« April 18, 2004 - April 24, 2004 | Main | May 2, 2004 - May 8, 2004 »
W-UH -- When traveling, it's often worthwhile getting recommendations from other travelers instead of using tips from travel guides. I'm marking up my Clie's travel section with something from Ole Eichhorn, who stayed in the Charles Hotel in Boston, located right off Harvard square. "High-speed Internet access, comfortable beds, plenty of water pressure, and nice restaurants.
KILKENNY -- It's a brilliant day to be in Ireland as ten countries join the European Union. Activities range from Lithuanian crafts exhibitors along Kilkenny Castle Wall to stiltwalkers on the streets. Back in Dublin, there's probably going to be a display with the water cannon as several thousand demonstrators attempt to enter Phoenix Park. Online, "Vectorial Elevations" allows people to engage creatively with the light sculptures over the Dublin sky but I didn't get much from that interaction. If you want colour in the sky, watch Dublin's fireworks at night.
BLACKFIVE -- Chance Phelps made the final trip home to Dubois, Wyoming last week as part of a procuedure that I remember well from my days as a C-141 aircraft commander. It was never joyful accompanying the remains of a serviceman home. But I will never forget the glowing testimonies that percolated out of the funerals and wakes. You didn't have to attend the burial of Chance Phelps to be affected by intense feeling of respect surrounding his journey home. And you don't have to be pro-American to recognise respect for the fallen.
MR Strobl -- "Taking chance home" with thanks to Jarhead Dad and Doc.
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BOARDS -- The mobile and the wireless section of boards.ie often carries interesting material about wireless applications, in addition to tips about using phones. I followed one thread that explained two-way SMS applications, such as a voting application, and its handling of large amounts of text messages. The Nokia Communicators can handle this kind of thing in a venue. I've also used a Nokia D211 on my laptop to handle SMS polls.
GOTHAMIST -- The Empire State Building turns 73 today--on the occasion of welcoming 10 accession countries into the EU. I think we're going to have a better party in Europe than what's celebrated in NYC. They're not drawing attention to large structures in the States any more. I wish we could light up the side of the Kilkenny Castle with the colours of Lithuania--the country being welcomed in Ireland in ceremonies held in the sunny southeast.
Gothamist -- "Happy 73rd birthday, Empire State Building." Picture from Gothamist.
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TEMPLE BAR -- Based on the amount of press coverage surrounding the concept of "derivative works," Irish gallery visitors will see fewer piss-takes on original work. Xeni Jardin described how a "reality-TV human baby giveaway pissed-off Uri Geller." Geller alleges breach of trademark. Irish viewers won't see the ABC-TV program 20/20 when it airs "Be My Baby", a contest between five couples on the show, because that TV feed isn't part of any broadcast package in the Republic. As Jardin prepares her viewing schedule, she note, "the winners of the show get to adopt a real-live, pooping, crying baby." And the viewers get "a reality show with a human life on the line--all disguised as news programming."
CLONMEL -- An awareness of how to cultivate technology appears absent from the political platforms of candidates for European Parliament as well as from the dossiers of some Irish ministers. This troubling problem threatens the integrity of Information Society initiatives.
IRISH TIMES -- In "Clothes Maketh the Profession," Rosita Boland resorts to a stereotype of "creative types -- artists, writers." She needs to visit the current members of the MA in Visual Arts Practices who meet several times each week in Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and to note how they personify 21st century fashion. She would quickly discard this so-wrong description:
Both sexes tend to favour long hair. Dreadlocks are out, but pony-tails enduringly popular. For women, skirts either flow to the ankles or stop not far below their navel--you will never find a woman arty type in a knee-length skirt. Men love weird T-shirts, with strang and pointless words on them, such as "Deep-frozen love," "Meat," and "Air Rocks."
GOOGLE -- "Test" is the single word that appears at Google.com/blog. This teaser appears on common derivatives of Google, such as www.googlr.com and www.466453.com (URLs we use to circumvent border management). But it does not appear in the SEC filing by Google.
Fintan Friel -- "I have a test blog and now Google has one too. Plus they have my mail."
John Battelle -- "Now that the other shoe has dropped"
Chris Gulker -- "Search Google for the world's leading web search engine"
Amy Harmon -- "Is a do-gooder company a good thing?"
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TEMPLE BAR -- We discuss the contribution of the arts to society every Friday in Studio 6 of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. Part of the coffee chat today dealt with an econometric impact study released by the California Arts Council this week. The report looked at non-profit arts groups in Santa Clara County annually and documented that they generate $229.1 million in revenue, "through everything from ticket sales to money spent by employees on rent and groceries."
TECHNOCULTURE -- Karlin Lillington says, "the government's voting commission has ruled against using electronic voting machines at this time in Ireland. A surprise -- and a decision to be welcomed -- but certainly not what I was expecting. The reasoning is that while the machines seem to work fine, it has not been demonstrated definitely enough that they are secure and safe and reliable." I hope the government respects the judgment of the expert commission.
Karlin Lillington -- "government voting commission"
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MOODLE -- One of the strongest acclamations that blogging can play a valuable role on the job comes through the use of a group blog in the work placement module for multimedia degree students in Tipperary Institute. All students, whether on industrial placement or those doing projects, fill out weekly logs and complete all monthly reports. These reports are first-hand evidence of learning on the job. We need to generate RSS feeds on them too.
Tipperary Institute -- "Weekly Work Journals"
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EBAY -- One of the coolest things about Wi-Fi in the Dublin airport is you can check your eBay items as you wait for your flights. We did this when traveling to Berlin. Bidding ended for SIZE 12 WEDDING DRESS/GOWN NO RESERVE, with absolutsth paying $3850 for the dress, worn "once for the wedding and once for these pictures." You have to see the pictures on the site. This wedding dress recorded more than 12.1m views en route to 113 bids.
The seller "found my ex-wife's wedding dress in the attic when I moved. She took the $4000 engagement ring but left the dress. I was actually going to have a dress burning party when the divorce became final, but my sister talked me out of it."
KILKENNY -- The real part of summer has to be coming this weekend. I have bright yellow in two places in the back garden, a day-long backyard engineering project scheduled, and our afternoon high temperature (53F) is the same as my hometown's (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) low temperature. My Yahoo tells me these things so I know I can walk out without a jacket to greet the Irish morning.
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KILKENNY -- The biggest mistake I have made this month is failing to pull together a major meeting of Irish bloggers' meeting while Doc Searls was in Dublin. We've attracted 20 people on the hop before--but we worked the sessions on Saturdays when transport links did not have to be critically timed. Plus, I don't teach on Saturdays--students in Tipp resent their lecturers being sighted on blogs when they expect them to be in the classroom. So, as I start counting down the days until Doc's return to Ireland, I'm also looking at ways of ensuring his travels keep him in Ireland for an entire Saturday. We want to get a table that includes Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig and Doc Searls for a Saturday afternoon in September 2004 during the Darklight Film Festival in Temple Bar.
TAINT -- Justin Mason played around with Gmail and makes a very interesting observation: "GMail does not create HTML mail -- all mail composed through their composer is sent as text/plain only. This is very interesting, because it suits me just fine. HTML mail causes so many more problems than it solves, especially when full-featured web browser components are used to display it, IMO. I get to see the security exploits this enables, every day in my anti-spam work. But it's also very significant that nobody else has commented on it -- nobody misses it!
Justin Mason -- "More thoughts on Gmail"
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KILKENNY -- I have set my Sony Clie's calendar alarm to 0800 every weekday because that's a good time to check my blogs to view the work of scumbags on the Internet who live to append unwelcome spam comments at the bottom of posts. The latest batch of scumbags comes from Germany where they're using dial-in nodes to copy-and-paste dozens of link-heavy items as comments. These scumbags can work around the Typepad restriction of "no links in comments." So I've opened a Typepad Help Ticket to ask the superusers to strip another form of tag from the allowable listing. At the moment, I think all angled brackets should be purged from blog comment sections. It would reduce the usefulness of spamming a blog with gratuitous links.
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CROFSBLOGS -- We are at the tail end of a successful year in the evolution of the first year writing class at Tipperary Institute where we have concluded yet again that a focus on "writing for the Web" is a worthwhile one. If anything, this focus proves you can learn to produce content by following a formula for immediate or embargoed release. That's a conclusion probably shared by Crawford Kilian at Capilano College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
DUBLIN -- On his whirlwind tour of the annual ICT Expo, James Corbett said, "Good show but a few hours was plenty, for me at least, to see it all. My memory of the Comms show 4 years ago was that it was rather bigger." Ditto.
However, if your show goal is to rekindle business contacts, scavenge giveaway items, dig behind the facades, and introduce employers to potential staff, you need to spend six hours working the stands, sitting in sessions (who could miss Doc Searls?), baldly claiming promotional items, and blagging your way into receptions around the corner at the sumptuous Four Seasons. The inherent value in each of these activities lies in the appreciation that the un-show is as valuable as the set pieces on the showroom floor.
BOWIE -- David Bowie, scheduled to play in Ireland in a gig that will dwarf all others, wants bootleg fans up front. He is offering a new Audi for the most creative theft of any classic song taken from Reality to create a "mash-up" track that uses vocals from one song superimposed over the backing tracks of another.
CRYSTAL TECH -- I have been well-served by a knowledgeable and professional staff at CrystalTech, benefiting from faster turn-around on my questions than from any other Internet vendor. CrystalTech offered a public forum well before any other ISP where both current customers as well as potential customers can freely ask questions, seek information and exchange problems and solutions to those problems. CrystalTech keeps customersnd services further keeping customers "in the loop" as changes occur.
So when I heard that Newtek Business Services were aquiring CrystalTech, I got concerned.
ICT EXPO -- Doc Searls will open his keynote address with trick question. It comes in a variety of flavours, normally involving a question like "How many use Microsoft software?" Since he lugs around a Powerbook Heatshield, he often asks "How many use Apple Macs?" When confronting suits with IT budgets, he sometimes asks, "How many use Linux?" If the audience has more suits than open collars, few hands show. So he rolls with a punchline: "Who uses Google?" And that means every raised hand uses Linux.
ICT EXPO -- As I well appreciate after monitoring software development projects, almost everything in software is a series of projects. That's the message delivered by Doc Searls to the ICT Expo in Dublin. Searls draws parallels between builders and the software industry.
DIY is the way software wants to work.
Doc Searls -- DIY-IT: How Open Source is turning IT into a Do-It-Yorself marketplace."
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DUBLIN -- One of the best things about going to events like the ICT Expo is you can trade stuff. I scavenge things like mouse pads, cables, SIM data savers, mobile phone covers, Wired magazines, hardcover books and bags with logos then trade the loot later. One of the other useful things to trade is bookmarks, links, presentations, and sca. (You have to know the lingo to appreciate the sca.) When I encounter a beamable friend, I often get some Palm data that leads me into crevices of the Internet, like these gems nicked from Joe Schumacher in Harlem.
ICT EXPO -- One of the most interesting things about Information Technology events is the level of discussion that greets the curious. So when I wanted to find out more about business banking in Ireland, I started by looking behind the counter of Red Sky, the specialists who can get you profit from technology. They do the business for one of Ireland's most resilient sectors--the banking industry.
There's is a long story, worth unfolding in front of budding software developers, but the catch phrase is simple:
Track everything worth doing.
Red Sky offers innovative ways to use websites to attract, convert and retain customers. Their case studies are required reading for anyone investing more than €5000 in developing or running a website. You need to know what people do when they visit so that you can convert those visits into paying revenues.
Red Sky -- "Client case studies" in attracting, converting and retaining customers.
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SCRIPTING -- Dave Winer, the most important voice in syndicating Web log information, has spun off a travelogue that uses the familiar Radio Userland widgets. It will be interesting to read his travels throughout the short break he has planned on the European mainland. Although my Newzcrawler picked up the RSS feed on the new site, Winer didn't list a traditional orange RSS button on his first iteration of the site, although he listed it directly as a hyperlink on his first post.
Dave Winer -- "Europe 2004" with comments and RSS feed here.
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DUBLIN -- While walking around the ICT Expo in Ballsbridge, I discovered few techies who understood and appreciated the level of digital cluelessness embedded to the Irish presidency of the EU. The deft (pronounced "daft" in Irish) Irish presidency passed the "IPR Enforcement Directive" to deal with "IPR infringement." This measure was championed by Janelly Fourtou, the wife of the CEO of Vivendi Universal. It has now been approved by the EU Council. It ranks as one of the lowest moments of European politics this year.
ACM -- Enterprise technology will become more pervasive and useful for businesses through 2005, says Gartner. The Gartner analysts identify 10 technologies expected to make the biggest impact in 2005. Gartner's trend identifications are helpful in my college classrooms as they focus the attention of a Watch List exercise for our first year multimedia degree students. These "top 10 tech items" are useful when walking the flow of the ICT Expo in Dublin this week.
UNDERWAY -- Isn't it interesting that required third level revision notes are "scanned by ScanMail for Lotus Notes 2.6 with scanengine 7.000-1004 and patternfile lpt$vpn.865" then automatically relegated to the trash heap before reading? IT should not direct academic discussion. But since much of my academic discussion occurs electronically, it's being snarled by IT. Time to educate the IT support structures.
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SHANNONSOFT -- Tony Murphy (Gartner) addressed a Shannonsoft event and offered ways to improve the positive correlation between IT spending and business value. His presentation stems from a Gartner IT Expo event in 2003. His recommendations involve process and governance structures. Specific value metrics are derived from value standards for each individual project.
KILKENNY -- I am becoming way too wound up lately. It's a condition that could be tamed through a fitness programme. Lacking that, there are 10 points below that help reduce the boiling point after reading another stupid e-mail.
STAR GEEK -- If you want a broad-brushed explanation of the devices using the Sony Memory Stick, start with Star Geek's Grok of the technology.
DUBLIN --Much talk revolves around the May Day events in Dublin, including some late night chat show snippets that reveal the depth to which the non-event is being spun. Justin Mason points out how eminent talk show host Pat Kenny mistakes "agent provocateur" for "rabble-rouser."
Agents provocateurs are also used in the investigation of political crimes. Here, it has been claimed that the provocateurs deliberately seek to incite ineffective radical acts, in order to foster public disdain for the political group being investigated; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for. Within the United States the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents posing as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of political groups the U.S. government found unacceptably radical. The activities of agents provocateurs against political dissidents in Imperial Russia was one of the grievances that led to the Russian Revolution.
SYSMOD -- Patrick O'Beirne has a handy online calculator, so those in the tourism business or those traveling to Europe now have a quick way of calculating equivalents of euro. I've just set it in my Clie. It pulls data automatically from the ECB exchange rates.
Patrick O'Beirne -- "Euro currency converter"
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CLONMMEL HOTSPOT -- John Robb rephrases David Halberstam and explains concisely why the American invasion of Iraq differs considerably from the Vietnam War.
In Vietnam, our enemy was essentially a nationalist movement. When we left, the victors focused their efforts on running their newly won country. In Iraq it is different. It's worse. Islam is aflame. By going into Iraq, we have turned ourselves into the lightning rod for everything that is wrong in the Middle East. The focus is on us, reinforced in real-time by global non-western media. At some point in the near future, we will leave Iraq. However it won't end there like Vietnam. This time, they will follow us back.
CLONMEL -- Eight months into my Typead experience and I'm blowing through more than 150,000 cumulative page views. But that's a composite picture--the 80,000th visitor hit this blog yesterday and the 70,000th visitor hit one of the assorted photo albums sometime last Thursday. It's important to note that people like to browse various ways. Some take hypertext links from blog entries or the miniature. Just as many follow the thumbnails photos. Based on Adam Curry's experience, an equal number would follow the audio tracks if I put them up. We'll try that later this summer.
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NEW SCIENTIST -- As I slip Bladerunner into its sleeve for another first year film review, I thumb through New Scientist for some interesting discussion on detecting traumatic memories. Getting suspects to respond to memory events is a tactic used in the film by Harrison Ford, the police detective. The movie (and the scientific article) raise ethical questions. Do you want to block traumatic memories from scarring your mind? What if someone else did it for you? Or how about receiving marketing messages beamed directly at you in hypersonic waves? Mind control is getting smarter by the minute, says Richard Glen Boire, co-founder of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics in California. He told Liz Else much more.
INDEPENDENT -- After finding 60 year old photographic treasures in a family attic, I'm hesitant to trust my digital photo albums to a digital safe-keeping. After all, has anyone ever opened a 60-year old GIF? It costs pennies to use CD-Rs as a storage medium but I'm worried about them because I've see students cut bad copies every week. Some of my CDs get scuffed. Others were stored in direct sunlight and were toasted within a year. It's a scientific fact, extending from the way CDs are made. When Nero burns my CDs, my laptop "burns" dye on the disc. The dye becomes dark, to represent a "1" while a "0" will be left blank so that if the dye fades, there's no difference. Enter sunlight and everything blanches out into a long string of nothing to the playback laser.
TAINT -- Justin Mason points to several interesting analyses concerning patents for software. Mason raises points that deserve to be calls to arms for the Irish software community. The underlying ideas about what the Treaty on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights must be correctly articulated to Enterprise Ireland and to the Minister for Enterprise.
PULVER -- Thanks to Ed Guy, Jeff Pulver has a talking blog. Pulver explains, "when you dial FWD# 19020, you will be able to hear the latest entries from my blog." Before you do that, you need to be an Asterick user and use a SIP phone.
Jeff Pulver -- "FWD # 19020 - The Talking Blog"
Broadband Reports -- "What does everybody think about P8 and SIP phone news?"
DSL Reports -- "Packet8 and FWD"
XVOIP -- "Stealth Telecommunications Knowledgebase"
Learn more. Join the mailing list.
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THE MEMORY HOLE -- I flew 67944 (the C-141 at left) several times in the 70s and 80s. I carried coffins aboard her too.
I logged nearly 2000 flying hours in the Starlizard--the affectionate name of the big bird when it was painted camogreen. The reliable transport remains in the public eye, this time through The Memory Hole Coffin Photos. If anything, getting these photos released proves why every democratic society needs a freedom of information system that works. The American system is levels above Ireland's. But the pictures (several making the inside of the Irish national papers without attribution to their source) can cost people their jobs, as Tami Silicio discovered.
Click on the C-141 to see an inside view of flag-draped coffins strapped down inside a cargo aircraft.
The Memory Hole -- 361 photos from Dover AFB, Delaware.
Dana Milbank -- "Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins"
-- "Woman loses her job over coffins photo"
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KILKENNY -- One element of collateral damage in my battle against spyware is that the USB port on my XP Pro laptop fails to communicate with my Sony Clie. I get the message "the connection between your handheld computer and the desktop could not be established." The Device Manager shows the USB Controller from Sony (Location 0, Palm handheld) is not installed. There is a hidden challenge in this error message because Palmsource did not standardize the Palm Universal Connector--the Sony Clie would be a lot more accessible if it integrated the PUC. You cannot assume that if a product has a USB port, it can magically connect to any other device that has a USB port. That doesn't work with the Clie. It doesn't work with most Bluetooth devices.
I can only use the USB cable with the Clie when on sync. The Cie doesn't like wires. From an engineer's point of view, wired connections defeat the purpose of pocket portability. The Clie USB cable can be a generic one with a Type A connector on one and and a Type B connector on the other will work. You do not have to buy Sony's cable. I use the one that came with my Clie at work and a camera cable at home.
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