Inside View from Ireland

Know them by their searching

I GLANCE AT interesting referrer strings that occasionally find their way into my referrer logs. Some tidbits from my referrer logs:

• Russians are looking for Sugarbabe texts and they found my item on Sugarbabe ringtones

  

Six things I like in Sony Centres

SONY -- I visit two different Sony centres when in Dublin, looking at six different things each time.

1. Vaio. I got nearly two years' service out of a ow-end Vaio notebook before its third drop killed the motherboard. I like both the high-end Vaio notebooks and the Vaio entertainment centre.
2. Room Link. More people come to this blog looking for info on Sony Room Link than any other Sony product. The Room Link is a wireless relay device that lets us stream from the Vaio to the TV. So you can watch files you downloaded from your high-speed office connection, thumb through e-mails or read your news aggregator on your sitting room screen.
3. Net MDR. The Internet-friendly MDRs let you shift your music faster than standard MDR connections.
4. CoCoon PVR. This slick, white hard disc video recorder does the business but its interface is way more complex than Sky+.
5. Flat panel screen with Wega. Sony's digital reality creation processors are the crucial element in producing sharp pictures.
6. PS-X. This slick device combines a television tuner, CD/DVD player with recorder, hard drive and games machine into a compact set-top box. In typical Sony style, the PS-X comes in eye-catching colours. Plus its simple icon system makes switching between any of the devices easier than fumbling with independent boxes and groups of remote control handsets.

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UK's best computing

EDINBURGH -- The biggest and best-rated informatics and computer science department in the UK is Edinburgh University. It is the only "A" rated department and, with 90 full-time research staff, bigger than the departments at Manchester and Cambridge Universities combined. Scottish Enterprise is working to build a centre to house 600 researchers in a single city centre unit, including researchers from IBM. If this unfolds, Edinburgh would create 550 jobs within 15 years, producing an annual income of £41.7m. Edinburgh University is already spinning out a company a moment.

Edinburgh's informatics and computing department covers a wide range of expertise, ranging from bio-informatics, speech and communications and Britain's only e-science centre, a combined venture with Glasgow University, which is a UK leader in developing the Grid as part of the next generation of the Internet.

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Professor Timothy O'Shea, vice chancellor of Edinburgh University, offers comments on European computing curricula. Tipperary Institute's recent degree accreditations benefit from O'Shea's advice.

Fastbuzz news service

FASTBUZZ -- I use Zapatec's Bloki for the engine behind my Media Studies Revision Wiki and I like the ancillary services on offer there.

Bloki have deployed Fastbuzz as a way to track changes to newsfeeds, blogs, forums, and anything with a URL. You can use Fastbuzz to:

• See the latest headlines from the New York Times (they have a subscription key).
• Track blogs as they update.
• Get alert when people post to Bloki forums.
• See the latest job offerings on Craig's List.
• Monitor breaking news on Electric News.
• Hear the other side of the story through the eyes of Backseat Drivers.

To set things up, you subscribe and organize your lists as Web channels with Fastbuzz. Choose e-mail delivery like me and they deliver straight to your mobile phone several times each day.

There is no software to download because everything runs on the server side.

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Dror Matalon -- "Bloki updates"
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Quick Facts about Irish Internet

COMREG -- The Commission for Communications Regulation in Ireland reveals interesting demographics about use of the Internet.

• The percentage of residential users online in Ireland is 39%, which is nearly the same as the percentage of my students who file their third level assignments from home.
• Flat-rate Internet Access (FRIACO) products continues upwards. There were more than 6500 FRIACO subscribers between April and June along with 3850 new DSL connections in the same time period.
• More Irish people use their phone lines for data than for voice. This means Eircom has become an Internet service company that offers traditional voice services.
• Mobile penetration has pushed above 81%, which equates to 3.17m mobile subscribers.
• Text messaging has leveled off at 716m text messages per quarter.
• More thasn 10,000 mobile phone numbers have been ported from one network to another.

In southeastern Ireland, most people don't see a compelling case for high-speed Internet access. Some of my students are surprised to hear that they can cap their monthly costs of Internet access through a DSL connection. Most would use Internet services to learn more if they knew the clock wasn't ticking for every minute of their connectivity. There are things we can do to educate them about these facts.

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Amarach -- "Fixed and Mobile User Research" (443kb Powerpoint)
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Getting value for IT money

JOHN MCGUINNESS -- National politicians like John McGuinness know that IT systems can provide great benefits but it is also possible for them to go off the rails. "In the real world, IT is being credited for giving greater efficiencies and creating money," McGuinness told The Irish Examiner when reviewing public sector IT spending. "I do not know any private companies that have made the same level of mistakes."

Five obsolete technologies

COMPUTERWORLD -- Five technologies on their way out include:

1. Windows 9x systems because new software won't run on the old operating system, fast making 70m users switch.
2. Client/server computing: the two-tier dream of dumb terminals is over as more powerful client computers win out.
3. Proprietary networks: the Internet has swept away all other networks.
4. Tape backup: it used to be the cheap mass storage option but hard disk economies of scale are catching up.
5. Visual Basic 6: The most popular programming language in the world is being phased out by Microsoft, making its survival pretty unlikely.

Hoping for a multimedia degree

KILKENNY -- Today a team of five evaluators from the Irish Higher Education Training Awards Council visits our multimedia staff to determine whether we can issue a third level mutimedia degree in our own name. I know how precocious our submission appears to be. We have a campus of one building, 60 multimedia computers in three labs, five classrooms containing fewer seats than several rostered classes, a library holding 82 more new media books than I own and a cafeteria that is bigger than every chapel in County Tipperary. We love our chips in Tipp. This upstart campus community has a higher profile in Google than much larger and long-time accredited institutions that award students a "multimedia diploma" in Ireland. If Google gives the nod to our current visibility, perhaps HETAC should concur with the conferring of degree-awarding status.

KickStart now shipping

CADENHEAD -- Radio UserLand KickStart is shipping and Radio users should get a copy. The chapter on Outlining is really helpful. I'm divorced from my Radio blog while my TransNote sits in The Computer Hospital with a broken power supply. In the meantime, I have evolved into a Communicator Blogger Tutor.

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Rogers Cadenhead -- Radio UserLand Kickstart
Dave Winer begrudgingly permits your purchase through Amazon.
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You can see farther at night

KILKENNY -- When I look through 10 consecutive years of my flight logs, I remember how far I could see at night. Because you can see the stars at night, hundreds of thousands of miles away. I could see stars when cruising above the tropopause that were well beyond the distance of the sun. Trapped now on the ground at night, most of my long distance vision comes through my electronic connections. I can see the electronic footprints of people visiting Irish Typepad, including 374 who came yesterday in search of the "last flight of Concorde." I see several women with cancer visiting here after midnight in Ireland. Nearly 20 different American students come to this virtual slice of Ireland after their nightly news programs air in the States. For some reason, they can see my Irish Typepad more clearly when darkness cloaks Ireland. I can see them more clearly too as my connectivity rips faster when the Irish and British Isles are asleep.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia Communicator O2 TypePad service.
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