Calum's Wee GNOME Blog » General

OpenSolaris Governing Board, Acrobatics

calum — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:58:55 +0000

The results are in; the OpenSolaris community has a new Governing Board. However, the proposed new constitution failed to gain sufficient support for approval.

Have to say I was slightly surprised (and, to be honest, a little disappointed) to see that only two non-Sun folks were voted in this time around (especially as one of those is a former Sun folk), but I have no doubt they’ll do a fine job… starting, I expect, by revisiting that constitution issue.

In other news, the long hiatus between releases of Adobe Reader for [Open]Solaris x86 is over… grab Reader 9.1 now on Adobe’s download page. Very fine though Evince is at handling the majority of PDF-reading tasks, some jobs still just require the proprietary Real Thing…and however one might feel about that, it’s great that Solaris and OpenSolaris are now sufficiently (re-)established on x86 that Adobe are offering that option once again.

Star Wars retold…

calum — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:35:00 +0000

This is better than at least four of the actual movies…

Six Degrees of Richard Herring

calum — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:29:28 +0000

The “Nationally Known Comedian” Richard Herring unleashed a thrilling new craze on the world during this week’s Collings and Herrin (sic) podcast… it goes like this¹:

The aim of the game is to get between two specific Wikipedia entries using only the highlighted blue links. The player who navigates between the two pages within the fewest clicks, or uses the cleverest path is the winner. For example, to get from the Wikipedia page for American actress Argentina Brunetti to French anti-communist party La Cagoule, one could go via the following clicks:

(Argentina played a supporting role in the Lone Ranger in 1955, The Lone Ranger starred in a chocolate advertisment in the mid ninties advertising Rolos, Nestlé are a chocolate manufacturer, Nestlé are shareholders in L’Oréal, L’Oréal was founded by Eugène Schueller and Eugène Schueller provided financial support and held meetings for La Cagoule.)

Have fun.

¹Description lifted from this RH forum to save me making up my own…

Things to do on your day off #13671

calum — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:28:56 +0000

Fun with Pixelblocks

Unseasonal musical spookiness

calum — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:19:09 +0000

Many years ago, I posted this guitar tab. Today, I came across this MP3 on this guy’s website.

Moon on a stick

calum — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:49:28 +0000

In an odd twist of 90’s nostalgia fate, I had the opportunity to see (and, indeed, briefly chat to) both Stewart Lee and Richard Herring live in Dublin in the past couple of weeks… older readers on this side of the pond may remember they used to be a double act in the BBC TV shows Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy (some of which are archived on Stewart’s website). More recently, Stewart Lee co-wrote Jerry Springer– The Opera.

Enjoyed both their gigs, but Stewart Lee was probably a bit more to my rib-tickling taste. Then again, he is the 41st best stand up ever.

Bejaysus and begorrah

calum — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:35:48 +0000

Only just starting to watch Season 2 of Heroes, and boy are those Irish accents show-spoilingly bad. (Even on the odd occasion they get close, they’re certainly not from anywhere near Cork…)

Fish ID

calum — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:19:37 +0000

Dear lazyweb. What kind of fish is this?

Meteorological apology

calum — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:28:10 +0000

We’re having summer in Dublin today. Apologies to anyone who will have missed it by visiting on any other day of the year.

New toy

calum — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:25:51 +0000

Quite liking the 12x optical zoom on my new Canon Powershot S3…