Aehso’s Output

Doh! Big Scheduling Gaff, not going to Creative Camp.

I’ve just realized I can’t make it to/speak at Creative Camp this coming Saturday as I am already booked into a pre-marital course in Dublin on the same day. I had, for some reason only know to me, thought Creative Camp was on Sunday and in my own little plan it was going to tie in nicely with an overnight visit to the home town to congratulate my brother on his recent engagement.

Doh! Apologies to Ken and Keith for the late notice. Next time, I swear…

O2’s iPhone Paddy Tax

Pat Phelan: Irish taken as fools as O2 Ireland iPhone package comes with attached “Paddy Tax”

Irish company Cubic Telecom today blasted the prices that people will have to pay for the iPhone when it’s introduced in Ireland on March 14th. Cubic Telecom CEO Pat Phelan, speaking on the packages said:
“There is no excuse for paying such high prices and getting so little in return. The minutes, the text bundles and the data package are completely inappropriate for Irish people and the massive difference in what Irish and UK and Northern people get for the same price suggests that they’ll throw any old scraps at the stupid Paddys. ”

Phelan is calling for a boycott of the phone until o2 rethinks their charges. “It’s time for us Irish to tell O2 we’re not going to accept this. We have Apple’s European HQ here in Ireland, the iPhone itself is fantastic but there’s no way we should buy this phone until O2 cops on and looks after their very loyal customers here. We should get the equivalent package they’re getting in the UK and Northern Ireland

Too fucking right. I don’t even want an iPhone - I just want affordable mobile internet access. Irish consumers are and have been gouged by a mobile network oligopoly in this country for years. It is the giant elephant in the room that everyone knows is there but nobody in power has the balls to do anything about. O2’s latest ‘product’ is yet another “up yours” to us stupid Paddies, our inept government and communications regulator. Hey, we’ve put up with with it for so long, why would anything change now?

A boycott of high end packages like the iPhone plans or broadband dongles won’t work. You’d need to get every soul in the country to stop sending SMS messages in order to get attention of these boyos.

Microsoft dropping Web3S for AtomPub for Windows Live! service APIs.

Big switch in direction from Microsoft, it would appear they are now planning to use AtomPub instead of Web3S for Windows Live service APIs they’ll formally be announcing at Mix’08.  As usual, Dare has all the details.

This is a huge endorsement for AtomPub - I’ll bet Bill is delighted (hey, I can even tell him in person at his IWTC talk in an hours time…)

Events this Week and CreativeCamp Kilkenny 2008

Ken McGuire and Keith Bohanna are amongst the organizers of an upcoming barcamp event called CreativeCamp in Kilkenny on Saturday March 8th. From the Facebook Event page:

A free one day gathering of people interested in how to blend technology and creativity for use in their businesses, organisations or to promote their creative work.

There are lots of interesting talks are already lined up, one of which is on Building and working in a distributed startup which I’ll be giving/leading based on the ‘process’ (if that isn’t too scary a word to use) we use inside nooked. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more added on the day in true barcamp “user generated conference” style.

If you are around, come along, it’ll no doubt be a nice desert after the veritable breakfast, lunch and dinner of events that are on this week in Dublin - IWTC - shaping up to be a big event, the ISA Annual Conference, xCellerate 2008 and of course the Irish Blog Awards. I’ll be popping in and out of both the IWTC and ISA events, if you wanna meet up give me a shout.

Iarnród Éireann Seat Reservations In Practice.

It would seem I spoke too soon about Iarnród Éireann’s internet seat booking system. In practice you can reserve seats using this system but when you get onto the train there may be no indication to other passengers that the seats are reserved. This happened to us coming back from Galway to Dublin last Sunday and rather than arguing with the hen party that was already encamped in our seats we just moved to the next available seats.

We had the luxury of doing this because we were pretty early. Of course the seats we ended up in were probably reserved too so there were some very puzzled looks when later passengers arrived. The only explanation we could offer was that everyone else seemed to be sitting where they pleased. BTW, this wasn’t a one off - the last time we got a train back from Galway to Dublin the station we had also reserved seats but the staff instructed us to ‘just sit anywhere’.

Meanwhile, most of the station staff were busy loitering on the platform not caring less about the confusion and frustration throughout the train. Well done lads, great job, very helpful.

Iarnród Éireann jump from the 19th to 21st century.

Welcome to the 21st century Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail). I have no idea how much tax money they have spent on developing their new seat reservation system but it is a welcome departure from queuing for an hour in Heuston Station in order to get a seat on an intercity train.

in fairness to them it now rivals most online airline check-in systems. Now if they could just find a few more trains or drop their charges a bit they might be able to complete their apparent aspirations to run a budget airline type business model. Oh, and they’ll also have to deal with those pesky unions.

Sony PS3 Blu-ray drive ‘gamble’ paying off?

I dunno if it Sony ever doubted that Blu-ray would win but it appears their big gamble of sticking expensive Blu-ray drives into PS3s is starting to win out in terms of market share with news that the PS3 is apparently outselling the XBox 360 and other news that Toshiba are giving up on the competing HD DVD format, perhaps driven by news that the largest retailer in the world has opted to back Blu-ray

I don’t really have much interest in either console right now (I own a Wii) but it’s interesting nonetheless how the PS3 seems to be rising from the ashes of burnout on launch. Talk about betting the farm!

Facebook are cracking down hard on invite/application spam

Facebook finally tackle the problem of forced invites, a behavioral characteristic of some (bad) applications that repeatedly prompt users to invite other users after installing an application of performing some action within the application.

This combined with new controls for limiting the number of application notifications per user per day from applications should mean a lot less unsolicited spam from applications.

Long overdue, the continued abuse of both the invite and notification APIs has significantly devalued and reduced the utility of service. Many high-tech folks I’ve talked to recently have already given up on Facebook (retreating to Twitter) but perhaps if they continue improving the spam controls they might be tempted back.

It would seem the initial “grab as many users as possible” focus of some applications in order to boost valuations may now be coming to an end (thankfully).

Mahon Tribunal - Laugh Of The Day 12-02-08

From this article on Sean Gilbride’s performance at the Mahon Tribunal yesterday

A former Fianna Fail councillor, who was on developer Owen O’Callaghan’s payroll during critical Quarryvale rezoning votes, never told other councillors he was being paid the equivalent of his teacher’s salary for almost a year.
…
He said he had always been supportive of Quarryvale. The fact he was being paid by Mr O’Callaghan had nothing to do with it.

I might have to start posting a series of these.

Aside, did you know that the Mahon Tribunal has been running since Nov 4th, 1997?

Past Employer Acquisitions - first CapeClear, next IONA?

It’s been a busy week for the Irish middleware industry, first Cape Clear get acquired and then Iona announce that someone is sniffing around. Having worked in both in the past I do hope deals work out well for the great folks involved.

Still though, these must be confusing times for anyone who is looking for an enterprise ESB/orchestration/integration solution. Terribly vague product description there but I’m never sure exactly how these vendors like their products to be classified but I’m sure ye know what I mean. The choices for customers are narrowing back to buying stacks from the old big enterprise software vendors like IBM, Oracle and MS.

Maybe the odd enlightened one will choose the alternate approach.