I caught the tail end (pardon the pun) of this report of the RTÉ News last night and it brought a huge smile to my face. I especially applaud the excellent choice of background music combined with slow frame-rate of the CCTV footage. And of course you simply have to admire the farmer. Only in Ireland…
The Irish national broadcaster RTÉ has launched its own TV Player allowing viewers (in Ireland) to watch programmes up to 21 days after they were broadcast. It is similar in concept to the BBC iPlayer (which was actually launched several years ago now) with the exception that it does not yet support Radio broadcasts. RTÉ have been broadcasting live TV from their website for some time now with limited availability of pre-broadcast programmes but this takes things a great deal further.
At first glance, I think it looks really well, seems pretty easy to use and plays well on my home broadband connection.
Source: RTÉ News
Today, Wednesday, 15th April 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough Soccer Disaster where 96 people lost their lives at an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, England.
I can still remember watching the tragedy unfold on the day it happened and proudly join in remembering the victims and their families today, as do Liverpool fans everywhere.
You’ll Never Walk Alone
The Irish recycling company Repak released some statistics (estimated) about the waste generated by food and beverage consumption this Easter weekend:
Easter Eggs Purchased: 7 million Drinks Cans consumed: 42 million Bottles of Wine: 9 million Plastic Drinks Bottles: 35 million Total alcohol/soft drinks: 31 million litres Total Waste: 42,000 tonnes
Whilst the figures above make pretty shocking reading (to me), it is a bit of a pity that they did not provide the comparative figures for a normal weekend. Even though I am happy enough with my own contribution to recycling generally, there is still plenty room for improvement and the availability of reduced-packaging Easter Eggs this weekend is a good start. Now all they have to do is make them cheaper than the fully-packaged ones!
Source: RTÉ News
We use MRTG on a number of test servers and have a simple backup solution in place that uses tar to take a copy of the MRTG configuration files as well as the graph data files. However, of late we have noticed that tar has run into trouble when it coincides with a scheduled MRTG update.
In the main, one of two things happens:
rateup are changed while tar is trying to add them to the archive, causing tar to fail with the error: file changed as we read it.Our solution to the first point was to add a --exclude=*.tmp to the tar command. However, the second issue was more interesting because it is not clear whether the .old files in question are actually something worth backing up or not.
As it turns out, they are not. Although not very well documented, our testing showed that these files are simply copies of the previous .log files and can also be excluded from the tar command without issues.
The people over at Red Oak Tax Refunds have released a handy Budget Calculator for assessing the likely (negative) impact of the recent emergency budget (April 2009) on you and your family.
Source: Damian Beresford
I’m delighted to see that FeedHenry (one of the start-up companies that I am heavily involved with) won an Emerging Technology Award at CTIA Wireless 2009. This is a great achievement by everyone at FeedHenry. The annoucement was also covered by Silicon Republic today.