• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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  Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License

  

Continuing my efforts to photograph historic buildings in the Maynooth area I set out to visit the Wonderful Barn in Leixlip (it’s about 6km from Maynooth). When I set off the weather was good but by the time I arrived it had started to rain a little so the pictures are not what they could be. However, they are still better than nothing.

You can have a look at my pictures of the Wonderful Barn in my gallery. The rest of this article contains more information about this very special building and some related links.

[tags]Photography, Ireland, Leixlip, Wonderful Barn, Granary, Dovecote, Famine Relief, Folly[/tags]

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I regularly have a go a Microsoft for not patching vulnerabilities quickly enough. The recent shambles with the animated cursor flaw proves that MS still have a long way to go in terms of security. However, they are a not alone. Apple have a definite advantage over MS when it comes to security, they have built OS X on top of the very robust and security conscious FreeBSD distribution of Unix, while MS are building on the shoddy foundation that is DOS and early versions of NT. A lot of current Windows vulnerabilities lie in this very old code, the Animated Cursor flaw being a good recent example. However, Apple are being complacent. They seem to be drinking too much of their own cool-aid and are acting as if OS X really is immune from attack. It is of course not immune, and with Apple TV and the iPhone now also running OS X it’s becoming a bigger target every day. When vulnerabilities are reported Apple have to respond promptly, unfortunately the current SAMBA flaw in OS X proves they are not doing this.

[tags]SAMBA, OS X, Security, Apple[/tags]

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Tagged with: vulnerability • OS X • Apple

The Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been notoriously tight lipped while she was writing the Potter Books. She said very little and when she did answer questions she always chose her answers very carefully. Now that the final Potter book is out we are getting to see a new more open JKR. She now seems happy to share what ever other information she has about Harry and his world with an eager public.

WARNING – the remainder of this post contains Harry Potter 7 spoilers!

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Well, it’s over. The Seventh Book is out and I’ve finished reading it. This post contains my initial reactions and a rundown of how many of my predictions from almost two years ago came to pass. To protect people who haven’t read the book yet from spoilers I won’t be putting anything else here in the preview, you’ll have to read the article itself to see more.

[tags]Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows[/tags]

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Although we should all be very well organised and we should never forget about files on our disk, we all leave files lying around where we shouldn’t. Then we forget about the files, and a few months later we’re wondering just where all our disk space has gone! Ideally you’d want to be able to get a visual representation of your disk where large files stand out no matter where they’re hidden. Windows users have had a solution to this problem for a long time with WinDirStat. There is now a port of WinDirStat for OS X called Disk Inventory X. This is very simple and very intuitive program and what’s even better is that it’s free and open source! Although it’s a port of a Windows program the port is well done so it looks like a proper OS X application.

[tags]Apple, OS X, Disk Inventory X, WinDirStat, Freeware[/tags]

Tagged with: open source • software • review • OS X

I’ve had a whole series of potter articles in the back of my brain for the last few months and I just haven’t gotten them out. Now with the book officially only two days away and a leaked copy doing the rounds on the internet I guess those posts are just not going to be. Two friends of mine now have a copy of the leaked book and both are convinced it is genuine. So, it would seem that the time for predictions is over and the time to watch out for spoilers has begun. I have to say I just don’t get the mentality of those people who think it’s fun or clever to ruin the book for the fans. Yesterday a supposedly sensible and educated chap ruined the book for a good friend of mine by posting spoilers on Mikado (our college bulleting board system). I have to say I was not impressed. What kind of sicko takes pleasure from causing others pain? Surely someone with a personality like that needs help? Anyhow, I’m being very very careful about what I read and what sites I visit for the next few days but before I vanish into hiding I just want to list the important un-answered questions from the first six books as I see them (in order):

1. What were Snape & Dumbledore arguing about in the forest when Hagrid over-heard them? – Theories that Dumbledore ordered Snape to kill him hinge on this
2. On who’s orders Snape to betray Emaline Vance? We know Snape gave Voldemort information that led to her murder, was that a solo-run by Snape or was it on Dumbledore’s orders? This would give us insight into which side Snape is really on.
3. What did Dumbledore’s little gleam of triumph at the news that Voldemort used Harry’s blood to return to power mean?
4. Who is R.A.B.?

There are some things we expect every media player to do out of the box, you know, the basics, actually playing media and that kind of thing. Most people would consider a full-screen mode to be one of these core features that all media players must have. Apple didn’t think so. Past versions of QuickTime made you upgrade to the pro version for $30 if you wanted full-screen playback. Needless to say this annoyed a lot of people. It just looked like greed on Apple’s part and drove people away from Quicktime towards free alternatives like VLC. However, as of QuickTime 7.2 which was released this week you get free full-screen playback. Great to see common-sense finally winning out in the QuickTime division of Apple. THANKYOU!

Tagged with: QuickTime • software • review • OS X • Apple

It was my brother’s stag do last weekend and he chose to spend it in Letterkenny in Donegal. I took my camera with me and got some nice shots around Letterkenny town on the Saturday morning while the rest were still in bed. Then on the Sunday on the way home Dad took a detour via the first wind farm he ever developed, Owenreagh in Co. Omagh.

• The Letterkenny Gallery
• The Owenreagh Gallery

[tags]Donegal, Ireland, Letterkenny, Omagh, Owernreagh, Wind Farm, Wind Power[/tags]

Despite the advent of broadband excessive round-trips to the server still slow websites down. Having to send a request to the server to get the same data again but in a different order each time someone wants to sort a table is just not efficient. Hence, what you want is some nice simple JavaScript to do it for you. Ideally this JavaScript should be cross-browser and should not require you to make any substantive changes to your mark-up. Well, the good news is that this ideal has been realized and has been released under the free and open source MIT License. I’m talking about Stuart Langridge’s Sorttable.

Assuming you use proper XHTML markup for your tables, in particluar thead and tbody tags, making your tables sortable is a two-step process:

1. Include sorttable.js
2. Set the class of the tables you want sortable to sortable

For a basic setup that’s it! If you want to get a little more fancy you can by doing things like making some columns un-sortable but that too is trivially easy. Honestly, I have no complaints at all about this script, it just works!

[tags]XHTML, tables, sortable tables, JavaScript[/tags]

Tagged with: JavaScript

I reviewed Perian a few months ago when it was at version 0.5. I was already very happy with it then, but it’s gotten better. It used to just be a simple QuickTime component, now it comes as a Preference Pane so it can be easily controlled from within the System Preferences app. It still does everything it used to do, and indeed more, but now it’s easier to manage. If you run OS X Tiger (doesn’t work on earlier versions) and you haven’t already done so, now is the time to download and install Perian.

[tags]Perian, Apple, OS X, Video, QuickTime[/tags]

Tagged with: media player • open source • software • review • OS X