Month: November 2008

Technology

How to insert Irish characters on Microsoft Windows

November 25, 2008 by 1 Comment

I’ve always found it a real pain to quickly and easily insert Irish/French/Hungarian (or other) language characters (i.e. vowels with fadas over them) into documents on Microsoft Windows, then let there be pain no more. A simple matter of pressing the Alt Gr key whilst also pressing the desired vowel does the trick very nicely.

I’m sure this may be well known to some/many of you but it was news to me and will save me a good bit of time as a number of colleagues have names with Irish/Foreign letters in them.

Credit goes to John Mernin for alerting me to this.

Life - Waterford

Blaas win European Bakery Award

November 23, 2008 by 1 Comment

As a long suffering purveyor of the merits and delights of Waterford’s most famous delicacy, the humble Blaa (a square-shaped yeast roll), it was with an enormous sense of pride, delight and downright, “I told ‘ya so”, that Waterford celebrated international recognition for the Blaa earlier this week in the form of a Euro-toques award.

In particular, four stalwort Waterford bakeries, Hickey’s and M&D of Waterford City, Harney’s of Kilmacow and Barron’s of Cappoquin were commended for their continued traditional production of the famous roll.

Related Articles: Irish Times, The Munster Express

Technology - TSSG

Irish IPv6 Summit

November 18, 2008 by 0 Comments

Part of what we do here at the TSSG is to attempt to raise awareness about emerging technologies such as IPv6, whenever the opportunity arises. To this end, in its capacity as a member of the Irish IPv6 task force, the TSSG is helping to organise an IPv6 Summit which has been specifically designed to raise awareness of IPv6 in the public and private sector.

So, if you have even the remotest interest in the Internet technologies, you should try to make it along.

Related Posts: Irish IPv6 Summit by John Ronan

Technology

Ubuntu Distribution Information

November 18, 2008 by 0 Comments

We have a number of Ubuntu Linux systems and I regularly find myself wanting to find out which specific distribution I have installed on a given system. While the trusty uname -a command is useful most of the time, it is unfortunately too generic in this instance and only reports version information about the Linux kernel.

However, today I discovered the lsb_release -a command which does precisely what I want. The description of this command in the man page says:

The lsb_release command provides certain LSB (Linux Standard Base) and distribution-specific information.

Here is a sample of the type of output it provides on a recently installed Ubuntu Server 8.10 system:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 8.10
Release:        8.10
Codename:       intrepid

Photography - Waterford

Light on Leaf and Land

November 17, 2008 by 1 Comment

Light on Leaf and Land is the title of a new photography exhibition by John Mernin that will take place during November 2008. It will feature a collection of unique photographs from around County Waterford (Ireland) and beyond, each with the theme that inspired the title of the exhibition, Light.

The exhibition itself will be launched on Friday, 21st November at 9pm in Dowers Bar, Ballymacaw, Co. Waterford and will go on display at Fisherman’s Hall, Dunmore East, Co. Waterford, from 10am to 4pm on Saturday 22nd and 29th of November 2008. Several mounted prints are available for purchase and are priced at €30 (with a €5 donation to the Carbally Community Centre).

So, if you fancy doing something different for an hour or so over the coming weeks, why not drop by and lend your support.

Related Articles: Over the Edge

Waterford

Science Week at WIT

November 10, 2008 by 0 Comments

I had the privilege of accompanying my daughter and a selection of her classmates earlier today to one of the events organised by Waterford Institute of Technology’s Centre for the Advancement of Learning of Maths, Science and Techology (CALMAST) as part of Science Week Ireland.

The event itself, entitled “Dave’s Jungle” featured a unique opportunity to meet exotic animals up close, such as snakes, spiders, scorpions, alligators and iguanas. It was so great to see the excitement and intrigue in the children’s faces and the wide variety in reactions to the different animals. However, the biggest thrill of all was the look of pride in my daughters eyes when I walked in the room. It was one of those days when I might have otherwise been too busy (or not bothered) to attend, but am now so glad that I did.

Well done CALMAST and thank you for a very special experience!

Life - Technology

Effective (but annoying) Smoke Alarms

November 10, 2008 by 0 Comments

I was greeted this evening upon my return home from work by a high-pitched chirping tone emitting from all 3 of my smoke alarms, every 40 seconds or so. Since each of the alarms appear to be wired to some sort of recessed connection in the ceiling, I presumed that they were being powered from an electrical circuit within my home (and not by battery).

However, I could not find any circuit breakers with an obvious connection to the smoke alarm circuitry, nor could I find any reason for the incessant (and increasingly more annoying) chirping. I even tried disconnecting each alarm in turn (not recommended I know) but the chirping persisted as did my rising frustration levels.

Upon closer inspection of the label on the rear of the alarms, I discovered a very well disguised (and not very obvious) battery compartment, with a 9V battery inside. Even more impressive (and annoying) was the fact that the chirping continued after I removed the (now suspect) battery. There was nothing for it, I simply had to get into my car and drive to the local shop to buy 3 replacement batteries and eventually, almost 10 minutes after I’d replaced the batteries, the chirping finally stopped. This was indicated on the label though (the fact that it could take up to 10 minutes for the circuitry to recover from a replaced battery).

In hindsight of course, I am highly impressed by this little piece of technology. Firstly, it was telling me that the battery was wasted (nothing new there) but moreso by the fact that, no matter what I tried to do, there was no way it was letting me away with replacing the battery.

I’m just glad it didn’t try to tell me at 4am in the morning!

Technology

Useful tricks and tips for Geeks

November 10, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’ve encountered a number of SlashDot posts over the past week or so which discuss some of the more useful aspects of several computing tools that I use regularly. I’d commented on the first two individually (Forgotten Unix Tricks and Useful Vim Tricks) but since then, several more have emerged.

So, here are the links to each of them in one post, showing their original titles (not mine):

If someone (not me) were to make these into a book, I reckon it would prove to be quite popular. I know I’d certainly buy a copy.

Technology

Recovering archived Outlook Express folders

November 7, 2008 by 0 Comments

I recently helped a family member to import some archived Microsoft Outlook Express folders from a CD and was aghast at how difficult it was to do, and how disruptive it was to their existing email folder structure. As a non-regular computer user, they expected that simply double-clicking on the relevant (.dbx) files on the CD would automatically open them in Outlook Express. Of course I knew this would not work but to be fair, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that most casual Windows users would share, and is in fact how it should work. But then again, this is Microsoft we’re dealing with.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, here is how to do it:

  1. Launch Outlook Express and locate the current directory where your mail folders are being stored by selecting Tools, Options, Maintenance tab and clicking on the Store Folder button.
  2. Make a note of the directory listed and exit Outlook Express
  3. Now copy the folders you are trying to import from to this folder (using Windows Explorer or another file manager)
  4. Then delete the file named Folders.dbx from this directory and restart Outlook Express.
  5. Your archived folders should now be available once more but unfortunately, since the file you deleted above was where your folder structure was stored, the structure of your folders will have been lost (flattened) and will have to be re-created by hand.

This is a pretty woeful user experience in my opinion, but if you are really stuck, it does work Thankfully, it is a lot easier in the non-Express versions of Outlook but is such a shame that the lions share of Outlook Express users are those who would benefit more from how Outlook operates.

Technology

Useful Vim Tricks

November 7, 2008 by 1 Comment

Inspired by an earlier post on forgotten Unix tips, another SlashDot contributer has created similar post discussing the many and varied merits of the popular Vim text editor (my editor of choice for many years now).

Once again, many of them were familiar to me but I was pleasantly surprised and suitably impressed by several other which I did not know. One commentator also posted a link to the Best Vim Tips website which I had not seen before.

Related Post: Useful Unix Tricks