Watching the final day of the Ashes

I spent a great afternoon watching the final (actually 4th) day of the Ashes at the Oval. Well not actually at the Oval, rather in the local pub in Sheffield.

Despite the Aussies needing 546 to win it was still tense, if any team can snatch defeat from victory in that sort of situation, England are the ones.

There was a friendly crowd in the bar. Everyone getting increasingly tense until Freddie threw the stumps down to run out Ponting. After that it was a steady procession of wickets, just when you felt it was starting to get tense again another would fall.

Great win for England, but credit to the Aussies and Ponting in particular for being dignified throughout this series. The series could have gone either way and the Aussies probably had the raw end of umpiring decisions this time.

Looking forward to Australia 2010/11.

More pictures here

Revenue on line (ie)

I just had to log onto the Irish revenue site to renew a digital certificate.

I was greeted by the a message to the following effect:

Security on this site is provided by software from The legion of the bouncy castle.

No link to bouncycastle.org was provided, so I ended up googling to check the thing out. It was all seeming a bit pythonesque.

Turns out it is all fine, an open source set of tools for cryptography.

So, after a slight fright I went ahead and renewed.

More annoyingly, the ROS service still does not support linux as a client. So whilst they use open source software for their site they still insist that you pay the Mac or Microsoft tax to file your taxes