You may want a hug after this

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Donncha

Chances are you’ve seen this already because 15,459,413 people on Youtube have already watched it. What the hell, if you haven’t, take a minute out of your busy day to hit play. (via)

Posted in Youtube | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Police Brutality in Barcelona

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Donncha

If you’ve been watching the news you probably missed the bit about the protests in Spain recently. I certainly haven’t heard anything about them on Irish radio stations and among those I follow on Twitter only Allan Cavanagh seems to be talking about it. Spanish TV stations aren’t talking about it either apparently:

Meanwhile, Barcelona TV has a cooking show; TV1 is covering an actress with depression; TV3 (Catalan) discussing bass guitars. #acampadabcn

He linked to a very distressing video showing Police brutality against unarmed protesters in Barcelona. Unfortunately (or thankfully depending on how sensitive you are to violence) I can’t embed it here.

I remember years ago a Spanish friend warning me that the Police there weren’t to be messed with, and she was only referring to traffic police.

THIS IS BARCELONA. THIS IS IN SPAIN WHERE YOU WENT ON HOLIDAY. WHAT THE HELL?

Posted in In the news | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Howto: Build a contact form with a Polldaddy survey

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Donncha

I just added a contact form to the about page here using a Polldaddy survey. While it’s not as straight forward as installing a plugin to do the job, I think it’s worth doing because it touches on all aspects of Polldaddy survey creation. After you’ve created this contact form on your own blog you’ll know how to create a Polldaddy survey, a custom style sheet and how to change the language in the form too. It’s very flexible.

Here’s how I did it.

  1. Login to Polldaddy and on the dashboard create a new survey for your contact form.
  2. Give your form a descriptive name and select the custom stylesheet. You’ll have to create a new one. I use the WordPress 2010 theme so I based my stylesheet on the Plain White theme. Changes are minor, mainly to accommodate width and font size. Grab the css file here and copy it into your style.
  3. Now on to the questions. I created a simple Name, Email and Comment form.
  4. You need to tell the survey where to send responses. After saving, go to Reports->Data and scroll down to the Email Notifications where you can fill in your details. You can also subscribe to an rss feed or send responses to a HTTP URL.

  5. To embed the form in your website use the embed popup and choose “Website Inline”. The iframe code should be copied into the new page that will hold your contact form.

  6. You’ll have a form that looks like this.

  7. You’re not finished yet though. Submit the form and you’ll see the message, “Survey Completed”. That’s not exactly appropriate for a contact form is it? Go to the languages page and create a new Survey Pack. You can change just about every bit of text displayed in the form here. After you’ve saved the language pack go back to the edit survey page and select the correct language pack:
  8. The one final job to do is to adjust the iframe size. I made each field of the form mandatory but that raises errors when you submit an empty form. Those errors make the form longer than the default and the iframe is too small to hold it. I bumped the height to 900 pixels and no more ugly scrollbars! There’s more empty whitespace below the form but my contact form is at the end of the page so I don’t mind.

You could also use the Javascript embed method, but that loads the survey form in a css popup window. I prefer the iframe method.

As you can see, Polldaddy surveys are incredibly flexible and offer a lot of customization options. I work on Polldaddy code every day so of course I’ll say this but I’d have no hesitation in recommending the service to anyone needing polls, surveys, quizzes or ratings. Create a free account and give it a spin!

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Hello Ubuntu 11.04

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Donncha

Today is the big day. A new release of Ubuntu Linux is out. Version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal” is the first to ship with the Unity desktop and I’m very impressed! If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Ubuntu website or this handy guide.

I like:

  • The auto hiding sidebar of icons. When a window is maximised it hides. Long click on an icon to move it around, and right click for a context dialog to remove it.
  • Control Center is 2 clicks away in the top right where there appears to be a light switch. That menu also has a lock screen item and various session controls.
  • Apps with multiple windows show a corresponding number of dots next to their icon on the sidebar. Click on the icon and you see all the windows of that application.
  • Application menus are in the top toolbar ala Mac OS. Some, like Chrome, aren’t however.
  • Long press Windows key and the sidebar icons are highlighted with numbers 0-9 to quick choose them.
  • Click the Ubuntu logo in the top left and you get a nice applications dispay.
  • Speedy alt-tab previews of each Window.
  • Left and right maximising of windows like in Windows 7. I think you need to drag it a bit further than in Windows 7 however, no bad thing. Full screen maximise on dragging a window to the top of the screen.
  • Painless upgrade from 10.10.

And what I didn’t like:

  • The window display for multi window apps requires you select a window. It’d be great if I could click the app icon again to return to the same window. ESC does the job though.
  • GIMP tear away menus are still broken, but this is likely an issue with GIMP. It was present in the last release of Ubuntu too and I just found a work around this evening.
    The menus you are looking for are no longer part of the drop-down menus, but rather part of a right-click menu visible when clicking on the canvas.

    I found using the space bar after clicking the menu option worked on torn off menus. This may be a bug.

  • The lack of formal application menus is off putting initially but it’s actually easy enough to find things with the new launcher.
  • I doubt I’ll ever like the thin scrollbar. There is a way to change that, must find out how.
  • Why does Ubuntu keep installing Evolution every time I upgrade? I’m fairly sure I uninstall that each and every time ..

In previous versions of Ubuntu I always felt the eye candy was there just to make things look pretty. With Unity they’re actually putting that graphical horsepower to good use. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, give it a spin! You can even try it without installing anything simply by booting from the install disk (or usb drive) and opting for that. Check out the download page for further details.

Posted in Linux | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Moriarty Tribunal in Text

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Donncha

The Moriarty Tribunal cost the Irish tax payer more than 100 million Euro and all we got was a 2,400 page protected PDF.

If you view the report’s PDF files you won’t be able to quote from it by selecting and copying text. You’ll have to manually type out anything you want to extract because the files are protected.

Value for money eh? Anyway, I ran the pdf files through the tool “pdftotext” and came up with m1.txt and m2.txt.
Use the original PDF files to read the report but for your convenience these text files will be much easier to quote from.

Please don’t link directly to them, mirror them on your own site if you write about them!

Here’s a Wordle tag cloud of the findings created by Jamie Lawrence.

Posted in Ireland | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Amazon Appstore opens in North America

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Donncha

The Amazon Appstore for Android opened today and apparently Apple are already suing them for confusing consumers with a name similar to their App Store.

I wouldn’t really know because after downloading the Appstore app (beautifully simple procedure: click a link in an email/text to a .apk file) and logging into Amazon it refused to let me download the exclusive Angry Birds Rio game.

The Amazon Appstore for Android is not yet available in your region

Good thing I’m sick of Angry Birds, but it’d be nice if it worked over here too!

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Make Android screenshots without root

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Donncha

Sometimes you can learn useful things from a bad thing happening. Yesterday came the news that 21 popular apps on the Android market had been copied. They were uploaded again to the market with similar sounding names but loaded with a trojan.

That installed a rootkit on your phone to get root access and then sent private data to a remote server in the US. All the apps have been removed, and the developer accounts banned but of course it’s a bad day for Android. :(

Anyway, this Symantic post explains how to know if you’ve been unlucky enough to download one of these apps. Open up Settings->Applications->Running Services and look for “DownloadManageService”.

I did that and found a service I didn’t recognise, ScreenCaptureService. What? In the past I had to root my phone to take screenshots. How do I do it now? A quick search and I found this thread. Apparently pressing the back key and power key starts the service and this post explains that pressing Back and Home takes a screenshot! This is a Froyo, (Android 2.2), feature and a welcome one but I wonder why it’s not documented?

Screenshots are stored on your SD card, in a ScreenCapture directory. The screenshot above was created with it. No root required!

Posted in Android | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Stephen Fry on Ros na Rún

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Donncha

Beidh Stephen Fry ar Ros na Rún anocht ar TG4. Looking forward to watching it! (via)

Posted in tv | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Parents: baby’s first years

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Donncha

I know many of my readers are already parents so they’ve been through the life changing event that is the birth of a baby. The video above may well prepare the rest of you for this moment when you become a parent. Well worth watching. (via)

Posted in Humour | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

WordPress in my Minecraft

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Donncha

I logged into my Minecraft server yesterday evening to see a stunning WordPress logo up on a hill. It was created by Thorsten. No it wasn’t. Author remains unknown. I wonder who created it?

I really must get that Minecraft commmentary done so I can show off what he and everyone else created in this world..

Posted in Games, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments