Pot Noodle

No more Princess Bride quotes I'm afraid.

Sam entered a world-class poem into a Gerry Ryan Pot Noodle competition today. Unfortunately she was not selected to go on air (unlike her last piece of genius which was up there with T.S. Eliot and she got to read out to the listening public). So, in order to give it the publicity it deserves, here it is in it's entirety.

The Pot heads

We are from the planet Noodle,

We cannot write, we scribble and doodle.

Where we're from, we're like Super Heros,

But there was no atmosphere and the gravity zero.

My family came here to be Earth's saviours,

But instead of names we're called flavours.

My father we affectionately call him BEEF,

He runs a tight ship, he's commander and chief.

He is muscular and handsome, long golden locks,

Our very own Samson, as strong as an Ox.

He flies through the neighbourhood, defending the weak,

Protecting the young, the old, and the meek.

He truly is a wonderful man,

My brothers help him all they can.

The boys had trouble trying to adjust,

They have to blend in, they know it's a must.

The oldest smells foul, so we call him CHICKEN.

It's bad ass this fella is always kickin'.

My other brother's cool, he is a FUNG-GHI,

He smokes strange plants, and is always high.

But he does keep up with the latest trends,

So in with Earth people, he perfectly blends.

My sisters for Aliens, they look really pretty,

Their good deeds are known throughout the city.

One's called CURRY, the other's CHOW-MEIN,

They're not a bit self-centred, not a bit me fein.

The Sizzler is the name we give our mother,

Because like her, there is no other.

She's hot, she's fiery, her humour is wicket,

She wouldn't go home if she got a free ticket.

Because there's a man she thinks is great,

For music and chat, and topical debate.

We sit around we are all ears,

When he says good morning, we give 3 cheers.

No-one comes close, even though they're all trying,

He's up on a pedestal, "HAIL GERRY RYAN".

We listen, we love him, his praises we sing,

Back home on our planet, he wud be king.

So every day between 9 and noon,

We boil the kettle and get our spoon.

We discard our masks, and undo extra limbs,

This is when Gerry's show begins.

We no longer have to disguise our features,

Beneath the latex we're exotic creatures.

We're the happiest family in the land,

Gerry Ryan on the radio, and pot noodle in hand,

and hand, and hand, and hand.

Inconceivable!....That word. I do not think it means what you think it means

I wish someone had told me this in late 2001.

It took me until late 2002 to figure it out for myself.

Best Laid Plans

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

We don't have it too bad for restaurants down here in Cork. We've had great meals in Gleesons in Clonakilty, Casino House in Kilbrittain and Broly's in Bandon.

Unfortunately most of the places in Bandon target the lower end of the Market and it's nice to see Broly's trying something better. It is a coffee shop/cafe during the day and they re-jig for more upmarket dinner at night. Good tasty food. I hope they do well but it was empty the night we were there before Christmas.

Other places in Bandon we've tried; Roccos - not too bad mid-ish-range place. Overuse of microwaves tho. Sorrento - very average Italian but the kids liked it.

Takeaways in Bandon (all sit-down too): Anarkali Indian - one of the better Indians around. Ho Kee Chinese - pretty average. Rainbow Chinese - started well, degenerated very quickly. Hong Kong - not bad (used to have a fantastic name "Memories of China", why change it to something so utterly crap?)

Gleeson's has given us some great meals over the last two years but the last meal was a let down - just lacking in flavour. The service by Alex and her team is always top class and extremely friendly.

Casino House got voted best restaurant in Ireland by Georgina Campbell which tells you everything you need to know - fabulous food in an awesome setting. Proving that being situated in the middle of no-where is no disadvantage if the food is good enough.

Our most recent expedition was into Cork City to eat at Les Gourmandises in Cook St (always makes me smile - where else would you have a restaurant? Also the barber on Sheare Street still causes a grin). I first heard of these in the RTE program last year about small businesses starting up. They had a baptism of fire but their commitment to the food shone through the program. I got a voucher for de wimmin in Passage to go there recently and they raved about it. So it was about time we checked it out.

The starters were both excellent. Very tasty, great attention to detail. My Red Snapper main was fabulous. Catherine not a huge fan of her Pork Belly but there was nothing really wrong with it, it just didn't suit her. We should probably have swapped plates. Desserts were good but not enough chocolate sauce on Catherines. When will restaurants learn? When a woman orders a chocolate dessert, she does not want to be short-changed. If sauce is involved, bring out a jug of it. None of this "dab here" "dab there" nonsense. Service was efficient and very discreet. Not cheap tho - ?106 for two with just half a bottle of wine. But we'll definitely be back.

Where is left to try in Cork? Cafe Paradiso obviously. Need to go back to Jacobs on The Mall. The Ivory Tower was just a bit too kooky for the sake of it to build up any loyalty. And we have a voucher for Otto's in Dunworley from C&T which we will use very soon. What sort of nutter sets up a restaurant 20 Km from anywhere down a windy headland in West Cork? And then makes a huge success of it? Bloody genius.

I knew it, I knew he was faking

OK-bleedin-Computer? How stupid is the average Channel 4 viewer?

Fat-bloated-prog-rock-whinge-fest pap voted the greatest album of all time? Maybe it isn't so shocking when you learn that they also voted The Verve (the Verve!) higher than Jimi Hendrix, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and The Doors. What can be the cause of the destruction of the brain stems of the average British TV viewer? Cocaine? E? Fluoride? Tony Blair? PS2? I despair.

OK "shoot me now I can't take any more of this crap and I'm only on the third song" Computer? Better than The Beatles?

Now I don't actually like the Beatles but they had a smidge more talent than these con-artists. At least the emperors clothes were revealed to all the sycophantic muppets who like what they are told to like when the laugh-fest that was Kid A was released.

The only (and I mean only) redeeming aspect of this was that the 100 songs were pre-selected (why???) and viewers just had to vote on the order. This would explain the lack of people like Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, Cream, Muddy Waters. Hell even Queens of The Stone Age and The Kings of Leon have more talent in their toes than goddammed Dido (placed 57th).

Great show tho. Seeing a clip of Ozzy doing "Paranoid" was a joy. Johnny Marr is a witty fucker too.

Next week on Channel 4: "Sleep" by Andy Warhol is voted greatest movie of all time.

And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva...

We are nearly a week into our Sky+ Box ownership. It's not often something far exceeds your expectation but this bloody thing does so with ease. The wee beauty can record two channels at the same time. There is some very impressive buffer management going on in there. We have set a bunch of recordings of weekly shows plus any movies that catch my eye no matter what time they start. Of course a VCR can do a lot of this but not with a browse feature and saved program information too. We can now record Nip/Tuck and Grand Designs Abroad at the same time. Why is it that so many of the programs we like clash with other programs we like?

And whilst I'm on the topic - that new Masterchef was fantastic, but 6.30pm? Get a clue you dim-wits. That is when most people who like cooking ARE cooking. Presumably the tristans (to steal an AA Gill term) who scheduled it eat out every night and wouldn't know what the little people do. Anyway, 7pm, the dead zone, is a far better time for most of us.

Back to Sky+; The live-pause feature is the piece de resistance (yeah, I'm too lazy to figure out how to do french accent symbols). Having three kids creating mayhem and refusing to go to bed during the new series of Doctor Who is no longer a problem. Start watching, Oisín screams, hit pause, come back 5 mins later, hit play, fight erupts, hit pause, back 10 minutes later, hit play. Overall program finishes 15 minutes later than the original. I hate complimenting Rupert over anything but they really have done a fantastic job on this thing.

As for Doctor Who. Hmm, undecided. Totally tongue in cheek, but then so was Tom Baker. Dislike his constant grinning (did Baker do that?). A lot of the humour will unfortunately date very quickly (bringing out a jukebox millions of years in the future and saying "we believe this was called an iPod"). But at the same time, it is rollicking good fun. The bi-pedal pig last night was hilarious and the aliens are nearly scary. I think my darlings (5, 3, 1) are still a bit too young to watch it but Oscar is showing definite interest in having a look.

And that sound of the Tardis as it disappears still gives me the willies.

There is something you don't know. I am not left-handed

Finally got around to collecting together the list of other bits of software I use (mainly at home). But first off, I should be given a thorough thrashing for not including XEmacs in the first list.

I first encountered XEmacs on HP-UX in Philips Eindhoven in 1995. Up until then I had used the VAX editor and a few crappy freeware PC ones. This thing was a revelation - syntax highlighting, tons of extensions, call-out to make, gcc, whatever. Built-in games for the love of god. It instantly became my favourite tool of all time.

When I got back to S3 I found it installed on SunOS, except it looked shit - very few menu items, awful scroll-bars etc. Then I found out about the schism between Emacs and XEmacs and discovered that the one in S3 was Emacs. In Integral Design, after getting gcc, popper and Samba installed on the Solaris boxes, XEmacs was my very next install.

Then the beauties hacked it to compile on Cygwin, then (heart palpitations), they got it to natively compile on Windows. It was my main development platform (and platform is not an exaggeration) until about 2001 when the amount of programming I did reduced to almost nothing.

But recently I re-discovered my old friend, still clunky on Windows, still unbelievably powerful. I must fish out my highly optimised .emacs file from a few years back and start using it again. In the past few weeks I have used it to edit Perl, Java and C++. Not great as an IDE anymore in comparison to Eclipse or Netbeans but for straight-up coding, you can't beat it.

Back to the list:

XEmacs 21.5 B17 - See above
DivX Player - handy MPEG4 player
Hello - Odd but interesting tool. Handy for sending pictures to Blogger
Picasa - Fantastic picture management tool
Nokia PC Suite - My 6230 would be useless without it
Quickpay - Run my payroll on this. Pretty rubbish but functional
Sage Instant Accounts - Run my accounts on this. Hate it but it works (barely)
Skype - Looks good. Don't know anyone else who has it, so kinda like the first guy with a fax.
Unison - Great for syncing directories
VLC Media Player - Good for playing lots of formats. Won't work with my PVR-350 yet tho!
xplorer2 - Good dual-pane Windows explorer replacement
ZXSpin - Excellent Spectrum Emulator
EmuZWin - Ditto
AutoIT v3 - Extremely powerful scripting tool for Windows Admin.
Fresh Download - Free Download accelerator
Fresh UI - Free Windows UI modifier (e.g. DOS Prompt here in the context menu)
DVD Shrink - Every DVD I buy gets processed by this. The kids are given the copies to destroy with their greasy fingers and the originals are kept pristine. A must-have tool.

You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles

Nostalgia time, 80's fans. Due to unprecedented public demand (currently at zero requests), I am making available my classic ZX Spectrum games at no cost. Each of these 4K masterpieces, which took months of pubescent angst to complete, requires either an actual ZX Spectrum or an emulator to play. My two favourite emulators are EmuZWin and ZXSpin. The current version of ZXSpin seems to have some problem finding ROMs so maybe stick with EmuZWin for the moment.

The three games are:

The Grid. Screengrab here. This is a TAP file (the preferred format) which is loaded as a tape.
Cent The Pete. Screengrab here. This is a Z80 file which is just a memory snapshot.
The Cherry Run. Screengrab here. Ditto.

Download and be amazed what one teenage geek can create in hand-crafted Z80 assembler with no proper development tools on an original rubber keyed ZX Spectrum 48K. Or maybe just think - what a pile of crap.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia

I keep a "link-blog" over at Bloglines. It is just a set of links to other peoples blog postings and sites with stories that caught my eye. I'll put a permanent link to it on this blog when I get a chance.

Overall I'm happy with Bloglines but I'm tired of old posts constantly re-appearing as new. Is Feedburner any better in this regard I wonder?

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.