Unemployed in Greenland?

I was watching The Princess Bride for the gazillionth time the other night and had forgotten how many great one liners it has. So the next few postings are all going to have completely unrelated titles from that movie.

Last year I bought a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 video capture card. The main reason was to transfer an ancient (vintage 1980) family video to DVD and also to transfer all our Sony HandyCam Video-8 to DVD. This was my third attempt to do this.

The first (in 2000) was to buy an ATI All-in-Wonder 128-Pro. Software was a flakey as hell and I never managed to capture and save the video with sufficent quality. At that time I was trying (and failing) to create VCDs with my CD Burner. Strike 1.

Last year, on impulse, I bought an Avermedia DVD EZMaker USB2.0 to try the same but targetting my new DVD Burner. It was dirt cheap, with good reason. What a piece of shit. Incapable of capturing video with movement without the whole screen degenerating into jaggies. Also didn't work with most capture software. Strike 2.

Then late last year I got the Hauppauge. Home Run! Captured the whole video in one go, perfect quality (or as perfect as a 24 year old tape can give you) and straight to DVD with no problems. I've been too busy to do all of the camcorder footage and I've kept meaning to hook it up to the TV aerial socket in the home office to check out its TV capabilities.

I finally did this on Sunday. Holy Crap! I now have my own (slightly clunky) Tivo. The software isn't great but it is functional. The scheduler worked on recording Scrubs ("let's hang out", "sure, if by hang out you mean 'throttle you'"). The main reason for needing this is that Sky doesn't do ITV (ok, no loss there) or Channel 4. So I'll never miss another Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall program again.

In keeping with our telly-addict household, we are also getting Sky+ installed today. As Sky is already digital, it records the MPEG stream to Hard Disk without needing any encoding. The funny thing is that my technophobe Dad was the first in the extended family to get one. Golf is a very strong motivator obviously. We all saw it in action over Easter and all of the men decided they _needed_ one, now! Even Oscar my 5 year old is dying to get it (no more missed episodes of Drake and Josh).

And the poor old VCR is now is a cupboard unconnected to anything. First time I haven't had a VCR wired up to a TV in 14 years.

Next job is to get TV listings for Ireland working on the WinTV (maybe using SageTV plus xmltv) and then wiring it up to the TV. Two steps forward, one step back.

The Apprentice (UK)

I never got into the US version of The Apprentice. I think mainly because I've always thought of Trump as a tacky buffoon. I remember being brought to Trump Towers in 1987 by my American cousin (whirlwind tour of NY in one day including WTC, St Patrick's Cathederal and The Statue of Liberty) and thinking - how can you spend so much money and end up with a place looking so cheap?

Then they announce the UK version of The Apprentice and I hear that it's going to be Alan Sugar in the Trump role.

Insant mixed emotions and reminiscences. My career in computers started in 1982 with a St Kieran's College school trip to Dublin. One of my friends brought me to the most amazing shop I had ever seen - "Tomorrow's World" - in a little arcade off Grafton Street. It was full of electronic gadgets and he showed me something the like of which I had never encountered before; the Sinclair ZX81. I can still remember touching the keypad and being amazed (pathetic really I know) when stuff appeared on the screen. A few months later, Sinclair announced the ZX Spectrum and I knew I had to have one. Luckily my parents bought into the idea of it "helping with the homework" and one was duly acquired by a work colleague of my Dad in WH Smiths in the UK. I wouldn't be where I am today if they hadn't bought that wee computer. I went from Basic to Forth to Z80 Assembler over the space of 4 years. I got two games in Assembler published in Your Sinclair/Your Spectrum in 1986 and I still have the bloody thing in the attic 23 years later!!!!

Sooooo, Sir Clive Sinclair was a great inventor but an absolutely disasterous businessman. Even at the age of 15 I despaired over his constant screw-ups with the Spectrum (Interface 2 cartridges, Microdrives etc etc). Eventually the company was sold for a song to Amstrad. And Alan Sugar did what he always does - screw innovation, lets squeeze the living daylights out of this whilst we still have a market and then give it the bullet. Broke my heart as a Sinclair fanatic but absolutely the right thing to do in retrospect as the home computer market was heading towards implosion.

Unfortunately this approach to business in ultimately self-limiting. You only have to look how Amstrad went from being one of the largest PC makers in Europe to nothing because he was so obsessed with wringing every penny out of what he had, the market simply left him behind. Dell gets away with it because the component suppliers do the innovation and Dell provides the channel. But at the back of my mind I wonder if one day someone will innovate Dell out of existence.

He finally gets back to the original topic: I have become a huge fan of The Apprentice. Sugar is a bollix but he is usually right. I'm thrilled that I have predicted most of those who have been fired so far. I was chuffed to predict Sebastian last week before the program even started (good hair only gets you so far baby).

Predictions for winning? I had Paul and Saira marked from very early on but Paul has screwed up two weeks in a row (that TV ad was craptastic) and Saira's "poor me" routine the same week was embarassing (in addition to her manktabulous print ad). Miriam relies a bit too much on the boys doing the work for her due to her physical assets methinks. Ben was a donkey until last week when his negotiating skills were spot on. Tim has definite all-round potential. James is a star but has no hope of winning. I cannot see a public school boy being Bovver Boy Sugars apprentice, no matter how good he is. Poor Raj seems to be solid but can't string a coherent sentence together. Paul and Saira have the best chance because they are both gobby grafters with no airs and graces. Not sure which one it'll be. Give it another 2 weeks.

Favourite Software Tools

Not flu - vicious throat infection and tonsil infection. Still in bits. Still agony to swallow saliva. So up late again. I got a new twin-CPU machine in work on Wednesday. I decided to write a list of all of the tools I definitely needed to install on it in addition to the corporate installs. I assumed it it would be 10 or 15. Bloody hell, more like 40. Some are obvious, others are quite nichey. Here's what I can remember off the top of my head (most are free apart from the obvious ones)

* Firefox (+ Adblock, Sitebar, ReloadEvery, Flashgot, User Agent Switcher, ieview, Image Zoom, Linky, Jump Link, BugMeNot, Mozilla Archive Format, Slashfix, Disable Targets for Downloads, Tabbrowser Preferences, BetterSearch, Bloglines Toolkit and Livelines. Whew!)
* Thunderbird (+ Enigmail)
* OpenOffice 2.0 Beta
* Cygwin - pseudo Unix env on your PC. Free XWindows is top notch.
* Dexpot - Good virtual screens tool
* FreeMind - Great Mind Mapping tool
* eWallet - Secure Password storage for PC and Palm
* Filezilla - Good FTP Client
* Inkscape - Good SVG Editor
* Irfanview - Fantastic Graphics viewer
* Maxthon - For sites that only support IE (Bloody Ulster Bank - care to join the 21st Century? Netscape 4.7 for the love of god)
* NVU - HTML Editor
* Open Workbench - Nifty MS Project replacement
* Password Safe - Good simple Password manager
* PSPad - Fantastic Text Editor with syntax highlighting support for lots of languages
* RapidSVN - Reasonable GUI for Subversion Version Control System
* TortoiseSVN - Better Subversion GUI
* TrueCrypt - Free Disk Encryption
* UltraVNC - the best of the VNC's
* Gaim - the best multi-protocol IM client
* GIMP 2 - Great graphics editor
* GPGTray - neat GPG tool for the System Tray
* PDFCreator - Fantastic free PDF Maker
* Process Explorer - For killing those processes that Windows can't
* ZipGenius - The best of the free WinZip Clones
* Google Desktop Search - Words fail me......
* SyncBack - Handy Sync/Backup tool
* Putty - Great SSH Client
* J2EE 1.4 - Everything you need for basic Enterprise Java Dev
* .Net 1.1 - To use any of the .Net Dev Tools
* NetBeans 4.1 Beta - Great Java IDE. Supports J2EE 1.4
* Eclipse 3.0 - Another Great Java IDE (and Perl too if you are feeling weird)
* Perl IDE - Nice free dev IDE and Debugger for Perl
* Activestate Perl - For those scripting jobs
* Activestate Python - FOr those scripting jobs where others have to read your code
* Inno Setup - Fab Setup tool like Installshield
* Jude Community - Lovely UML tool all the way from Japan
* Visual Studio .Net 2003 - A mother of a piece of software
* SharpDevelop - If you can't afford Visual Studio .Net 2003
* MySQL - For some of my web tools
* SQL Server 2000 - Only €40 or so for the developers edition
* Oracle 9i - Free for development purposes
* Apache 2 - For all my web tools
* Tomcat 5.5 - For all my initial Servlet and JSP development
* VMWare - One of the greatest software tools ever developed. Pity it is so pricey - you need this software.
* Crystal Reports - The best of the mid-range reporting tools
* Crystal Enterprise - Web Portal version of Crystal Reports

To come - non-work tools on my home PC and my fave Linux tools (specifically on Fedora)

Dungarvan Follow-up

I was home sick all day today - vicious flu. Slept most of the day so now it's midnight and I'm wide awake. But my day was brightened by a letter we got in the post from the secretary of a small Kilkenny GAA club. When we had stayed in Clonea Strand Hotel, there had been a lot of shouting and banging in the middle of the night for about 20 minutes. Woke us up but we weren't that bothered. This letter offered profuse apologies for any distress that had been caused. It had been the first time ever the club had stayed overnight anywhere and their good spirits got the better of them. I laughed my ass off. The poor gob-shites have probably got themselves in more trouble by getting all of the guests names and addresses and infringing on their privacy. Imagine if you'd been on a dirty weekend away. Oops.

Reminded me of the weekend Catherine did the Dublin City marathon. We stayed in the City West Hotel and in a hilarious contrast of bookings, people were either competing in the Marathon or competing in the Darts Tourament in the Hotel. What a difference in body weights! The female darts supporters were either indistiguishable from the men or looked like street walkers. The muppets who run the hotel put runners and darts players on the same floors of the hotel. We went to bed at 9pm only to be regularly woken by fat cretins shouting "let's play darts". We had breakfast at 6am and I took great pleasure in shouting "let's play darts, wankers" on the way back to the room.

Bloglines vs FeedonFeeds

So I've been using an RSS Aggregator called FeedonFeeds for a long time now. The reason I've always liked it is that it is server based and caches the data in a MySQL DB. I have it installed on the Fedora box at home and can connect to it via the DSL connection from anywhere. So I have one centralised location for all my feeds. The caching is also handy as I found a lot of the older aggregators would only cache the titles and not any of the content, and for sites that turnover their RSS links quickly, a lot of the items used to be gone by the time I'd try to read them. But it ain't very pretty and as I've added a lot of feeds recently, the lack of grouping is killing me.

I searched around a bit and found Bloglines. Did a quick export-import of the OPML file and was up and running in no time. After a few days use, I'm nearly a convert. Groupings work brilliantly and I have now discovered the joy of a ClipBlog (always wondered what the hell Scoble was talking about). Mine is here. I think it also lists all of my feeds. Obviously it doesn't include links to Iguana Fetish Monthly but everything else should be there. Gosh this WorldWideInterWeb thingy is jolly useful isn't it?

Now what I would like is a free RSS Aggregator that uses the Web-Services provided by Bloglines so I have a nice client side tool accessing the server-side data. I know FeedDemon does it but that costs. Anyone?

Funniest Damn thing I've read in a long time

From the Onion: Irish-Heritage Timeline

Sample: "1487 - In a decision still regretted today, Irish let a few British friends stay in Belfast".

This must have been written by a Paddy. Makes me proud to be Irish.

Unfortunately, as I spent 8 years in the Scouts as a kid and had to march in the pissing rain every March 17th in the Paddy's Day Parade in Kilkenny, I now have a pathological loathing of the whole day. Saluting a buch of no-name County Councillors who were happily sitting in the dry in an open-sided Smithwicks truck trailer has made me a bitter man. Snakes, schmakes.

Saturday in Dungarvan

We spent Saturday in and around Dungarvan visiting Catherines cousin Maria. They live near Clonea Strand which is a fantastic beach. Myself and the boys whiled away an hour or two digging holes and filling them with stones. We stayed in the Clonea Strand Hotel - a good mid-market place with some fantastic (non-ironic) 70's interiors. Big high ceilings and open stairs. Beds could do with replacing but a top spot with great kids facilities. The three monsters loved the new Kids Loft with climbing frames, slides, tons of plastic balls etc. Good pool too. Shockingly Oscar thought it was better than Disney Paris. Mentalist.

We had dinner in the Tannery. Knew it was going to be good but it was fabulous. Very friendly staff, interesting but not ridiculous food (e.g. Creme Brulee of Crab) and a wonderful building. I had a duck ravioli on puy lentils and chuocroute to start. Nearly licked the plate. Of course I had confused charcuterie and choucroute yet again and was expecting pig parts, not sauerkraut but it was delish anyway. Two itsy bitsy teeny weeny quail for main were literally finger-licking good and the semi-freddo with pineapple was just the right mix of sweet and tart. Catherines Crabby thing looked fab, her monkfish was the size of a small child and she rated her chocolate fondant thingy as the best desert she has had in a long long time. The only tiny glitch was a poor young-fella thinking that 1 D espresso on an order was decaffeinated espresso rather than a double. Ok so I laughed. Meal was very good value too. Run, don't walk, run to this restaurant as soon as you can.

50 Gmail Accounts to give away

I now have 50 Gmail invites available. So if you want one, mail me at cwjoneill at gmail dot com nad I'll dish em out on a first come first served basis. I can't recommend Gmail highly enough.

High-5!! 

I'm pretty sure that's an arm....... 

4-2 to the Boys

Well the wee fetus has turned out to be a boy. We had the 21-week scan yesterday and even I could tell it was a bloke! He is slightly above average weight and all looks perfect. A couple of scans will be posted soon (including a High-5 which is pretty neat). Ois and Osc are thrilled "So that'll be 4 boys and only 2 girls in the house. Brilliant!". Names we have come up with so far to annoy my mother include Cavan, Mossie, Moses and Cruz.

UCD 150 Celebration

My Alma Mater, University College Dublin, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year and there is a special event being held on April 12th to recognise achievements of past graduates of the Engineering School, and to look forward to the future.

One of the items intended for the day is a brief archive of past graduates and what they have got up to. So if you are willing to supply some career details/highlights/images etc, please e-mail Conor Heneghan or David Timoney for a form which you can fill out. Please spread freely to other graduates of UCD Engineering & Architecture.

Ciarán and Heathers Wedding - Superb

It's not often I comment on a wedding but last weekends wedding of Ciarán and Heather was absolutely brilliant. From the lovely church in Tinahely to the beautifal location for the reception in Ballybeg House to the phenomenal catering, great crowd, top atmosphere and razor sharp speeches, we all left with huge grins on our faces.
Of course I'm now getting flashbacks of the picture shown by Eoin O'B of Ciarán in First Year Eng with his German 'tache. Shudder.
And they organised the whole thing in 3 months! Both looked stunning and the wicklow air meant no hangover the following morning.
C&T survived baby-sitting our three monsters for the night. A very successful weeekend all in all.
And Mark _did_ look like a vet, no matter what he says.

Irish Examiner Ad this Friday

We have a job ad in this weeks Irish Examiner on Friday! This is very much the next phase of the company's development.

Due to even more demand for our services, we need both full-time and contract software developers with a background in Custom Database Application development, Java/C++/C# development, Enterprise Frameworks or Network Management software. As always, the work is based in Co Cork and all interested applicants should head on over to www.argolon.com.

This is a great opportunity for developers who like to be on the bleeding-edge of Enterprise software integration and want to get in early with a fast-growing company.

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