Entries made in May 2004

Fedora Core 2

Yesterday, I installed Fedora Core 2 on my work machine. I must say, I was impressed. Within an hour, the system was installed (from scratch), using Firefox and Thunderbird as my web and mail clients (respectively); decent Flash and MP3 support were added, sound worked from the get-go and our networked 4050N was working in less than 2 minutes.

Anyone who's tried tracking down the JetDirect software for their printer from the HP website knows the pain involved with setting this up under Windows. I was shocked at how quickly I got everything working. It would take me around two - three hours to get Windows to this stage.

It's still not set for prime-time (a lot of my fixes were made from the command line, using yum). But it's by far the nicest Linux distribution I've come across for the desktop.

Yes, today is a nerd day.

Insert part A into part B

It turns out a German couple were having problems conceiving, and it turned out that they weren't having sex. I can't help but think of a previous entry on this topic.

Test your websites

Now I can test my websites in a wide selection of browsers. I took this screenshot today. Running Panther on PearPC, I'm now able to test websites on the Mac without leaving my PC. The picture below should make a lot of people vomit.

Browsers used include:

• Internet Explorers 3, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6 (Windows) and Internet Explorer 5.2 (Mac)
• Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Netscape 4.08 (Windows)
• Safara 1.2 (Mac)
• Opera 7.50 (Windows)

It's pretty nuts alright.

Birthday today

Today is my twenty-second birthday. Tomorrow night is the big dinner (those who've been invited know the time and location).

Twenty-two is a bit of an anti-climax, after my rip-roaring, action-packed twenty-first (involving a large hall, lots of people and much more lasagna than today); though I did win a lot (25 euro) on the scratch cards various aunties and uncles bought for me, and my brother gave me a picture of a monkey.

My mum's card was quite soppy, as one would expect. It read:

Son, remember how you always wanted to grow up and become something special?

...well, you did.

As the picture inside the card shows, it turns out my mum thinks I turned into Dave Shea...

Not just Dave Shea. Dave Shea flying a frickin' kite.

Overheard last night

I stayed in Rathmines last night, at my friend Pete's flat. While waiting for Pete outside McDonalds, a group of women walked by me and burst into song, singing:

I don't want anybody else,
And when I think about you I touch myself.

They continued shouting this at random guys as they walked down the street. Thankfully, they seemed drunk; this done sober would freak me out.

Looking back

In nine days I turn twenty-two, and with a little luck I'll be moving out of my parent's house a couple of weeks later. In preparation for the big move I've been working my way through all the crap in my room, ruthlessly cutting the wheat (which goes into boxes) from the chaff (which goes into the bin). I've already filled two bags full of loose papers: guitar tabs, printed articles, newspapers and plain crap.

I found a couple of old note books, copy books and pads. Among them, I found a copy book from my third-year of secondary school. It's labelled "Warhammer 40,000". This is not going to be good.

Along with pages after pages of crap about that lame-ass game, including several pages of me talking to myself in written form, there's a couple of lyrics.

When I was 14, I fancied myself as something of a songwriter. I was wrong. Here's one such "song" (capitalisation preserved):

Life goes on,
Where did the magic go;
Faced with a decision,
And I Gotta say no.

Don't want to go,
Don't want to say,
That I don't trust you no more,
Have to live my life my way.

I've gone Bezerk,
I'm called a jerk;
But they're gone to the other side,
They're gone to the dark side.

Excuse me, I think I'm going to be sick.

New URL structure

I'm slowly working towards implementing the changes required for the redesign. I've implemented the first change today. The URLs on the site are now in a future-friendly format, which means I can switch all of the pages to something more dynamic than HTML in a manner completely transparent to the site visitor.

I also hacked Movable Type code to produce Google friendly URLs. According to Christoph Cemper, Google doesn't like pages which have redirects, so I may soon no longer be the first result for Joanne Colan on the search engine, but hey :)

There's much more to come, I'll keep you posted.