Inside View from Ireland

Expanding MSN search

SCOBLE -- Robert Scoble shares a few thoughts about emerging MSN search functionality. He talks about wanting to find patterns in people. He wants to find groups with shared interests. Scoble has searched Technorati for several themes, such as "all blogs that mention quilting, and they are in some sort of order based on how many inbound links they have and they bias toward webloggers who mentioned quilting in the past few days."

Connecting points

ETHOS -- Throughts about Ireland's incumbent telephone operator run through the Irish Sunday papers. Most of the connecting commentary points to Eircom's demise as a quality investment.¹ Two items in The Sunday Tribune point to a smart way forward from the morass of poor broadband connectivity left behind by Eircom in Ireland.

Fergus Cassidy thinks way too much government navel gazing occurs when it comes to sorting out broadband in Ireland.²

The state is wasting precious time and money throwing carrots around when the horse has bolted. The choice now is either to close the stable door and pray to Saint Jude or take action and comit to an alternative telecoms infratructure.... It's time to ... provide "economic returns" for the rest of us.

Joe Finucane from Wireless Network Ireland offers some interesting ideas based around setting up Wi-Fi hotspots for free use inside chosen venues.³ Finucane spots something I have seen--Dublin hotels are not attracting people onto their wireless networks when charging EUR 10 an hour.

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¹Frank Fitzgibbon -- "Eircom woes take toll on share price" in The Sunday Times Business, March 28, 2004.
²Fergus Cassidy -- "Navel gazing" in The Sunday Tibune, March 28, 2004.
³Matthew Magee -- "New Dublin firm touts temporary wireless internet networks" in The Sunday Tibune, March 28, 2004.
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Art talks on air

NYT -- PS1 is a creative place and it's nice to know that arts education and critical reviews will be on Internet Radio from New York. WPS1 will broadcast historical audio material from a variety of sources, like the sound archives of the Museum of Modern Art.

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JD Lasica -- "An art radio station on the web"
Carol Vogel -- "Word pictures on Internet radio"
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Define multimedia

KILKENNY -- We have a fine art course running in Ormonde College where elements of multimedia enter the classroom discussion. And we have students sitting in a multimedia degree course in Tipperary Institute where they use multimedia. I wonder if both courses share the same definition of multimedia?

Things never taught in design school

DESIGN OBSERVER -- Michael McDonough, the accomplished New York-based architect, writer and teacher, ran “The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School” last month in The Architect's Newsletter. He offers some useful observations that fit multimedia design.

Nose pickings

TAINT -- After hallucinating about an Irish breakfast in cholestoral-free southern California, Justin Mason meanders from black pudding to King Crisps before sharing scientific conclusions that nose pickings are good for you. Spare a thought for the displaced Irishman who has somehow totally misconstrued the long-standing Guinness proclamation. Guinness is good for you. Hands up for those who believe nose pickings are good for you. The evidence from Innsbruck-based lung specialist Prof Dr Friedrich Bischinger is sound, even though Dick O'Brien does not concur.

svchost.exe

UPDATE -- I solved my problem with 100% CPU usage due to multiple instances of svchost running. I originally thought I had figured it out after removing SoundForge, the program that caused a hard crash on my laptop because CPU usage dropped to between 4% and 100% after removal. But after reboot, the system returned to 100% CPU usage. The svchost.exe (Generic Host Process for Win32 Services) is an integral part of Windows XP OS. It cannot be stopped or restarted manually. It manages 32-bit DLLs and other services. In normal conditions more than one Svchost.exe instance will always be open. Because I normally have five open, I cannot launch things such as REGEDIT or Norton Anti-Virus. This is tedious, even when using online scanning troubleshooting like RAV AntiVirus.

It's important to note that SERVICE HOST is not a bug. It is a required service. SVCHOST.exe runs runs DLLs. In my case, a DLL might be experiencing a problem or might be corrupted. These problems might be caused by viruses, trojans--or spy software in my case. SVCHOST.exe runs a DLL. If a specific DLL is corrupted, you have to identify what app is causing the DLL call. The Event Viewer helps here.

Violence in Kilkenny People

KILKENNY -- Mirroring incidents reported in Dublin during St Patrick's Day, Carmel Hayes gives front page coverage to several violent attacks in Kilkenny on the national holiday.¹ The effects of violence trickle over to the editorial page where it is the lead editorial. The second editorial meekly endorses bin charges. On the same page, a letter questioning the "Future of Rothe House" contains more words than either editorial.²

MS fined by fax

NTK -- Microsoft received news of its EUR 497m bill for Windows Media Player by fax, prompting Need to Know to speculate that "attempts to send it by Outlook mysteriously bounced. The company spent a few minutes with the currency calculator before chucking it in the 'due to pay after five years of appeals' folder. Funnily enough, Gates spoke last month about trying to find a way of reducing the $52.8bn of cash that the company currently sits on."

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via Dave Green and Forbes
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EU Surveillance Rising

EUROPEAN LEADERS have agreed a series of anti-terrorism measures that will put everyone in the EU under surveillance. Those living in Europe who wish to retain their current levels of anonymity need to familiarise themselves with pay-as-you-go phones, referrer blocking on their browsers and web-based e-mail services. These are skillsets that I have penciled into third level accreditation documents that we are using to mark out important space i the decade ahead.

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Harry McGuire -- "EU to get sweeping anti-yerror powers" on the front page of The Irish Examiner, March 26, 2004.

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