Aehso’s Output

Dublin City Council have notions of building a municipal Wi-Fi network? From SiliconRepublic.com:

According to reports this morning, Dublin City Council has put out a tender for consultants to offer advice regarding technological, regulatory and financial issues if such a service was deployed.

I hope they are better at planning wireless networks than they are at planning everything else.

Another interesting snippet from that article:

A recent survey by UK telecoms regulator Ofcom revealed that Ireland has surprisingly the largest penetration of Wi-Fi hotspots per head of population in the world, with 18.3 hotspots per 1,000 people.

I for one am very surprised by that, even if there is no shortage of open Wi-Fi networks in the commercial districts of Dublin 2 & 4. This figure is probably driven by the broadband providers switching over to supplying cheap DSL/Wi-Fi routers. Maybe the Ofcom guys should broaden their survey a little, go war driving around California for a couple of days maybe…

aehso internet, irish

The news that Adobe are discontinuing support for their SVG Viewer browser plug-in on Jan 1st 2008 is bad news for the SVG community in general, and bad for anyone who has existing SVG content on their sites. This doesn’t mean the plugin will disappear overnight but content formats that may not render on the majority of browser are very unattractive to content producers.

Internet Explorer 7 has never had SVG support and Microsoft’s current stance seems is still to tell IE users to install the Adobe SVG plugin. Meanwhile folks over at svg.org are lobbying Microsoft for native SVG support but maybe they are not listening? Firefox 2, on the other hand, does support SVG natively.

By the way, Adobe publish some useful scripts to prompt the user to install the SVG plug-in if required. However, they need some tweaking to get pages that use these scripts to let Firefix 2 just use its native SVG support. Modified versions that I created to work with both Firefox 2 and IE 6/7 are available here.

aehso content, internet

The front page of yesterdays Irish Times carried a story about an international expert on online paedophile activity who is suggesting that the Government should provide email addresses to every pupil in Irish schools to help verify their age when signing up to internet communities.

The international expert who suggested this is one Dr Rachel O’Connell, Bebo’s Chief Safety Officer. It is amazing that someone holding such an important position in one of the companies hosting these online communities would propose such a technically deficient policy. Users of social websites can sign up using any email address they own, not just one that a government might allocate.

The technical managers at Bebo would do well to vet these statements in future. They reflect very badly on the percieved competence of the company’s management team as a whole.

aehso internet, irish, security

Now that I have installed Mozilla Lightning Thunderbird can finally read all those meeting invitations (text/calendar mime attachments) that the marketing and sales folks in work are so fond of sending from their Outlook/Exchange system. It can also read Google Calendar generated events that you receive via email.

aehso internet, software

Google Reader redirected me to the end of the internet today. 

Oh well, it was good while it lasted.

aehso internet, junk

Recently I switched to O2 (Ireland) in order to be able to replace my aging Sony Ericsson t610 (workhorse!) with a k800i (über-phone!). Vodafone will probably release the same handset at some undefined date in the distant future but their customer service was completely incompetent in dealing with my queries.

Anyway, the k800i is a full on 3G phone – video calling, mobile email, blog-this-photo – lots of features I have no immediate plans to use (and it turns out lots of features that the O2 configuration & network do not support ‘out-of-the-box’). It does support RSS feeds though and that will be useful to me for a number of reasons. Plus it can run Opera Mini so I use it occasionally to get my PVR (EyeTV+Mac) at home to record tv programs via TVTV mobile.

I’d use it a lot more for data were it not for the incredibly expensive data pricing plans that O2 have in place. 1c per kB (O2 refer to them as ‘kb’s – I hope to God they don’t mean kilobits!) is the default rate. So, that 21kb BBC News RSS feed that SonyEricsson pre-install (actually a wrapper feed URL that is not accessible from full internet browsers?) costs 21c for every update. It gets better though – downloading a single MP3 (say a conservative 3000kB) would cost you, wait for it, 3000c = €30 for the data alone. Hahah, you’re having a laugh O2, no wonder nobody uses these services.

Meanwhile, over in the land of the rising sun, they have massive adaption of their 3G services primarily because of flat rate data plans. A relevent quote from an article today on Read/Write Web:

A lot of people in Japan buy not only digital (music, games, videos) but “real” or “offline” goods on their mobile. They use auction services, blogs and use assisted-GPS powered navigation services to walk the city. And they have been doing so for already 2-3 years, at least. Market maturity is not only about getting a device in people’s hand, it is also about the service offering and the actual usage rate.

But you don’t even need to go to the orient to find examples. T-Mobile UK offer flat rate unlimited internet access (with fair use policies) for around an additional £7.50 a month.

In Ireland, it’s like the switch from dial-up to broadband internet access all over again. Except in this case there are no excuses like decades of underinvestment in infrastructure or a low density population. Nope, we just have a duopoly that just like to charge extortionate prices for services that are way behind those offered in rival information societies.

Ireland an Information Society? My ass.

aehso internet, irish, mobile, tech

This just blows me away – grab Democracy from the folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation, browse the various RSS feeds and end up watching content like this or this (yes, Democracy loads torrents too).  Then check out their sister site Video Bomb and if have your own content set up a Broadcast Machine or your own.

Awesome stuff, with quality free software and content like this, who needs broadcast TV?

aehso internet, movies, music, oss, software, tv

[Update: Fixed - the link to metrics.apple.com seems to have been updated to a correctly configured server, securemetrics.apple.com. Shame they didn't bother testing it before putting it live...]
Deciding to comment on the Apple Discussion about the Front Row DRM issue I’m having, I tried to log onto Apple Support and but my browser immediately warns that while trying to connect to https://metrics.apple.com it was presented with a certificate owned by *.112.207.net. 207.net, despite the alarm bells it might set off, is owned by Omniture (cookie monsters – read the privacy statement here, for what it’s worth)

Does anyone bother test this stuff before it goes live or is gathering those metrics far more important? If I am Joe Mac User and I want to log a support issue with Apple what would my reaction be? Umm, panic, followed by the old “should-I-shouldn’t-I” OK/Cancel button shuffle. Incredibly shoddy, for any commercial website, let alone the website of the shining light of computer usability.

Try it yourself.

aehso apple, https, internet, mac, security

Via RexBlog, this quiz is so true, it’s funny. Has the world run out of unbranded words or is it time to retake the asylum from the the lunatics?

(Wow, I just searched for a link and I can’t find a link to Alan Cooper’s “The Lunatics are running the Asylum” book anywhere. WTF? More people need to read that book…)

aehso internet, web2.0

Interesting post, it’ll also be interesting to see if Sun’s strategy (especially for Java servers and tooling) ever follows this reasoning. Endorsing REST by providing the tooling wouldn’t be a bad thing.

aehso internet, java, soa