I travelled to Galway to collect my new Dell 30″ Widescreen Monitor this weekend. I brought down my graphics card to test out on the brothers machine – I’ve been using it now for 2 days and every time I walk into the room the scale and resolution of this monitor doesn’t cease to impress me. I’d read a lot of articles and reviews online before making the purchase. Some mention uneven brightness, dead pixels and random interference in the shape of specked dots appearing. I haven’t experienced or seen any of these (yet).

It has a native resolution of 2560×1600 which I believe is the upper limits of Dual Link DVI. Above is a picture of my new set up with my ‘old’ Dell 2001FP working at 1200×1600 beside it.

It took me a full hour or two to configure the above in linux. Using the nvidia drivers in linux I quickly realised that TwinView would not allow me to set it up as I wanted it (With the second monitor being in portrait mode). Rotation is not supported when using TwinView. I had to do some reading about Xinerama – Which is how I got it working in the end. Throw me a mail if you have problems getting something similar to work. Some other pictures are available from my gallery.

I’m just after noticing that there is a very noticable brightness difference in the picture above. The 3007WFP is brighter than the 2001FP. Reducing the brightness level on the 3007WFP by a notch or two makes the color/brightness differences indistinguishable.

Had a car at my disposal this weekend. With it I managed to get a number of things I wouldn’t normally have the energy to get namely two nice rugs for the apartment and a framed print by an artist called Bernadette Triki. It stood out at me immediately – and after hanging it – I’m even more pleased. Got some fresh air too – with a trip to Johnnie Foxes pub and 18 holes of pitch and putt.

Watched “Tristan & Isolde” and “Mission Impossible 3″ at the ugc. Ehhh – don’t really feel like commenting on either – but I’m glad I saw them.

Thats the print above. Nice eh? She has a number of other prints available – I’ll be surprised if I don’t get more over the coming months.

So I know it’s late in the week – but wanted to blog about last weekend. It was kicked off by a night with Liamo and Devins. Flanary’s – Doyles and then back to Moley’s gaff. Nearly left the house in the early hours of the morning to catch a train. (I was the last man standing) But in the end got into galway for about 2. Witnessed the new Eyre Square packed with folk along with the arch swamped with like minded easy going Galwegians. The weather was nice – and the thought really crossed my mind – what the hell am I living in Dublin for; maybe I just miss home.

Anyways, Indian on the 22nd with 4 lovely ladies; lucky me! And a round of golf in my brand new White Hooded Jumper on Sunday. Not a keyboard touched.

Spent Friday and Saturday night in Cork this weekend. Stayed with my cousin; whos influence over getting me drunk, quick, should never be underestimated. So I ended up spending Saturday wandering around the lee in a hungered hungover glaze. Managed to watch Ice Age 2 in The Gate cinema – had to move seats ’cause there were forty screaming cork kids saying things like

‘luk ma – a shark ma’
‘tony, be quiet williya – thera people tryin to watch the filum like’
’shut up ma’.

I dont think I would have enjoyed the film either way though. Munched through west47 on Sunday when I got back, libeds on the back burner!

A long weekend just passed, with Paddys Day falling on the friday. So I got three days of substantial enough coding in. My time was spent refamilarising myself with jni by writing Java bindings to the evolution libebook library and to a lesser extent the libedataserver library. It was very successful, by Sunday I had my Java Gnome Contacts application reflecting evolution. With some documentation, feature completition work, examples and memory management I may even have something useful to pass on.

Also, spent some time getting gallery2 and mediawiki up onto thecentric. Chrikey; CSS is a nightmare. Everything was going fine until I opened this site up in I.E. – the css tip: margin 0px !important was invaluable for fixing relative positioning differences between firefox and I.E.

Had a drink with moley in the dandelion on St. Stephens green. Expensive Smithwicks!

Was at home by myself this weekend, Anna was at a birthday in Galway. Decided not to go – wanted to catch up on some episodes and get a patch for drag and drop in java-gnome in. Didn’t manage to get the patch together – spent alot of time reading the bindings and figuring out what I could regarding it’s memory management. Very late sunday; I finally managed to figure out why dragging as a source in Java Gnome wasn’t working. It’s a little tricky – but I hope to get a patch for that and setting the data bytes of SelectionData before the end of today.

I watched Battlestar Galactica Season 2 finale over the weekend. It was a cracker! Lay down your burdens part II – a 90 minute episode that really broke all the rules with the ending. I’ll be ordering the Box Set as soon as it comes out and am considering buying a ‘So Say We All’ T-Shirt…

Myself and Anna are together six whole years! Our anniversary was over the weekend and we celebrated in our usual tradition of cinema with popcorn. We got through 3 films in all; The Matador, Proof and The Weather Man. I enjoyed The Weather Man the most – it evoked a true ineasiness in myself, but was worth it. The other two were just alright. All three films starred Hope Davis, a name and face I’m destined to unfortunately remember (valuable neuron real esate etc…). We ate at a noodle house on Saturday and took a Bombay Pantry take away home on Sunday.

Spent a relaxing weekend at monart this weekend. The whole event was filled with luxury and good taste. Everyone walked around on site with white monart robes. Wonderful pool, indoor and outdoor saunas, salt room, massage and relaxation rooms. An incredible experience, one that I’m glad to have had the pleasure of indulging in. I would not have guessed such a place existed in Ireland. Highly Recommended. Oh, the 6 course meal and the waiter with obligotory French accent made the destination that more surreal.

I re-watched all of West Wing Season 6 over the weekend. Every episode except the Cuba one. Which was episode 20 I think. Not that it was a bad episode, it was just that I was in an Election Campaign mood. Jimmy Smiths is great; really looking forward to Season 7. Set to premier in the U.S. Sunday the 25th.

On a different note; I did lose the semi’s on Friday as I predicted in my last post. Lost in the final of the doubles also. Not sure what the prize for runner up was – I bolted as soon as the match was over to rejoin the West Wing Weekend.

I managed to get my desktop at home upgrade to Ubuntu ‘The Breezy Badger’. Very stable at this point. My laptop gave me a little trouble; power button got stuck. Had to open the thing up :/

Spending the weekend at Galway LAN 10. Leeching, games and a small bit of coding. My laptop gave out a few days ago. Currently being repaired, they tell me it’s a Fan / CPU / Motherboard problem. A shame I don’t have it for GLX.