Raiméis

As per usual blogging is a tad slow, to be honest i’ve had nothing to say in the past week and the couple of postings during that period were a struggle. And it’ll get worse [if blogging gets much slower they'll be calling in the state pathologist to see if it's still alive at all] for the rest of the week as i’m off on business travels for the next 3 days, I can add another country to my list and maybe i’ll have something to talk about then, though it’ll be Friday before i’m online again.
Just had my daily scan through the online papers and saw nothing worth reporting apart from maybe the story about single parents paying up to 200% interest to moneylenders, which sounds very worrying, or maybe the German sham who flaked it across Australia in 43 days for charity, or the scary story about why kids are starting puberty at the age of 7 or 8. But none of those interest me too much, instead i’ve been enjoying having a good whinge on Slugger or moping about some other net forums I frequent. Some of the Irish blogs are worth a browse, and have gotten me through periods of boredom in the past few weeks. Sin é.

Me back & shoulders are in bits today, I was playing handball last night, first time since my grand final defeat to a sham from Galway in the “Päijät-Häme Regional Championship” 5 weeks ago. Said Galway-man took home the ‘Eulich McGee Memorial Cup’. It felt good to be back handling balls again.
Anywayz, i’m feeling very ‘retro’ at the moment. As you probably don’t know, since I don’t think I have ever mentioned it, I am doing 3D modelling as a hobby and decided to express this retro feeling through modelling. I was going to model the Flash Gordon rocket [what a classic! You don't get much more retro than that] but opted instead to do a less-detailed quickie model, current status is below, bear in mind i’ve only just started.
» Read more…

It’s Orgasm Day today in the Brazilian town of Espertantina. “Mayor Santolia said the remote town of 38,000 people has been unofficially celebrating orgasm day for years, but that the town’s former mayor had vetoed a bill making it an official municipal holiday.” “We’re celebrating orgasm in all its senses.” God-damn I’m in the wrong place!!

It’s a friggin warzone. Some gang members from one of the main criminal gangs in Limerick launched a grenade attack on a house in the city yesterday. It’s like fecking Beirut. And they say serious crime is down … arse! Get the finger out McDowell.

Yep, it’s been slow. I’ve just been completely lazy in the past week or so. And work, where I usually manage to blog at least once per day, has been damn busy. It’s hard to believe it’s May already (this would have been more appropriate last week, when I intended to post it, but anyway…).
We were half thinking of moving back to Ireland next summer and I had been planning to start checking the work situation back home around February or March but it’s already bloody May and i’ve done didley squat! The c.v is updated but needs a rewrite, so I guess i’d better get it done and send it out to a few agencies. You don’t know anyone looking to hire a plastics engineer with experience in mobile phone part tooling?

… and in particular the Irish translation of … did you notice that Firefox has passed the 50 million user mark? Plus that’s 50 million of only Windows, Mac OSX and the generic Linux i686 install. According to ‘someone in the know’ if you were to add, for example, optimised G4 OSX builds, BeOS installations, and all the customised Linux distributions the real figure could be closer to 60-70 million. I wonder how many Irish localizations among those?
I don’t know if Mozilla keep those sort of stats but a French company Xiti Monitor have taken an interesting look at Firefox usage in Europe and have come up with some cool stats. According to their research an amazing 30.91% of people in Finland are now using Firefox. Germans have also taken to the browser with 22.89% of them using it while in Hungary 19.42% use it. Ireland’s usage is 10%. All the stats are in the site linked above.

The Irish language has often been compared with Welsh. While Welsh is still a threatened language it’s in way better shape than Irish, for quite many reasons, too many to go into tonight. One thing I noticed during my tiny involvement with the Irish localization of Firefox was just how active the Welsh folk are with software localizations. On Firefox those lads were way ahead of the ‘Irish team’ and had the browser translated yonks before the first Irish builds ever came out.
One ongoing localization I have some interest in now is Open Office. OO, for those that don’t know, is much like MS Office, only better (imo), is open source and therefore free. Now here’s a comparison: a team at the University of Wales is getting GB£320,000 over 26 months [old news, Sept '04] to localize Open Office … while the Irish localization is being carried out by basically one guy [with some very recent support], a volunteer, who so far, has translated about 15,000 of the 20,000 or so strings.
I don’t know how ‘organised’ the Welsh really are or if there is any ‘coordination’ for all the translation projects but certainly they are very very active particularly in the open source scene. In the case of Irish it looks as if teams just fall together and translate some piece of software, there’s certainly no coordination to it. What I would really like to see for Irish is a comprehensive modern on-line dictionary [current dictionaries don't cut it IMO] and a full database of terms which translators can use for reference. There should also be some sort of central location where ongoing projects can be registered and perhaps could apply for financial or other support. Software in Irish is needed, the are a lot of departments in colleges and even in the government who have started using Firefox in Irish and who will, I have heard, use Open Office when it is finished so there is some demand. It’s about time we had proper organisation in place to get more good software translated into Irish. Maybe Foras na Gaeilge should be taking care of this ??

Yes you read right, a 23 year old Norwegian woman has been sentenced to 9 months in jail for raping a man. Seemingly he fell asleep on the couch in the woman’s apartment but woke up a short time later to find the woman giving him oral sex, which constitutes rape in Norway. “The man said the incident left him with insomnia and virtually no interest in sex. He also described it as a breach of trust between friends that crushed his faith in people.” Oh FUCK OFF, you were loving it you tosser.

You really know you’re an absolute lazy basket when it pains you to simply click on a flippin browser tab. I made the switch yesterday from one browser tab extension (tabbrowser preferences) to another (tab mix) which has some pretty cool new functions but I lost the tab-switching-on-mouseover functionality so now I have to actually click each tab I want to view. Is this what I have become, such a lazy shite that I can’t even click a shaggin’ mouse button? Oi vei!

We’ve been stuck in a time warp with IE6 for yonks, the only updates have been to fix a few of the gazillion fucking security holes in the web browser-slash-windows browser. IE7 will probably be released as part of Longhorn, M$’s latest attempt at a secure stable OS, and as well as better security (security-focused release they claim, the browser is ‘divorced’ from windows which was one of the biggest security problems with previous IE versions) they have promised what web developers have been crying for, better support for web standards.
In a blog entry last week Chris Wilson promised to address many of the major CSS consistency problems and also to support the alpha channel in PNG images. Better late than never I suppose.
Contrary to what i’ve heard before IE7 will also work on XP SP2 (there’s going to be an SP3 by the way) and it will be released before Longhorn (first Beta will be this summer) although it seems MS can’t even make up their mind on that as they previously announced that there would be no standalone version of IE7 before a Longhorn release*. They are not even sure how they will update IE on other systems, whether it will be small add-ons or as part of a service pack release.

*I wonder if MS under estimated the growth of Firefox … latest firgures indicate over 46 million people have downloaded Firefox! It might be a reason for the earlier release. Either way IE7 will be doing the same thing on my PC as IE6 is doing now, gathering dust … virtual dust.