Life is grand

And not just for a tour but a brand spanking new album:

Singer Frank Black has confirmed the band will start work in January on their first record since 1991’s ‘Trompe Le Monde’.

Deadly!

The creator of Dilbert wrote about a fascinating, and deeply scary, event in his life; the loss and find of his voice.

I imagine it is one of those things that you have to experience to truly appreciate. To most of us it sounds almost trivial. In the end he asks people to write about the happiest moment of their life. In a similar, though far more common, vein to Scott’s experience I think one of my happiest moments was the day I got contact-lenses.

I am not blind but I do have to wear something to correct my eyes. Reading, driving, playing sport or working without glasses is a blurry, dangerous experience for me. I think most people take their eyesight for granted and have very little idea what it is like to be dependant on two circles of polished plastic on a bit of wire.

People like me know that coca-cola is a good way of keeping those tiny eye-glass screws in place.

And so the day I got contact-lenses was a good day. I could go from the cold outdoors to the warm indoors and not be temporarily blinded as my glasses demisted. I could wear a diving mask and actually see what was going on underwater (glasses don’t fit in most diving masks.) I finally had decent peripheral vision. I could wear any pair of sunglasses I wanted. I didn’t have to use the hem of my shirt to clean my glasses every 15 minutes. I could run or cycle and not worry about my glasses slipping off. Helmets fitted better and I could see the girl I was kissing.

Everything felt very big and clear that first day I walked around with contact-lenses in.

I imagine an even happier day will be the one when I remove the cotton wads from my eyes after laser surgery and not be dependant on anything to see ever again.

Tangerine is a fantastic side-car app to iTunes. Basically it creates a playlist based on the beats per minute of the songs in your iTunes library. So if you want a fast, dancy hour of music just tell Tangerine and it will create it.

I lived 20 years in South Africa, one of the most violent countries on Earth, and never saw a single street fight.

I have lived 1 year in Ireland and seen two people have their heads kicked in on the street.

Tonight I walked past a man beaten till he was unconcious. I watched his head get wedged under a car tire, his torso pushed under a bumper by the force of the kicks. He went limp as two men kicked him. He was corpulent and it took many kicks to move him. They kicked him, he got to his knees and they kicked him back down.

This was in the center of Waterford, the 3rd biggest city in Ireland. The victim was Lithuanian and the attackers Russian. My girlfriend, Irish, tried to intervene and the Russians, herding her away, simply told her that the Lithuanian hadn’t paid his dues. They mentioned 20 thousand Euro and 60 thousand Euro. While one Russian was talking to her I saw the unconcious man stagger to his feet, walk around the corner and then pull a knife on two other Russians following him. They beat him back to the ground. He got up again and walked down to the quays and around a corner.

My only concern was getting my girlfriend and another friend back to our apartment just a few hundred meters away. Tomorrow we will report it. Hopefully the growing statistics on foreign-national crime will kick start the Gardae (Irish police) into cracking down on them. Till then I can only think of moving out of the city center. I don’t want to run away but there is no chance I or the few others in the area can stand up to this. These are hardened thugs from eastern Europe, they won’t think twice about silencing a few people.

A strange night really. Earlier our friend’s jacket had been stolen from Muldoons (a pub) while my girlfriends coat was close to being stolen. She had to grab the coat back from a young woman who was walking out the door. Only a few minutes later did we realise she had taken the other friend’s jacket.

It is horrible that I get to experience this in Ireland. It is sad to see the difference between poverty driven crime as we have back home in South Africa and this greedy, brutal and organised crime I see in Ireland. I have no sympathy here, there is no excuse for it.

Glickr is hilarious. Give it a tag, your Flickr screen name and then select the photos. It will produce an animated GIF. Lots of fun with tags like the above which is my One A Day set.

We are getting to a point in our project where we want the different bits to start integrating. One part is Java, another is C++ and the part I am responsible for is Ruby on Rails. All of this runs off of a MySQL 5 database.

The database schema is owned by a C++ guy and while he was willing to modify some of his style to fit Rails conventions I told him not to. To be honest I was worried when I said that. It was a risk thinking that Rails would be able to handle a non-standard database. Not only were primary and join tables named completely differently to Rails conventions but the columns were quite different and the data the one Rails app needed to get at was spread over multiple databases.

About 10 minutes ago I sat back in my creaky chair and sighed a sigh of relief. It all works. Rails handles the non-standard setup just fine.

We first made views of the underlying tables (which is why we are on MySQL 5) to get as close to Rails conventions as we could. It wasn’t perfect though as all our views are prefixed. By default Rails won’t handle that unless I bastardised my model naming which we weren’t going to do. The next trick was to use AustinMoody’s def self.table_name() “mpq.mpqs” end tip to tell Rails what table (actually, views) to use. It also solved the multiple-database problem as you just prefix the table name with the database name.

I then found out about the :join_table option on has_and_belongs_to_many in your models which deals with the join tables.

And that is all it took. I am relieved and impressed with Rails. I get all the good stuff while working on a decidely non-conventional Rails database setup.

Balconies

Originally uploaded by Jim Moran.

Google Co-op allows you to create your own search engine. You specify a list of sites and are given a home-page which lets you use Google to search just that list or the whole web but with an emphasis on those sites.

This is really useful for specialists or groups of people who have a set of quality sources on a given topic. e.g. Ruby on Rails developers or horticulturalist. Google Co-op lets just one person or a group of invited people to contribute to the list.

I think it is even more useful as a personal search engine. Here I have created a search list that searches just my resources on the web. It includes my Flickr photos, my del.icio.us and Blinklist links and my blog. Other people can use it but it is more useful to me as a way to pull out past things I have written about, photographed or linked to.

Rollyo does much this but I found their interface a bit complicated and it wasn’t using the great Google search engine.

You may notice just above the comments section below is a new feature; the Evoca Browser Mic. It is yet another good idea from Evoca. It lets anyone leave a voice comment on my blog. It uses Flash to record and send the recording to my Evoca account. Give it a bash.

Fearless by Ronny Yu and starring Jet Li tells a powerful story of the founding of the Jin Wu Sport Federation which brought wushu (literally “martial arts” in China) together. Fearless is easily one of the best of the run of beautiful, high-production value martial movies that have come out of the East in the past few years. Fearless is hard and gritty unlike some of the others where the fights can be choreographed till they might as well be two butterflies farting at each other in the wind.

Speaking of wind I also got to see The Wind That Shakes the Barley which is a good film. It isn’t all it is cracked up to be with my main objection being that it is neither a strong tale between brothers nor a broad story of the Irish nation. It floats between the two and loses out on both. It is still worth seeing.