I do a bit of faffing about with Photoshop every now and then, but my efforts are like a child's finger paintings when compared to the masterpieces that appear at The Snackbox Diaries.

I loved these two in particular:

Who Keeps An Eye On The Bad Guys?

The Story of Jimbob

I only ask, because mine is shite. In the piece below, I must have made more erroneous keystrokes than correct omes. So for this entry, I am going to eschew the use of the backspace key altogether.

Somethines I start to type something adn it's as if I have grown ten thumbs. After the spacebar, I'd recon the bakspace key ids the most used eky omn my compyter. My most common tyhriock ids to press rtwo keys at once. Or the otherone id to make a mistake, and then go to hit the backspace key but hist the equals key by mistake, so I end up with somethas==ign==ng like this.

I fequently type 'and' as 'adn' or 'abd', and 'the' as 'thr'. I seem yo have a cplete blindspot for the 'L' key, as I constanyly hit either the 'k' ot the ';' key nuy mistake.

I relanny should learjk how to type properly.

A couple of years ago, I did up a simple website for my sister, who was getting married. I used a Blogger template, and put a load of links in the sidebar for things like accommodation and wedding list. I hosted the photos and a couple of movie clips on my .Mac account, and overall, it looked fine.

Today, my wife's brother and his fiancée have announced the date for their wedding, and I have offered that I would do something similar for them. Things have moved on a bit since 2005, so I reckon I could do a much better job this time round. What I plan to do is as follows:

- Set up the site in Wordpress, with a blog as a home page, for them to update as they wish.
- Use Google Maps for directions to the venue
- A page for accommodation details (including nearby hotels and B&Bs)
- A link to wherever their wedding list is kept
- A special Flickr account for their photos.

Any more ideas?

The saga surrounding Minister Tony Killeen is disturbing.

He says that the letters making representations on behalf of a convicted paedophile and a convicted murderer, sent from his constituency office, were sent without his consent. He claims he did not sign the letter.

I can believe that. Below is a letter I got the other day, forwarded from my old address in Dublin, from my erstwhile TD, one Mr Bertie Ahern TD. You can be damn sure that this letter didn't pass under the Taoiseachly nose for his approval and signature, even though it is signed in a matey, first-name manner.



Sending ersatz-signed letters to constituents about mundane matters like tenants' rights is one thing, but having them sent from your office, by your staff, making representations to the Department of Justice on behalf of persons convicted of serious crimes is another thing, whether you know about them or not.

On the RTE News tonight, it was suggested that Killeen's job as Minister for State for Labour Affairs is not under threat, because all TDs do this sort of thing. This is disgraceful, and it shows just how far the culture of the parish-pump is ingrained in our political life.

Tony Killeen should resign his ministerial office over this. If he doesn't he should be sacked. Ivor Callely was forced to resign for not disclosing that a builder he dealt with while he was chairman of the Eastern Health Board had painted his house gratis.

Unlikely, though.

The report concerning RUC collusion with loyalist terrorists by the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland, published this week, has brought the expected reactions from both sides of the sectarian divide. Nationalists are happy, and say that it vindicates everything they have been saying for years. Unionists are furious, casting doubt on the veracity and independence of the inquiry, and claiming that it vilifies the brave RUC officers who were at the frontline of the fight against terrorism down the years.

Almost daily in Northern Ireland, someone or other makes a call for a public inquiry into some murder or other atrocity of the Troubles. Whichever side makes the call, almost without fail, the other side starts the whataboutery and the atrocity trading. It makes you think what would be the point of any inquiry if the findings (and presumably the truth) were just going to be used to bash the other side over the head.

Take the Bloody Sunday Inquiry for example. I welcomed its setting up, as I believed that a new, credible investigation into the events of that day would go some way to bringing closure to one of Ireland's most tragic days of recent times. It was clear that the flawed Widgery Report was a running sore, and something had to be done to really get to the truth.

But what will happen when the report is finally published?

Let's say that Lord Saville finds that the soldiers acted within the law and their actions were justified. Nationalists will stamp their feet and call the independence of the inquiry into question. They will say that it is another example of how Irish people are hard done by when dealing with British justice. Unionists will say that the British Army has been vindicated and complain about the cost of the tribunal.

Alternatively, what would happen if Saville judges that the soldiers acted unlawfully, used lethal force inappropriately and planted evidence on the victims? Nationalists will say that justice has been done and an historic wrong has been righted. Unionists will complain about the political bias of the tribunal, and again complain about the cost when it was obvious from the start that the tribunal was only ever going to come to one conclusion as a sop to nationalists.

If Saville and his team try to plough a furrow down the middle, and say that the soldiers were sorta to blame, but the victims were also partly the authors of their own misfortune, their findings will be condemned as a fudge by both sides.

What will not happen is the "losing" side saying "OK, that's cleared that one up. Let's move on."

So that leaves the question: In a hopelessly divided society like Northern Ireland, where zero-sum-game politics reign supreme, is the truth worth pursuing at all?

Never content to rest on my laurels, I have just added to the burgeoning publishing empire that is gerryos.net.

This time it's about Apple and the Mac (well, it will be), and it labours under the title CmdNotCtrl.



Once again, I have gone the WordPress route.

Five months old, started on solids, sleeping in her big cot, hair still as mad as ever...

And this smile:

Today's "Pricewatch" in The Irish Times was all about music purchasing, and comparing the price of downloading with buying a physical CD.

While Conor Pope was happy enough about the value available for those seeking to buy singles, he felt that album purchases weren't such good value.

"While a CD single costs in the region of €4 - for which you also get the B-side and other material - often of dubious merit - a song can be downloaded from iTunes for just 99 cent. It is not a lot to pay for a single. The price of a full album downloaded from iTunes is not quite such good value, however, particularly when you consider how little it costs to make the music available."

He took the example - the only one he provided and upon which he based his entire argument - of Snow Patrol's current album "Eyes Open", which was available at the time of his writing on CD Wow for €9.99. This is the same price that Apple charge for a download of the album from the iTunes Store. His argument was that given that the costs of delivering the music via download are virtually negligible in comparison to those of producing and retailing a CD, how come they cost the same to the end consumer?

"The CD of Snow Patrol's Eyes Open currently tops the CD Wow! chart and has a price tag of €9.99. On iTunes, Eyes Open is selling for the same price even though the costs associated with delivering it to your computer are negligible. There's no shiny CD or plastic packaging to factor in, no sleeve to print and no one has to be employed either to sell it to you or to put it in an envelope and stick it in the post."

The problem here is that his argument is baseless. Eyes Open may have been €9.99 on CD Wow when he wrote his piece, but it is €11.99 as I write this. It's still €9.99 on iTunes though. I also saw it in two central Dublin record shops today, in one for €19.99 and in the other for €14.99.


I don't know the exact figures involved, but I would imagine that sales of music, on CD and paid for over the counter of record shops would still account for the largest part of the market. There is no doubt that shopping online can get you bargains when it comes to music, but not always. I just checked the price of Snow Patrol's album on HMV's site and it came out at £8.99 (€13.66), but this was before the VAT was recalculated or any shipping price added. I did the same on Amazon.co.uk and with shipping and Irish VAT, it finished up at £10.47 (€15.91).

So what Conor Pope forgot to say is that the price of CDs is very variable, whereas on the iTunes Store, every album is the same price, €9.99. (Some longer albums are a little more. For example, U2's recent compilation "U218", with 27 tracks is €15.99.)

While the cost of preparing a CD for retail sale is undoubtedly more than it would be to offer the album for download, there are substantial costs involved in the latter method. The music has to be coded into a format that can be downloaded and put on servers. I can only imagine that Apple's monthly bandwidth bill must be enormous.

There are advantages and disadvantages for the consumer when it comes to downloading. One of the great advantages is that you can get your music almost instantly, anytime you like. So if you want to buy a new album at 11pm on a Friday night, you can be wiggling your booty and shaking your thang to your new purchase at 11.05pm. If you prefer to buy it on CD, you either have to wait until the shops open on Saturday, or until your CD is delivered the following week from your online retailer of choice. Either way, it will result in deferment of booty wiggling and thang shaking. Another advantage is that you don't pay a premium for a new album. The price of most new releases hitting the shops these days is in the high teens or into the twenties. On iTunes they are €9.99.

The big disadvantage of downloading is DRM, which surprisingly Pope did not mention at all in his article. Buying music online means you only have limited rights as to how you may use it. Music from iTunes Store will not play on any MP3 player other than an iPod, and you may only play the music on a maximum of five computers. You may however burn as many CDs as you like, but after seven burns, you must rearrange the track listing. Some see DRM as an abomination, but as long as it is reasonable then in my opinion, it's a fair trade-off for being able to buy the album at a lower price and getting access to it straight away.

The other thing that Conor Pope ignored completely was the subscription model of downloading, whereby you have access to the music for as long as you maintain your subscription, or you have the facility to download a fixed number of songs for keeps (and usually DRM-free) per month.

Overall, I felt it was a poorly researched article. Pope had made up his mind that downloading was poor value, and sought to build an argument around that. Unfortunately, the facts got in the way.

I have pdfed the article, which you can download from here.

My thoughts on the fall of Fortress Thomond, here

The geekiest of Mac geeks are the ones to post up their "unpacking pr0n" photos the minute they get their new Apple goodies out of the box.



But this has to be the best pisstake of the process ever. This guy makes a cardboard mockup of the iPhone, prints out what looks like the front cover of the documentation, packs them into a Mighty Mouse box (which he has modified to look like an iPhone box), packs that into an Amazon box, and then photographs the unpacking of the lot and posts it on the net.



Not only that, but he has actually registered the url iphoneunboxed.com.

That is dedication. This guy is hardcr0e. Respec'!

This is a panel from last Friday's Doonesbury strip:



Does anyone know if this is true or just an urban myth?

Today marked the 300th anniversary of the Acts of Union between England and Scotland, when the Scottish and English parliaments were abolished to be replaced by a new parliament of Great Britain, sitting in Westminster. Some have celebrated this date, some have mourned it, and many more have asked if it is now time to revisit this relationship.

Firmly in the pro-Union camp is Gordon Brown, destined to be Britain's next Prime Minister, and MP for the Scottish constituency of Kirkcaldy. Over the last couple of years, Brown has been keen to promote an homogenous Britishness, although some suggest that this might just be a ploy to make his premiership more palatable to Middle England.

Scottish (and Welsh) devolution have been a reality for some years now, with the Scottish parliament going about its business of making laws for Scotland. The problem is that Scotland also sends several MPs to Westminster, where they can vote on matters affecting England and Wales. Yet English and Welsh MPs have no corresponding jurisdiction over Scotland, because it has a substantial amount of power devolved to the Scottish parliament.

The fault for this mess lies squarely with the current Labour Government. Bowing to pressure from its own Scottish party, it rushed through devolution for Scotland in an attempt to stave off outright Scottish nationalism, and save the Union. Ironically, this ill-conceived approach may in fact hasten the demise of the Union, as more English voters question its value.

When Scottish devolution was granted, it should have been as part of an overall devolution plan for the entire UK, England included. However, at the time, the English didn't want their own parliament, as they regarded Westminster as fulfilling that role. And herein lies the problem. Westminster is now forced to perform two duties - parliament of the United Kingdom, and de facto devolved parliament of England.

If the devolution project is to work and the UK to stay intact, then England must be given its own parliament to make its own laws. Each devolved jurisdiction can then send MPs to Westminster (many fewer than the current 650 would be required) to look after the overall governance of the UK. If this doesn't happen, the whole thing could come asunder.

Is the Union Jack about to come asunder?


There was a poll about the relationship between Scotland and England/Wales on the BBC website today. Funnily enough, there was no mention about the other part of the UK, i.e. Northern Ireland. How on earth could they forget about such an integral part of the United Kingdom, I wonder?

When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a headline writer for a tabloid newspaper. Unfortunately, I didn't get enough points in my Leaving Cert to do tabloid headline writing, and had to do wine merchantry instead, so here I am today.

I still like to keep my hand in at the old headline writing, but one of the problems I encounter is that sometimes I think of a headline, but the story to go with it just doesn't materialise. That's never stopped a few tabloid newspapers, I suppose, though.

Anyway, the ones below the fold have been thrashing around my head for a while, so I thought that in best tabloid fashion, I'd make up the stories to go with them.

One thing I noticed about the coverage of the awful Wexford trawler tragedy is the almost complete lack of interest in the story from the BBC's online news. I just did a search through the entries for the BBC's main news feed, and not one reference to the story came up. (There are 562 entries in the reader going back to 2 January.)



You can be sure that if seven fishermen were drowned in a sinking off the coast of Indonesia, or seven miners drowned in a flooded mine in Ecuador, it would get coverage. But not when the tragedy happens off the coast of Ireland.

I eventually found earlier today it in the Northern Ireland section. (It's dropped out of the feed now.)

So it's a regional story then, as opposed to an international one? Glad that's settled.

We do this every now and again for our tea, and it's dead tasty I tell thee.

Get some spuds and peel them. Cut into strips vaguely resembling what you might get in a chipper. Dry them off and lay them in a single layer in a roasting dish. Glug some olive oil, salt and pepper on them and chuck into a hot oven for 20 minutes or so.

In the meantime, take a fillet of monkfish and cut it into chunks. In a bowl, mix together about 200 grams of flour and a half a can of Smithwicks or any other ale or lager (not stout). It should have a good runny consistency, if not add more beer. Heat up a deep pan of cooking oil. Immerse the monkfish in the beer batter, and when the oil is hot enough, drop the battered chunks of fish in using a slotted spoon. Fry until the batter is golden brown.

Serve with the oven-roasted chips and some tartare sauce. To be really posh, accompany with chilled fino or manzanilla sherry or even better, a glass of Champagne.

I have finally gotten the finger out and moved Hands In The Ruck over to the gerryos.net domain.

I've decided to go the Wordpress route this time.

In a comment over on Machead, Jimbo asks how we should articulate the name of the new device called tv. Apple tv? Symbol tv?



My suggestion is to go the route once taken by Prince - and call it "The Device Formerly Known As iTV"

It seems that Cisco aren't happy about Apple using the name 'iPhone' for their new all-singing-all-dancing handheld-multimedia-internet-communication-phone-thingie after all, and have engaged the services of Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne.

(via Mac Rumors)

One of the announced features of Mac OS X Leopard will be Dashcode, an app that allows you to create your own Dashboard Widgets. This is something I have been keen to do for ages, so I was delighted to see that Apple have released a beta of Dashcode that works in Tiger.

I have installed it and have been playing around with it for a while. With the help of some instruction from The Download Squad, I have managed to create an RSS widget for this blog.



It's kinda basic, but it does the job. I have set up a new page in the sidebar from where you can download it. Note that it will only work with the Mac's Dashboard, and not in the Yahoo! (Konfabulator) environment.

Ryanair have been in the news a bit in the last week or so (when are they ever out of it? you may ask.) Last week, the company was singled out by a British politician, criticising their environmental record. Today, they came out against the Fine Gael idea of a second airport for Dublin.

On both occasions, Ryanair spokesmen came on to The Last Word to bat for the company. On Friday it was Michael O'Leary himself, and today it was one of his underlings, whose name escapes me at this moment. As well as making their point about the main topic at hand, the discussion on both occasions got around to the issue of a rail link from Dublin city centre to the airport. You might think that Ryanair might support this proposal, but in fact they are quite trenchant in their opposition to it.



On Friday, O'Leary baldly stated that a rail link to the airport would be a waste because no-one would use it. The vast majority of people who come to Dublin airport arrive by car, he said. Today, his lackey said that international experience showed that rail links to airports are a waste of resources. Really? So no-one uses the Stanstead Express when they get off their Ryanair flight to London, then?

This is of course, utter bollocks, and reminiscent of the sort of nonsense we might have heard about air travel to and from Ireland in the days before Ryanair. Why build an airport in the bogs of Mayo, when no-one would use it? Why have flights to regional airports across Europe, when no-one would want to go there?

What are your options for getting to Dublin airport at present?

- Private car. Delays likely on the M50 or on the roads out of the city centre. Long term car park fees.

- Taxi. Expensive, and again you can get badly stuck in traffic.

- Aircoach. Probably the best option at present, and it now serves destinations well beyond Dublin city centre. But again, you are at the mercy of the traffic.

- Other buses. Second best option.

A fast rail link that would get you from the city centre to the airport in 15-20 minutes would be massively successful in my opinion. The Luas has shown us that if a good, reliable public transport service is built, people will use it.

A caller suggested that the reason why Ryanair oppose a rail link is because they get a cut off all the car-hire deals booked through their website, and that Dublin Airport has one of the biggest car-hire markets in Europe.

Macworld today was pretty much all about one product - iPhone. For months the speculation was rife that Apple were working on a phone, but no-one had an inkling just how advanced this thing appears to be. (Incidentally, I queried the iPhone name yesterday, and would be interested to find out how Apple got around the fact that Cisco already have a product called iPhone on the market.)

There's a good demo of the various features of the device on the US Apple site. It has the effortless handling and ease of use we expect from an Apple product, and should be the runaway success of the year.

This is a major new departure for Apple, but the mobile phone market is the one they simply had to get in on. Right now, the control 75% or thereabouts of the MP3 player market, but that is small fry compared to the massive global market for mobile phones. Here in Ireland, there are more mobile phones than people. The problem for Apple is that this is not a stand-alone product. You can't just buy one from the Apple Store and get it going. For each market, Apple must entrust their device to a carrier network to enable it to connect to the wider world. In the US, Apple has gone with Cingular. Who will get it for Ireland, I wonder? Hopefully Comreg will not be involved in any way!

I just noticed that the QuickTime link for the Keynote address has gone live. I got as far as 8 minutes in before it tanked. This happens every Keynote day. The demand for the video is huge, and as soon as everyone piles in, it's easy to get elbowed out of the way. I'll try again tomorrow.

Added Weds night: I seem to be having problems with Haloscan for this post, and have been unable to reply to Frank McGahon's comment of this morning, so I'll post it here:

And many happy returns to all in the McGahon household, Frank.From where I'm standing, one of the biggest problems I can for foresee in getting the phone out to markets other than the US, is Apple's choice of carrier. Some of the features of the iPhone were developed in tandem with Cingular, e.g. the selectable voicemail messages. Can Apple confirm that features like this will work if they go with O2 or Vodafone here in Ireland?Also there is the issue of connectivity. As far as I'm aware, EDGE isn't in use in Europe, so will Apple have to modify the handset to work satisfactorily with say, Vodafone 3G?Battery life looks good in comparison to the Treo and the Blackberry Pearl, however the battery is sealed within the device, a similar arrangement to the iPod. This will cause a bit of grief, because it will require that the phone go to a repair centre for a new battery when the installed one eventually runs out.I still want one, though...

Apple's year started as always with Macworld in San Francisco. This is the show where the company sets out its stall for the coming twelve months, and is often the showcase for new product lines.

While there weren't any completely new goodies on offer last January, the big news story was the launch of the first two Intel-equipped Macs - the iMac and the MacBook Pro. Both sported the Core Duo chip, and the MBP came equipped with a built-in iSight. iLife '06 was released as well, and it included a new app - iWeb, a basic, template-driven web-publishing platform.

The move to Intel continued throughout the year, with the Mac mini converted in April, the MacBook replacing the G4 iBook in May, and finally the Power Mac sailing off into the twilight in August, to be replaced by the new quad-core MacPro. Overall, it took just 14 months to port the entire range over to Intel.

Since then, all Core Duo models (with the exception of the mini) got bumped up to Core 2 Duo processors in the Autumn. Some prices dropped (most notably on the iMac) and installed RAM was increased. The iMac line got a new big brother, a 24-inch behemoth.

Almost as soon as the Intel machines appeared, the race was on to see who would be the first to install Windows on them. A competition was launched and eventually a shaky video appeared confirming the worst fears of the most fundamentalist of Mac devotees - Windows XP booting on an iMac. Shortly afterwards, Apple themselves released a beta of a new app called BootCamp, which allowed Windows to be installed on a separate partition of any Mactel HD. And then Parallels Desktop appeared, which enabled Windows to run on top of OS X, so that a reboot wasn't needed to swtich between the two.

Apart from its computer business, Apple had another highly successful year in the world of digital entertainment. The iPod continued to dominate the market, even though there was little enhancement of the device itself. The nano got to second generation status, and reclaimed the look of the player it replaced, with bright colours replacing the black-or-white-only option of the first generation nanos. The Shuffle got a complete redesign and became even smaller. Are we getting closer to the iPod flea, I wonder?



More competition for the iPod emerged in the form of the Zune from Microsoft. Launched in November, it had a quiet start, and so far hasn't made a serious impact into the iPod's position as dominant player.

Alongside all this was the revamp of the Apple's digital music marketplace, the iTunes Music Store. Full-length feature films were added to the offering (US store only, as yet), and the word 'Music' was dropped from the title. So far, the only movies available are from Disney, which should come as no surprise, seeing as Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on the board of Disney.

The big hype of the year has of course been the mythical iPod/phone hybrid. There have been rumours, sightings, photoshop mockups, alleged patent filings - you name it. One thing there hasn't been is a word from Apple to say that they are developing the thing at all. The balance of probability is that they are, and may even launch it at Macworld later today. Hopefully it will be resolved soon, cos I don't think that the server hosting TUAW will be able to handle another God-knows-how-many "OMG, OMG, iPhone, w00t, w00t" type comments whenever they run yet another IPod phone rumour story.

Apple did allow a couple of sneak-peeks this year of upcoming launches. Leopard, the fifth release of Mac OS X will be launched in the first or second quarter of this year (hopefully, we'll have a date later today), and it was previewed at the Wordwide Developers' Conference in August. There are some nice things in there like Time Machine and Spaces, and some pretty eye-candy added to existing apps like Mail and iChat.

The other pre-launch we were treated to was iTV, a device that will stream digital media content from your Mac or PC to your television. Emboldened by the success of iPod and iTunes, Apple are going hell for leather into the digital entertainment world. They need to get more movie studios on board, and to broaden out the availability of movies through the iTunes Store in order to make this market their own in 2007.

So what does 2007 hold for Apple? Apple themselves are proclaiming 2007 as being a special year, with this graphic on their US homepage for the last few days.

Leopard and iTV (although that will not be its name when it goes on sale) are shoo-ins, and probably the iPod phone as well. (Note to everyone who writes about this thing: Apple don't own the name 'iPhone', Cisco do and have launched a Linksys VoIP phone under than name.) The whole range of Macs will probably get one or more processor refresh throughout the year. The iPod may get a widescreen overhaul and a touchscreen interface. Or indeed it may not.

What will be the hype for this year? Will Apple decide to dip its toes in the games console market? Will Steve Jobs and Saint Bono jointly announce a new Apple product that eliminates world poverty and AIDS?

Oh, and don't forget the new Apple anti-gravity machine, the iFloat.

w00t! indeed.

A while back I wrote a piece about a new pram that we'd bought for the babby, and commented about all the engineering involved:

"There is an incredible amount of engineering in one of these things. They have to match several criteria, such as being easy to fold up, being compact when folded, adaptable, sturdy, having an integrated iPod dock so that baby can sleep to the dulcet tones of her favourite music (OK, I made that one up.)"

I should have friggin' guessed that someone, somewhere would do exactly that.

If you don't have broadband, then you don't get to enjoy some of the quirkier aspects of the web.

Like seeing if you can blend an iPod

Let's start the New Year off with a joke:


Jesus and Saint Peter are golfing. St. Peter steps up to the tee on a par three and hits one long and straight. It reaches the green.

Jesus is up next. He slices it. It heads over the fence into traffic on an adjacent street. Bounces off a truck, onto the roof of a nearby shack and into the rain gutter, down the drain spout and onto a lilly pad at the edge of a lake. A frog jumps up and snatches the ball in his mouth. An eagle swoops down, grabs the frog. As the eagle flies over the green, the frog croaks and drops the ball. It’s in the hole.

Saint Peter looks at Jesus, exasperated. "Are you gonna play golf?" he asks "Or are you just gonna fuck around?"

From "100 Funniest Jokes Of All Time" via Daring Fireball


Happy New Year!