Archive for September, 2005
The wilds of wicklow
Posted on September 29, 2005, under Uncategorized, general, photography.
The photos from Wicklow were all pooled today, I liked this one especially, it was taken pretty near the end of it all, when the sun finally started shining.
I found out this week that I’ll be speaking at HEAnet’s National Networking Conference, so I’ll be there once again. I’m looking forward to hearing from Karlin Lillington. I also think it’s pretty cool that there will be at least 6 RedBrick members (bboyle, bootie, colmmacc, davew, elvis, singer) speaking.
Bloglines Vs Newsgator
A few weeks ago, Paul updated his entry in the Apache contributors section to note that he’s now working for Ask Jeeves’ bloglines and I decided to check it out, since anything Paul touches is generally cool.
I’ve never comprehended why anyone would use something like Thunderbird, Safari or whatever to aggregate rss feeds, as to my mind it’s vital that you be able to access it from anywhere. For a long time I’d been using NewsGator, but have been growing more and more dis-satisfied with its quirky interface and general slowness.
Bloglines on the other hand has been much better. I like its interface much more, especially the small little details like using the relevant favicon’s for the rss feeds in the listing and the great sign up procedure which lets you get things you would ordinary find hard to get – like a dilbert feed.
I have never once found it to be slow, It’s got notifiers working for a tonne of operating systems, and some great customisation features. And it even has things like an exportable blogroll, which I’ll integrate with this blog soon hopefully. About the only bad thing I can say about it is that it uses frames rather unneccessarily, but it’s a very minor nit.
Noirin has been using it for the last few days too, and even found a blog noone else is subscribed to, which is pretty impressive, and seems to like it, and she’s usually a better reviewer of these things than I.
Dash and go
The last few days have been a bit odd, on Thursday the whole HEAnet crew went off to Wicklow where we had a fun day learning to cook complicated Italian things. I made about a kilo of pasta, from scratch, and it was even edible, We retired to the Glenview where a fun time was had, including poker games until 4:30 AM.
It probably wasn’t the best idea in the world to follow this with 5 hours of orienteering on some pretty steep slopes in drenching rain, but we did. We learned how to pace navigate, compass navigate, take and use bearings and to feature navigate, oh and nearly broke some limbs in the process; but it was great fun all the same.
While I was up one of those hills, my new Powerbook arrived, and I’m writing this post from the WordPress Dashboard widget. Mmmm, it’s good.
And by way of a final note; If you havn’t already, go use Apache httpd 2.2. It’s currently in beta and the rough plan is to release by December, in time for Apachecon US in San Diego (see you there!) .
DIgital Rights Ireland
The initiative I wrote about a while ago continues apace, and yesterday we had our first in-person meeting, with more planned. Right now it’s a great mix of activists from previous campaigns, experienced technical gurus, media experts and very enthusiastic lawyers.
There will be a kick-off and annoucenment at TechCamp Ireland. but until then anyone can register their interest in an EFF-like body for Ireland by mailing or subscribing to the dri-interest@lists.stdlib.net mailing list.
AKUS
As both Noirin and Colin have blogged; last Monday we went to see Allison Krauss and Union Station, at the Olympia. They played a straight set, two and a half hours without stopping, and no support act, and it was easily one of the best gigs I have ever been to. Having seen Bella Fleck earlier this year, we are really notching up the bluegrass superstars.
Allison Krauss’ voice was superb, as ever. Her singing has a genuine haunting quality and for some of the numbers like “Ghost in this house” it was almost hard to believe that anyone is capable of producing such perfect sound. Highly recommended! If you ever have the chance, go see them while they are still playing.