With outlook not setting reminders properly (the hour-change confused it !), and people trying to schedule meetings while I’m away for the next few days I’m having a fun day today !
Lots of conversation on IRC now that Liam and Ann are back from the geekski trip … Ann did damage her hand on the first day though, so hard luck there … get well soon etc !
Oh … and if anyone’s good at art … please help Niall get a backdrop for the ILUG Knoppix CD !
Due to no-one actually standing up and taking the baton to run with various parts of this damned trade-show I’m getting phone-calls from people asking what the story is with various guests. Whether or not they’re speaking at some other event while they’re over …
Then I get the news that a proposed side-event is clashing with another event likely to cause us to miss out on a large number of Perl hackers …
It all stems from $Organiser not wanting us to have direct contact with speakers / sponsors, yet the speakers and sponsors thinking they’re dealing with us … we’re not getting feedback from $Organiser and then speakers and sponsors expect us to know what’s going on …
I’m ready to LART(5) someone – I swear !
I’ll say this much …
In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood (Heartbreak Ridge) …. “It’s one giant clusterfuck”
Installed it last night on the laptop … and despite a few minor glitches with fonts on WindowMaker it seems *very* nice. The installer even understood what I wanted when I told it to use existing partitions … it automatically worked out that it was supposed to nuke the / partition and keep the /home as it was …
KDE 3.1 is nice (if waaay too slow to start), as is Gnome 2.2 (once I’d removed my existing b0rked gnome configs in /home
All in all worth the buy … now to order the boxed set …
Some of you have expressed an interest in the Realtek 8180 Drivers … they’re available for download from :
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?software=True&compamodel=RTL8180L
Enjoy !
Wedding is just over two months away now … scary thoughts really !
Trying to work out the music and readings for the ceremony now … I’ll have to pay the hotel fees as well for the first leg of the honeymoon as well in about a week or so !
Stress levels are starting to rise … haven’t booked the main honeymoon hotel yet though … still reasonably sure of the one we want (it’s in Martinique) … but it’s rather expensive … really nice though !
Bloody ‘ell !
I’m reading documentation for a black-box C++ library I’ve got to work around … and it’s the typical “Completely accurate but totally useless” type. It’s telling me _exactly_ what’s returned, _exactly_ what the input parameters are, but not the important part … _exactly_ how it turns input into output … and I know it’s some rather hairy maths !
Gotta love this job !
Back from Kerry via Cork last night, arrived home at about 0215 … damn … I need to arrange to get more sleep …
Going to be very busy this week closing out old projects and current jobs … All related to moving to this new team … going to try and make it a clean break ..
Organisation for ICT Expo is going ahead .. things are definately looking up on all fronts, there’s even an ILUG-Patented Pissup-in-a-brewry ™ being organised ….
Kudos to Realtek … they supplied a binary driver for RH 7.3 with a cheap wireless card I got recently, but it wouldn’t load under my Mandrake 9.0 installation. After a small amount of email traffic they’ve actually sent me the sources for the latest version of the driver …. with any luck this’ll work nicely …
Thankyou Realtek
I’ve had a few requests for the software … it’s available from Realtek’s site www.realtek.com.tw or possibly by clicking here
At last …. getting out of Dublin took about two hours, from there it was reasonably plain sailing.
Looks like the sponsorship thing with the exhibition is going to be sorted reasonably amicably. We’re going to have to get the whole thing organised better for the next time, but it’s hard to get anyone to commit budget much in advance nowadays. Pity really !
Anyway … this is being done over a 38.4 GSM dialup … so I’m not going to stay on long !
Looks like the interview went well … I was cc’d on a mail introducing me as the new member of the team today
Looks like a good start to the weekend …
Thank Crunchie !
And despite the fact that the war is still going strong, and there are protests all over the world, I’m off to the kingdom (Kerry) for the weekend.
Need to get to Maplins today before I head though … this should be fun …
Oh … and wibble – if you’re reading this – “Get back to work !”
From a friend’s email:
“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the
best golfer is a black guy, France is accusing the US of arrogance and
Germany doesn’t want to go to war.”
Wilfred Owen wrote the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” in 1921, in memory of the first world war.
It’s every bit as relevant today as it was eighty years ago.
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Seems to have gone reasonably well … Although it might mean spending some time in NY in the near future, which I may not be madly keen on … we’ll see ..
When will I learn the above fact … You cannot make a positive match on a NULL, nor a negative !
NULL is neither = “XXX” nor != “XXX”, this can and does cause code problems where values are unexpectedly NULL !
Anyway, enough of that !
Heh … I’ve an interview for an internal transfer today … wish me luck … I’ll need it !
Seems these people in NY think I know C++ inside out, and Perl (okay I know enough Perl) and Shell scripting and SQL and …
oh .. wait … I probably did enough of all of the above …
I’m getting a little nervous as 1600 approaches though … interviews on conference calls aren’t exactly something I’m used to !
The best excuses are the recursive ones:
“Iarnród Éireann regret to announce that the 08:30 train to Bray is delayed by 10 minutes due to the late arrival of an incoming train”
This would be acceptable if it didn’t happen regularly, and more to the point on a closed circut route. The train is the DART (local light rail in Dublin) and runs up and down the coast all day … so if one train is late you get this excuse all day on that (and all subsequent) trains !!
Got out to see the house at the weekend, it’s been rendered since we saw it last week … this is good (progress)
The insides are still just the timber frames for the partition walls, no electrics / plasterboard etc yet (but that’ll come fairly quick) … loks like we’re still reasonably close to schedule all going well
Sat down with Susan H last night to work out the music for the wedding. Suprisingly she was occasionally on my side (the “You can’t do that” option). At this stage we’ve got what could be considered an eclectic mix of traditional Irish -> Rock Mass -> Happy-Clappy -> Classical music … should be interesting !!
Well, it’s the weekend … I’m off, possibly hiking tomorrow, then to watch the fireworks (and maybe even catch that blasted 98FM Fugitive !
Hoping the weather holds up, and that there are no last moment glitches here before I head off for the w/end !
Oops, I did it again, this time I got to work in about half the usual time by leaving a little later than normal … I’ll figure this out yet …
It’s Einstein’s birthday today – Happy Birthday E ..
I’m wondering now, if someone like Einstein could fail maths and go on to prove that E=MC^2 (among other revolutionary things), surely I should be able to figure out the physics of Dublin traffic ?