Author: Rory

What explanation can anyone offer for the Google Image Search results for "Rory Parle" (without quotes)? Specifically, where did this rhino come from?

When Homer Simpson was shown to be innocent of sexual harassment based on the evidence presented by Groundskeeper Willie, TV magazine show Rock Bottom broadcast a list of other corrections. Thanks to the wonderful invention that is freeze-frame, you can see the list at SNPP.com. Be warned though. One of the items is "If you are reading this you have no life".

Carnegie Hall is on the corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. It’s reasonably easy to get to, being within walking distance of Central Park and Broadway. Juggling five balls, on the other hand, takes practice. The method I use is a pyramid method (not to be confused with a pyramid scheme) which goes like this:

• Let n equal, say, five.
• Juggle ten runs of n catches, eight runs of n + 1, six runs of n + 2, four runs of n + 3, two runs of n + 4 and one run of n + 5. At each stage record how many times you failed to get a run of the prescribed length, including false starts, drops, and premature gathers.
• Total the number of failed runs. If it’s more than 31 (10 + 8 + 6 + 4 + 2 + 1), just write it down so you can track your long-term improvement and try again another day. If it’s less than 31, increment n by 1 for the next time.

I’ve been using this method since mid January, not at all regularly but on average about once every two days. I’ve got pretty close to pushing n up to 11 which—as well as being an easy Spinal Tap reference—means I qualify more often than not these days. I remember my first qualifying run was only at the beginning of January. It’s this fast rate of improvement that makes juggling such a great hobby.

It seems tha Gmail may finally be opening to the public very soon. They originally predicted the beta period to end last autumn, but it has remained invitation-only well into this year. A few weeks ago members received 50 invites each, to allow more people to join the decreasingly exclusive club. When Gmail was announced last April I signed up to receive news of updates; today I got an email from the team inviting me to open an account. There doesn’t seem to be a signup mechanism on the site yet, but the signs are pointing to an iminent opening.

You’re not really a blogger until you’ve posted a recipe. And a cat picture. Since I don’t have a cat—and the other option is to sneak around my neighbours’ gardens with a digital camera, some clunky lighting equipment and a handful of dead mice—I’ll have to give that a miss. As for the recipe, I don’t think I’ve yet reached the peak of my culinary potential so I’ll give that a miss too, making this post entirely useless but for ("what’s a buttfor?", "for pooping, silly") the all-important link.

Revisiting two recent posts, IE7 and Religion as Software: what role does Internet Explorer 7 play in the religion as software analogy? After throwing it about a bit it has occured to me that a comparison with the Reformation fits reasonably well. Firefox has nailed its 95 theses (make that 101) to the door of the cathedral and Pope Bill III has decided to stop selling indulgences (and start selling security). The Reformation (eventually) led to the possibility of a whole host of religious freedoms in Europe; the Open Source Reformation will lead to interoperable file formats that will then give us true platform independence and therefore, crucially, choice. How long before Microsoft Word supports the Open Office XML format?

I’ve just put up a page on the DIT juggling society website about the Dublin Juggling Convention 2005. It’s on at the beginning of March, Friday the 4^th to Sunday the 6^th. It promises all the usual goodness: workshops, fire show, Renegade show (which I’ve been capitalising; should I have been?) All for the low low price of just €15.

It seems a man by the name of Ryan Air is the most popular man in Ireland, at least according to Google’s new zeitgeist for Ireland.

Occassionally when I drop a skittle on the floor when at the computer I’m tempted to leave it there. They’re very hard to find, particularly the purple ones. Maybe I should just let them pile up there for a week or two and then go find them in bulk.

In the words of WWE‘s Jim "JR" Ross we have some huge news for you ladies and gentlemen. In common with the news we usually get out of Good Ol’ JR this news isn’t actually particularly huge, nor is it at this stage particularly new (I was away from my blog feeds most of the day so I’m only reading about this now).

It seems the fact that over 25 million people have downloaded Firefox in less than 100 days since 1.0 was released has pushed Microsoft to release Internet Explorer 7 sooner than they had planned. The old plan was to release the next version of IE as part of Longhorn, no sooner than 2006. It seems the current plan of releasing a beta this summer will push that forwards by at least a few months (even if Longhorn isn’t delayed; who’ll give me odds on that happening?) Equally importantly the beta (and therefore the final release) will work on Windows XP. On a side note it seems that all the most visible aspects of Longhorn are either now planned for some sort of XP release (IE, Avalon) or shelved altogether (WinFS).

Since Microsoft always refuses to comment on features in development we don’t know if they’ve fixed any of the most frequently annoying bugs that they’ve been spamed about on their IE team blog since it launched. I’m thinking of support for things like PNG alpha transparency, position: fixed, and display: table and its kin.

The best sources on this, from Firefox’s perspective, are Asa and Blake; they seem to have all of the major sources linked.