Congrats to the VirtualBox team on being the first (that I know of) to provide a working Seamless/Unity/Coherence mode for OpenSolaris 2008.05 guests on OS X. (I don't know how long this has actually worked, I only tried it last night, in VB 1.6...)

Obviously a bit of work to do before it rivals the sort of integration that Windows guests enjoy in Fusion and Parallels, but it's a good step in the right direction...

Not liking the new British coins all that much, I have to say.

Apart from the fact they look a lot like the cardboard money that I used to have in my toy cash register many years ago, they don't look very friendly to tourists who might have little or no English, and/or just bad eyesight. I'd have thought the first rule of currency design would be to use biggish numbers, not just (in some cases, tiny) words?

Phil O'Donnell would have turned 36 today, the same age as me (albeit only until June). Calls for a wee dram and a re-watching of the '91 Scottish Cup Final video tonight I think, if only to reinforce just how badly we could do with him back in our midfield at the moment...

EDIT: Coincidentally, it was also the 13th anniversary of Davie Cooper's untimely death a couple of days ago, too. Unbelievable that two of that cup winning team died in their 30s, while just doing their job.

In an odd twist of 90's nostalgia fate, I had the opportunity to see (and, indeed, briefly chat to) both Stewart Lee and Richard Herring live in Dublin in the past couple of weeks... older readers on this side of the pond may remember they used to be a double act in the BBC TV shows Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy (some of which are archived on Stewart's website). More recently, Stewart Lee co-wrote Jerry Springer-- The Opera.

Enjoyed both their gigs, but Stewart Lee was probably a bit more to my rib-tickling taste-- then again, he is the 41st Best Stand Up Ever. (Julie was rather pleased to get a kiss off Richard Herring, though!)

Only just starting to watch Season 2 of Heroes, and boy are those Irish accents show-spoilingly bad. (Even on the odd occasion they get close, they're certainly not from anywhere near Cork...)

Dear lazyweb. What kind of fish is this?

After completing the Painting With Light photography class last year, I've just started Cheryl's Tech Pro Masterclass. Part of the prep is to choose a theme for the "visual diary" you have to keep, and I've decided to run with "Architecture and Geometry". We'll see how it goes. Here are a couple of shots from my first weekend's snapping (straight from the camera, so as yet uncropped and untweaked.)

Was just pondering in the shower at the weekend (as you do) about what still makes, say, MacOS X feel like a more cohesive desktop experience than even the latest and greatest GNOME in Indiana/Nevada.

One thing that came to mind was its integrated management of your media-- in pretty much any Mac app where you might want to insert or edit multimedia content, you can immediately access your entire music, photo or video library in a familiar-looking window and drag it over from there. It's built into the file selection dialog, too.

Of course, Apple only really let you manage your media library with their own software: iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, iMovie, Final Cut etc. But it did get me wondering if there was a place for a freedesktop 'media library' spec, that would offer our users the same sort of quick, searchable access to their media content (be it local, remote, stored on Flickr, split across three DVDs, or any combination of the above) in any application that required it. And, of course, to do what Apple doesn't, and allow any app to manage that content, if it needs to do so :)

I like this idea. Motherwell fans have had two weeks to pay their respects, and Hearts fans have already paid theirs with a minute's applause before their last two games (and fair play to them for doing it the second time-- not entirely sure why they were asked to do it more than once...)

Let's just get back on with the fitba' now-- it's what Phil would have wanted!

Numbed by the news when I got home last night that Motherwell captain Phil O'Donnell had died after collapsing during the game with Dundee Utd yesterday.

I well remember his debut against St.Mirren in the 1990/91 season, when as a 17-year-old he was given the complete runaround by Kenny MacDowell. At the end of that season, he scored his first goal for the club-- in the memorable Scottish Cup "family final" at Hampden Park. Ironically, that was also against Dundee Utd, in a game which was also tinged with sadness-- the managers of the two teams were brothers Tommy and Jim McLean, whose father died a couple of days before the final.

(That cup winning side seems somewhat jinxed, now... it also featured Davie Cooper, who was to collapse and die a few years later on the training ground at the age of 39. And two of our other stars that day never played again, forced into early retirement through injury.)

So, thanks for the memories, Phil. Thoughts are with your family and friends today, especially to your wife, kids, and nephew and Motherwell team-mate David Clarkson who's been a revelation this year-- I hope he can find it within himself to pull on the claret and amber jersey again after what he witnessed yesterday.

If you have any interest in seeing a Solaris version of the Parallels Tools, a good place to register your interest would be this thread on the Parallels Forums.

Or, you could just use VMware instead, which already has them.

Just a bit deflated that one of the most inexplicably wrong refereeing decisions I’ve seen cost Scotland a draw against Italy this afternoon, but I don’t think it would have been enough anyway, and I’m certainly glad we’re not sitting waiting on the France result on Wednesday. Can’t fault the lads for another great performance (bar the first two minutes), bring on the World Cup qualifiers!

(To be fair, the ref ruled out a perfectly good Italian second goal for offside, and failed to disallow ours for the same offence… but to lose like that was just rubbing it in, really.)

Was slightly surprised to find a Google Summer of Code 2007 t-shirt in the mail this morning-- had forgotten I'd even signed up as a mentor. Obviously my services weren't required this year, which is probably no bad thing for the would-be protégé.