Beer with subtitles

The second Sandymount jaunt of the year. The sun was beaming when I left the flat and by the time we reached the beach…clouds.

We stuck mostly to the little nature reserve thing adjacent to the power station since the tide was in.

It’s not as picturesque as the beach but a decent afternoon was had all in all…then we went home and baked some cakes.

    Lovely. Comfortable, fast. Happy Trev.

As hinted at in previous posts, I spent the weekend in Belfast.

I’ve been here loads of times but rarely had the time to take in tourist things. Today, however, I had a whole day free: top of my list of things to do (more accurately, the entire list) was:

1. The tour of City Hall
2. Titanic Trail

There was no reason I couldn’t have done both but owing to the glacier-like progress of the Belfast Tourism Centre – it’s truly disgracefully slow and I made this clear when I finally made it through the queue. Consequently, I only had time for the Titanic Trail.

I’d heard this was self-guided GPS-enhanced multimedia tour of the historic parts of Belfast city centre linked with the Titanic. This turned out to be mostly true, except for the GPS part: it simply displays a map on the hand-held device, which has a 3″ colour screen and headphone jack. In addition to the map it displays video associated with whatever site you’re currently at.

The tour begins at the Belfast Welcome Centre in Donegall Place; assuming you can wait, the tour begins at nearby City Hall.

I feel a bit silly wandering about with the electronic guide, but soon realise that many people are wandering about with headphones and the video/alleged-GPS device but, in fact, nobody I talk to (I run into a few friends during the tour) even notices until I point it out.

Well, maybe they notice but are too polite to say anything.

Anyway, inside the grounds of City Hall lies a statue of Harland (of shipyard fame) and the “famous Titanic Memorial”, a fairly unassuming statue one side of the hall. Along with some video content – which is nearly impossible to see in the strong sunlight – the tour tells me this once had a very prominent position in front of City Hall before it was considered a traffic hazard.

Two other sites of interest lie nearby: the Robinson and Cleaver building (once a centre of the world’s flax trade; now it incorporates a Foot Locker) and the Linenhall Library. The library, at least, remains a library.

The last link with Titanic actually comes surprisingly early with the Reform Club, right beside the Castlecourt shopping centre. The link is simply that Thomas Andrew – chief designer – was once a member.

Now for a short tour of the city until we reach the shipyards; along the way we pass through Castle Street and past Transport House (the oldest listed building in Belfast) to the Albert Clock (Belfast’s very own leaning tower) and a brief stay in Custom House Square.

A footbridge takes us across the Lagan to the Odyssey Centre, which looks out onto the Harland and Wolff shipyards.

This is the climax of the tour and the only slightly disappointing part: you can’t simply wander alone around the ship yards (which are still ship yards), so instead you take in a vista of the area and are treated to videos of the relevant components, such as the interiors of the Harland and Wolff buildings and re-enactments of the Titanic under construction.

Unfortunately, I found the information didn’t really stick when you were just watching it onscreen. Something of a shame, but probably unavoidable.

In conclusion, the Titanic Trail is well worth a couple of hours of your time, especially if you’re not very familiar with the city. Just beware that it’s not as sophisticated as it pretends, that background information on the ship’s construction itself is not actually as detailed as it could be and that you don’t get very close to the ship yards. The emphasis is on the background concerning the ship’s origins and on showing you Belfast city centre.

I’ll end this with the vista of the Harland and Wolff shipyards; as far as I could tell, Titanic was built just left of Samson and Goliath.

Shit. Jammed, standing room only on an international journey. How can that be?

My opinion of the Enterprise has gone even lower….

Still, all is forgiven when I arrive in Belfast Central and waltz across the road into the Waterfront.

Not the starship, but rather the train. One is an unconvincing plastic model built in the late 1960s that doesn’t work, the other is a fictional space vessel from the TV series “Star Trek”.

Harsh? Yes. I’m just in a bad mood.

For those who don’t know, the Enterprise is the train service between Belfast and Dublin. It’s operated jointly by Iarnroid Eireann and Translink and runs between Connolly Station and Belfast Central approximately every two hours, servicing major towns along the way (Drogheda, Dundalk, Newry and Portadown).

Naturally, since it serves the two major cities of Ireland it’s been something of a flagship service ever since it began in the early 1900s; in fact, nowadays, it’s the only train service remaining between Ireland and Northern Ireland – and the only one for the forseeable future – and its status has remained evident, somewhat, by the fact that until the new Cork trains were launched late last year it had by far the most comfortable and newest (by well over a decade) carraiges of any service in Ireland.

So you could feel a bit smug if you had to travel often from Drogheda or Dundalk to Dublin: the best trains in the country by a country mile. Consequently, a few years ago, the Enterprise is what got me interested in trains: the bus from Drogheda to Dublin often took over two hours (this was the days before the M1 motorway) while the Enterprise just worked: 35 minutes to Dublin, comfortable, cool lighting, tables, etc. etc.

What else were you going to take? Unfortunately, back then, every non-Enterprise service was awful that I rarely took the train for fear of landing a bone-shaker.

Things have changed since then and even non-Enterprise services are tolerable (although very slow) and so these days I take it all the time. It’s every bit as good now as it was then: in fact, it hasn’t changed at all. That’s the problem: it hasn’t changed. It still only runs every two hours, it’s not particularly fast, it’s no longer got the nicest carriages around and – crucially for commuters – it’s the only express service from Drogheda and Dundalk to Dublin.

That last point is crucial (especially for me, right now, today) so I’ll deal with the other two first: like I said earlier, the Cork service now runs at least once an hour; well, Belfast and Dublin are the major cities but they only have a service every two hours, at best. As for the speed, the Enterprise may still be – in fairness – the fastest way to go from Dublin city centre to Belfast city centre, but it still only reaches 80 miles per hour at its fastest, on the long stretch between Drogheda and Dundalk. This is 1950s speeds: contrast with the Cork service, who are talking about a 200kmph service becoming reality in the next year or so.

Back to local services: the Enterprise is the only express service between Dundalk, Drogheda and Dublin. The alternative is the local services, which take 60 minutes from Drogheda to Dundalk – a journey of about 30 miles. Done regularly, that journey is soul destroying: hundreds travel into Dublin every morning on the Enterprise to save the time. However, as it only runs every two hours it is absolutely jammed every single morning. I only take the Enterprise at off-peak times; using it every morning doesn’t bear thinking about.

Finally finally, there is the awful inconsistency of it all: not every Enterprise services service every major intermediate town. For instance, on a Friday the 15.20 service from Dublin to Belfast doesn’t service Drogheda. Why not? It has to slow down to a crawl in order to negotiate the viaduct…..but it won’t stop. I will take the Enterprise to Belfast this afternoon – and I will enjoy the comfort and speed and I know the reasons behind all of the above complaints and I will deal with them in another post when I’ve calmed down – but for this one baffling inconsistency…once and for all, the last bit of straw left in the barn…basically, there’s no straw left is what I’m trying say.

The Enterprise is simply not good enough anymore. Trains in Ireland have improved and one of the problems of doing a good job is that you get to do it again. Let’s hope the Enterprise is next in line for improvement.

I have been struggling with Notes 6.5.4 for a long long time. Although there is an official, supported, “native” Notes 7 for Linux now it is tricky to install and – more importantly – much slower than a Wine-d Notes client. Also, since it’s Eclipse-based it suffers from the usual Eclipse filesystem bloat; expect mystery folders dotted throughout your home directory.

Finally, it seems somebody has made the necessary additions to enable Notes 7 support in Wine. A small patch was necessary for 0.9.30 but this has made it into 0.9.31.

It’s surprisingly easy to get it up and running. Here are the steps, just beware that I’m going to assume you have Notes 7 already installed on some Windows system.

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the WineHQ repository for Wine by adding these lines:

   # Repository for winedeb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main
   deb-src http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main

2. Install Wine by running apt-get install wine.
3. Create a basic Wine configuration by running winecfg. This takes a moment or two after which a window will appear; the defaults are fine except that you should set the version of Windows to be emulated to be Windows 98.
4. Time to copy over your Notes 7 install from your Windows machine. Assuming that Notes is installed in C:\Program Files\Lotus\notes, copy this directory into $HOME/.wine/drive_c/ (winecfg will have created this folder).
5. Edit $HOME/.wine/drive_c/notes/notes.ini and change the line Directory=C:\Program Files\Lotus\notes\data to read Directory=C:\notes\data.
6. Notes 7 can now be run with the command wine c:\\notes\\nlnotes.exe.
7. However, there remains a problem with the preferences dialog. You must set the environment variable WINEDLLOVERRIDES to oleacc=n. To simplify this, I wrote this script called notes7 and placed it in /usr/local/bin:

   #!/bin/bash
   export WINEDLLOVERRIDES=oleacc=n
   wine c:\\notes\\nlnotes.exe

Now, you can just run notes7 to launch Notes.

I haven’t encountered any problems with any functionality; the only remaining minor issue is that bold and italic stylings for the default Notes font won’t appear.

References:

• http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5944
• http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2007-February/035429.html

I need Tahoma for some work applications (you know, to “fit in” with the Windows crowd) and these instructions worked fine for Ubuntu Edgy:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-82318.html

Or, to summarise:

1. Download http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/IELPKTH.CAB
2. cabextract IELPKTH.CAB
3. cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/

Another oddity with the Thinkpad, related this time to the fglrx graphics driver.

In order for Wine to run successfully I need to add this line to the options section of my device in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option "UseFastTLS" "2"

Very annoying and it just confirms what utter s$%^ the fglrx driver is.

This tip comes from the “Problems with fglrx” page on Thinkwiki: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problems_with_fglrx

With this done, however, I can now run Autostitch, DVD Shrink and Lotus Notes just perfectly. Incidentally, I use the Wine packages from WineHQ:

deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main

A strange one; my iPod gives read/write errors when I connect it via one of the USB ports on the right-hand side of my T60. However, if I use the lone USB port on the left-hand side…no problem.

More on this here:

http://taint.org/2006/12/13/191554a.html

http://kerneltrap.org/node/3844

There’s no consensus on whether this is a software (i.e. kernel) or hardware problem, but I’m tending towards the latter as modprobe -r ehci_usb made no difference.

On the other hand, with the iPod connected to the lone USB port I transferred its full contents onto an external USB disk (connected, interestingly enough – albeit inevitably – to one of the other ports, which the iPod doesn’t like) without any issues.