Wed, 20 Aug 2008

Dear Linux Kernel,

my laptop compressing 14GB of data into an archive is not a great definition of being idle, and is probably not a great time to go into standby state. While I was impressed at the ability to resume and continue the compression, I'd rather hoped the job would be done by the time I returned from lunch.

*sigh*

posted at: 14:25 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 18 Aug 2008

I've just been Rickrolled...

...in the pub! I think it's time to have a serious word with the staff of The Hamlet about their choice of music. I just came in for a quiet pint ;-)

posted at: 21:46 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry

OpenStreetmap Mapping Party in Drogheda

OpenStreetMap is a worldwide community project to provide free maps; these maps (at www.openstreetmap.org) are free for anyone to use, modify, copy, redistribute and republish in whole or in part.

Building on the success of last month's State of the Map conference in Limerick, some of OpenStreetMap's nearly 50,000 members will be coming from as far away as London, Cork and Belfast to a mapping party in Drogheda this coming weekend, Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th of August, 10am-6pm both days.

Mapping parties are great for putting places on the map that aren't there already, breaking new ground. They're also great for getting new people involved in OpenStreetMap, and they're a fun way to contribute something real to a community project.

Thanks to the Rev. Michael Graham, we have secured an excellent venue to operate out of: St Peter's Parish Hall on Peter St - look out for the OpenStreetMap banner!

All are welcome to drop by at any time during the weekend and stay as long as they want, to make maps or just chat with the mappers. Laptop advised but not essential if you want to get involved. We will have plenty of spare GPS units available, on loan from OpenStreetMap UK.

Please visit wiki.openstreetmap.org for further information on OpenStreetMap, or e-mail Christian or Gareth via the usual blog comments address, blog@signal2noise.co.uk if you have any questions about the event in Drogheda.

posted at: 11:19 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 05 Aug 2008

eeePC Thunderbird fail

I'm making an effort to use my eeePC with a 3G modem as my work platform between home and the office. It's form factor is excellent, though I would prefer the 3G modem built in rather than dangling out a USB port. Oh well...

More seriously, Thunderbird (Work tab | e-mail) was completely failing to run after I updated the software. Running it from the command line yielded a segfault:

	/opt/thunderbird> ./thunderbird
	./run-mozilla.sh: line 131:  4440 Segmentation fault      "$prog" ${1+"$@"}

Apparently, this is a known issue that can be fixed one of two ways. Either remove the SCIM support (probably not an issue if you're only using Western character sets: sudo aptitude remove scim) or install the little known update pack eeepc-updatepack-20071126 using aptitude install eeepc-updatepack-20071126.

I chose the latter option and Thunderbird immediately sprang into life. For my next trick, I'd quite like to get Firefox 3 running.

posted at: 09:41 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry