Hmmm… not entirely sure what freakiness caused large numbers of my old blog entries to turn up on Planet GNOME today… perhaps it was one of those solar flares that’s caused the aurora borealis to be visible in Ireland recently…
A Nova Corsa
Spent the weekend car browsing (and eventually, buying) with Julie. The Astra she brought over with her from the UK has been registered here for a year now, which means it’s now floggable without incurring the wrath of the Revenue Commissioners… so, next week she’ll be taking delivery of a black ’03 Vaux^H^H^H^HOpel Corsa Njoy with a trifling 8000 miles on the clock.
Just Another Day at Sun…
Apparently, a plane was spotted circling a couple of Sun campuses yesterday trailing a “Just Another Day at Red Hat” banner. As one Sun wag put it, the conclusion to be drawn is presumably that a typical day at Red Hat involves going round in circles with your head in the clouds worrying about the launch of Solaris 10 
(Or, as another put it, “So Red Hat has moved from the ‘ignoring Sun’ to ‘laughing at Sun’
stage. On to stage three…”)
Wanted by the Police : A Good Interface
On the vagaries of installing a new Windows-based touchscreen interface in San Jose police cars…
JDS Live CD now available for FREE DOWNLOAD
For anyone who wants to try the Java Desktop System before buying, Dave Southern writes:
Just wanted to let everyone know, that we now have the JDS Live-CD .iso available at jdshelp.org. A special thanks to Sun for allowing us to post it.
This is the same version of JDS that comes with Tom Adelstein and Sam Hiser’s book, Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop.
The Grudge
We went to see The Grudge at the weekend, an English language re-working of the Japanese Ju-On fright flick (and its sequels). Reviews had been mixed here (as they had in the States), but the majority pointed to the ‘worth seeing and really quite scary’ end of the scale.
It would probably have worked better had the cinema not been half-full of underage kids who couldn’t decide whether to giggle all the way through or just scream occasionally at the wrong bits, and therefore decided just to do both… but while it was nicely made, it had a few loose ends, and I never find that films where the all the scary parts are precluded by scary music ever really end up being all that scary. Julie thought otherwise, however
Gitaroo Man
Finally caved in and bought Gitaroo Man when I saw somebody selling it cheap on Amazon the other day, as it’s not too easy to find any more– it arrived this morning. When trying to find the sort of game we might enjoy when the PS2 first arrived chez nous (Julie didn’t strike me as your Metal Gear Solid or Pro Evo sort of girl), it was a toss up between this and Mad Maestro, in the rhythm genre… we went for MM, and on first impressions of Gitaroo, it’s probably just as well– Gitaroo is a lot more difficult, or at least it gets difficult a lot more quickly. Looks like good fun, though…
Give George a Brain
Julie sent me this little gem of a game today (sound required)… so far I’ve only managed to get him into second grade though
Tabbed browsing security
An interesting article over at The Register highlighting how tabbed browsers can increase the risk of phishing. There are a couple of concrete recommendations that I guess Epiphany should take on board (if they haven’t already– Firefox and Konqueror are already on the case):
- Keep the user informed as to which tab is responsible for any popup dialog boxes.
- Don’t allow inactive tabs to spawn dialog boxes in the first place.
Of course, if everyone followed the HIG and didn’t use tabbed MDI interfaces, we wouldn’t have the problem, right? :o) (Kidding!)
Peace at Last
Hot on the heels of the eminently-useful (but sadly illegal, in many places) cellphone jammer, Ananova reports on the inevitable mutation of the universal remote control– a keyfob zapper that will turn off any TV, anywhere.
