JJ looking pensive in old age. We will have Burgundy and gorgonzola sandwiches at half past noon in honour of Mr Leopold Bloom, late of No. 7 Eccles Street, Dublin.
Which reminds me of a nice Irish joke:
First man: “Do you like gorgonzola?”
Second man: “No, but I hear his brother Emile is a bloody fine writer.”
A friend telephones to tell me about the front cover of the new issue of The Phoenix, the nearest thing Ireland has to a satirical magazine. The issue marks the passing of its old adversary, An Duce. I can’t locate the publication online, alas, but my informant describes it thus:
The cover shows (President) Mary McAleese looking grimly presidential, eyes half closed, looking into the middle distance. The photograph was taken at some State occasion or other, possibly the centenary of the Easter Rising. Behind her stands Bertie ‘Gurrier’ Ahern, complete with black overcoat and red nose. McAleese is saying, “He touched millions”. Bertie is muttering, “You’re telling me”. Or words to that effect.
I also hear that some Joyceans, who often renact Paddy Dignam’s funeral on Bloomsday, are planning to make a detour to take in the Haughey obsequies. The Latin Americans have nothing on us when it comes to Magic Realism.
The user-generated content bandwagon rolls on. Jumpcut is a web service which enables you to edit small movies (add soundtracks, efffects, etc) in your browser. According to this New York Times report, there are lots of workalike services on the way:
Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.
Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.
“We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing,” said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. “We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail.”
Mr. Kaskade refers to the process as “mixing,” however, saying he believes that the term “editing” may sound labor-intensive to the amateur videographer. Previously, putting together a multishot video like Mr. Moore’s would have involved installing and learning to use a piece of software like iMovie from Apple, Adobe Premiere or Studio from Pinnacle Systems. Some of that software is packaged free with new computers or sold for about $100.
The analyst firm Parks Associates estimated last year that only about four million people regularly use such software for video editing — far fewer than the number who capture video using camcorders, Webcams, digital still cameras and cellphones.
But with more videos of soccer games, weddings and cruise vacations being posted online — and potentially being seen by people who have not been dragooned into the living room for a showing — editing gains in importance, Mr. Kaskade says, even if it involves trimming only the dizzying camera whirls at the beginning of a shot, or the inevitable question, “Are you taping right now?”
The bandwidth implications of this are interesting. All of the sites, except Grouper, require that video clips be uploaded to their servers before they can be manipulated. That can take a long time, and there are limits to the size of the files that can be sent. (For Jumpcut, the limit is 50 megabytes per clip.)
Grouper users have to download a free piece of Windows-only software that works in conjunction with the Web site. It permits users to trim and rearrange clips on their PC and upload only the finished product, in compressed form.
Apple has released three more of those wicked videos which make fun of the poor, misunderstood PC. Not recommended for Wintel users with delicate constitutions.
Photographed in a restaurant, while waiting for the food.
Yeah — I know I’ve photographed it before. But one day I will get it right.
My countrymen are disgracing themselves again. Charlie Haughey, the former Fianna Fail leader and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) has died, in his bed, of cancer, at the ripe old age of 80. As one of the most corrupt politicians in the short history of the Irish state (which means he came top of a high-quality field), he ought to have died in gaol. But that’s not what rattles me; it’s the unctuous drivel that prominent Irishmen and women are spouting today. Listening to them, you’d think that it was some weird combination of Spinoza and Nelson Mandela who had passed away. Listen, for example, to what the country’s leading sky pilots have been saying:
The Primate of All-Ireland, Dr Seán Brady, said Mr Haughey was an able and talented politician who did much to promote the interests of Ireland and her people.
Dr Brady said Mr Haughey was a reforming politician who had considerable success in introducing measures to take care of the less well-off and disadvantaged in our society.
He said Mr Haughey will also be remembered for pioneering public utility allowance schemes and free transport for the elderly.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, said Mr Haughey was a man who engaged the people of Ireland over the last 40 years on the public stage.
Archbishop Martin said that these days following the death of the former Taoiseach were not ones for writing history books. He said a full and balanced analysis of Mr Haughey’s impact on Irish life would take time and careful consideration….
John Hume, the Nobel laureate, said:
Peace and justice in the North of Ireland was always at the top of the agenda for Charles Haughey and when I started to talk to Gerry Adams, he strongly supported me. He worked very closely with me in preparation for the whole movement to get lasting peace and an end to violence with the Downing Street Declaration and he fully briefed his successor Albert Reynolds.
The former Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach, Garrett Fitzgerald said that Haughey was:
a man of formidable political skills. Despite their public political differences, their relationship was always marked by courtesy and absence of personal antagonism.
Eh?
It gets worse. Haughey is to be given a State Funeral on Friday, and the current Taoiseach and Fianna Fail leader, Bertie Ahern, is to give the oration at the graveside. I look forward to the solemn tones of the RTE commentators as the cortege passes various landmarks in Haughey’s rapacious career. The local branch of Allied Irish Banks, for example, which tried to call in Haughey’s six-figure overdraft and were told to get stuffed. (Deciding that it rather hoped to do further business in Ireland, the bank wrote off the debt.) Will there be a respectful pause when the procession reaches a branch of Dunne’s Stores, one of whose family directors (Ben) handed over colossal sums of money to Haughey in brown envelopes? And what of the numerous housing estates built on green belt land mysteriously rezoned for development after being purchased by Haughey and his mates? And will the cortege stop briefly at the polling station where Haughey’s election agent was caught voting twice (and later prosecuted for that offence)?
Compassionate souls will say that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, especially on the day of decease, and in general I agree. In which case, the right thing to have done today would have been to note Haughey’s passing, express condolences to his family and leave it at that. But for the State to honour so conspiciously a man who so comprehensively polluted Irish political life beggars belief. And it leads one to wonder what’s really going on.
Part of the problem with Haughey is that everybody knew he was bent — but nobody ever dared to say anything. It was only when Ben Dunne spilt the beans after being arrested for possession of drugs while on a junket to Florida that the whole can of worms was levered open. I remember once being on holiday in Dingle many years ago. Haughey had bought Inishvickillane — a beautiful, uninhabited island in the Blaskets off the Kerry coast — and was building a house on it. The problem with Inishvickillane is that it is largely inaccessible from the sea, so most of the building materials were airlifted in by helicopter. As I watched the aerial comings and goings I started to estimate the costs of the operation. At that time helicopter charter costs were something like £200 an hour. I looked up Charlie’s ministerial salary — it was, I think, about £60,000 a year. Eventually I said to a local onlooker: “How can Charlie afford this?” He looked at me, smiled slyly, and said “Aw sure, you know Charlie”.
And that, of course, was part of the problem. Everyone knew what Charlie was like. There was widespread tacit acceptance that the planning system — largely controlled by Fianna Fail — was comprehensively corrupt. Worse than that — there was a kind of cynical admiration of the brazenness of the Haughey clique — as Conor Cruise O’Brien discovered to his cost when he ran for election in the late 1960s.
O’Brien had held the Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities in New York University during most of the 1960s and was at that time a classic liberal intellectual. (He had, for example, been arrested during protests against the Vietnam war.) But he eventually decided that his country needed him and returned home to run for the Dail (the Irish Parliament). He ran against Haughey as a Labour candidate in the latter’s North Dublin constituency. (Under Ireland’s proportional representation system, there are multi-member constituencies.) During the campaign, O’Brien discovered that some farmland that Haughey had purchased in the locality had, mysteriously, been re-zoned for housing development, increasing its value tenfold. O’Brien fulminated against this apparent abuse of power and obviously calculated that in so doing he would damage Haughey. But he was wrong. Haughey was returned with a considerably increased majority. It was if the electorate was saying “Sure, he’s corrupt, but good luck to him.”
So why the sudden attack of amnesia brough on by Haughey’s demise? Could it be that it’s just too embarrassing for the proud jockeys of the Celtic Tiger to admit that, in the not very distant past, their country was a rotten little borough off the mainland of Europe, run by a corrupt bunch of shysters who were the direct political ancestors of our own dear Euro-friendly Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern? Better to emphasise the positive aspects of Charlie — for example his ‘contribution’ to the peace process — than to dwell on these sordid realities. To me, it smacks of the famous attempt to find something good to say about Mussolini: that at least he made the trains run on time.
* Footnote: ‘An’ is the definite article in Irish.
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
On Friday, officials from The National Nuclear Security Administration told a House oversight committee that a malicious hacker stole a computer file containing the names and Social Security numbers of 1,500 employees of the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons agency. The theft was detected last September, but no one bothered to report it to senior officials until late last week. NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks blamed the cockup on “bureaucratic confusion.” “It appears that each side of that organization assumed that the other side had made the appropriate notification,” Brooks told the House energy panel’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. “Just as the secretary just learned about this week, I learned this week that the secretary didn’t know. There are a number of us who in hindsight should have done things differently on informing.” That explanation didn’t fly with Rep. Joe Barton, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, though. “That’s hogwash,” Rep. Barton told Brooks. “You report directly to the secretary. You meet with him or the deputy every day…. You had a major breach of your own security and yet you didn’t inform the secretary,” adding “you should be removed from your office as expeditiously as possible. And I mean like 5 o’clock this afternoon.”
Fact 1: The NNSA is a semi-autonomous arm of the Energy Department and also guards some of the U.S. military’s nuclear secrets and responds to global nuclear and radiological emergencies.
Fact 2: Earlier this week the Pentagon revealed that personal information on about 2.2 million active-duty, National Guard and Reserve troops was stolen last month from a government employee’s house.
[Source]
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
More than 60 percent of Windows PCs scanned by Microsoft’s Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (WMSRT) between January 2005 and March 2006 hosted malware. This according to a new research report released by Microsoft this morning. Since it first debuted in January 2005, WMSRT has removed 16 million instances of malicious software from 5.7 million unique Windows machines. On average, the tool removes at least one virus, Trojan, rootkit or worm from every 311 computers it examines.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Matt Braverman, who authored the report, told eWEEK. “In addition to the fact that bots are high on the list, we’re seeing a significant amount of new variants everyday. We’re adding detections for about 2,000 new Rbot variants (to the MSRT) with each release. Bots are not only active on computers. It’s something that the attackers are modifying and turning around quickly. They’re moving in, corralling a set of users, stealing information, then moving on to the next target.”
My MacBook Pro has arrived. In general, I’m impressed by the smoothness of the transition Apple has made to the new processor architecture. The Rosetta emulator does a good job of running software written for the PowerPC processor, and the new native applications are indeed noticeably faster. The only big snag I’ve hit so far is that Adobe PhotoShop CS won’t run — it launches and then quits. This is a pain, since PhotoShop is a key application for me. A spot of Googling failed to unearth any obvious solution. But then I remembered that I also had an old copy of PhotoShop 7 in my Applications folder, so I launched that and it runs perfectly. And although I’m sure CS is a more sophisticated program than its predecessor, a naive user like me can’t honestly tell the difference.
Update: Lots of helpful suggestions from readers — for which many thanks. One suggested that there was a known issue which could be solved by updating to QuickTime 7.1.1. But I was already running that. Quentin suggested creating a test account and logging in on it to see if CS ran properly in those conditions — in which case the problem would be something connected with my CS plug-ins or preferences. I did this and CS ran perfectly. So then logged in as myself and — guess what? CS runs perfectly! I give up. (But I’m not complaining, either!)