Inside View from Ireland

November Conjectures

KILKENNY -- Inspired by the produce reports from Philadelphia, I think it's fitting that I set aside space in my blog to write notes to myself. I'll call them "conjectures" in memory of my well-renowned forebear, Christian Goldbach. Nothing mathematical here, just some observations about the passing of time. And the month's most important conjecture concerns weather patterns. I believe that a valid conjecture would find that the longer the leaves stay on trees in Ireland, the more likely the Garringreen strawberry bed will produce red produce. It's well into November and the green climate of Ireland is giving me one plump strawberry a week. I can get two a week if I take pink strawberries inside to finish ripening.

Java Cartogram

VANDERBEI -- Robert Vanderbei has the best implementation of a Java-assisted county-by-county breakdown of the 2004 Presidential Election Results. To get the code that produced a series of truly excellent online maps, you have to take his class.

Celebratory occasions

IRISH TIMES -- In "Wired on Friday" Danny O'Brien points to "a flurry of tenth anniversaries" such as the web banner ad, British net industry, and W3C organising consortium. But O'Brien doesn't miss some milestones.

Irish Breakfast Powerpoint

MY REFERRER LOGS told me that Google has more than 5000 pages related to "Irish Breakfast Powerpoint" and I can't believe that means more than 5000 PowerPoint presentations have been made at breakfast meetings in Ireland. Although someone came here looking for a "powerpoint breakfast," I have never had one called that--but I have watched PowerPoint presentations during breakfast in Ireland, like this "woman in suit" using her laptop at the Assisi Cafe in Dublin's Liberties. It's the first breakfast laptop session I've seen flagrantly exposed to unsuspecting office workers who scooted by, averting their gaze. (I might be jumping to conclusions because the open screen might actually be a morning prayer card since the laptop was pointed at a prominent church on Thomas Street.)

Precious Thoughts

CLONMEL -- One of the exercises we do in our Media Writing Course is a review of web site referrers. Some of that electronic information shows that material written for our third level multimedia classroom resurfaces in other websites. Some students are miffed by that occurrence and take no comfort in my Foucaultian retort that writing our course material is not a vehicle for me, the author, to express my emotions or ideas. I teach that the primary purpose of writing isn't meant to communicate from author to reader. In my mind, affected by Michel Foucault, writing's primary purpose is to circulate language through memes, with little regard for individual authors or readers. Foucault says, "It is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears." In terms of blogging, that means who said what is subordinated to what is said the most. The message spreading is much more significant than who started the message flowing.

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Michel Foucault -- "What is an author?"
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High Water Mark

KILKENNY -- Sometime during the 2004 Election Campaign this 15-month-old blog and its photo album extensions reached a total traffic count of 500,000 with hundreds of people looking at the question "Is Bush Wired"?

MyCampus WLAN

THE FEATURE -- MyCampus was specifically set up to develop context-aware mobile services for Carnegie Mellon's community. The system runs on PDAs and across 700 WLAN access points located around the university, and it is used daily by 3,000 people to help them study, socialize, plan meals, attend events, shop, and engage in extracurricular activities.

Theo van Gogh RIP

THEO VAN GOGH -- Theo Van Gogh was a blogger. May he Rest in Peace. Like Doc, I learned this from a podcast. It's not covered by Irish media sources. He was shot repeatedly and stabbed with two knives in a ritual killing by an extremist Muslim. A note, supposedly containing Koran scripture was pinned to his chest by one of the blades. Thousands of miles away, I know that Theo was a creative man. It don't know much about the demented person who knifed him but I feel sorry for both of them. The world has lost a creative inspiration.

Webcamming the Tally

PART OF MY ELECTION watch included a webcam link to daughter Misty who gave me a blow-by-blow of the network coverage along with comments from the couch in Flagstaff, Arizona. She was reading and signing in a process I caught in a webcam session. I toggled through some leading-edge blogs for solace and pointed some of them out to her. Four or five guys sat on the couch behind Misty's webcam while absorbing the election coverage. Some of the guys were deaf, so Misty signed them between typing me. It was the slowest Yahoo Messenger session I've ever had with the States. It's actually a very surreal thing to do at sunrise. That and to read Yeats:

Google's Lifetime Cookie

IN IRELAND, your local publican normally keeps your favourite drinks order tucked away for your future visits. Make mine a pint of Guinness and a glass of Smithwicks.

(Note to Google: Please record my preferences so my search-engine aware local publican is in no doubt.)

In Google, a perpetual cookie can relate your searching to your site visits--hence some fine-toothed analysis of who clicks what in AdSense. Google also uses cookies in Gmail. There's was a Gmail exploit that allowed an attacker to steal your Gmail cookie, which thereafter identified them as you to the system, even if you changed your password. Google has probably patched this by now but this is a big issue for Google, if Gmail uses an unlimited lifetime Google cookie. The data in that cookie is, presumably, extremely valuable for their tracking efforts.

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Nitzan Weidenfeld -- "Security hole found in Google"

Adam Fields -- "Gmail security breach"

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