I got a present of this last year, but between much tooing and froing it only arrived today. This is a handmade carving set made by a craftsman called Rory Connor. He is based in Ballylickey, West Cork and he makes the most amazing handcrafted knives.

This is his standard carving set, but I upgraded to Damascene Steel (think samurai sword steel). The handles are made out of snakewood. my standard knife sharpness test is to hold the blade horizontal and drag it laterally over the back of my thumbnail to see if it can lift a small amount of nail material. Well that just won’t work with this knife, it just digs in, its is definitely the sharpest knife I have ever owned.

More photos in the flickr photoset.

… God save us from Microsoft Word Morons (typically legal types) who type in headers manually rather than using proper heading levels.

All you ever wanted to know about washing symbols (the strange hierorglyphics on that white tab inside all your clothes) is here.

IMG_0717.JPG

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

Innocent enough looking. Until you try to unwrap them, it often requires heavy work with a knife.

Some day I’m going to line up all the CEOs who use infernal packaging, and the last one to successfully open their product will be subjected a public flogging.

In case you wondering I’m talking to you blister pack sons of bitches!

Here is a cool paradigm for desktop interaction. The use of physics to model desktop interaction is right up the street of a local company based here in Dublin, Havoc Havok.

You can watch the video here. I tried posting it inline, but WordPress’s utterly shite editor keeps scrambling the HTML.

For all you good people out there (you know who you are) who use this hack to create a daily posting of your del.icio.us links, stop it, please stop it!

If I want to see your del.icio.us links I’ll subscribe to your del.icio.us RSS feed or add you to my network.

I’ve been playing with Google Notebook for the past few days as an adjunct to my del.icio.us links. All in all I like it, especially the Firefox extension that allows you to add notes to the current page without occluding it (unlike the del.icio.us extension). There are some gripes though. Firstly the search doesn’t seem to work, it can’t find a note with the string “VAT” in it despite me having a note defining my VAT number. Secondly, it appends notes to the end of the list rather than putting them at the top, blog style. This means you end up doing a lot of scrolling (especially as the search doesn’t work).

All in all I think I’ll stick with it a bit longer. The drag and drop on the notes page itself is sexalicious!

Michi Henning writes about The Rise and Fall of CORBA on the ACM Queue website. In the article he describes the history and development of the CORBA standard and details why it has been relegated to a infrastructure backwater. They key reason for CORBA’s failure that resonates with me is the following statement,

The OMG does not require a reference implementation for a specification to be adopted. This practice opens the door to castle-in-the-air specifications. On several occasions the OMG has published standards that turned out to be partly or wholly unimplementable because of serious technical flaws. In other cases, specifications that could be implemented were pragmatically unusable because they imposed unacceptable runtime overhead. Naturally, repeated incidents of this sort are embarassing and do little to boost customer confidence. A requirement for a reference implementation would have forced submitters to implement their proposals and would have avoided many such incidents.

I recently gave a dig out to somebody by registering a .ie domain for them. Total time from initial application to finally getting the domain up and running (e.g. getting the IEDR to update the nameservers) was 40 days!! Even I can’t believe it when I count it up.

Even if I generously lop of ten days to allow for some delays on my part in responding, this really is atrocious, and we pay a premium price of €95.59 for this service.

They farcically recommend you use a reseller, but when I tried to register initially via hostireland, I got bounced straight back to the IEDR, who required me to fax (yes fax, not email) in a justification.

My advice, stick to godaddy.com and register any kind of domain you want for $9.95, in seconds.

I came across these sweet cigarettes,

in our local Spar shop on Sunday.

Maybe I’m out of touch with children’s sweets but I haven’t seen anything like this,

since my dad ran a sweet shop in Artane (Dublin) in the 1970s (when everybody smoked).

Given the common knowledge that cigarette companies sales are in terminal decline and as a result they are targetting younger and younger demographics, isn’t it somewhat irresponsible to be selling such lifelike cigarette sweets?

(Conspiracy theorists can ponder the fact the Ferton France SA who manufacture these sweets have no website to speak off, they couldn’t possibly have links to big tobacco, could they? Who knows?)