Ronan’s Blog

I finally sold my old car last weekend and this week bough my new car … And She’s a beauty !

2003 BMW 320i Sports Coupé, 22,500miles, 2200cc Engine, M-Tec Trim, the works.

€7500 VRT when I brought it down from Northern Ireland, got my new Irish Plates fitted today and Tax paid … All-in-all I probably saved about €3000 by buying outside Ireland and Importing.

Picasa Web Albums - Ronan - New Car

At eSpatial we’re getting ready to release iSMART 5.3, one of the major new features is a completely revamped online spatial data editing capability. In the development team, we’re all pretty excited about its capabilities, because it like nothing we’ve seen before in a pure web (i.e. No Applet) mode.
Click the link below to get access to the early-access demo recording.
eSpatial _ next generation geospatial technology

I personally can’t wait to see Transformers the Movie…. But after reading the article from Wired linked below, I’ll have to do so making sure that I see it on the largest screen that I can find in Dublin and then make sure that I have an excellent seat.

The reason is simple clarity is everything in this movie. I’ve seen awesome 9MB JPEG’s of the CGI renders of what the characters will look like and was blown away. You need to see this movie on a large screen just to take it all in.

The trend of movie downloading via BitTorrent, be it either Camera’s in Cinema’s or DVD rips will never do this movie justice, so those “pirates” who download movies in this way probably should not do so this time, because they will miss out on so much.

“In scenes with multiple robots, rendering a single frame of film can take up to 38 hours.”

The Rebirth of Optimus Prime: Behind the Scenes with Director Michael Bay

I think that this movie could only have been made now, when we have High Definition Cinema’s and Blu-Ray technology available at home …. This movie is probably the first true usage of both…..

Anyway 11 days to go….

private void showMyPopup()
{
//Object accessed iunside inner class must be final
final MyObject myo = new MyObject();

//Create Buttons
JButton btnOK = new JButton( “Ok” );
JButton btnCancel = new JButton( “Cancel” );
JButton btnPreview = new JButton( “Preview” );
Object[] options = new Object[]{btnOK, btnCancel, btnPreview};

//Create JOptionPane Object
JOptionPane jop = new JOptionPane(
myo, JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE, JOptionPane.YES_NO_CANCEL_OPTION, null, options );

//Create JDialog from JOptionPane Object
final JDialog jd = jop.createDialog( editorApp, “JOptionPane Tester” );

//Create ActionListener
ActionListener list = new ActionListener()
{
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae){
if ( ae.getActionCommand().equals( “Ok” ) || ae.getActionCommand().equals( “Preview” ) )
{
//Do the Work when Preview or OK are pressed
myo.executePreview();
}

if ( ae.getActionCommand().equals( “Ok” ) || ae.getActionCommand().equals( “Cancel” ) )
{
//Close the Dialig when OK or Cancel Are pressed
jd.dispose();
}
}};

//Add ActionListners
btnOK.addActionListener( list );
btnCancel.addActionListener( list );
btnPreview.addActionListener( list );

//Show JDialog
jd.show();
}

For the past 2 years I have had a wireless Irish BroadBand Breeze Connection. Including the diamond-shaped Aerial strapped to my Chimney. The connection is very good and since I first subscribed to Irish BroadBand, the quality of service (and customer support) has greatly increased, increasing my connection to a 2Mb  bidirectional connection. However, the connection had pretty much died over the past 2 weeks.
It turns out that I lost line of sight with the base station, due to some growing trees. When the technicians came out this morning there was no line of sight that they could get to fix it so they took the aerial away and no I am without Broadband at home.

After looking around today, I have signed up for NTL Braodband MAX. Which is a whopping 6Mb download, but only 512Kb up. Hopefully all will work out, I’ve heard horror stories of NTL’s customer support.