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Underway in Ireland
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30 November 2002 |
NYT -- Ray Ozzie tells Glenn Rifkin that his career-defining moment came in 1974 while in college. I was an electrical engineering major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and had a job as an electronic technician. On my way to work, I kept passing this building that had a strange orange glow emanating from the windows. I looked in and saw people sitting at rows and rows of terminals.The system was called Plato, a computer system built in the late 1960's by Don Bitzer, Paul Tenczar and an amazing team of bright, eccentric, creative individuals. It was unique and way ahead of its time. Of course, I wangled myself a job as a systems programmer on Plato. There were a thousand terminals connected to the mainframe, half on campus and the other half at universities around the world. It was amazing. It had instant messaging, e-mail, online discussions, interactive games. Remember, this was 1974! Ray Ozzie went on to create Lotus Notes, the infrastructure used by more than 100m desktops, including that of the Irish courts system.
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SILICON VALLEY com -- Mike Langberg gives himself a B for his 1992 predictions. Here is what he believes will happen by 2012. - The Internet is everywhere -- and nowhere. "Almost every object we own that uses electricity will be connected to the Internet in 2012." That's useful ubiquity.
"You'll no longer be surprised to get a call from the repair center saying your washing machine is using too much hot water and needs adjustment."
- All present and accounted for -- always. "Family, friends and co-workers will be able to instantly see where you are, thanks to wireless phones even tinier than what's available today and other devices with built-in GPS locators. You'll be able to specify how you wish to be reached."
- Walk now, pay later. "Stores without doors will rely on RFID, or radio-frequency identification, tags to keep track of inventory and payment. These tiny semiconductors communicate a small amount of information, such as a product serial number, when queried by inexpensive transmitter/receivers." These chips are inexpensive now and by 2012, RFID chips could be printed onto packaging and price tags. This is the beginning of the end for cash registers.
- Prime time is your time. "Every cable and satellite television receiver will include a hard disk for recording shows, and those disks will have a minimum capacity of one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, enough to store hundreds of hours of high-definition programming."
- Finally, we can talk to our computers. "Reliable speech recognition will allow computers, phones and household appliances to understand our spoken commands."
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72-mile, 2.4-GHz link
IRELAND OFFLINE org -- Perhaps the time has come for Irish wireless broadband users to start acting like the guys running TV reflectors. Move up from the puny milliwatts of power and pump your links between one and two watts. A researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center turned up a 72-mile wireless hop between San Diego and San Clemente Island. The link uses hopped-up 802.11b WLAN gear, two foot parabolic antennas, and operates at the maximum allowed 1-watt output.
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Mike Wendland -- Ex-con Alan Ralsky makes a terrific living by spamming 250,000,000 email addresses.
In the lower level of his home, tucked away in a still-unfinished room, will soon be an array of 20 different computers -- the control center of what many believe is the largest single bulk e-mailing operation in the world.
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29 November 2002 |
Improving DSC Images While Keeping IrTranP Garringreen Hotspot -- Losing electrical power has to be one of the worst things that can happen under pressure. I ran out of battery power for my Fuji DSC and as the pictures of the IIA Net Visionary Award show, my little Concord EyeQ isn't the best. I need to look for better optics on cameras that accommodate IrTranP. - Casio QV-770
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Casio QV-2000UX
- Casio QV-3000UX
- JVC GC-S1
- Sharp VE-LC2
- Sony DSC-F3
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DUBLIN -- Mary Hanafin (on right, holding flowers) congratulated denise cox on winning the 2002 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Award. Other winners included Adrian Weckler from The Sunday Business Post (Journalism), Frank Daly from the Revenue Commissioners (eGovernment), David Long from IrelandOffline (Social Contribution) and Cliodhna McGuirk from Saadian Technologies (Innovation). Now it's off to send this little tidbit to the Irish Open Mailing List and to text the details so that they're put into the proper boards.ie forums.
Moblogged from Nokia 9210i Communicator using Vodafone HSD.
Picture by Bernie Goldbach using Concord EyeQ IrTranP digital still camera. Click to view picture shot outside with Fuji S602Z.
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Managing Convergent Communications DUBLIN -- My 9210i can email while sending and receiving SMS text messages. While I moblogging the opening remarks of the 2002 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards, Tom Murphy sent me a text that asked who won. Back in a minute.
Moblogged by Nokia 9210i Communicator using Vodafone HSD.
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Mary Hanafin Credits Net Visionaries DUBLIN -- Mary Hanafin, chief government whip, addressed the 2002 Net Visionary Awards, noting the speed at which technology moves today. "Vision recognised today is being implemented tomorrow. Your idea of today can become the policy of tomorrow." At tabletop level, a few people muttered how IrelandOffLine's ideas of reduced access fees yesterday should become the pricing levels today. That would be the most welcome address that the government could make to this assembled audience.
Moblogged from Nokia 9210i Communicator over Vodafone HSD.
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Net Visionary Journalism DUBLIN -- If you're serious about understanding Internet issues in Ireland, you will seek out and read articles by David d'Arcy (Computerscope), Jamie Smyth (The Irish Times) and Adrian Weckler (The Sunday Business Post). All three are short-listed for the Net Visionary Journalism Award. Nominees in other categories with track records for mainstream publishing include denise cox, Sheila McDonald and Ruairi Roddy. Every one of these nominees have improved the state of play on the Irish Internet today.
Moblogged by Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
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Long and Daly Tipped to Win Net Visionary Awards DUBLIN -- One of the marks of a well-conducted event is that it starts on time, just like now with the IIA Net Visionary Awards. It's noon and opening remarks have begun. I didn't expect a free bar, but that helps networking and the noontime drinks make it easier to conduct exit polls. If my anecdotal evidence is correct, both David Long and Frank Daly will win today. The race for top-ranked award is too close to call.
Moblogged with Nokia 9210i Communicator using Radio Web Services.
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2002 Irish Net Visionary Awards  DUBLIN -- Looking just beyond the dimly lit reception area for the 2002 Net Visionary Awards (see picture at left), you could find designated seats for more than 800 people. That number pales in comparison to the number of votes cast for the short-listed nominees. Although it's easy to find detractors for any of the awards ceremonies sponsored in Ireland, it's hard to deny that this event represents the most democratic and most transparent acclamation of excellence in the Irish Internet community.
Moblogged by IBM TransNote using Nokia D211 over Vodafone HSD.
Picture by Bernie Goldbach using Concord EyeQ IrTranP digital still camera.
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Behind Irish eGovernment Services  DUBLIN -- Last year, Ireland turned heads in the European Community, based on the government's forward push into electronic information services. P.J. Fitzpatrick (shown at right) is one of the factors behind the success, doing yeoman's work with e-courts. He rattles off how 500 judges are now wired into Lotus Notes and how it's possible for the Register to reflect a judgment within minutes of the court's decision. That's a big leap forward and should ensure a more expeditious and thorough judicial system in Ireland for years to come. Next year, Fitzpatrick hopes that more than 20,000 accounts for wards of the courts will be managed electronically. That may help reduce the level of juvenile deliquency, with positive knock-on effects against the scourge of joyriding in Ireland.
Moblogged by IBM TransNote over Nokia D211 Vodafone HSD connection.
Picture by Bernie Goldbach's Fuji S600 digital still camera.
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 DUBLIN -- Sitting in the lobby of The Alexander Hotel with Ruairi Roddy, talking about blogging's slow uptake in Ireland. Roddy makes a biting comment about how most bloggers cannot spell -- that's critical because the blogosphere is very text-dependent. You have to use precise text otherwise technologies like BlogChannels will fail to give loosely joined webloggers a metadata way of selecting like-minded perspectives. By tagging blogged comments with the correct elements of information architecture, you can grab onto others who use the same tagging structure. We can make a lot out of this, but the metadata structure is actually rooted in the behaviour of disciplined mailing lists. On those lists, people use relevant subject headings, and they identify when they are about to veer off into the Off-Topic. This happens on the Irish Open Mailing List. Thanks to focused cross-talk, community intelligence quickly rises to the top shortly after a question is raised. That's also been my experience with boards.ie.
Behind the scenes, a bunch of coders are working to overcome differences in metadata by building shared taxonomy, such as with XFML maps that relate topics to each other. When the community builds these things out in the open (such as liveTopcis topic rolls), other people start to adopt the same terminology. When that happens, community microcontent becomes exceptionally relevant.
Moblogged from IBM TransNote with Nokia D211 and Vodafone HSD.
More on BlogChannels and topics
[Seb's Open Research and Al Macintyre and Curiouser and curiouser!]
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Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards for 2002
IIA ie -- This is Ireland's most democratic awards programme. Nominations come from the Internet community. Then that same community casts their votes for the winners. The top category, that of IIA Net Visionary, holds several credible personalities.
- denise cox, E-Search and IrishAnimals.ie
- Mary Mary Mangan, ireland.com
- Sheila McDonald, ENN
- Ruairi Roddy, TCM
- Damian Ryan, Perfect World
Nominated for the IIA Journalist Award:
- David D'Arcy, ComputerScope
- Jamie Smyth, The Irish Times
- Adrian Weckler, Sunday Business Post
Nominees for the IIA Innovation Award:
- John Brady, Am-Beo
- Cliodhna McGuirk, Saadian Technologies
- Niall O'Cleirigh, Macalla
Net Activists will follow the campaign for the IIA Social Contribution Award whose nominees include
While Ireland is winning accolades in Brussels for its range of government Internet services, credit should extend to those nominated for the IIA eGovernment Award:
- Colm Butler, Department of the Taoiseach
- Frank Daly, Revenue Commissioners
- PJ Fitzpatrick, ecourts
Moblogged by Nokia 9210i using Radio Web Services
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 POLEMIA -- Although Paul Clerkin is likely to consider my commentary akin to polemic, I am taking my Nokia 9210i Commuicator mobile phone and its companion (a Concord EyeQ IrTranP camera) under The Alexander Hotel in Dublin for the 2002 IIA Net Visionary Awards. I will moblog to Underway in Ireland and to Irish New Media Cuts. Both of these blogs run from notebooks always-on to Radio Web Services. This test comes from a Dublin bus, attached to a picture of Tim Kirby.
Moblogged by a Nokia 9210i using Radio Web Services.
Jeremy Allaire on XML and Web Services.
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DUBLIN -- It's a fortnight away from the day that Lawrence Lessig will announce his licensing scheme for The Creative Commons and Damian Ryan is already considering how to fold this idea into an upcoming Digital Rights Management Conference in Ireland. Ryan holds Ireland's only board seat on the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Lessig earned prominence for arguing the case for copyright in front of the Supreme Court. He previously visited Ireland during a Digital Darklight Festival event, around six months before his arguments with The Supremes.
Moblogged with Nokia 9210i using Radio Web Services
x: 128
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28 November 2002 |
Happy Thanksgiving  KILKENNY, Ireland -- I'm most thankful for settling into a home with Ruth and for having continued opportunities for growth among friends and professional colleagues.
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INTERNET -- Web Search 9 marks the first major overhaul of Inktomi since last year.
- Web services interface that allows content providers, portal and paid inclusion partners to exchange information with the Inktomi search engine.
- Algoritmic and editoral techniques, such as Web site synopsis written by a human editor, that better interpret a user's intent and deliver more accurate, comprehensive techniques.
- Spelling suggestions.
- Paid inclusion customers will have the ability to provide tailored local content for more than 30 regions.
- Improvements in information freshness (the index refreshes every 10 to 14 days, paid inclusion every two days) and the scope of the search (up to 3 billion documents).
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THE REGISTER -- Do you believe that entertainment will leapfrog messaging in MMS? Juniper Research interviewed 40 industry leaders and concluded that MMS has the potential to generate revenues in excess of $8.3bn by 2004. Approximately $5.6 billion of that will be generated through content delivery and provisioning, rather than pure peer-to-peer messaging, at $2.7bn. In areas of high footfall, this would mean that a successful services would be one that leveraged the intelligent multimedia platform and its inherent anytime, anywhere nature. Juniper thinks business use alone will account for $1.4bn of MMS revenue in 2004. That's trend starts next year and could represent people who desire MMS downloads of news summaries, liggers' lists and erotic content.
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 David Mach -- Check out this gorgeous online gallery of burning matchstick art. Artist David Mach creates sculptures from the colored heads of matches, then sets them on fire. Mach made his first matchhead in 1982. Kinskihead was a response to a reviewer comparing one of his magazine installations to a weekend modeller making a ship or the Eiffel Tower out of matches. The reviewer talked about matches as if their rightful place was at the bottom of the materials league. The reviewer was referring to modellers who don't use matches but just matchsticks, small pieces of wood. Mach explains, "Live matches offer an entirely different proposition. The first head, Kinskihead, was set alight by mistake. It was originally made out of blue and red matches but once burnt they became different shades of grey ash. What interests me is the violence and power involved in that change and the fact that this performance comes from such a cheap, throwaway, almost non-material."
There doesn't seem to be any limit to the subject matter. There's an edginess to the lethal incendiary device capability of the exhibits.
In fact you can describe three clear lives to these sculptures: the original head with colour; the performance of burning it; and the burned head, instantly aged black and white version of the original. Not bad for a nothing material.
[Jeff Winkler and Cory Doctorow]
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FIND SOUNDS -- Comparisonics have a great library of sounds to use. In compliance with the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, Comparisonics removes links to copyrighted sounds from FindSounds.com and FindSounds Palette at the request of the copyright holder.
[netbib]
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BBC -- The Internet is not a highway; it's better visualised as a footpath. It's unplanned, decentralized, organic. BBC discusses simulations of attacks upon a few critical network nodes. Redundancy isn't needed in good times, when "shortest distance between two points" applies, but during stress, diversity is a distinct advantage. In a related thought, Simon McGarr ruminates how blogs fit into this mix. He equates blogs to streams that bubble through the Internet. Although the current thoughts reflect on comments about the prospect of the Internet failing at critical nodes, that's always a possbility in the aftermath of physical events, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center. So maybe it's important to think around key failure nodes, and to leverage different infostreams, such as public access wireless devices that can work around individual failure nodes, just like smart Internet routers.
[JD on MX and Tuppenceworth]
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 NYT -- Wouldn't you gawk at a screen containing images harvested in real time from active Google searches? You can do that now, when sitting in Google's lobby in California. Last week, visitors in the lobby "were transfixed by the words scrolling by on the wall behind the receptionist's desk: animación japonese Harry Potter pensées et poèmes associação brasileira de normas técnicas."
Live Query shows updated samples of what people around the world are typing into Google's search engine. The terms scroll by in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, French, Dutch, Italian - any of the 86 languages that Google tracks. Live Query shows you the collective consciousness of the world.
[Web Wordsmiths and Jennifer Lee]
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DESIGN TECHNICA -- FedEx Corporate Services are developing the FedEx PowerPad in conjunction with Motorola. It's to be powered by Pocket PC and used by 40,000 FedEx Express couriers to get online, near real-time, wireless access to the FedEx network. Exclusively designed for FedEx, the FedEx PowerPad will enhance and accelerate package information available to customers by enabling couriers to wirelessly send and receive near real-time information and updates from any location. Additional functionality will be added, such as up-to-date information on shipping rates and inclement weather advisories. This is a big deal for box kickers.
[G! has 8 hits]
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IEDR ie -- Making the news appear as pop-ups means they won't work for many people who drive around the Internet with pop-ups inhibited. And John McCormac questions why IEDR need a content management system for a site with an apparently long interval between major content updates.
[W3C and Pop-Up Stopper and Hackwatch]
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HEAVY-BACKPACK -- Here's a "Creative Catalogue" promoting over 80 "individuals, collectives, companies, and their creative work." Each includes a Flash-powered slideshow of visual samples along with answers to the following questions about each designer: "Name? - What? - Company? - Where? - Age? - Listening to? - Looking at? - Link?"
[Coolstop Daily Pick and jenett.radio]
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CLEAN-STREAM co uk -- Solutions here for scrubbing mail for viruses, spam and unwanted content. Some of the site's pages may challenge search engines that try to crawl the content as they are Iframes. Clean Stream won't keep you on site if you prefer to jump directly to a main anti-virus vendor. If you want to investigate a viable solution that will cut your costs of Internet messaging, look at how Clean Stream works. This technology needs to be considered by all ISPs.
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27 November 2002 |
Brewster Kahle -- He's scavenging the Internet Library because he knows you can't tell in advance what will be important. "The
Web is the people's medium, it's not elitist. Anyone can publish there, so you've got the good, the bad, the ugly, the profane. It's just us, that's the amazing thing." We owe it to our citizenry to train articulate bloggers.
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One Reason I Miss Thanksgiving  Garringreen Hotspot -- Thanksgiving in Europe means a workday without turkey, no pumpkin pie, no NFL doubleheader and no end-to-end kids' movies. Add a dose of Irish rain on top of it all and you know why I'm depressed.
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Mark Pilgrim -- Both Mark and Sam Ruby have underscored the need for RSS Validation. Now the issue kicks into high gear in Ireland, as Brian Greene is sniffing around for the perfect RSS validator.
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Andrew Orlowski -- RIAA targeted the US Naval Academy because they could, according to The Register.
I read the original article, thought that its headline told a different angle on the story than the text, and moved on. The RIAA read the story, didn't like either the headline or the text, and demanded that it be removed. That impertinent demand caused more of a flap than the original story.
The real story might be to explore the port-hopping and file masking techniques used by students who cut a different music CD every week. I was amazed at what some enterprising teenagers showed me in Tipperary Institute. Give them bandwidth and they will hoover.
I graduated from the USAF Academy in 1976. Like many of my instructors, I copied cassette tapes for my personal use. I fail to see where that practise differs from cultivating a personal MP3 collection. It would be dead-easy to decimate the officer corps in three of the uniformed services by trawling for deviants who copy music for pleasure. I don't think the military academies should demean their Honor Codes or misuse my tax money through this kind of enforcement practice.
[Washington Post and The Register and Wired and Cory Doctorow and Dave Winer and John Dowdell]
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26 November 2002 |
The Day Mr Bojangles Died in Crumlin CRUMLIN, Ireland -- I watched as 120 people gathered in the Newlands Cross Cemetery to bury Jimmy Maher. He was the Mr Bojangles for hundreds of admirers in the local area, including those in the Garda Siochana band. I will be away today, reflecting on the way his music inspired joy into the lives of hundreds who heard him play.
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25 November 2002 |
IDSA org -- The Industrial Design Excellence Award Competition Call for Entries recognises the importance of design to economic growth.
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Finding: Vodafone Live! Signing Them Up Garringreen Hotspot -- Vodafone CEO Christopher Gent told Business Week that 50,000 have already signed up for Vodafone Live! That's remarkable, considering the service costs €300, once you factor in the cost of a MMS phone.
["Wireless Web, Take Two" by Katie Cappel in Business Week.]
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THE FEATURE -- Justin Hall considers the blogosphere resident in mobile phones. He coins the phrase "moblog" to describe the personalcast blog one creates with a cell phone. I have played in this space since starting my Underway in Ireland blog, often sending "mail2blog" from my Nokia 9210i to an always-on DSL laptop.
A weblog is a record of travels on the Web, so a mobile phone log (“moblog”?) should be a record of travels in the world. Weblogs reflect our lives at our desks, on our computers, referencing mostly other flat pages, links between blocks of text. But mobile blogs should be far richer, fueled by multimedia, more intimate data and far-flung friends. As we chatter and text away, our phones could record and share the parts we choose: a walking, talking, texting, seeing record of our time around town, corrected and augmented by other mobloggers. [...]
(S)ome of our daily activities would be enhanced by sharing them, both with our circle of friends around the Web, and the people nearby with like minds. Each of our moblogs, our mobile information profiles and archives, could search people in the area for compatible data. Think of it as a Web search on the real world. The results would be constant, part of conversation, tracked by your moblog.
[Justin Hall and Dan Gillmor and Karlin Lillington and Cory Doctorow]
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TIMOTHY -- With an innovative new device known as the FlatStack, a user can log on to a Web page and operate home appliances with point-and-click commands issued through an ordinary Web browser.
Timothy Technology's FlatStack is a tiny circuit board with an embedded operating system that functions as a Web server. The device connects to the Internet. The user logs on to the Internet, opens the Web page and is presented with various options. It's easy to switch on a coffee maker, TV, lights or any other home appliance to which the FlatSstack device is connected.
"Wouldn't it be nice if your refrigerator could do your shopping on the Internet? Or if you could operate your air condition with a UMTS mobile phone?" asks LG
[Newzcrawler]
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John McGuinness -- The deputy for Carlow-Kilkenny continues publicly criticising the current government. McGuinness has hit a chord, claiming Fianna Fail is drifting away from its core values. It's a fact -- the governing party reflects IBEC more than it favours the common working man. McGuinness has stoked a fire that is fanned by nearly half of the dominant party. Journalist Brian Dowling thinks that McGuinness "may be seen by colleagues as a loner, but the party leadership could make a serious miscalculation if they reckoned he was simply a maverick, engaging in solo runs on his own."
"McGuinness Shapes Up as a Rebel with a Cause," by Brian Dowling in The Sunday Times, 24 Nov 02.
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Impressive O2 Results Brian Carey -- In case anyone needed proof that a duopoly produces profits, the Sunday Tribune on 24 Nov 02 provided the numbers. - O2 Ireland operating profits are ahead by 34% for the six months ending Sep 02.
- O2 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation per subscriber in Ireland was £65.4 while in Britain it was £35.4.
- Irish Ebitda were 33% and only 26% in Britain.
- On a quarter by quarter basis, the number of text message sent has risen 47% tp 221m per quarter (that's 2m per day). Text messaging is 70% higher in Ireland than in the UK.
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Absurd Irish Neutality SHANNON, Ireland -- Visit this international airport any day of the week and you will spot USAF military aircraft refueling. Some Irish do not support this action even though Ireland voted in favour of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, declaring the terms for renewing arms inspection in Iraq. Aircraft refueling come hand-in-hand with arms inspections. Trying to deny this reality while posturing behind neutrality is an absurdity. The most critical issue in the current situation is the primacy of international law. Saddam Hussein has mocked the international community for years. If he flouts the current UN Resolution, he should face the consequences. Some of those consequences involve Irish refueling military aircraft.
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SFA ie -- Members of the Irish Small Firms Association can download the "Comprehensive Guide to IT Management" and those who can't should know some key details. - Government subsidised IT training courses were identified as the number one priority by 64% of small business respondents.
- Flat-rate internet access rated as a main priority for 40% of small businesses in Ireland.
- 73% of small businesses viewed the promises and predictions of e-commerce experts as overhyped.
- 70% of all porn is downloaded between the hours of nine to five.
At this stage of its economic development, Ireland must cultivate knowledge networks between companies, suppliers and financial backers. Increased investment in and use of technilogy must become a day-to-day reality for small business.
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24 November 2002 |
Irish Sites Fail Accessibility Tests Barry McMullin -- The Internet is actually increasing the social exclusion of disabled people because developers are building web sites that are impossible for people with disabilities to use. That's McMullin's conclusion, after studying 214 Irish sites. Only 6% of those sites met the minimum accessbility standard set by the Worldwide Web Consortium.
G! has only 7 hits for "Web Accessbility Tests"
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Adrian Weckler -- Two weeks ago, Weckler got a call from a public relations woman who was trying on underwear and asking her friend about it. Once he got a call from a venture capitalist he had just interviewed on the phone. "He was discussing the interview with a third person. He had obviously hit the redial button by accident." Weckler points out that since his name normally lands at the top of the phone books in many mobile phones, he inadvertently gets calls from phones that would bring out the voyeur in anybody.
G! finds 2550 hits
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TREK -- I have a fat USB storage key and am always worried about it getting lost or stolen. Thumbdrive Secure helps reduce the threat of stolen data. Its security features are based around an alphanumeric password. By default the password is fifteen zeroes. The need for a secure PIN means that the Thumbdrive Secure relies on a driver CD for every system you need to install it on. Installation is a matter of choosing either the Windows 2000 or Windows 98 drivers and letting the system do the rest. Every time you insert the Thumbdrive Secure on a system, a dialog pops up demanding the security code. This is also the only time you can change the code.
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Howard Rheingold -- The Well's public conferences are quite handy, especially when considering how lightweight their bandwidth demands are. Howard Rheingold talked about SmartMobs on the Well.
The FCC was set up to regulate the spectrum on behalf of its owners -- the citizens. It happened in the wake of the Titanic disaster, where "interference" was an issue. Radio waves don't physically interfere with each other -- they pass through each other. But the radios of the 1920s were "dumb" insofar as they lacked the ability to discriminate between signals from nearby broadcasters on the same frequencies. So the regime we now know emerged -- broadcasters are licensed to broadcast in a particular geographic area in a particular frequency band. For the most part, licenses to chunks of spectrum are auctioned, and the winner of the auction "owns" that piece of spectrum. We have seen in recent years that the owners of broadcast licenses have amassed considerable wealth, and that those owners have consolidated ownership in a smaller and smaller number of more and more wealthy entities. And of course, political power goes along with that wealth. These aren't widget-manufacturing industries. These are enterprises that influence what people perceive and believe to be happening in the world.
Recently, different new radio technologies have emerged. Cognitive radios are "smarter" in that they have the capability to discriminate among competing broadcasters. Software-defined radio makes it possible for devices to choose the frequency and modulation scheme that is most efficient for the circumstances. Ultra-wideband radio doesn't use one slice of spectrum, but sends out ultra-short pulses over all frequencies. It is possible now to think of "intelligent" broadcast and reception devices that use the spectrum in a way similar to the way routers use the Internet: devices can listen, and if a chunk of spectrum isn't being used by another device for an interval (millionths or billionths of seconds), the device can broadcast on that frequency; reception devices are smart enough to hop around and put the digital broadcasts together, roughly similar to the way packets assemble themselves as they find their way through the Internet. Again, let me caution that there are probably many people who read this who can point out gross technical generalizations and slight inaccuracies in this description. The point, however, is that spectrum no longer has to be regulated the way it used to be. Politically, however, those interests that benefitted from the traditional regime have the ear and pocketbooks of rulemakers, whether they are regulators or legislators. Yochai Benkler at Yale has proposed an "open spectrum" regime, and Lawrence Lessig has discussed a mixed regime, in which parts of the spectrum continue to be owned and sold the way they have been, but other parts are opened to be treated as a commons.
At the same time, the IIU mailing list considered "the dawn of the stupid network."
In recent history, the basis of telephone company value has been the sharing of scarce resources -- wires, switches, etc. - to create premium-priced services. Over the last few years, glass fibers have gotten clearer, lasers are faster and cheaper, and processors have become many orders of magnitude more capable and available. In other words, the scarcity assumption has disappeared, which poses a challenge to the telcos' "Intelligent Network" model. A new type of open, flexible communications infrastructure, the "Stupid Network," is poised to deliver increased user control, more innovation, and greater value.
[Well and Antoin O Lachtnain and Cory Doctorow]
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Dan Bricklin -- Tablets go back a long way. To understand why it doesn't seem like such an advance, you have to be familiar with the hardware and software of the early 1990's. The use of pens and tablets, and "light-pens" that you could point at the screen, goes very far back in the history of computers.
[Tomalak's Realm]
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BBC -- Record industry attempts to stop the swapping of pop music on online networks such as Kazaa will never work. So says a research paper prepared by computer scientists working for software giant Microsoft.
[BBC News and JD's New Media Musings]
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NYT -- Now watch what happens. At least 20 people will arrive on this page during the next 7 days, looking for an inside view of Britney. And all I've done is refer to a New York Times article on Britney's makeover in which executive edirot Howell Raines defends Britney on the front page. "It was about the fame machine, the economic engine that's behind it," Raines said. "Our readers are interested in reading a sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon like that."
[Mickey Kaus]
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Mickey Kaus -- As a keynote speaker at the Revenge of the Blog Conference, Mickey knows the core elements of quality blogging.
- Half-finished ideas are sort of the point. Put the idea out there, let people tell you if it's good or not.
- The shift away from more traditional, print technology press practices: Mickey probably couldn't write a "lead" or "billboard" paragraph if you asked him to.
- There was a very bad editor at the L.A. times who said: "Do it once, do it right, and do it long." This is a really dumb philosophy for a newspaper, and this is why the L.A. Times failed to break any scandals while this guy was editor. In blogging, you don't do it once, you do it repeatedly. You don't do it right, but through feedback you eventually get it right. You don't do it long.
[ Denise Howell and Mickey Kaus and Dave Winer]
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23 November 2002 |
TELEPOLIS -- Google has changed students' and journalists' research habits. Students no longer go to the library. They find fragmented bits of information without checking if they're true or not, and accept other people's arguments instead of thinking themselves.
[Telepolis and netbib weblog and The Aardvark Speaks]
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22 November 2002 |
ECONOMIST -- Excellent piece comparing mobile phones and computers. The convergence of additional computing power is bringing the giants of the two industries into direct conflict. Of the 400m mobile phones that to be sold in 2002, nearly 16m will have built-in cameras. My Nokia 9210i Communicator is more a computer than a phone and I depend on it handling Word documents and Powerpoint files for my corridor computing requirements. By putting new technologies into consumers' hands in an easy-to-use form, the new handsets will succeed where their more expensive and bulkier PCs have failed.
Economist: "Nokia vs Microsoft: The fight for digital dominance"
x: 140
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CNET -- Margaret Kane reports on Amazon's use of Google's API.
The experiments, which might seem technical and obscure, carry broad ramifications. Their concept turns the idea of the graphics-based Web on its head, bypassing its heavily designed home pages and sending developers straight to back-end corporate operations. In opening this new public path to their operations, companies hope to find new ways to generate business and validate the strategy behind Web services.
[CNET]
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GLASSHAUS -- Here's an excellent book by Gareth Downes-Powell, Tim Green and Bruno Mairlot: Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development. This is the very best book dealing with databases and web programming. It covers PHP, SQL and how to build a complex application in Dreamweaver MX. You need it if you are installing PHP and MySQL.
The Advanced SQL Usage chapter is the best in the book. It includes examples and gives reasons.
You can get code for the book on the glasshaus site.
[Amazon and Matt Brown]
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Mark Pilgrim -- You can correlate your news aggregator into the blogging ecosystem and get recommendations for sites you ought to be reading as well.
[Dive into Mark and half-pie]
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ENN ie -- When Emily Dubberley visited Ireland last month, she lamented the paucity of public WiFi nodes in Dublin. Now O2 Ireland plans to offer public WLAN services for business customers in locations around the country from January 2003. According to Andrew McLindon, the Neighbourhood Access Points "will be placed in hotels, conference centres and train stations after O2 signed deals with Jurys Doyle Hotel Group, Bewleys Hotel Group, Lynch Hotel Group and CIE."
A range of payment options will be available. The main one of these will be a voucher system where users "scratch-off" the card to reveal access codes and details. The vouchers will be available at each of the hotspots.
At Kilkenny's SEISS Conference on Monday, we talked about how easy it would be to introduce WLAN roaming between major Irish operators. In fact, my Nokia D211 card is set up with that functionality as part of its admin control panel.
O2 Ireland has partnered with Ye@h Internet which sees Ye@h getting first refusal on sites along with a national roaming agreement with O2 for the sites it establishes.
[ENN brand new: G! 0 hits]
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KARLSRUHE, Germany -- Cairos Technologies have plans to wire the pitch for the next World Cup. They would fit credit-card sized microwave transmitters in players' shin-pads. A peanut-sized transmitter goes inside the ball. Each produces a signature pattern several hundred times a second. Up to 10 antennas around the pitch relay the information to a central computer, which pools the data to reconstruct the game. Within milliseconds referees receive information via a wrist receiver. No more arguing with the referee. The computer sounding the alarm also collects statistics for coaches, pundits and fans. It can even recreate the game online, or control television cameras.
[Smart Mobs and G! 799 hits]
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21 November 2002 |
Sighting: Garringreen Neighbourhood Access Point GARRINGREEN NAP -- We have established a WiFi Neighbourhood Access Point (NAP) in Garringreen, Johnswell Road, Kilkenny, Ireland. It's tied to a 2Mb EsatBT DSL line and it's a weak signal, emanating from a LinkSys Netrouter. But it's browseable from the pavement and ready for an external antenna mount.
[G! 27 hits]
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GARRINGREEN, Kilkenny, Ireland -- I have started calculating the running costs of a truly mobile office. I place my October 2002 Vodafone bill into to the pile -- all €462 of it. And I will use Vodafone's free bill-checking phone number in an attempt to cap my monthly spend below €500.
[G! 225 hits]
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NEW SCIENTIST -- I have many fun memories of the Golden Gate. And if New Scientist is correct, my memories - dubbed "MyLifeBits" in a Microsoft superdatabase - could hold a huge amounts of information, catalogued and easy to search. I have lost so many shoeboxes of photos each of the 15 times that I've moved. The packrat piles of documents and scattered tapes hide special memories from so many places. Blogs like this are one way of recording important things. It will be interesting to see how MyLifeBits evolves at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco. I think it's always worthwhile to improve searchability of multimedia databases.
[New Scientist and Google Sci/Tech with G! 45 hits]
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SYNCHROTECH -- I need another PC Card for my IBM TransNote computer. I like the PCMCIA ATA CompactFlash memory cards because I can slip them between my Fuji digital camera and the TransNote. Since they're solid state, they have no moving parts. They are less prone to fail, so you don't get decimated if you crash a 60GB HDD containing priceless photos. And they're so compact. They increase the data storage of my notebook and camera without taking up space themselves.
CompactFlash Cards were designed specifically to be a mass storage device. The cards include an on-board intelligent controller so they are 100% compatible with all operating systems and applications that support IDE disk drives.
[G! 106,000 hits]
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Vehicle Telematics Frost & Sullivan -- Mobile-enabled cars are getting more prevalent. Here are some of the prominent companies involved in vehicle telematics:
- Volvo DynafleetScania Infotronics
- Daimler-Chrysler FleetBoard
- NavTech
- TeleAtlas
- SiemensVDO Automotive
- Bosch
- Motorola
- Magneti Marelli
- Vodafone
- Webraska
- ProSyst
- IBM
- Acunia
- Gedas
- Minorplanet Systems
Expect the European commercial vehicle telematics market to grow from €169.5m in 2001 to revenues of €4.7bn by 2009, with nearly 5.4m mobile-enable vehicles. And those numbers would not include vehicles with Intellisign Personalcast systems onboard.
[G! 3680 hits]
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Bernie's Machine Calls Tim's Machine SANTRY -- Tim Kirby has a Dell Inspiron sitting in my Nokia 9210's address book. Whenever I send information to his Inspiron, it appears on his weblog. I think this is rather effective machine-to-machine communication. It's also a very good example of repopulating the Web with personal content.
At Waterford Institute of Technology, most of the Coke machines are smart enough to tell service technicians whether they need more soft drink. Actually, the technician has to call the machine first, then look at a database containing information about the stock level. I think that if the soft drink machine had embedded chips that enabled it to call for replenishment, the machine could make more money. Those kind of embedded chips would cost no more than €10 and they would be much cheaper if installed at point of manufacture of the Coke machines.
[G! 116 hits]
We're looking at an incredible potential to enable and expand communication between people and machines. I've started by allowing my Nokia Communicator to talk to Tim's Dell Inspiron. I suspect we'll establish an automated feature where the two machines talk without any human involvement.
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iPROSPECT -- According to a recent study on search statistics from iProspect, three-quarters of Internet users use search engines. However, 16 percent of Internet users only look at the first few search results, while 32 percent will read through to the bottom of the first page. Only 23 percent of searchers go beyond the second page, and the numbers drop for every page thereafter.
[Nua Surveys and IASLASH]
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Ringing Up Revenues from Mobile Data GUINNESS STOREHOUSE, Dublin -- Vodafone now offer content creators 60 percent of the revenue streams. Ringtones, logos and games amount for most of the revenues but in the long term, business use will create the most value. At least once a week during a morning train journey, I listen to a faceless nurse babble on her mobile phone to a long distance colleague. That connection would be well-served by a mobile data application.
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20 November 2002 |
Kevin Werbach -- Spam will kill email as we know it.One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam. That's 10 billion daily pitches for herbal Viagra, Nigerian scams, and genital- enlarging creams piling up in our inboxes. Neither legislation nor litigation against spammers has stemmed the tide, and they're not going to have much of an effect in the future, either. It's time to give up: Despite the best efforts of legislators, lawyers, and computer programmers, spam has won. Spam is killing e-mail.
[Werblog]
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Tim Kirby -- Armed with their Sonys and Macs, and their iMovie or Adobe editing software, just plain people (some watching their kids show them how it's done) can capture relatively high-quality moving images, PLUS use post-production functions like high-speed editing. And it's in Dublin.
[Irish New Media Cuts]
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THE SHIFTED LIBRARIAN -- Jenny Levine recently made some new additions to her NetFlix rental queue, and received the following email from them:
"We noticed that you recently added Enigma to your Rental Queue. We would like to alert you to a possible issue.
It has been brought to our attention by the DVD manufacturers that the Enigma DVD is not viewable on most Toshiba DVD players. If you have a Toshiba DVD player, you may want to select another title.
Review your Rental Queue: http://www.netflix.com/Queue
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Sincerely,
Your Friends at Netflix"
How cool is that? Kind of the anti-Universal BMG (the record company that plans to release ALL their CDs with copy protection now, even if it means they don't work in little things like PCs and car stereos). The entertainment industry could learn a lot from these folks - they're customer-centric, they're service-oriented, and they provide a valuable service (to me, at least) at a reasonable price with a minimum of hassle. That's why they got more of my money this year than the record companies.
[The Shifted Librarian]
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AABLOG -- Here's a funny Switch Parody. "On many occasions, I've heard someone say, 'If you don't love the United States of America, then get the hell out.' I did.... My name is John, and I'm a Canadian."
[AaBlog 2.0 and Jenny Levine]
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SEISS ie -- Just like the goal of UK educators, many attending the regional SEISS conference in Kilkenny this week want broadband for all schools, but it's unrealistic to expect that kind of goal before five years are up.
[The Register]
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COLLISION DETECTION net -- What do you call people who don't show up on a Google search? How do you describe a person who doesn't generate even a single page hit? Jenny Levine calls them "ungoogleables."
The point being, you have to avoid doing and being an awful lot of things to stay off of Google. Though the number of North Americans who don't appear on Google is probably still quite big, it's diminishing every day. I wonder if at some point in the far future, the world of data will be so huge and all-encompassing that there will be a final person who is the last one to not crop up in a major search engine? Kinda like a noosphere version of Mary Shelley's The Last Man (or the Left Behind series).
Will there be people who try as hard as possible not to be Googleable? If you don't appear on Google, it can seem a little unnerving to the rest of us! It's like being The Man Who Didn't Exist, one of those bit characters on the X-files who doesn't have fingerprints."
[Jenny Levine, Collision Detection and Hippo Dignity]
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Eliyahu Goldratt -- Critical Chain applies the Theory of Constraints, introduced in The Goal, to project management, and it seems to really make sense.
Joel Spolsky takes the scenario of creating Painless Software Schedules.
Most people's intuition is to come up with conservative, padded estimates for each task, but they still find that their schedules always slip. Goldratt shows that the slip is precisely because we pad the estimates for each step, which leads to three problems:
- "Student Syndrome" - no matter how long you give students to work on something, they will start the night before. Phil Greenspun noticed this: "The first term that we taught 6.916, we gave the students one week to do Problem Set 1. It was pretty tough and some of them worked all night the last two nights. Having watched them still at their terminals when we left the lab at 4:00 am, we wanted to be kinder and gentler the next semester. So we gave them two weeks to do the same homework assignment. The first week went by. The students were working on other classes, playing sports on the lawn, going out with friends. They didn't start working on the problem set until a few days before it was due and ended up in the lab all night just as before."
- Multitasking, which, as I discuss, makes the lead time for each step dramatically longer, and
- the fact that delays accumulate, while advances do not (for example, if you have finished this week's work on Friday morning, chances are you will waste time on Friday afternoon rather than starting the next week's work. But if you don't make it on time, you'll still leave at 5 o'clock on Friday, accumulating a delay.)
Goldratt's solution is to choose task estimates that are not padded: each individual task's estimate should be exactly in the middle of the probability curve, so there is a 50% chance you will finish early and a 50% chance you will be late. You should move all the padding to the end of the project (or milestone) where it won't do any harm.
If you're doing any kind of project scheduling or management, Goldratt's books will help you stay on track.
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eircom -- Lots of Irish ads for the eircom 4012 SMS phones now. These are rebadged Siemens Gigaset units and they work well. So if you can visit an electronics shop in Germany and don't mind reading instructions in German, buying the same Siemens kit in Germany is cheaper. And as members of the Irish Open Mailing List point out, Siemens offer some very nice and inexpensive cordless ISDN options.
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19 November 2002 |
DIFFUSE org -- The European Commission hosts "Convergence of Web Services, Grid Services and the Semantic Web for delivering e-Services" at Centre Borschette, Brussels, on 12th December 2002. The Opening Keynote Address will be provided by Erkki Liikanen, Commissioner for Enterprise and Information Society, European Commission.
The conference will review, explore and discuss the strategic issues concerning and surrounding the three interrelated technologies of Web Services, Grid Services and the Semantic Web from a broad perspective, with the following specific aims:
- Provide a strategic overview of the current status of the three technologies
- Explore the relationships between these technologies regarding the innovation aspects, knowledge aspects, enterprise aspects, and economic aspects
- Examine current initiatives in harmonization and spotlight the issues surrounding interoperability in the widest context, including the role of open source software, harmonization work needed, value propositions of interoperability, convergence in practice, and control & management issues
- Identify and discuss the critical points to facilitate further development especially in Europe, realistic targets and milestones, and what strategic measures and actions are needed from the stakeholders
The conference programme includes coruscating talks from Carl Kesselman (a Founder of the Grid), Bruce Perens (Primary Author of the Open Source Definition), Guus Schreiber (Co-Chair, W3C Web Ontology WG) and the European Commission.
The programme also includes senior speakers from ABN AMRO Trust, BEA, Berkom, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, TIEKE and Universities of Heidelberg & Toronto.
The conference results will be widely disseminated through www.diffuse.org and other channels, and specifically made available to the relevant organizations.
[Patrick O'Beirne]
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DASHES com -- I have started seeing a lot of discussion about standardising on new blog types. The thought started with the Microcontent Client. With the right kind of microcontent attributes running inside a new blog architecture, you could easily see your dynamic blog posts inside the same category as someone else in a similar micro-content structure. This would leverage Mozilla's reusable components.
[Marc's Voice]
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A Dog in the Cockpit SUN-SENTINEL -- Ken Kaye, aviation writer for The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reported on the following report on a joke making the rounds in the aircraft industry. It addresses new in-flight technology and its importance to the growth of air traffic capacity. In the airline cockpit of the future, only two crew members will be needed: a pilot and a dog. The pilot's job will be to assure passengers everything is under control. The dog's job will be to bite the pilot if he touches anything.
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Ben Hammersley -- Edenfaster, the community wireless group, got their funding!
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WEB CREDIBILITY org -- The Stanford group seeks to "understand what leads people to believe what they find on the Web. We hope this knowledge will enhance Web site design and promote future research on Web credibility." This project stems from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, who offer ten guidelines for a web site's credibility.
[MetaFilter]
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SEISS conference -- The most-attended display at the 2002 regional IIA event in Kilkenny was the OmniServ WiFi stand. It shows people are interested in both local wireless connectivity and in connecting their communities together over distances. It suggests the traditional power balance is shifting from consumers and businesses depending on the dominant telcos providing Internet access to smaller entrepreneurs in the digital wireless world offering less expensive connectivity options.
Three years ago, eircom would have featured at this kind of conference. You cannot believe that company will meekly accept these kinds of challenges to the status quo. The established players, like the national television station RTE and long-established infrastructure providers like Motorola did not attend this event, where some participants were mulling over strategies sure to result in potential interference.
The Irish regulator must be getting pressure by various forces that are quite concerned about Wi-Fi. As Reed E. Hundt, a former chairman of the FCC tells the New York Times, "They're worried that it is really a trenching machine that will uproot the entrenched forces."
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18 November 2002 |
Information Society Programme under Framework 6 SEISS Breakout Session A -- Rory Power from Enterprise Ireland outlined current thinking around FP6, the European Union's upcoming call for proposals. Projects funded under FP6 could receive funding for 50 percent of the costs of approved projects. Based on the intial concepts, it would appear the EU wants to attract larger projects focusing on 23 priority areas. Of interest:
- broadband for all
- networking business and government
- technology-enabled learning and access to cultural heritage
Peter Johnston believes "these will be substantial projects involving substantial resources to manage and co-ordinate. The managing participants may be the larger research institutes. Around them will be others around the second tier of participants. You will be managing €15m and small businesses would not have the expertise to handle that kind of a large project."
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Irish eWork Statistics Imogen Bertin -- Speaking to an IIA/SEISS audience in Kilkenny, Bertin revealed facts about Irish e-working. - Just 5% of the small Irish companies in the knowledge sector report using staff who are fully based e-workers.
- 2% of small Irish knowledge sector companies use staff in remote back office locations.
- Irish e-working is at a low base level but is likely to grow because 58% of Irish workers want to work at home.
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KILKENNY, Ireland -- Innovative technology and helpful technicians led 106 attendees through the opening morning of intense activities. Reading from a new page in the broadband debate, local TD John McGuinness has thought about spreading broadband Internet access to small towns in his constituency by leveraging WiFi. Until recently, only technologies like Chorus MMDS or DSL cable modem service were the only options. McGuinness could make broadband waves by introducing "Kickstart Broadband Access" with government funding to develop more powerful and cheaper long-range wireless networks. McGuinness, formerly the mayor of the city of Kilkenny, now has the unenviable position of representing interests in two counties. Both areas have well-defined needs for always-on Internet connectivity.
Sent by Nokia 9210i mail2blog. This is the first time for wireless blogging at an IIA event.
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OMNISERVE-INC com -- There's plenty of competition for the TC1000 tablet computer, including the Evita 2000A personal tablet companion. Like other power-conscious computers, the Evita 2000A uses the Transmeta Crusoe processor. It comes with a 20GB HDD and 256MB RAM. We worked with it while connected to a WiFi LAN during the 2002 regional SEISS conference.
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Phil Wolff -- Information Convergence is an important subtheme in the essay "From .blog to converged client."
Blogging is a form in transition. I think blogging as a form will merge with all the other forms of digital expression. With email and IM first. With voice/video conferencing, streaming videos, browsing, and PowerPointing later.
Watch it change:
- as more people blog from their foto-mobiles
- as devices start to blog ("My car's day")
- as audiobloggers create radio shows and videobloggers create televsion programming
- as Sims characters start to blog.
Moving forward, see a convergent software client emerge.
Source: evanwolf group, 2002....
We're on our way. Blogging tools are starting to interact with email and sounds. PIMs are managing contact information across multiple applications. Community and collaboration features are as critical to games as traditional gameplay.
[a klog apart and G! and The Shifted Librarian]
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Cory Doctorow -- Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishmann and Adam "TidBITS" Engst have written a book on setting up a home wireless network, called "The Wireless Networking Starter Kit." The book runs down the cross-platform, step-by-step instructions for setting up and running a WiFi network from scratch.
Table of contents
- Why Wireless?
- Networking Basics
- How Wireless Works
- Connecting Your Computer
- Building Your Wireless Network
- Wireless Security
- Taking It on the Road
- Going the Distance
- Things That Go Bump in the Net
- The Future of Wireless
[The Book and G! and Boing Boing Blog]
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Adam Curry -- Audiobloggers like Curry know there's something about being able to read along with an author that makes it somehow quite appealing. He wants "to deliver content on a regular basis that can actually be used royalty free, and yet not be a total waste of bandwidth." This is challenging stuff. Even major studios stumble when trying to serve up compelling content.
Tim Kirby noted last week that Peercast's open source could be used for distribting audioblogs over GNUtella.
[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog and Tim Kirby. G! 10 hits]
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Howard Rheingold -- The Mobile Data Association says British use mobile phones for data more than before. Over 11m webpages are being looked at via phones every day according to figures collated by the Mobile Data Association. The industry group says the figures are the first comprehensive study of mobile net use and it intends to repeat the research regularly to chart increases. The association puts the steady growth of use down to strategy and technology changes by operators which try to make it much easier for customers to browse pages. The most popular pages that people look at cover sport and news as well as net messaging and chat services. The MDA estimates that in September, the last month for which figures are available, 340 million webpages were viewed via mobiles phones.
[Smart Mobs]
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Arguments for Open WiFi Spectrum Kevin Werbach -- The whole point of open spectrum is that we can now build systems smart enough to use open space in the airwaves when it's available, and get out of the way when it isn't.
Andy Seybold worries about public safety communications, but most of those are highly inefficient, proprietary systems. Open spectrum would actually be a boon to public safety and national security. For example, we could build a "priority override" capability for emergencies into software-defined radios, or could make the public safety radios much more robust to interference or system failures.
[Werblog G! 508 hits]
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17 November 2002 |
Larry MvMurty -- In his short retrospective on turning 60, writer Larry McMurtry bemoans the decline of the family mealtime. It took television only one long generation to destroy the family dinner table; where, when, and how someone ate came to be determined by what there was to watch. The order of precedence migrated: who got the best piece of chicken came to be less important than who got to choose which program to watch. Siblings fought more bitterly over program choice than theya ever had over food. Then someone invented the TV dinner -- after which it became rarer and rarer for a whole family to gather round the old kitchen table. "The old bonding power of the family dinner table was lost as the center of the family life gradually shifted from the kitchen to wherever the TV was; female energies shifted too, from the preparation of food and the cleaning up that took place after a meal to just being sure that the freezer was stocked with plenty of frozen pizza. "No sooner had the television set become a common-place in American homes than the parents began to be apprehensive about its effects. 'We never eat together anymore' became a common lament, sounded often by parents who must have sensed that something valuable -- they may not have been quite sure what -- was going away or being lost. As the children grew into teenagers it became rarer and yet more rare to see them in the house at mealtimes; and then the very concept of mealtime began to lose its force. What is mealtime now, in America? It's become a meaningless concept.
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Will Bon Jovi Build Irish Electronic Fan Relationship The band Bon Jovi is taking a novel approach to marketing "Bounce." When fans buy the CD, they will receive a unique serial number that they can then use to register at a Bon Jovi Web site. Members of "American XS," as the program is called, will be notified regularly via e-mail of "Bon Jovi exclusives," and I wo nder if they extend to the band's Irish play date. The new approach represents one of the music industry's biggest efforts to fight piracy by inducing fans to purchase albums in order to get freebie add-ons. "I would like to think this is the beginning of the process where the labels start to think more about the added value," says Jay Berman, head of International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. "The industry's initial reaction to piracy was to fight back. Now the reaction is that we've got to do something positive, and this is the start of it."
[Wall Street Journal]
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CNET -- Eighty-six percent of today's college students are hooked up to the Web, and 79% say being online has had a positive influence on their lives overall, according to the latest survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Not surprisingly, nearly three out of four college students check their e-mail every day and use the Web for library research. A majority of students report improved relationships with classmates, thanks to the Internet, and nearly half say that using e-mail allows them to voice an idea to a professor that they likely would not have expressed in class. And while the high-speed connections on most college campuses do enable more media downloading, students use the Internet just as frequently for academic purposes, making use of course-related mail lists, e-mail and Web sites. "Today's 18-year-old college freshmen were born the same year as the PC was introduced, and they have grown up with these technologies," says the report's author, Steve Jones. "To them, the Internet and e-mail are as commonplace as telephones and television -- and equally as indispensable. This generation is going to end up making the Internet a major part of their lives as they go into the work force. The folks who are trying to market broadband are missing out if they're not targeting this wired market."
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DULLES AIRPORT -- You can see one of the perimeter fences for the $300m National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) on one of the side roads to Dulles. During my days in the Pentagon, we used NRO satellite data. Actually, we didn't use their data, since NRO doesn't really exist.
I think Eisenhower started the NRO to collect intelligence data. The NRO kicked into high gear when satellites and spy planes started generating miles of images.
It's hard to pick out the NRO budget among the trillions of dollars spent by the US government, but it's not hard to find someone from NSA, CIA or USAF who works inside the NRO complex. And the director of the NRO just happens to control the Pentagon's $68bn space budget.
In 1998, a Titan 4 rocket exploded shortly after launch from Cape Canaveral, carrying an NRO satellite worth $1bn.
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Theodor Mommmsen -- This German historian (1817-1903) achieved widespread recognition for his studies of ancient Rome, won the Nobel Prize for literature 100 years ago, one year before he died. Mommsen's famous "History of Rome," written between 1854 and 1885,
combined a focus on the political history of the Roman republic with broad concern for aspects of social and cultural life, based on the critical examination of texts, artifacts, and monuments. He also wrote two other major scholarly, one on Roman Constitutional Law and the other on Roman Criminal Law. The Romans had never codified their law, and Mommsen was the first to undertake the task, which he considered an even more significant contribution to scholarship than his History. The son of a Protestant minister, he grew up in Oldesloe, and studied jurisprudence at the University of Kiel; then, after receiving his master's and doctor's degrees, he spent three years in Italy on a research scholarship at the Archaeological Institute in Rome. Here he became a master of epigraphy -- the study and interpretation of inscriptions -- which Mommsen was to make a source work that complemented the traditional literary approach to understanding life in the ancient world. Returning home, Mommsen enjoyed, in turn, professorships at the universities of Leipzig, Zurich and Breslau, where he wrote the first three volumes of his Roman History. Critically examining hitherto unquestioned traditions, he rejected the Enlightenment's idealization of the classical age and used the political and sociological vocabulary of the 19th century to demythologize Roman history. Mommsen had a long and happy marriage with Marie Reimer, a bookseller's daughter, who bore him 16 children. When he died just four weeks short of his 86th birthday, Mommsen had attained mythical status among his contemporaries.
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Rock Journalism Frank Zappa -- "Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."
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PC WORLD com -- Qualcomm has licensed TransDimension USB-on-the-Go (OTG) technology that will allow peer-to-peer and direct connections between phones and other devices without a personal computer. When OTG is integrated into a handset, users will be able to connect their phones to USB printers, portable keyboards, CD ROM drives, MP3 players, and digital cameras. They also will be able to synchronize cell phone data with handhelds and use their cell phones as modems when attached to a handheld that doesn't have integrated wireless. OTG poses formidable competition to Bluetooth, because USB is prevalent on most devices.
[
Infoworld and Newsscan]
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Talk is Cheap, but Not if You're Irish Brian Carey -- Irish Vodafone subscribers, particularly the pre-paid, gab at a rate of up to 100 percent more than Vodafone customers in the UK. That's the conclusion Brian Carey makes, after reviewing Vodafone numbers that show the average Vodafone Ireland customer is paying mobile phone bills that are 20 percent higher than customers in the UK.
Pre-paid Ready to Go users bills are 67 percent higher than pre-paid cusomters in the UK. And it's down to the fact that Irish people rabbit on more, not because tariffs are higher.
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Broadband Internet for Irish Schools The Irish Department of Education will commission a report on the feasibility of providing schools with broadband access as part of its blueprint for the future of ICT in Irish education. The department actually is concerned more about cost-per-minute, not speeds of download. The deparment has a fund of €25m for its blueprint for the future of ICT in Irish education programmes for each of the three years from 2001 to 2003.
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Riverdeep and Ireland Inc Wall Street Radio -- David Rocker continues belittling Riverdeep's portfolio estimates. He challenges how Riverdeep can mak a $57m acquisition and claim their goodwill increases by $89m. He smirks at Riverdeep delisting from Nasdaq and points out how the company does not help the image of Ireland Inc in the eyes of the international investment community.
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European Twentysomethings Live at Home ESRC -- Professor Richard Berthoud from the Economic and Social Research Council reports that Irish twentysomethings are likely to remain living at home with their parents far longer than their European counterparts. Only half of Irishmen surveyed had left home by the age of 26, roughly three years later than their British counterparts. Two fiscal realities bear down in Ireland -- it's impossible to find reasonably priced car insurance and real estate costs too much to buy or rent.
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Revolt over Spending Cuts SUNDAY-TIMES co uk -- Emily O'Reilly tops the front page and relates that the Irish government faces a new wave of internal dissent after several backbenchers warned ministers against hijecking scarce public funds to bolster their own popularity.
John McGuinness, one of the most outspoken backbenchers, fired the first salvo yesterday, stating that he would defend the spending estimates published last Thursday but expected the burden to be shared right across the government.
"I know many colleagues feel the same way, but some feeel they will be penalised if they are seen to be rocking the boat," he said. "I am not going to tolerate any minister hijacking the public purse to look after their constituency at a time when everyone is being asked to accept the spending cuts."
The Carlow-Kilkenny backbencher said he would not be treated like a second-class TD. "I was elected like everyone else in the Dail and I am predicting there will be uproar in the party if every minister does not pull their own weight and ensure a fair distribution of the available resources," he said. FP
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You Have the Poor Always with You David McWilliams -- Historians are fascinated by the reasons for the 4th century transition from classic patronage (where the rich citizens looked after the poor ones in the name of the Republic) to the much more inclusive charitable activities of the Christians. Economics may well help explain this.
The new rhetoric about the poor came from the likes of Saint Augustine and Saint John who came from North Africa and Syria, places characterised by massive economic booms in the fourth and fifth centuries. Just as the Dickensian obsession with the poor in Victorian England spawned the Salvation Army and the like, a degree of "relative poverty" -- rich and a significant poor living side by side -- is needed to kick-start discussion on the poor.
x: 261
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First Time Irish Home Buyers Hit KILEKENNY, Ireland -- The Irish government has eliminated money paid to first time home buyers. But that hasn't resulted in decreases to the selling prices. In Dublin, most estate agents claim the market is robust, with prices going up around 20 percent this year. Around 40 percent of the price of a house goes back to the government through PAYE, PRSI, Corporation Tax and VAT. Agents estimate that about half of all first time buyers currently receive parental assistance. Scrapping the first time buyers' grant alienates a significant proportion of the population that aspires to ownership. Although most new owners may still find the funds for a purchase, they will lose € that would go into fitting out the house. In the case of an Irish home, that means some rooms will go unfinished for several years, perhaps until the next Irish general election in five years' time.
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16 November 2002 |
Kevin Werbach -- Thinks there are more WiFi nodes along some metropolitan railroad lines than mobile phone towers.
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Dave Winer -- Opines about where RDF is at.
Before there was a World Wide Web, there were big technology companies with ambitious plans for networking and application integration, and interop between competing software. Apple had OpenDoc and Taligent in partnership with IBM and a bunch of other companies. Microsoft had Cairo and various mail and database APIs, some in partnership with other companies. It seemed every company had their own roadmap, the industry made mundane mature products, PCs and Macs; and mostly incomprehensible white papers and bookshelves of incomprehensible documentation, and not much inbetween.
Then along came the Web and blew that all up. You didn't even need to read the docs to figure it out. Just View Source. That was good because there were no docs.
So I am a disbeliever of anything that requires as much documentation, head-scratching, hand-waving, and eyes-glazing-over as RDF does in 2002. Forget the problems with the formats, that can be dealt with later, after you figure out how to explain it to someone who knows a lot about computers, networks, users, XML, HTTP, etc. If you can't explain it to me so that I understand what you're doing -- you've got a big problem.
It's a cute, and all-too-common tactic to say that people who don't get it are dumb. I'm not dumb, but RDF makes me feel that way. After all these years, I've concluded that if I can't understand it, it doesn't have much of a chance in the market. All the powerfully successful technologies of the past have had simple explanations anyone could understand. If RDF is one of those, I strongly believe it must too. Therefore I conclude that it isn't.
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DUBLIN, Ireland -- After I read how a Nokia camerphone was swapped with pictures intact, I remembered that the same thing has happened to me when getting a reconditioned Nokia Communicator. I got some interior decorators Nokia 9110, complete with contact addresses, SMS text messages, faxes sent and images. If you give up your Nokia phone to a service point because it won't power up, that normally means you were not able to scratch all data from it. Be careful when getting a replacement phone. And be careful when storing private media clips on your cameraphone.
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STEVEN BERLIN JOHNSON com -- Googleshare is and interesting idea that Rael Dornfest has implemented:
Search Google for a specific word, and get back the total number of results. Then you search that set for someone's name. Divide the second number by the first, and you get a percentage that shows you how much the person "owns" the word. Call it semantic mindshare. Or lexical penetration. You'll need a Google Web API developer's key> Otherwise, download the source for your mutating and spindling pleasure.
[ SBJ and Googleshare]
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Sky Dayton -- Boingo's exec thinks non-laptop Wi-Fi devices will dramatically increase hot spot usage and the size of the potential user population. With Pocket Boingo, PocketPC becomes the first such device. Pocket Boingo on an iPaq, provides an instant-on, 5-10 second login experience, perfect for people who are moving through a hot spot quickly. It's pretty cool to be sitting in a hot spot streaming video on your PDA! Bigger picture -- with Wi-Fi component prices dropping through the floor and all the innovation around power conservation, we can expect to see a flood of non-laptop Wi-Fi devices. Not just PDAs, but cell phones, MP3 players, Game Boys. Anything with a battery that could benefit from fast wireless Internet connection. Pocket Boingo will only work on Pocket PCs running ARM processors (initially the iPAQ 3600, 3700, 3800, and 3900 series) and with Wi-Fi cards using Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) 5.1 compliant drivers for network sniffing and managing the connection (Proxim ORiNOCO, Compaq WL110 or HP hn220w PC Cards with version 7.62 device drivers).
[80211b News]
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SANTRY SKUNK WORKS -- Although there's a high-speed video streaming service within 600m of our roof, the VideoLan Project at Ecole Centrale Paris is a complete software solution for video streaming, developed by students and contributors from all over the world, under the General Public License (GPL).
[New Media Irish Cuts]
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OJR org -- Online Journalism Review interviews Matt Jones. Editorial folk are going to have to become more like Sherpas than censors, and make more and more use of the non-textual tools and techniques available to "manufacture understanding." As our attention gets less, we seem to get more media.
[Tomalak's Realm]
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Howard Rheingold -- Auto-ID technology will change the world by merging bits and atoms together to form one seamless network that interacts with the real world in real time. Physical objects will have embedded intelligence that will allow them to communicate with each other and with businesses and consumers. Auto-ID technology offers an automated, numeric system of smart objects that revolutionizes the way we manufacture, sell, and buy products. An Electronic Product Code (ePC) is embedded onto individual products and physical objects on memory chips known as "smart tags" that connect objects to the Internet. Auto-ID technology will allow the Internet to extend to everyday objects. Everything will be connected in a dynamic, automated supply chain that joins businesses and consumers together in a mutually beneficial relationship.
[Smart Mobs]
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15 November 2002 |
PHOTOBLOGS org -- "Created to help people find high-quality photoblogs." It already has almost 300 photoblogs listed, with a user rating system in place to show the "Top 100" on the main page.
[Coolstop Daily Pick, Scorcher Radio and Aimee]
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Dublin Gridlock as River Tolka Bursts 
DUBLIN -- One of the little side effects of slowdowns in infrastructure spending is that traffic will crawl to a halt when heavy rains fall. The problems start with shorted electrical connections, killing traffic signaling and washing out logical driving skills. Recently, much-need drainage systems were given the long finger concurrently with drain cleaning programmes being stalled, resulting in major flooding in north Dublin. Cars don't travel where currents run.
Severe weather events like these floods in Dublin are happening in Ireland about once a year. I remember driving through Christmas storms in 1997, when their winds caused over #8364;100m. In December 2000, a major freeze saw payouts totalling €30m to homes and businesses flooded by burst pipes. It's official: Ireland feels global warming effects.
Picture with Concord EyeQ camer sent to blog by Nokia 9210i IrTran-P
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Salon editor David Talbot has strong feelings about Salon. The online magazine "still stands, in large part because of the nearly 50,000 readers who now subscribe -- over 44,000 for Salon Premium and over 5,000 for the Well and Table Talk. In fact, more readers signed up for subscriptions in October than in any other month since we launched the Premium service -- and November is shaping up as another record month."
[Werblog and Marc's Voice]
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Open: Locale Information OPEN -- Members of the Irish Open Mailing List mulled over a problem with a recently built W2K server running IISi5. When running test asp code using the date() function, the date returns in the format dd/mm/yyyy. When running the same code on an NT4 server with IIS4 it returns in the format dd/mm/yy. Both servers return the same locale information ie 6153. Both servers are set with the same country date formats. Thgis is a common problem. Jon Hanna suggests "it's best to avoid relying on locale information of this type on servers.
Explicitly render dates using the Format function and a user-defined format string (which also makes it easier to create ISO8601 dates for XML, HTML attributes or SQL Server and RFC2822/RFC822-as-updated-by-RFC1123 dates for HTTP headers).
You could still have the ability to quickly change the format if you use a constant defined in an .inc file or a type-library. This would be wise anyway as "dd\/mm\/yyyy" (for the first above format) "yyyy-mm-ddTHh\:NN\:Ss" (W3C profile of ISO8601 for XML, HTML attributes and SQL Server) and "ddd, dd mmm yyyy Hh\:Nn\:Ss G\MT" (for HTTP headers) should be considered "magic strings" and constants should be used for the same reasons as they are for "magic numbers".
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DIJEST -- What literacy do you need to blog well? We teach these things in "Essential Web Journaling."
- Know the elements of good blogging.
- Quickly read and distill elements of a newsfeed.
- Know how to add rich media to a blog.
- Appreciate your target audience's connectivity.
- Keep a thematic interest.
- Understand the blog's software and web services.
Phil Wolff
x: 125
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Impacts of Irish Budget Cuts SHANOWEN -- The 2003 Irish National Budget features more cutbacks than initiatives. Cuts are being implemented wherever they can be made. Nearly every government programme announced last December must be unstititched.
- First Time Buyers' Grant gone. The fact is, the €3600 given to first time homeowners normally helped improved the profit for builders, not to increase the chance for someone to qualify for a new home purchase. Banks did not factor in the grant money to the qualification standards for home loans. If new buyers don't get the money, they stall interior decorating. The government might divert the funding towards building homes for single moms.
- National Roads Unchanged. Only one major roads project gets the go-ahead.
- The Government's allocation for scientific research bucks the trend. It gets substantial increases in two departments, but one key programme gets stopped. The science allocation in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment sees an increase of almost 60 percent. Most of this money flows into the Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland. But the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions has been postponed for at least one year.
- Funding for the Irish Film Board drops by 12 percent. The Arts Council loses €3.6m.
- Capital projects in the institutes of technology are slashed by 33 percent. Funding across third level education is down dramatically.
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WINDLEY com -- Aaron Medford has interesting links related to cantennas. - Where to buy N-type connectors plus instructions for building and using cantennas. Includes Javascript application that calculates key dimension for parts depening on desired cantenna diameter.
- Cantenna is a commercial product that costs USD 19.95.
[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog and dws.]
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An entry-level Cray XI will start at $2.5m, but CEO Jim Rottsolk says he expects the majority of Cray systems sold to range from $5m to $40m. A top-of-the-line machine with 50 cabinets would cost $200 to $300m. That would be the world's fastest computer.
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14 November 2002 |
KVA se -- A new Swedish telescope facility removes blurs and snaps astonishing views of the Sun. Some of these show inner structure, a dark core, in the hitherto unresolved filaments in sunspot penumbrae. The dark-cored filaments were an unexpected discovery, that is published as a Letter in Nature, "Dark cores in sunspot penumbral filaments" by Göran B. Scharmer, Boris V. Gudiksen, Dan Kiselman, Mats G. Löfdahl, and Luc H. M. Rouppe van der Voort.
[Slashdot with images courtesy of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.]
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IPDL WIPO int -- Part of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the Intellectual Property Digital Library contains a wealth of information on the wide expanse of human creativity.
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Doc Searls -- Personal identity ought to belong to the person and not to a service provider or some other agency. You would think that this would be straightforward and obvious, but it's not, at least, not to industry. The response is to create a digital identity system for the rest of us. "If we create the protocols, APIs and other standards that let customers relate at full power with the companies they choose, consumer becomes an obsolete noun. The companies now in full charge of the identities they confer on each of us will no longer have full control, because now they will have to relate and not just distribute."
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NYT -- William Safire has major concerns about the giant federal database that John Poindexter gets USD 200m to set up under the Homeland Security Act. "Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the data-mining power to snoop on every public and private act of every American." Safire explains that most editorial writers and lawmakers either don't know what's in the bill or fail to understand what's about to happen. He claims that "every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a virtual, centralized grand database."
[Karlin Lillington and Thomas Greene in The Register]
Animated cartoon on TIA by Mark Fiore
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BBC -- Holiday spending habits revealed for Europe. Forrester Research thinks shoppers will almost double their online spending, with sales rising over the festive season EUR 7.6bn from just EUR 4bn last year.
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Open: PHP and OS-X OPEN -- Dermot McNally raises an interesting point on the Irish Open Mailing List regarding PHP and OS-X. "Given that OS-X is Unix and can actually run PHP, isn't is surprising that PHP wouldn't by now have been updated to know about Mac line ends? Or, if OS-X now uses standard Unix line ends, maybe an OS-X version of Filemaker would produce an export file for you that would be friendly for subseqent import."
But Jonathan Heron pointed out "different programs on OS-X will produce files with different line endings. I would expect that FMP, as a Carbon application (updated from the Classic Mac) would not use Unix line ends unless the developers decided to explicitly update it for that."
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Open: Bulk Mail through Eircom ANTIVIRUS ie ---Some bulk mailers are having problems sending their mail through mail1.eircom.net. They noticed they can send only up to 100 emails at a time. Ross Cooney pointed out, "it seems that they are using tarpitting to annoy spammers.
This means if you are a spammer and you want to use Eircom just send the good news in blocks of 99 or less.
Cooney believes "using an ISP's mail servers to send bulk mail is not a good idea. Other users have to wait until your email leaves the queue before they can send email." He points out that his bulk mail service sits on a 42Mb backbone and does not get in the way of other people's mail.
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FORBES -- Although the article is about America's congested radio spectrum, the same lesson applies to Ireland, where one of the country's most valuable resources sits underdeveloped, consigned to uses that time and technology have long since passed by. Old technologies are swamped with excess airwaves they don't use. Newer technologies gasp for airwaves they desperately need. And promising industries of the future are asphyxiated.
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Skillset: Remote Comms Assistant THE GUARDIAN -- The Remote Comms team behind The Guardian, The Observer and GuardianUnlimited seeks a specialist who can provide tech support over the phone. The technician needs an awareness of medems, GSM, GPRS, and ADSL."We recognise team diversity as a vital contributor to business performance."
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COMPUTERWORLD com -- A remarkably progressive group is bringing network access to remote places by running a 72-mile link in San Diego, using a 2.4 GHz connection to an island to handle telemetry from a variety of monitoring equipment. The devices use 2-foot parabolic dishes and the maximum 1 watt output.
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Peeter Marvet -- Here are some tasty examples of mobile blogging from Estonia. Peeter has developed a real-time SMS advertising and posting system that uses Frontier. People can place text ads on a media site and pay for them using an SMS equiped phone. He also built a site where people can report bad drivers from their phone. I also like his stuff involving a decentralized multimedia collection. He built a site using Frontier for a local Radio station that allowed them to send out reporters with cameraphones. Reporters snapped photos, then emailed them from the phones to a Frontier server which then automatically displayed the pictures on the station's site. This is what we plan to do in the Essential Web Journaling Course.
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HYPERGENE net -- Civic journalism is likely to transform newsrooms thanks to the efforts of Pew Center's J-Lab Institute and Jan Schaffer. Jan has always struck us as a kindred spirit when it comes to bringing fresh approaches to a traditional craft. Now, in her new role as executive director of J-Lab, she will have the resources to seek and develop new ways to engage and inform news audiences.
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SAMSONITE com -- Samsonite now offers a Bluetooth-enabled briefcase. It can be used for storage and backup while travelling, although the most immediate gain may be as security against theft or loss.
[Gizmodo]
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NEWS com -- Bill Gates plans to show a set of everyday devices, completely connected. They come with processors, IP addresses, and connectivity protocols. Just as more computers are getting connected, and processing power migrates down into ever-smaller devices, we're also seeing an increase in sensors (webcams, satellite data, GPS info) and effectors (appliances, motors, things which actually do something). In the middle we'll have an increased need for software-driven interfaces, often tailored to a particular sub-audience, so that you can do more with this increased information about the world.
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ECOMMERCE BASE com -- Sitepoint proffers 5 Steps to Relationship Marketing Success.
- Change your Perspective from "Here's what I do" to "What do you need?"
- Recognize your Vulnerability
- Keep in touch
- Position Yourself as an Expert
- Grow to Meet Client Needs
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HIPTOP NATION -- These Hiptop bloggers recently had a Halloween Scavenger Hunt. Howard Rheingold blogs about Hiptop and one of the members of one of the teams has written a paper about it. As Ireland moves into MMS, someone is going to figure out how to arrange teams using cameraphones in games that reward contestants for their photos. And some mobile bloggers are going to figure out how to incorporate all these things as part of a mobile swarm.
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AP -- The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments about whether
libraries can be forced to install Internet filters or risk losing
federal funds. The Children's Internet Protection Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, has come under intense pressure from library groups and free-speech advocates who say the filter requirement infringes on the First Amendment. A three-judge panel agreed, citing the inability of current filters to block objectionable material without also blocking content protected by the First Amendment. In writing the law, Congress indicated that after review by the three-judge panel, further appeals would go directly to the Supreme Court, and officials from Texas have filed such an appeal supporting the law.
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A WHOLE LOTTA NOTHING org -- Matt Haughey discussed how syndication makes the publisher. I’ve never personally found much use for a RSS reader. That all changed when a friend said she wasn’t reading my site anymore, or any sites for that matter that didn’t carry RSS feeds. Thanks to my aggregator, I read about a hundred sites a day. My worldwide reach extends much farther than I could ever follow in my browser. I visit my feeds when I see an interesting title. With RSS, webloggers can reach wider swaths of our networked world. RSS doesn't demean HTML. RSS avails HTML to wider readership.
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13 November 2002 |
Open: Web Sessions Which Do Not Rely on Cookies OPEN -- Irish developers are discussing ways of using sessions which do not rely on cookies. Craig McFadyen says that "ASP.Net Session generated keys can have the option of using a cookie-less mode that was not available in ASP 3.0 where the IIS server generated sessionID is passed on the URL line instead of via a client cookie. The session object is recreated on the server based on the session key passed. This could be open to abuse from URL tampering."
ref: ASP.Net forms Authentication
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FOUND -- This incredibly cool online and print publication explores the beauty and funkiness and accidental poignance of found things. Trash. Discarded objects. Weird notes about random sex, like this one, that defy description. Love letters (like the one shown) pinned behind car windshield wipers that eventually dislodge themselves to float down the street, unread. Watch for an audio CD in '03, with found sound--think answering machine messages, discarded audio letters, and original songs inspired by found notes.
Found Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Poynter.org and Cory Doctorow]
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W3C -- The XForms proposal has been moved to recommendation status. XForms will make interchanging forms easier on multiple devices.
[Matt Brown's Radio Weblog]
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12 November 2002 |
POCOCKE HOTSPOT -- Tim Kirby has a migrane headache and as he packed up his PowerBook in search of solace, I wondered how much of that pain was from his very distinct T Model of Skills. Because like the letter T, Tim is very deep in one area and very wide in all other areas. As a new media developer, Tim doesn't tell an accountant how to develop his amortisation schedule. Nor does he tell a metal worker how to improve corrosion resistance. But Tim knows just enough about these isses and how they affect new media production. Plus, he can talk to those other specialists without demeaning them. An accountant or a metal worker coming up with new media strategies sounds like a mistake from the point of conception. Unless we're dealing with Renaissance Men in both cases.
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NEUROS AUDIO -- The Nueros 20 GB HD looks interesting. It can broadcast songs wirelessly to your stereo. It can record and identify songs from FM radio. It can automatically synchronise your downloads, playlists and requests from your PC library. Plus, it enables sharing between handheld drives. You choose: share or private. It automatically recognises shared drives within the wireless handheld, making it a doddle to select, connect, and download playlists, music, and movies at broadband speed.
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Wireless Speakers
OPEN -- Several audiophiles on the Irish Open Mailing List discussed how to use wireless speakers. "Wireless headsets are definitely an option," said Ciaran Walsh. "Sennheiser do a set, which can take up to four sources, and gives you virtual surround sound that's supposed to be fairly good."
I agree with Ciaran and think if you're serious about your sound, you'll figure out how to hide your wires. The pursuits (Ciaran, Dave Wilson and Stephen McCarron) recommend moving around the wood flooring and edge skirting to suit your needs.
Lift them floorboards! It's not that bad. If it's a floating floor, there are skirting board options, such as magnetic clip-on skirting that you can easily remove and replace. And there are usually gaps around the edges where the wires fit nicely.
If you are running the wires, then consider future-proofing it. Think of runnning the wires needed for a subwoofer, and possibly a rear centre speaker (for 6.1 support). Subwoofer cabling is not the same as just another speaker wire.
If you're being really neat, then you can always do some wall plates and sockets too, instead of cables suddenly appearing from the skirting.
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JIGZAW -- This tasty Pieces Bookmarklet hangs on PC and Mac IE and NN browsers. Content creators, site maintainers and bloggers can use the bookmarklet's functionality to rapidly go from a selected Book Title, Author or ISBN to inserting a rich set of content with links from Amazon and other sources. It will allow you to insert your own Associate ID into all of the "buy it now" links. Future releases of the program include full support for all items sold by Amazon as well as rich content from sources like Google.
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Open: Ideas for Maintaining State of a User's Session OPEN -- Fruitful discussion ensued on the Open Mailing List concerning the most common way of maintaining state of a user's session in a web-based application. The discussion ultimately revolves around statistics that show the percentage of viewers using cookies.
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Closing the Door BUSINESS PLUS -- Nick Mulcahy reports that FAS, the Irish State labour agency, wants a clamp-down on work permits, believing some employers are abusing the current system. Overseas workers are tied to their employers by the terms of their work permit, which puts the employer in a very strong position when it comes to dictating terms.There has been a very considerable increase in immigration over the last four years including a record number of work permits in 2001. Most of the immigrants over the latter years of the 1990s were highly skilled or experienced. However, work permits have been issued primarily for unskilled jobs in retail, agriculture, hotels, catering and construction. Business Plus revealed 19,000 work permits were issued in Ireland in the first half of 2002, of which 11,500 were new permits and 7,500 were renewal permits. Of the 47,600 job vacancies notified to FAS this year, 42 percent have ended up with work permit applications. FAS director general Rudy Molloy wants to move towards a transparent immigration system that might be based on a points system. The existing system rests in the Department of Employment. An internal report there shows that the labour supply will have to grow significantly in the medium-term in order to satisfy project employment needs.
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SIEMENS ie -- Trying to drive customers towards mobile content is as important as getting mobile phones to those customers in the first place. That's part of the message I took from listening to Danuta Gray in The Mansion House a few days ago. On the heels of that philosophy, Simens is offering funding to companies to develop the next must-have item.
Siemens Mobile Acceleration will provide capital investment of up to €1m to deserving companies. Investment decisions are based upon a business idea that shows potential to successfully tap into the wireless technology, applications and services market that will open up with the advent of next generation mobile telephony,W says Dietrich Ulmer, chief executive of the unit.
The acceleration fund has made seven investments so far in Germany, Sweden, China and Italy. The company is not interested in "me too" applications.
All of the Siemens fundings went to companies with telecom expertise present in the management teams.
x:109
Sent to blog with Nokia D211 WiFi connected to Pembroke Street (Dublin) hotspot.
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WIRED -- Katie Dean reports on an SRI study that shows handhelds can be effective classroom tools. Over 90 percent of teachers who used them with their classes say that handhelds can have a positive impact on learning. Topgold gets weekly requests for information about Pocket Classrooms, a concept related to the SRI report.
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WIRED -- Kendra Mayfield reports that a former tech exec is photographing California's 1,100-mile coastline and posting the shots online. The database has already helped environmentalists catch polluters, and that has some property owners worried. Visitors can look up a photograph at a specific location by clicking on a detailed map or entering longitude and latitude.
x: 109
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Cell Phone Straddling Two Worlds Ephraim Schwartz -- Curious what might be a "cell phone that straddles two worlds," I read on InfoWorld that it's a phone that does voice and data through a keyboard. I'm pretty sure that's the same as "texting" in Ireland.
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MACROMEDIA -- Contribute is an easy way to edit static HTML sites.
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SLASHDOT org -- Check out the Slashdot thread on Network Detectors. The white paper discusses how to detect whether NetStumbler and similar programs are running on your network. Normally, NetStumbler is considered a passive activity.
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OPEN -- Keith Jordan received an invoice for €590 from UTP Digital Directories for a directory listing he know nothing about. He wondered if anyone else received this. Group consensus suggested it was another directory con-job. Jon Hanna believes "it doesn't matter if anyone has heard of them or not, if no one in your office has heard of them (or at least no one who can authorise €590 expenditure) then contact both the gardai and law enforcement in whatever country they reside in. Gaddo Benedetti pointed to a helpful URL on bogus operations. John McCormac explained some of the consumer psychology behind invoice scams.
The Eu-digital scam involved a time limit on the scam invoice as in if you did not return payment within a few days, you had accepted the invoice. These operations tend to be based on the lack of financial control in large companies -- someone thinks that the inclusion/ad has been approved and pays out.
Sent by Nokia 9210i as mail2blog.
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11 November 2002 |
DUBLIN, Ireland -- Before she left for the O2 breakfast, Karlin told Santa that she wants a cameraphone for Christmas. Note the reaction when she asked Danuta Gray, CEO of O2 Ireland.
Seriously, both women were accompanied by 16 other people at breakfast in The Mansion House, getting a whirlwind tour of O2's MMS, Java games, location-based SMS text alerts, and parking paid by mobile phones.
All this non-voice capability may be fully functioning technology, but did consumers really buy their phones for those purposes? Non-data usage would help both O2 and Vodafone pump up their average revenue per user (ARPU) figures. O2's ARPU was €542 last year, €10 more than Vodafone.
I am watching third level students at Tipperary Institute in Java classes, writing small programs that can run on the new phones. Java games require only a couple of programmers and a lot of caffeine. In Tipp, many of the students will code up an arcade game in exchange for a new phone. But one of the problems is the way Java has been installed on the phones. The programmers cannot access any of the interesting bits of the phone. That means they cannot get to the camera, or to the SMS function or to the address book. These limitations make it difficult to quickly write the really interesting location-based games using low-end Java coders.
One non-data capability that went unmentioned in the O2 session was the possibility of wireless internet networks being used instead of wireless phone networks. This is already happening in the USA, where you can have your telephone routed to your handheld device. It would pay O2 to look into emerging 802.11 usage patterns because they are a competitive threat.
"Non-Voice Products" by Karlin Lillington, 11 Nov 02. "These are fun. I want one."
Original mail-to-blog story on Kirbycom, 11 Nov 02.
Picture snapped by Nokia 9210i Concord EyeQ IrTranP camera and emailed to blog files.
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DUBBERLEY com -- Emily wants Geek Girl pants. "Totally cool. Wear your code on your crotch. Or something." I would prefer RFID in the waistband. That way, you could nonchalantly grab whatever information you wanted, even from across the room.
[Geek Girl Thong]
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New Scientist -- Columbia Tristar now ships high-res "Superbit" DVDs in Europe without Macrovision protection. An Irish-American company makes the technology used to keep home users from making VHS recordings from their own DVDs. Macrovision charges the film companies big bucks for licenses to their technology, which is trivial to circumvent and makes home-theater setups unnecessarily complex. So Columbia-Tristar is forgoing paying for Macrovision licenses for its new Superbit titles and releasing without the copy-prevention technology.
[New Scientist, Boing Boing and The Aardvark Speaks]
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Keep WiFi Unlicensed SEISS ie -- The Irish Communications Regulator views wireless spectrum as a finite resource, but in the case of WiFi, that perspective may be flawed.
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Irish Civil Servants Main Cause of Dublin Gridlock DUBLIN -- Almost two-thirds of all city centre parking in Dublin is owned by the public sector, which means that over 7,000 civil servants take their cars instead of public transport into the city every day. They use car parking spaces worth up to €50,000 each on the open market. However, this perk is not taxed as a benefit in kind.
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TELEWORK ie -- Advances in Irish tax law make it easier to work from home. In relation to income tax, an e-worker's employer may provide computers and ancillary equipment to enable them to work outside of the office. No benefit in kind charge will be imposed. Regarding home expenses, such as electricity, it is accepted that the w-worker will incur extra expenditure while working from home. Revenue allows an employer to makde payments up to €3.20 per day to employees without deducting PAYE and PRSI. The tax treatment of motor expenses and subsistence payments is set out in separate pamphlets. Several friends avail of capital gains tax exemptions for their home office space. These concepts are explained well by Telework Ireland.
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U2 -- I remember thumbing through a flatmate's newly minted CD collection in 1992. He was in the process of converting vinyl to CD and he had a fresh copy of The Joshua Tree. I decided to play the CD. Up until that point, I did not equate the album with U2 anthems. I craved the hip-shaking funky fuzz guitar, the taut, dance-style drums, the riffs with attitude. The best thing is I got to see them perform in Slane last year. The next best thing is that I have the best of their work from the past decade.
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KILKENNY, Ireland -- Talking about the bare minimum equipment for a wireless office, friends preparing for the Telework Ireland Conference tick off the same kind of things.
- ISDN or DSL line
- router
- wireless access point
- wireless card
- Zone Alarm or firewall
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10 November 2002 |
What a Way to Run a Railroad DUBLIN -- In the pissy rain, stumbling around the traffic cones in Harcourt Street, I wonder why Dublin closed down the Harcourt Street train line. These days, we queue for hours in Dublin traffic jams, the legacy of Ted Andrews' decision to close the Harcourt Line years ago. Some would say there was little demand for the Harcourt Line service and that's why it shut down. Today, the carriages would be overflowing if they were running. Last week, I walked over the Clonmel railroad bridge as a slow train chugged underway below. These days, if you take that same train from Waterford to Limerick, you will be treated to 24mph service in carriages creaky with age. Your trip features a 63 minute wait on the Limerick Junction platform as you await a connection to Dublin. As a frequent user of public transport, I know the fastest way to Dublin from Clonmel is by bus. Only a 0630 bus from Clonmel will connect to any train heading to the capital. Ther should be a serious investigation of maintaining public service for the private sector. This would mean upgrading rail service, promoting its existence, and offering a sensible transport option to those living outside of Dublin's commuter belt.
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DUBLIN -- We are only a few lines of code away from MMS-enabled Smart Mobs. The camera phones would herald in new kinds of group behaviour enabled by MMS applications.
In the States, the popular wireless blogging website Hiptop Nation acts as a central blogging site for owners of the Sidekick device, a portable handheld data communications device recently introduced by Danger. The Sidekick supports wireless AOL Instant Messaging, email, SMS text messages, and web access. Users of the Sidekick can post wireless public blogs on Hiptop Nation via their Sidekick device, as well as upload photographs from the Sidekick's digital camera.
On Halloween, October 31 2002, Hiptop Nation sponsored a >photo-scavenger hunt competition across the US. Participants were users of the Hiptop Nation blog site who were placed into competing teams, and participants coordinated their actions as well as acquired and uploaded photographs across the US exclusively via their Sidekick wireless devices. The hunt lasted for 24 hours.
x:109
[Howard Rheingold and Cory Doctorow]
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EPIC -- The practise of colleges monitoring P2P file sharing is "incompatible with intellectual freedom." EPIC warned universities that students deserve a measure of academic freedom. This warning continues a running battle between EPIC and the recording industry. During the same week, Holly on The Stones Underground List revealed how bouncers at the Stones concerts were telling people to turn off their cell phones, because of copyright infringements.
x: 153
[jenett.radio, t e c h n o c u l t u r e , "Idiocy" and Infoworld]
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GOOGLE/answers -- Although it's still in beta, Google Answers works well. You can make money with it. As John Robb explains, "within an organizational context questions could be posted to a specific category weblog, aggregated by a information expert via RSS, and posted to a questions weblog with answers. Readers of this weblog could extend the answers with comments and additional data. Questions, answers, and comments would then naturally become part of the firm's Knowledge Base." Companies need this because most people have problems searching and finding information.
x:114 [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
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Root Causes of The Celtic Tiger David McWilliams -- "The catalyst was lower interest rates, more widely available credit, demogrpahics and an American boom as well as good fortune, institutional maturity and a few very brilliant people, not simply the lowering of income taxes."
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WAYPATH -- I clicked into the Waypath Project, since seeing it mentioned by Dave Winer, Slashdot and Karlin Lilligton. It's an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics. It's like tracking a meme. The Waypath Project's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This isn't a refined search algorithm but I think it's a rudimentary hypeindex measurement tool. And it also quickly found 31 potential members of my weblog neighbourhood.
I think there are a lot of interesting projects underway that use Google's API. According to Smart Mobs, Marc Smith, a sociologist-geek who works for Microsoft Research, has connected an inexpensive barcode scanner to a handheld computer with a wireless connection, and has installed code that connects the info returned from the universal product code database to the Google search engine. The UPC database provides salient information about the product linked to a bar code. It's all part of AURA, a research project to explore ubiquitous computing using off-the-shelf technology. People who register at the site can send their scans — and their comments on their scans — to a website. Their comments thus turn up within days, open to everyone with Google access, as results of keyword searches relevant to the scanned object.
The US Information Awareness Office wants this kind of functionality to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers."
All these things need to be discussed in Xi Blue's Search Engine Strategies Course.
x:109
RTMark's CueJack
John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness Office
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Ireland's Economy Needs Immigrants KILKENNY, Ireland -- In nearly every European counry, immigration is the most emotive of contemporary issues. There is a small amount of overt racism, which I observed first-hand at Dublin airport. There are more widely-held suspicions that immigrants will be a drain on public resources (my American passport was endorsed by British immigration to block this prospect). On radio talk shows, some Irish callers believe immigrants will transform society in some ill-defined but detrimental way.
I believe immigration can bring great benefits to Ireland. I think immigrants bring dynamism, not deprivation. I salivate for Chinese food and Turkish kebabs. I enjoy trading stories with Romanians and Lithuanians.
Niall Stanage, editor of Magill, reports that in Britain, immigrants made a net fiscal contribution of STG 2.5bn in 1999-2000 &em; a 1 per cent income tax rise would be required to raise the same sum from the indigenous British population. In Germany, the first words of a report delivered last year by a high-level commission were "Germany needs immigrants." A recent copy of The Economist concluded "The potential gains from liberalising immigration dwarf those from removing barriers to world trade."
It will take progressive thinking to deliver balanced policies of immigration into Irish society. I don't think the process has started with the current Irish government.
"Refused Leave to Land"
"Auld Triangle Going Jingle Jangle" by Karlin Lillington, 23 Sep 02.
Ireland's Racist No Attitude, Topgold Blog, 25 Sep 02.
"Get a Work Permit or Go to Jail" by Bernie Goldbach, Irish Examiner, 27 Sep 02.
"Dublin Has Become a Magnet for Technology and People," Alan Cowell in The New York Times, October 31, 2000.
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09 November 2002 |
NYT -- One of the things I easily forget is that the Irish mobile phone market has tested and increased revenue streams possible from cell phones. We've played with ringtones for more than two years already, so it's a little surprising to discover that NYT journalist Lisa Napoli is just discovering how American ringtones can make money for telcos too.
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Dave Winer -- Radio now leverages aggregation. AggregatorLand facilitates the create of user interfaces for UserLand's engine in any language or environment, including Flash, .NET, Java, DHTML, Cocoa, Python, Tcl, and Perl.
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THE REGISTER -- John Lettice writes about an outrageous e-mail sent from an EMI customer services rep at EMI in Germany to a customer who had difficulty playing a copy-protected CD in his CD player. One of the most stunning lines from the translation: "If you plan to continue protesting about future audio media releases with copy protection, forget it; copy protection is a reality, and within a matter of months more or less all audio media worldwide are copy protected. And this is a good thing for the music industry. In order to make this happen we will do anything within our power - whether you like it or not."
[German original and Slashdot]
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08 November 2002 |
Richard Stallman -- Every Halloween, Stallman finds another reason to poke two fingers at Microsoft. This month, it's another leaked Microsoft memo. You could conclude that the memo shows Microsoft's strategy failed when publicly bashing the Open Source Movement. You could also conclude Microsoft is going after open source. Dan Gillmor believes the primary method will be to launch patent lawsuits. Microsoft has explicitly threatened to do this. This tactic might catch the Open Source movement on the back foot.
[InfoWorld: Top News and Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
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K Oanh Ha -- The Audio Publishers Association says that the audio book industry has become a $2 billion business, with revenue for
audio books outstripping printed books by more than 41% between 1996 and 2000. Many publishers now release audio books (which can sell for as much as $80 for an unabridged selection) whenever printed versions go on sale, and almost any new title is available in audio format. (Some publishers are offering downloadable MP3 audio books on the Web, for about half the cost of books on tape or CD.) And the latest wrinkle is the development of audio book rental stores,
whose success is in more-or-less direct proportion to the amount of time weary commuters have to spend in traffic. This is the kind of product that Irish planners are trying to promote with their road works strategy.
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AFTENPOSTEN no -- Two men in Norway discovered that the text one of them was typing on his Hewlett-Packard cordless keyboard was also appearing on a neighbor's computer in another building at least 150m
away. They have since had their equipment replaced, but the problem
persists and HP Norway product manager Tore A. Särelind says the firm is taking it "deadly seriously," and has mobilized forces to correct the situation. "Among other things we will check the suitability of the frequency we use. It is a so-called walkie-talkie frequency with a radius that can be difficult to limit," says Särelind. "We would also like to do an 'on-site' test in the area where Helle and Evjeberg live to see if there are special circumstances there which might influence the
wireless reach of the keyboards." Over 65,000 of the keyboards have been sold in Europe.
[Newsscan]
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NYT -- Yale computer scientist David Gelernter believes "operating systems are lapsing into senile irrelevance" and he thinks, "every piece of digital information you own or share will appear (in the near future) in one universal structure" -- one to which you'll have
access from any Net-connected computer anywhere. "I have time for only one screen in my life," says Gelernter. "That screen had better give me access to everything, everywhere." The universal structure, dubbed Scopeware, will be a narrative, 3D stream of electronic documents flowing through time. "The future (where you store your calendar, reminders, plans) flows into the present (where you keep material you're working on right now) and on into the past (where every e-mail message and draft, digital photo, application, virtual Rolodex card, video and audio clip and Web bookmark is stored, in addition to all those calendar notes and reminders that used to
be part of the future and have since flowed into the past to be archived.
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Competitions All Over the Wall John Stanley -- "Competitions attract people. Think of the crowded shopping mall where people hang around a storefront or a sign. Now add interaction to it." The Light Surgeones get people to stop in their tracks when they beam displays onto large wall. Imagine what that looks like if you mix that with multi-player games.
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Gartner Group -- Gartner Dataquest released third quarter 2002 market share results for the PDA sector, revealing that PDA shipments for the first three quarters of 2002 are down 8.3 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, Palm retained only 30 percent market share in the third quarter, down from 70 percent a year or so ago. But what would I do without my Palm m505?
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07 November 2002 |
Search Engines -- Like Matt Mower said last week, "Google is a business, not a public servant." So those in the business of trawling the seas of public data must take on board the fact that portions of Google's algorithms are weighted against the display of meta-tagged content. It might pay to have your own agnostic search mechanism if you need to find all flavours of content.
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THE REGISTER -- Sendo has abandoned the MS Smartphone and is now developing for Nokia 60 series phones. Sendo was supposed to launch its Z100 handset this month into Spain and Italy. Microsoft has invested $12m in Sendo but this recent move will cause some questioning of that investment.
[The Register and Devices]
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 Karlin Lillington -- Green TD Eamon Ryan was one of three Greens that chained themselves to the 100+ year old plane trees down Dublin's main thoroughfare, O'Connell Street.
"In its infinite wisdom, Dublin Corporation has decided to chop down ALL the trees and replace them with smaller lime trees. Apparently the big old planes won't fit in with some trendoid landscape artiste's 'vision' of what the grand old street should look like. Dubliners are furious about this, going by the anger expressed on radio programmes in the past few days. Dublin has few enough trees as it is, and old trees are even rarer, much less trees that had a front row seat to the 1916 Uprising and Pearse's reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the front of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street."
[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]
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06 November 2002 |
Kevin Werbach -- Reporting from the Foursquare Conference, Werbach said, "The media industry is still obsessed with Tivo. All of the entertainment company CEOs have brought it up, whether as a threat, an opportunity, or something they can successfully compete against. Tivo CEO Mike Ramsay is speaking tomorrow. All this attention doesn't guarantee that Tivo the company will survive and thrive, but it reinforces my belief that they are onto something deep and important."
[Werblog]
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Bookshelf -- O'Reilly's just-released "MySQL Cookbook" provides a unique problem-and-solution format that offers practical examples for everyday programming dilemmas. The chapters include problems along with code that you can insert directly into your applications. The books also explains how and why the code works, so you can learn to adapt the techniques to similar situations and get the most out of MySQL.
Sent from Nokia 9210i mail-to-blog
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Circle of Friends FLAGSTAFF, Arizona -- Too many people put off something that brings them joy just because they haven't thought about it, don't have it on their schedule, didn't know it was coming or are too rigid to depart from their routine. I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night in an effort to cut back. From then on, I've tried to be a little more flexible.
How many women out there will eat at home because their husband didn't suggest going out to dinner until after something had been thawed? Does the word "refrigeration" mean nothing to you? How often have your kids dropped in to talk and sat in silence while you watched 'Jeopardy' on television? I cannot count the times I called my sister and said, "How about going to lunch in a half hour?" She would gasp and stammer, "I can't. I have clothes on the line. My hair is dirty. I wish I had known yesterday. I had a late breakfast. It looks like rain." And my personal favorite: "It's Monday." She died a few years ago. We never did have lunch together.
We tend to schedule our headaches. We live on a sparse diet of promises we make to ourselves when all the conditions are perfect,. We'll go back and visit the grandparents when we get Stevie toilet-trained. We'll entertain when we replace the living room carpet. We'll go on a second honeymoon when we get two more kids out of college.
Life has a way of accelerating as we get older. The days get shorter, and the list of promises to ourselves gets longer. One morning, we awaken, and all we have to show for our lives is a litany of I'm going to, I plan on, and Someday, when things are settled down a bit.
When anyone calls my 'seize the moment' friend, she is open to adventure and available for trips. She keeps an open mind on new ideas. Her enthusiasm for life is contagious. You talk with her for five minutes, and you're ready to trade your bad feet for a pair of Rollerblades and skip an elevator for a bungee cord.
My lips have not touched ice cream in 10 years. I love ice cream. It's just that I might as well apply it directly to my stomach with a spatula and eliminate the digestive process. The other day, I stopped the car and bought a tripledecker. If my car had hit an iceberg on the way home, I would have died happy.
Now, do something you want to, not something on your Should Do list.
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
Have you ever watched kids playing on a merry go round or listened to the rain lapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight or gazed at the sun into the fading night? Do you run through each day on the fly? When you ask "How are you?" Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done, do you lie in your bed with the next hundred chores running through your head?
Ever lost touch? Let a good friendship die? Just call to say "Hi"? When you worry and hurry through your day, it is like an unopened gift, thrown away.
Life is not a race. Take it slower. Hear the music before the song is over.
Sent by Misty at NAU to Topgold Blog to mark National Friendship Week.
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Esat DSL Wires My Neighbourhood KILKENNY, Ireland -- My housing estate gets DSL service from Esat BT this month, more than a year after Eircom completed its ADSL testing here. So why have Eircom refused to sell broadband services to homeowners? I have two theories.
- To stifle competition. The track record shows Ireland's dominant telco has not unbundled the local loop, has impeded leased line interconnect, and won't facilitate 1891 interconnect.
- To protect an existing revenue stream coming from Eircom's leased line revenues.
Sent from Nokia 9210i Communicator as email to blog.
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McMurdo, Antarctica -- 
Photo from the US Antarctic Program.
I remember taking Emperor Penguins for a flight from McMurdo one day. But I they had to walk to their departure point and I don't think they ever caught a ride on a bicycle on the ice cap.
[Polar.org Photolibrary and KerLone with Boing Boing Blog]
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DUBLIN -- HP's tablet computer begins entering the channel, looking sleek while raising questions whether it can handle digital text (handwriting) any better than earlier iterations from other vendors.
If the TC1000 makes its mark where its marketers think it should, the machines will be used extensively in meetings, as ubiquitous as pen on paper. And they would appear as reading tools for next generation electronic books as well as a means of automating work flows for medical staff, legislators, sales representatives and delivery workers.
But the digital pen has to work. Previous generations of the same technology suffered from poor handwriting recognition and the inefficiencies involved in managing large amounts of text with a pen.
The company must pitch the TC 1000 as a niche device because companies do not pay &8364;3000 for each notebook today. That's about the price point of a reasonably configured Tablet PC with docking capability.
A decade ago, Microsoft killed a nascent pen computing industry because it thought it would be a threat to its Windows operating system business. Now the technology has emerged from the ashes of an anti-trust lawsuit. It still must win in the marketplace.
[John Markoff in the New York Times]
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DUBLIN -- Media Lab Europe have announced that Rudy Burger is leaving as CEO as MLE enters "a phase of consolidation" but Burger will stay on as an adviser to the board and as a visiting scientist. Prof Kenneth Haase of MIT will be the interim director.
[Karlin Lillington]
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05 November 2002 |
Law Meme -- It appears that spammers have started leaving ad URLs as the "referring page" in their HTTP headers. By reloading a given blog a few hundred times, they can force their chosen URL to appear to be the most common link to that blog. Comment sections will be next. The current default is typically completely unsecured, so anyone can leave any text they want. This has happened to the ElectricNews discussion boards already. I need to lock down my comments by forcing people to register on the Topgold boards. It's free but normally requires human interaction.
[Michelle Delio: "When Spam Hits the Blogs"]
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Search for a Powerful Connection FT -- Fiona Harvey looks at data over powerlines and thinks "there may be another, less ambitious use for the technology. While outdoor digital powerline still looks risky, indoors the technology has been proving itself." In the US, the Homeplug Powerline Alliance has gained the backing from the likes of Cisco, Intel, Motorola and Hewlwtt-Packard. Other members of the consortium have developed products that plug into ordinary power sockets to create wireless networks that any suitably equipped piece of electronic equipment within a short radius can connect to.This opens the way to home networks connecting personal computers, printers, laptops and in future other devices such as digital television sets and digital radios. This kind of cabling is the only practical way to wire the inside of medieval structures. Traditional cabling would be prohibited by planning factors and cost issues.
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04 November 2002 |
NYT -- John Markoff of the New York Times writes about Vivato, a smart antenna startup that claims it can extend WiFi to distances of 2,000 feet indoors and four miles outdoors. The exciting aspects of the technology are that it works with the established WiFi standard, and with a point-to-multipoint configuration serving several hundred users.
The Vivato antenna is shaped like a large picture frame, about three feet by four feet and about three inches thick. The Vivato technology, which stems from 1950's research for so-called phased-array antennas for military applications, makes it possible to electronically steer numerous radio beams from a single point. Focusing the beams increases their signal strength, and using large numbers of them greatly increases the antenna's traffic capacity.
The core of the old Musenki source tree is the basis for the Vivato switch software, right down to the bootloader. The Musenki software was developed under an open source license. [Werblog]
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Picture: International Space Station
The crew of the International Space Station took this view of exploding Mt Etna from space.
A plume of brown ash blows to the south-east (to the left of the picture) and reportedly extends almost 600km. We drove under that area in mid-September.
The lighter-coloured plumes north of the summit (to the left) are produced by forest fires set by lava flowing into the pine forests on the slope of the 3667m mountain.
By and large, the people of the Etna region (they proudly call themselves <i>Etnei</i>) stay put. They have an affectionate relationship with <i>a' muntagna</i>, as they call Etna. When Ruth and I visited Sicily in September, we heard the people say, "la montagna e buona" which means "the mountain is good."
Etna perches atop savagely beautiful landscape. It extremely fertile soil produces excellent oranges, lemons, mandarins and wines. However, the lava flow consumes trees, vegatation and any buildings rashly placed high up the mountain side. We collected some tokens of a centuries-old flow and now have a few lava rocks sitting around our home in Ireland. We plan to go back next year and collect some more.
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Sean Redmond -- He tells the Irish Open Mailing List that he's "in Switzerland, a land where a litre of milk costs one Euro, 500mls of beer costs €4.16, the average salary is €41,666 and ADSL/Cable-modem (256Mb) unmetered-access starts at €28 per month. I won't even mention what the rent is like here. It will only depress ye all further."
[Tim Kirby]
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What People Are Looking for Here Last week, more people came to this blog looking for Gianni Jacklone than any other term I've blogged about. Almost the same number came looking for Maddox Rules and "I am better than your kids." Britney's Lesbian Lust continued to attract, bringing 30 readers to the Topgold blog for a look. The most attractive gadget on the blog was the Logitech io Pen, bringing in 21 viewers.
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Real SuperPass Best Five Clicks in October 2002
Sent by Nokia D211 into Eircom ADSL to Blog
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The Guggenheim -- "To disable the Internet to save EMI and Disney is the moral equivalent of burning down the library of Alexandria to ensure the livelihood of monastic scribes."
--Jon Ippolito, of the Guggenheim, on the CBDTPA
Sent by Noka 9210i as
e-mail to blog
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03 November 2002 |
Happy Birthday, Karis Hunt DELGANY, Ireland -- Karis Hunt turned 32 today. Like many who read Mick and Keith by Chris Salewicz, I wonder how much support her father (Mick Jagger) actually provided her. Her mom, writer Marsha Hunt, put up with a lot of hassle for the trickle of money Mick actually sent. It's a story I write in my own mind whenever I see Marsha thumbing through book shelves in local shops.
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Ireland Needs a Green Card System DUBLIN -- I have long wondered why Ireland does not have a work visa system, where the visa is owned by the employee, not the employer. Actually, you can get an Irish work visa. The Sunday Business Post reports that nearly 5,000 work visas were issued in Ireland in 2001. Current Irish legislation for immigration dates back to 1935, which means that Ireland has no immigration system. It only has programmes for handling aliens.
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Eliminate the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland Kilkenny, Ireland -- Talk around the pub is about television advertisements that got the ax from the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland (ASAI). The watchdog group recently upheld complaints against ads for Levi's jeans in which young adults fully clothed in denim looked suggestively at the camera. The tagline was "rub yourself." The complaints committee also pulled a Carlsberg ad featuring a female construction worker happily displaying her builder's bum to a group of male Carlserg drinkers on holiday. In 2000-2001, the number of complaints made about offensive ads was just over twice the number made about misleading ads, 192 and 93 respectively, according to ASAI figures. The ASAI will pull an advertisement based on the number of complaints. That guideline has allowed a puritanical brigade to regulate advertising in Ireland.
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Gerry Sighting: Busy on the Lecture Circuit Sunday Business Post -- Adrian Weckler explained that Nua founder Gerry McGovern has "reinvented himself as a star of the technology lecture circuit." He is also close to launching a new product: a corporate scorecard for companies with large websites.
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02 November 2002 |
Santry Skunk Works -- We are playing around with a Tablet PC and it does what it says in the box. After a morning of messing around with it, I have three immediate observations. First, its Windows XP operating system protected me from the blue screen of death.¹ Second, the battery life is as good as it gets. We turned it on shortly after 0900 and it was still able to run WiFi plus an InFocus projector right up to noon. That's better than any battery powered laptop I've carried.² Third, it feels like Compaq have taken all their processing power and ensured they buttoned it into an ergo-friendly package that adapts to the user, not the other way around. This alone makes the TC1000 a fine piece of technology.
We've had the opportunity to compare the TC 1000 to an IBM TransNote. The TC 1000 has some rough edges in the pen computing department. Specifically, its pen actions are no where as intuitive as touching and tapping. But for people lugging around a 6-pound laptop that's more than 3 years old, the TC 1000 is a real leap into the 21st century.
Dan Bricklin tried out tablets and he agrees.
The most important thing to know about the Tablet PC, as far as I'm concerned so far, is that Microsoft did a great job...of naming it. Much as the press wants to call it a "pen" computer, it is a Tablet computer. You must understand that. The basis of the machine is that it is (or can be turned into) a tablet. The pen is secondary, and not always important. I think they did the right thing in concentrating on the tablet aspect. I would not get a Tablet PC without the software supporting the pen. Those who use OneNote from Microsoft Office swear by its usefulness.
NOTE ONE WEEK LATER: I am amazed that 56 different people viewed this page within the first week of its publication. That indicates there's a lot of interest in the slablets, and in getting tablet computers with Linux.
TWO WEEKS LATER: We carried the TC 1000 around the lobby of The Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel while setting up for a regional IT Conference and the thing was a bona fide Geek Magnet. Business Week's Stephen Wildstrom would agree.³
¹ However, we weren't running anything outside of the standard installation and we didn't work with any other application other than a browser and Office.
² I haven't explored the default power-saving features but I believe they are set to maximise power savings.
³ "The Compaq is the most interesting of the bunch," wrote Wildstrom in "The Liberation of Laptop Design," Business Week, November 25, 2002.
Dan Bricklin and "Sighting: Slablet", Topgold Blog, 25 Oct 02
Sent by TransNote over Nokia D211+Airport WiFi.
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01 November 2002 |
Ray Ozzie -- 1) I love GSM. Let me repeat: I love GSM. It's the only communications safety net that I really keep in-place wherever I go. I so very much appreciate that it works most anywhere - except Japan, Korea, and New Hampshire - and lets me reach critical phone numbers such as voice mail, the hotel, and in this case, the U.S. Consulate.
2) I love OAG. Although I didn't stay connected, I carried my Libretto in my backpack "just in case". When forced to do significant last-minute (and very complex) rerouting of my trip due to the unfortunate bombing in Indonesia, I was able to use OAG (TIS) to do significant and nontrivial rerouting, I was able to use 9600bps GSM dialup to Earthlink to look up some hotel information, and I was able to communicate with the travel agent, airline, hotel, and my assistant, reworking an entire itinerary in five hours end-to-end. An incredible testament to the state of technology and the Internet.
3) I love my Casio Exilim (for stills) and my Panasonic SV-AV10 (for clips), both of which fit in my pockets, and both of which - with 512MB SD memory cards - fit all of the hundreds of images from the trip. Truly revolutionary.
[Ray Ozzie]
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ONLINE BLOG -- When Sun Microsystems was promoting Java (J2EE) for corporate use it produced Pet Store, a sample application to show how it really should be done. Microsoft then produced an implementation using .Net to show how much better it was. "Foul" cried the Java-backing multitude: Pet Store wasn't optimised for performance. the Microsoft.net Pet Store 2 still trounces the Java version. In fact, the Microsoft.net server with two processors is rather faster than the 8-processor J2EE server B version, and amazingly cheaper ($4,722 v $316/tps). Worse, the Java B server tested "was unable to sustain peak throughput beyond four hours, destabilizing over this period of time to the point of failure" says TMC's report. Another aside from this fun-packed epistle: the Java version of Pet Store 2 required 14,004 lines of code whereas the C#/.net version was done in 2,096. You can download a copy of the report here. The Java side is discussing the implications on The ServerSide.com.`
[onlineblog.com] Sent from TransNote using Nokia D211+Vodafone HSD
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OPEN -- I am putting this post here to solicit a comment that tells me the settings for the Esat ADSL modem (Ericsson HM220d) on a very simple setup PC->ADSL modem->Analog line. PCs can ping ADSL router but no further.
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Easy Mail to Blog BALLYBLOG -- So I have a "Contact" named "Blog" and when my fingers slip on my mobile phone's messaging area, I fire blanks at my blog. This little posting contained nothing until I saw it and decided to explain to anyone watching how a Nokia 9210 can fire blanks.
Sent on train by Noka 9210i e-mail to blog
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BALLYBLOG -- It seems that each passing week brings me more spam. I need better spam filtering and that means using Spam Assassin or Choice Mail. I am resigned to paying for protection against junk mail. That's simply part of the cost of participating in the Net. But I miss the days when I posted to Usenet without thinking of such things.
Sent by Noka 9210i e-mail to blog.
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Letting Advertising Pay for City ServicesUSA TODAY -- Cash-strapped American cities are considering innovative ways of getting revenue. Larry Copeland discovered San Diego is considering letting General Motors put ads on life guard towers in exchange for 35 free police cars. The city of St Charles, Missouri, is renting ad space on its trash trucks. And the 1,793 people in Biggs, California, are mulling an offer from the California Milk Processor Board to change its name to "Got Milk?, California," in exchange for a "meaningful contibution.
Sent by Noka 9210i as e-mail to blog
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Spam Suffocates MeFour weeks after the SIGIA-L put their archives online, I have more than 2000 pieces of rubbish in the trash folder of my company mail account. I filter my mail. Before the SIGIA-L archives went public, I received hardly any jjunk mail to my company address. Someone should pay me to receive their junk. As it is, I am stuck with the costs of receiving, filtering, storing and deleting.
Sent by Noka 9210i as e-mail to blog
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It's Official: The Celtic Tiger Has Died BUSINESS WEEK -- The European edition reports the death of the Celtic Tiger and no wonder -- economic growth has slowed markedly in Ireland, tax revenues are sharply below target and technology jobs are shriveling. I chalk up the downturn to the exit of the telecommunications companies from funds that stimulated the growth of concept businesses. The principals who got the money had a "time to market" imperative without having to prove the validity of their business models. Some didn't have a model, so they had no benchmarks at entry. A tech sector skimmed high daily rates from Y2K-paranoid companies, then many of the same consultants discovered they could charge more because they were few in numbers. Now, demand for their services is down, as is their income, as is the tax take.
The government also started the Special Savings Investment Scheme, which siphons around €425m annually. Now the Irish government must borrow €750m in 2002 and €3bn in 2003. There is no slush fund to maintain public spending. For the next two years, slowdowns and reduced expectations will replace the champagne days of the Celtic Tiger.
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Irish Penalty Points System Implemented Irish Motorways -- If you drive on an Irish motorway, you will probably observe slower-moving traffic as the penalty points system finally gets implemented. I think getting points will deter friends who violate traffic code. After just three speeding violations, drivers can be forced to find another way to travel to work. That prospect will change drivers' behaviours. As it stands, speed kills more than the dire state of most Irish roads.
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Magadalene Sisters Movie Heads for Box Office Record ECLIPSE PICTURES -- A hard-hitting film examining the gruesome conditions pregnant girls endured in notorious Irish workhouses has sold out in cinemas across Ireland. It is expected to hit €300,000 by the close of its second week on release. That could push its revenues over a million within five weeks and make it one of the biggest grossing pictures ever screened in Ireland. The film won The Golden Lion Award for best film at the Venice Film Festival but it has been blasted by the Vatican.
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Irish Software Association Company of the Year ISA -- The shortlist for Young Company of the Year is out for the annual Irish Software Association Awards. The shortlist includes AEP Systems, Am Beo, AMT, Cinehub, WS2 and Xiam.
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XI BLUE -- To produce a film using the digital tools available at Xi Blue is certainly less expensive than using traditional film formats. Xi's post-production suite also makes it easier to add special effects or to remove items that detract from the original footage.
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