Priestley for this little gem... In Matt's own words:

"It took me a while but I finally got 100%"

http://www.swearing.org/misc/img/wambulance.gif

Specially for my girlfriend, who complains I don't update my blog enough to keep her and her work colleagues entertained at work ;-)

Fri, 10 Feb 2006

...I am jetlagged. This is not good and I do not like it. Someone should do something about it - perhaps some kind of law prohibiting jetlag, or something?...
posted at: 09:18 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 07 Feb 2006

Today, in the US, I was reacquainted with some very dear friends of mine who have moved to Australia. Check out chillicrab.net for Monica's blog.
posted at: 04:36 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 06 Feb 2006

Sometimes real life conversations mirror IRC rather too closely. To whit, some genuine quotations from our trip to the US:

"John S. cornered me in his study and it was very difficult to get out." -- Laura

"You're the only person who had a starter and managed to finish her dinner." -- davisc
"Do I win a prize." -- pili
"Yes! She gets my beef." -- Ivan
"All two inches of it?" -- tyRion
[general laughter]

"You might have noticed I've had my hand in my pocket for most of the day. It's something to do with my boxers being damp." -- tyRion

"That was just too much meat for me..." -- davisc

"Would you like to go back to my place? Bouncy, bouncy? I am no longer infected." --sith

If you grew up in Ireland and are around my age, you will no doubt remember Bosco. After many years gathering dust in the RTE archives, a DVD with 7 episodes has been released. Needless to say, I have a copy - and have had to battle to regain control of my DVD player from my little girl. She loves Bosco - the stories, the arts and crafts, the short films through the magic door, the tongue twisters, the márla (Claymation) antics of Gregory Gráinneóg - it's all good to her.
What I find good is that the educational content is there, and she seems to take no notice of the production shortcomings. Today the production values for kids TV are almost as slick as for feature films. Perhaps the message from this four year old is to concentrate on the educational and entertainment content - and let production values, branding, sponsored advertising and the like come a distant second.
I'm looking forward to Volume 2 - another seven pieces of heaven^W nostalgia - but not as much as a certain 4-year-old is :-)
posted at: 16:54 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 05 Feb 2006

...if it means finding an Irish bar in Boston, getting a large Irish breakfast served to your table, finding a fellow Limerick person coincidentally in the same pub, having the Ireland Vs Italy 6 Nations rugby match on a big screen...
...and watching Ireland winning 26-16...
...just about!
posted at: 05:52 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 01 Feb 2006

Today we decided to get steak for dinner. It was tasty good and a certain vegetarian should cook it for me more often. (I live in eternal hope...)i
After the wasabi incident last night, resulting in the mildly amusing discovery that brocolli and wasabi are a tasty combination, molc should have known better than to be ordering spicy chicken wings:

"Here - try some of these hotwings. They're so spicy that molc tried one and it made him deaf." -- diamond

...drilling with a HUGE pneumatic drill - that I can hear even though I'm 11 floors up - is okay.
posted at: 06:09 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

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