Feckoff.net

First off, I would like to say that I have no affiliation with any political party or other interest group in the subject below.

Fair play to the Fina Gaelers on having the balls to come forward and propose making Irish a non-compulsory subject at leaving cert level, and boo to the FFeckers for attacking the idea like rabid dogs. This is a touchy subject, and usually the side supporting removing the compulsory status of Irish get their “Irishness” called into question, and fall victim to other stupid, low down tactics like that.
As a victim of the compulsory Irish regime in my schooldays, I fully support removing the compulsory status of the subject. Having a subject rammed down your throat without any effort to endear students to it, or to explain what the hell is actually going on is no way to engender support and love of the language. After my 14-odd years spent learning Irish in school, I can hardly string a sentence together in the language.
Make it optional. At least then those who want to study it can do so, and those who don’t can spend their time studying something more useful. And, to those who trot out the tired old “but its part of your heritage!” line: Cram it up your arse. Potato famine and oppression under the rule of our neighbours are also part of my heritage, should I starve myself and give up my civil rights too? It is 2005. More people in Ireland speak Chinese on a daily basis than Irish. We are an English-speaking country, like it or not. I don’t know about you, but the only place I’ve heard people speaking Irish to each other on the street is in the Connemara Gaeltacht.

I wish the subject was optional when I was in school.

Here’s why:

Last week Sony made quite a negative impact on the Internet with news of their DRM-cum-rootkit system. Hot on the heels of that fiasco comes further rumours of Sony plans to hobble the Playstation 3 — by preventing people from running pre-owned games on it.

Note that the patent discussed in the above link does not specifically mention the PS3 but you can see the obvious implications of it.

Well done again, Sony. Way to repair the damage you did to your reputation with the DRM rootkit incident. These two incidents, combined with the constant efforts to prevent people from running homebrew software and emulators on their PSP’s has well and truely put any desire to buy any Sony product again out of my mind. Muppets.

As a bit of an experiment, I tried to get SuSE Linux 10 running from an external 20GB USB hard disk I had lying around. It took a bit of fooling about and googling, but it worked in the end. Follow these steps and it should work for you too.
Note: I installed the x86_64 version, but this procedure should be exactly the same for 32 bit versions.

1. To make things as simple as possible, you may want to delete all partitions on your USB disk before continuing. This way, the SuSE 10 installer will automatically default to installing on that disk and will set up the partitions for you automatically.
2. Boot from the SuSE 10 DVD/CD’s, and begin the installation procedure as normal.

Read more »

This looks like the best version of VNC I’ve seen, having a lot of features and performance usually found in commercial remote control software like PCAnywhere or Microsoft’s crippled remote desktop: UltraVNC.
I like remote desktop, but being restricted to only being able to rdp to Windows XP Pro or various flavours of Windows server sucks.
UltraVNC is free and open source, available under the GNU licence as usual.

Have a look at the pictures on this thread at boards.ie. The utter destruction of the car is shocking - what kind of speed must he have been doing to totally crush it like that?
There’s not a lot left of either car or driver

Myself and my classmates finally got our degrees from IT Carlow today, at the yearly conferring ceremony. A handful of photos are here.
I guess now I get to be a smug asshole and write BSc after my name whenever I have to sign anything!

Click for full version

Have a read of this blog post by Sysinternals’ Mark Russinovich.
He describes the malware that some of Sony Music’s latest DRM-protected (DRM-infected is a more appropriate term) audio CD’s will install on any Windows PC that they are allowed to autorun (perhaps that should be autoruin?) on.
The comments following Mark’s post contain some more interesting bits and pieces too.
In short, Sony would like to install a rootkit on your PC, and hide it as much as possible.
Sickening behaviour - all the more reason to boycott their music labels.

Update: TheRegister (and a ton of blogs besides this one) have reported on this story too. Well done, Sony!