Ah it's grand.
Sure.

Found out from my brother that it was half-time in the All-Ireland Hurling Semi-Final between Galway and Kilkenny. So I got onto RTÉ’s Radio 1 (Real Audio link) feed and listened to the second half. Cracking game and the best part is that Galway won! Next up is Cork in the final, hopefully we’ll see the title cross the Shannon this year.

As an aside I was searching for blogs on hurling and came across a site, not normally known for it’s GAA commentary. Great to see that more people are showing an interest in the GAA. With a bit of luck it will get more widespread acceptance and thoughts move away from sectarian experiences.

Over the past few days, Harish from RedHat has been discussing running a demo of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) which is based on Fedora Core 3. We’re going to use a machine I have spare here (which is rather severely underpowered) so I was getting the LTSP distro installed last night. Interestingly enough it allows you to start a session from OS X using X11. Here’s a screenshot from my desktop with Exposé triggered.

This is a test of Polaroid-o-nizer implemented as a WordPress plugin:

<!-polaroid:http://www.igallagher.com/images/zoom/MEYWKO/viewsize/DSC01212.jpg|The computer room->

You can find the script here: kloeschen.com »

1I spent a good part of Saturday tidying my computer room which had turned into a disaster area. As I want to try and start doing some more constructive things, I decided that the environment should be more conducive to productivity. So the result is this:

<td>
  <a href="http://igallagher.com/index.php?option=com_zoom&#38;Itemid=1&#38;page=view&#38;catid=34&#38;PageNo=1&#38;key=1&#38;hit=1"><img src="http://i0.wp.com/igallagher.com/blog/posting_images/220505/DSC01212.jpg?resize=133%2C100" alt="Dsc01212" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a>
</td>

The photo on the left has my main machine – an Apple PowerBook (12” Rev A. 867MHz). It’s missing a PIII under the desk which I’m setting up with Ubuntu Linux to test out an accounts package. The photo on the right has a lot of hardware. There are two printers; a Brother HL-1430 laser and HP DeskJet 3500. There’s also my SpeedTouch 580 ADSL modem/router/wifi and another 8-port hub. The computers are:

Ran into a problem this evening – I was going to put Familiar/Opie back onto my iPaq tonight and was trying to connect to my FreeBSD machine to use the serial port on it. Alas couldn’t get connected. Rebooted a couple of times and it still wasn’t coming up. So had to disconnect it and drag it over to my switch to see what the story was. Page Faults to the last. Can’t even boot off a recovery cd to try and deal with the fscked / partition. The recovery CD is also hitting page faults. Think the machine has been overheating and the RAM has suffered. Sadly, RAM is something I don’t have kicking around so I couldn’t do swap to test. Looks like I’ll have to head down to Sim Lim …

Being the sad git that I am (see previous post), I thought I would add my comments to the whole ‘How Great is Tiger ©’. Lots of people have covered various things like Spotlight and Dashboard but not many have looked at the improved hardware/device support. One neat little thing I discovered, just after killing a FireWire hub by applying a random voltage to it, is that I can now sync my iPod when it is chained through my Sarotech HardBox (FHD-353UF2). This didn’t work on Panther and resulted in me going out to buy said toasted hub, which didn’t work anyway. So I can flick between my iPod and my iSight as required. Actually a proper FireWire hub is still desirable.

I finally succumbed to the upgrade, it’s been a depressing few weeks and geek retail therapy was the only answer. So now I’m messing around with the various Dashboard widgets available. Still have a lot to figure out with Tiger. Hopefully will get around to the new XCode soon. Seems quicker. However, on the downside I seem to have lost my iLife ‘04 DVD, so no GarageBand for the time being. Not that I have any musical ability anyway :)

Yesterday marked four years in Singapore to the day, for me. Amazing to think that I came here for four months originally. What’s also interesting is looking back on the two years that I spent in a month-to-month limbo status. The ‘yes, James needs to stay for another month, or two months, or a few months’ was also interesting and it’s thanks to TGH and to an extent CB that things were made reasonably comfortable and then got sorted out.

For a change it doesn’t affect me but one of the other lads, onto that a bit later. As usual my blogging lags behind the events as they occur, in theory that should be resolved when I sort out my blogging by email with WordPress. That’s another task for the weekend.

Last Saturday was quite interesting, aside from not being hungover for a change, as LKY kindly offered me a SGI Indy. As one who has a certain sentimental fondness for the old Unix workstations I was more than happy to take it. So the plan was to meetup at the usual spot; SF’s, and install NetBSD on it from CD. Alas, I didn’t have the time to read up before planning all of this and just downloaded and sgimips ISO. It turned out, after much puzzling over what variant of boot scsi(x)disk(y)partition(z) should be used to boot of the CD, that the ISO isn’t bootable and you have to play around a bit with some of the images within the ISO to make things work. There’s a reason why the install guide for this port talks about a net boot. That’s another task for the weekend, if anyone’s keeping count. While all of this was going on, SF was amusing himself with some puzzle game on LKY’s new PSP. Nice bit of kit, wonder if there’s a *BSD port for it yet? :)

Bit of an interesting week, which kind of started last Saturday. Not usual, I know, but bear with me. PG’s birthday celebration was on Saturday night which turned into an all night session (kind of). The culmination of which was the rather amusing, to the observer, series of events that follow. After pouring PG into a taxi, DH and I paid a visit to the two late night bars that I knew of off-hand (i.e. my regular haunts when PG stops serving). Bouncer tried to stop us going into the first but I spotted the owner who allowed us a drink there. Things were quiet enough there (probably about 4) so we went off to Starhub (There’s a late bar nearby which you will know of, if that’s your thing. Otherwise, just stay bewildered). There’s a pool table there so I decided to play a few games against DH and found myself rather wanting in the old cue control department. Went down 0-4 there. We wandered on outside and I was in the mood for a burger, even a McDs (it was around 6:30 and I was rather drunk, forgive me Father), but the best to be had was a sandwich and a can of 100-plus from 7-11. While DH wisely scanned the horizon for a taxi, I declared that I was off to catch the MRT and went off in a direction. As it happened it was completely the wrong one, which was hard to do given that I was across the road from Sommerset! I ended up taking a long walk along paths I had never previously ventured (no, that’s not a euphemism so don’t start!) and loosing my sense of direction completely until I finally saw the Singtel tower, in the distance. Oh, yes! In the distance. I kid you not. More stumbling ensued and I made it to the station in painful time. Don’t recall the journey back, however if you were on the train and there was an ang moh smelling of lager, mainly, wearing various jaegermeister promotional items – it was me. Sorry.