Pretend football

Had Julie’s parents over visiting for the weekend. For something a little different, we took them along to the first round All-Ireland football championship games at Croke Park, not least because Julie knows one of the Wicklow players (although we’ve yet so see him do anything other than sit on the subs bench, and occasionally warm up). For the record, Kildare edged out Wicklow in the more exciting game by 1-17 (20) to 2-12 (18), and Dublin strolled past Longford by 2-23 (29) to 0-10 (10). I’ve no idea if the future-in-laws had any idea what was going on, but at least they had a pleasant sit out on the warmest day of the year so far.

On Monday, I was back at work, so Julie left to them wander down to the botanic gardens to play with their recently-acquired Nikon Coolpix 3200. Apparently it was raining though, so they only took a couple of photos in the glass houses inside in case it got wet… and then they got lost on the way home taking a “shortcut” :)

The Queen is Dead, Long Live… Paul Rodgers?

In the penultimate stage of our current retro-bands “tour”, Julie and I went to see Queen with Paul Rodgers in Dublin on Saturday. Of course, Queen are really just Brian May and Roger Taylor these days, with Danny Miranda (of Blue Oyster Cult and Pyramid fame) taking the disassociated John Deacon’s place on bass, and Spike Edney (SAS Band, and a million-and-one big-name session, production and musical director credits) on keyboards. The unenviable task of trying not to impersonate Freddie Mercury fell to Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company) on this tour, one which he pulled off with varying degrees of success… he was certainly more comfortable performing the songs that originated in his own back catalogue, though.

While I’ve never been a great Brian May fan– he’s certainly not in the league of guitar gods who should be trying to pull off ten-minute guitar solos in the middle of a show, but try he did– his guitar-playing is certainly the most defining feature of the Queen sound in the absence of Freddie’s voice, and if you shut your eyes, you did occasionally get a flash of what it must have been like to see them live in their heyday. Queen it probably wasn’t, but a good old-fashioned rock gig it certainly was.

Next week: Mark Knopfler…

OCS

I wasn’t long out of university when Ocean Colour Scene made it big in the mid-90s, with grungey guitar hits like The Day We Caught the Train and The Riverboat Song. Can’t say I was really into them then, but we went to see them in Dublin at the weekend and they totally rocked… it’s rare enough for one Britpop singer to hit every note all night, let alone the whole band! (Well, okay, apart from Oscar on drums and piano, who belted one out during the encore and was pretty dire…)

May Day

Pretty quiet holiday weekend here. Had lunch out and a wander round the Botanic Gardens earlier today… bit drizzly, though, so we didn’t hang around too long.

Caught a fair bit of the world snooker final on TV, and waited with bated breath (as I do at this time every year) to see if BBC2 would stick on anything instead of the scheduled film whose cancellation the final’s over-run had caused. Only an old episode of Grumpy Old Men so far, though… Ceefax hasn’t caught up yet so I don’t know what’s on next to fill the rest of the gap before we’re back on track.

Also started to pull together a presentation I’m supposed to be giving to Netsoc at Trinity College on Thursday evening. It’s shaping up to be about the application of usability methods in commercial and open source environments, and what they might learn from each other (with a few shining examples of GUI Bloopers along the way for light relief)… but it’s all a tad, er… ‘fluid’ at the moment.

Tiger so far

My experiences with Tiger so far, after a few hours’ playing:

  • The installer refused to install anything at first, failing after the hard disk verification stage with the everso-helpful message “There was a problem with the installation. Please try installing again”. Luckily I knew where to look for the install log when I rebooted, whereupon it claimed it had encountered the dreaded Error -9972. Not wanting to take any chances, I backed up everything and did a clean install.
  • Things do generally feel somewhat snappier, as promised.
  • Spotlight does what it says on the tin, but for me, not quite as elegantly as Quicksilver, at least as an application launcher. Biggest annoyance in that regard is that you hit the shortcut (Cmd-Space, rather that Quicksilver’s Ctrl-Space, but that’s fine), type the first few characters of the app you want to run, and the results come back. At this point, Quicksilver will show you the closest match and you can launch it straight away ny hitting Enter. Spotlight, however, always pre-selects “Show all matches” rather than “Top hit”, so you have to arrow down to select the app or file you want to open. A tad annoying.
  • Dashboard is very pretty, but some of the widgets duplicate stuff that’s already in OSX, and it would be much more convenient if the widgets could be placed on your actual desktop, rather than an Exposé-like overlay. It also takes up a space on the dock… haven’t checked to see if it still runs if you remove it, yet.
  • Still no virtual desktop support– Desktop Manager to the rescue.
  • Photoshop CS refuses to run any more, even after a complete re-install. (Update: I tried again, and now it does.)
  • Had to upgrade Desktop Manager and my Wacom tablet driver to get them to work, but now they’re fine.

I haven’t yet looked at Automator, the 3D video chatrooms in iChat (nobody to talk to!), the improved mail client (as I only use that for my work email, which I can’t access until Cisco come out with a Tiger-compatible VPN client), or much else, really.

Update: samba also looks to be somewhat broken… I can connect to my office share using smbclient, but I can’t mount it with mount_smbfs (or Connect to Server, in Finder).

Update II: Mac On Linux can’t run Tiger yet.

Update III: There is a way to have dashboard widgets on your desktop

Update IV: Samba does work after all; in 10.4 it just sends passwords encrypted by default, which our office servers can’t handle yet. Adding this to /etc/nsmb.conf fixes it:

[default]
minauth=none

Tiger Time

My copy of OS X Tiger has arrived, a day ahead of schedule (and 10% off, thanks to Sun’s employee purchase plan)… all I can say so far is that it comes in this nice (if slightly hard-to-open) box, because I haven’t decided yet whether to install it and break my ability to work at home until Cisco get their act together and release a compatible vpn client. But I think I probably will :)

Mad world

Continuing our recent theme of going to see reformed 80’s groups, Tears for Fears were on our schedule at the weekend. Not a band whose albums I would have rushed out and bought first time around, but it’s always good to hear a few songs from your youth belted out by the original artistes, even if Roland does look more like Lawrence Llewlyn-Bowen these days. And the original Mad World is still a lot better than that effort that was No.1 at Christmas (which, spookily enough, was playing in the taxi on the way home).

The support was Irish Eurovision reject Fran King, who was kind of a less-polished cross between David Gray and the Finn Brothers… pleasant enough, but you get the feeling he might get a bit samey after a while. Will probably check out his new album (“Beautifcation”) at some point anyway, though… you can listen to his new single here.

The Network is the Computer (but not everyone’s)

Working at home a day or so a week has been a great convenience, but it looks like my days are numbered… at least if I want to keep using my Mac.

The current Cisco VPN client apparently doesn’t work with OSX 10.4, so I won’t be able to connect to the office from home that way if I decide to install my shiny new upgrade when it arrives next week– and let’s face it, it’s going to be hard to resist :) Rumours abound too that the OSX version is about to be EOL’d anyway, so who knows how well it’ll ever work post-Panther.

Normally I’m running Linux on my Mac when I’m working anyway, so no problem you’d think– except there’s no PowerPC version of the Cisco VPN client, and today we’ve been told that we’re no longer allowed to use the open source vpnc client either, as a security audit has determined the current version to be too insecure.

Even if there was a way around those issues, Sun is taking SOX compliance rather seriously, and in the not too distant future, full remote access will be restricted to employees with centrally-managed workstations running Java Desktop System, with a Java card reader for authentication. If you think this sounds a lot like SunRay@Home, you’d probably be right :) The rest of us will be restricted to accessing so-called ‘edge services’ like mail and calendar from our evil non-JDS boxes.

While SunRay is one of the coolest technologies going, and being able to control who does what with your infrastructure is a must, I’m not convinced that everyone who currently works at home is going to be well-served by this one-size-fits-all approach, or that the world is going to be a safer place as a result. It’s a perfect solution for VPs, managers and salesfolk, who have a SunRay on their desk whose session they can then tap into wherever they go. But I fear that engineers (and Sun does have the odd one or two, so I’m told) with their three or four standalone workstations per desk, and designers with the need for something a little more powerful than GIMP and StarOffice Draw, are going to find it a lot harder to get their job done in the comfort of their own home.

But there’s a way to go before all that happens, and I live in hope… Sun prides itself on the number of its employees who have the opportunity to work remotely. If anyone can find a way to securely connect together a bunch of differently-flavoured *nix machines1 across the internet without limiting their functionality to that of an internet café, you would think it might be us :)

1Ignoring the fact that some folk will probably want to connect Windows machines as well, but since they represent the largest part of the problem, I’d have no issue with them being banned from connecting remotely at all…