My first Greasemonkey script is for people who travel. I find it annoying that google will re-direct me to the local country’s page, even if I don’t speak the language. This is a handy, incredibly feature light, script that redirects you to the google.ie site. It doesn’t redirect from .com because some tools depend on that tld.

I hope it’s useful!
You can find it at the userscripts.org site here:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47340

To change it to redirect to another country, just edit the @exclude from http://*.google.ie/* to replace .ie with your tld of choice, and then change
'.google.ie' in the parentheses with your desired domain.

Ireland had an ‘emergency’ budget re-allocation today. In addition to the general measures, which can be seen here [Supplementary Budget Changes], there were additional changes to the University Sector. I have copied these sections from the document [Minister O'Keeffe outlines key Budget measures in Education as part of efforts to cut public spending] which is attached to the announcement on the Dept. of Education and Science Website [Word Document]:

Higher education (minus €16m)
A reduction of €15.5m combined with earlier budgetary adjustments means that the Higher Education Authority’s budget will be €1.319bn. The colleges will have to operate within tighter budgets and effect economies. These reductions should be seen in the context of recent overall increases in investment in higher education. That’s risen by more than 33pc since 2004. There is also a reduction of €0.5m in respect of certain other third-level colleges.

Research (minus €2m)
The revised provision for research of €86.6m indicates an increase of some 14pc on expenditure last year. However, last year brought a lower level of projects and activity and the provision for this year may curtail progress on some projects and reduce awards to be made by the research councils.

Strategic Innovation Fund (minus €2m)
The revised provision of €26m is an increase on last year’s expenditure. This reflects the lower level of activity on projects during last year which had not fully ramped up and this year’s provision will involve the scaling back of some SIF projects and a possible delay in new projects.

[...]

Higher education [minus €24m]
Capital available for investment in the higher education sector this year amounts to €200m. This is net of €4m which has been transferred to support current expenditure on the labour market activation fund. Since there is now much better value in the construction market, in real terms this investment delivers significantly greater buying power. The allocation for last year was €184.056m.

This is balanced by an increase in the allocation of places for training:

Extra places in further education (€4m) and higher education
An additional 6,910 places will be created for unemployed people in the further and higher education sectors. This requires a transfer of €4m capital to further education. The places being provided are 1500 in PLC courses; 3,500 full and part time third level places; 930 on third level transition courses; 280 on accelerated certificate programmes; and 700 in a new education programme for redundant apprentices. This initiative is part of a joint approach with the Departments of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Social and Family Affairs on labour market activation. The overall cost to the Education budget in 2009 is nearly €19 million most of which is being met from within the overall third level provision and by transfer.

The full text can be found in the link above.

We have a proxy in work that prevents connections from being made out directly. I found out about the awesome MacPorts program, which is a bit like apt for OSX. It pulls backports from a repository and installs them for you.

There’s not a lot to the tool’s installation if you live on the open web, but I needed to do some stuff to get it working with our squid proxy.

If you run sudo port selfupdate, and get an error that says ‘port selfupdate failed: Couldn’t sync the ports tree’ or something like that, chances are your proxy is blocking rsync.

There are three steps. The prerequisites required for this to work are that you have the proxy address, admin access to your mac, and that the proxy supports the rsync port (873/tcp).

You can test the connectivity by going to http://rsync.macports.org:873, you should get the following error:

@RSYNCD: 30.0
@ERROR: protocol startup error


Step 1

If that works ok, then you need to set up the sudo environment for osx to let proxy environment settings through. First, edit your sudoers file with:
sudo visudo
Do not just edit /etc/sudoers

You need to append these lines:

Defaults env_keep += "http_proxy HTTP_PROXY HTTPS_PROXY FTP_PROXY RSYNC_PROXY"
Defaults env_keep += "ALL_PROXY NO_PROXY"


Step 2

Now, you need to set your http proxy
export http_proxy=http://proxy.example.com:8080
where 8080 is the port number of the proxy

Step 3

By Default, port uses rsync to manage its updates. RSync can use a proxy environment setting (man rsync for mre)
export RSYNC_PROXY=proxy.example.com:8080
Note the rsync proxy capitalisation, and the fact that it does not need http://

That should do it. You can then run selfupdate to get port to the latest version.

The hard way

If that doesn’t work, you can have a look at these instructions for replace rsync with subversion:
Syncing with SVN in Macports