Month: June 2008

Sport

Enhorabuena a España

June 29, 2008 by 0 Comments

Many congratulations to Spain who have just won the European Soccer Championships. They beat Germany 1-0 in the final at the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna. This is their first international trophy in over 44 years and only their second major tournament win ever.

They were good value for their win in my opinion, having been the only team to win every game they played, the team that scored the most goals throughout the tournament and the team with the top scoring player of the tournament (David Villa).

I was also proud to see Liverpool F.C. striker Fernando Torres score the winning goal, with no less than 3 other Liverpool players in the Spanish side (Xabi Alonso, Álvaro Arbeloa and Pepe Reina).

Enhorabuena!

Technology

Triskit Project

June 28, 2008 by 0 Comments

Triskit is a fascinating project that takes the form of a self-generating toy system. If you own (or have access to) a mini laser cutter or acrylic sheet stock then you can use the Triskit software to design pieces for your very own toy system (called a Triskit). You can use the data that is produced by the software as input data for your laser cutter and the result is your very own, custom-made toy part.

Sample Triskit

One of the benefits of this is that, if you are trying to build a toy and find that you don’t have a particular part that does what you need, you can just make one to suit your needs. With the likes of LEGO and K’nex, you are limited to what pieces came in the original box.

General - Life

Secret LEGO Vault

June 25, 2008 by 0 Comments

Here is real treat for LEGO fans everywhere. I learned today that there is a special vault at LEGO Headquarters in Denmark where they store one of every LEGO set ever created from 1953 to 2008, that’s 4720 sets, still in their original boxes!

Apparently one of the primary reasons for retaining such a collection is that LEGO can use it as a safeguard in copyright and patent cases.

To a long time LEGO fanatic like myself, this is an unimaginable concept and represents possibly the finest toy collection in existence bar none. Special thanks goes to Gizmodo for sharing the experience and emotion of his recent visit to this labrynth of true wonderment. His article and accompanying video are well worth checking out.

Source: SlashDot

Technology

Upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 completed

June 23, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’ve just upgraded this blog to use WordPress 2.5.1 and thankfully it was a pretty painless process. Whilst there should be very few obvious changes to most readers, there are quite a number of changes to the WordPress dashboard, mostly attempts to make it easier for me to manage the blog.

It will probably take a couple of days to get used to the new interface but I’ve already seen a number of things I do like and some others that I don’t. I like the improvements in the general menu system as it’s now a lot easier to find things.

However, they seem to have overdone it on the rearrangments they’ve made to some of the other screens. For instance, when posting a new article, the categories used to be neatly displayed down the right-hand side of the screen but now they are much lower down and I have to scroll down to configure them. Not only that but the categories themselves are now displayed in a fixed size scrollable area so I also have to scroll down within this area to find some of the categories. This is a real pain, especially as I have a decent sized widescreen monitor with plenty of screen realestate.

Life

How clean is your car?

June 20, 2008 by 2 Comments

Sustainable Energy Ireland has a useful energy emissions calculator for all models of car purchased since 2000. I tried this out for my 2003 Renault Scenic and was quite shocked at how poor the emissions were (173 gC02/km) and that it could cost €600 under the new motor taxation scheme, compared to €292 under the current scheme. Fortunately, it will not cost this since it was registered prior to July 2008 and is thus exempt from the new system.

I was also very surprised to see how little by comparison a brand new 2008 BMW 520 Diesel is going to cost under the new scheme (€290 compared to €689 under the current scheme). This car is very efficient and emits a mere 149 gCO2/km.

The times they are a’ changin’

Life

Motor Tax changes

June 20, 2008 by 6 Comments

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the new motor taxation system being introduced in Ireland at the start of July 2008, so I did a little research of my own to see what impact, if any, this will have on me (and my family). I found the answers to most of my questions on the Citizens Information website and for me, it basically boils down to this:

  1. Cars registered before 1 January 2008 will continue to pay motor tax on the basis of engine size.
  2. New cars registered from 1 July 2008 will pay motor tax charges on the basis of seven CO2 emissions.
  3. The CO2 emissions are measured in terms of grammes of Carbon Dioxide emitted per kilometer travelled, or gCO2/km.
  4. There are 7 different bands of emissions, ranging in price from €100 to €2,00.

So for me (and most others I know) nothing changes in the short term and we will continue to pay motor tax based on the older system of engine size, which ironically increased its rates in January 2008. Only when we trade up to a car newer than July 2008 will these changes affect us.

Technology

Firefox 3 upgrade complete

June 17, 2008 by 0 Comments

Well I did my bit for Mozilla’s World Record attempt by downloading the latest release of the Firefox browser this evening. However, I’d have to say that Mozilla did rather a poor job at managing the launch of this new version.

They’ve been banging on about it for weeks and then when the big day finally arrived, there wasn’t a download button to be seen on the Mozilla site all day, with no obvious explanation that I could see. I fully expected to see some sort of imaginative countdown timer that would tell me when I should check back but no, I had to delve really deep into their website to discover that the launch wouldn’t actually take place until 6pm Irish time.

Of course, once the release did finally get under way, their websites fell over under the strain, which impressed me even less. I eventually managed to get a copy from one of their FTP sites thanks to Michele Neylon’s post.

All in all, I’m a big fan of Firefox and will stick with it but Mozilla annoyed me quite a bit with this one.

Life

Special Effects Legend dies at 62

June 17, 2008 by 0 Comments

I was saddened to learn today of the untimely death earlier this week of the special effects pioneer Stan Winston, at the tender age of just 62. Stan was responsible for the ground breaking effects in movies such as Alien, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park to name but a few. When I think about each of these movies, I can recall being totally blown away by them and never realised that the same person was responsible for them all.

As we say in Ireland, “Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam” which translates to, “May his soul be on God’s right side”.

Source: Underwire

Technology

Solaris CoolStack 1.3 released

June 11, 2008 by 2 Comments

CoolStack is a collection of some of the most commonly used open source applications optimized for the Sun Solaris platform. The latest version of this software suite, Cool Stack 1.3, has just been released. Here is a brief overview:

Notable Additions

  • Python 2.5.2
  • Nginx 0.6.31
  • New Apache modules including mod_python, mod_ruby, mod_dtrace etc.

Updated Versions

  • Apache 2.28
  • Tomcat 5.5.26
  • MySQL 5.1.24
  • PHP 5.2.6
  • Memcached 1.2.5
  • Ruby 1.8.6p114 with Ruby Gems 1.1.1 and Rails 2.0.2

Other Enhancements

  • Ruby performance improvements in the order of 20-30% (with a further 8-15% coming down the line when Ruby 1.8.7 is released)
  • Better support for installing Ruby Gems that require native compilation on SPARC systems

The addition of Nginx an Python support along with the performance improvements in Ruby as well as the additional Apache modules are all very useful additions and have yet again come at just the right time for our organisation. Well done to Shanti and his team for providing almost exactly everything we were hoping for in this release, again!

Life - Technology

Rubik’s Cube Proof Cut to 23 moves

June 6, 2008 by 0 Comments

In March 2008, I commented on a Stanford-trained mathematician (Tomas Rokicki) who proved that it was possible to solve any scrambled Rubik’s cube in just 25 moves. The equipment used to do this was computer with 8GB and a Q6600 CPU.

Now a mere 3 months later, he has returned with an updated proof that shows it can be down in just 23 moves. He traded his previous computer for the supercomputers at Sony Pictures Imageworks and carried out his testing in the idle-time between productions.

I sense it will not be long before we hear from him again.

Source: SlashDot