Inside View from Ireland

Vote 2004 [Bush Wins]

BETAVOTE -- If you think you should be voting today, you can cast your vote at BetaVote from any place in the world. The server is extremely slow but just as fast as waiting in a polling place. It's interesting to look at tallies from around the world. Or you may want to express your vote in Technorati fashion for John Kerry or George Bush.

Blogs are reverberating the vote--and affecting the New York Stock Exchange. According to Yahoo News, "shares of defense, pharmaceutical, health care and medical technology companies led a reversal that sharply trimmed gains and moved major indexes lower at mid-afternoon after traders heard about the exit poll speculation" by bloggers. And right about the time that people started checking the veracity of those reports, blogs began vaporising under the load. The ones that collapsed often serve up dynamic pages. That is not smart if you want to handle more than 10 connections to the same page every minute. If you want the facts, you need to check with sites that can handle more than 2500 views an hour. Think wire services, NYT, WSJ.

How to uncripple iTunes

BOING BOING -- Apple disingenously released an "update" that needs to be neutered. As Cory Doctorow explains, "It turns out that Apple's system for disabling the plugin uses a blacklist of disallowed iTunes additions in the iTunes binary. If you open the binary in a hexadecimal editor, like HexEdit, you can find the area where Apple has inserted the string 'iPod Download' in its blacklist and simply replace the text with something else (in fact, I think you could probably just change one character) and your iTunes's original functionality will be restored."

Grunt Life of Tom Murphy

DUBLIN -- I met Tom Murphy at the height of the Celtic Tiger, probably the same time that John Sterne met him as well. From my initial reading of Adventures in Code, it looks like Tom commands more pages than any other Irish programmer I know well enough to be owed a drink. (Sean McGrath gets more pages in the paperback text but there are no drink debts involving me and Sean.) John Sterne explains:

SkypeOut cheaper than text-in

SKYPE -- My first 30 days using SkypeOut services prove it is less expensive for me to use my Skype VoIP phone to call friends on their mobiles in Ireland or Arizona than it is for me to send SMS text messages to them.

It costs me 10 cents and 15 cents to send text via SMS to mobile phones in Ireland and Arizona respectively. Skype charges me two cents and one cent per minute respectively to call mobile phones in Ireland and Arizona. I do not need a calculator to realise that I suddenly have enough money to buy a used iPod with the money I save through now and June 2005 if I continue using Skype-out as my primary method of contacting friends with mobile phones.

Tec Sport Coat

SCOTTEVEST -- If you have to bring a pile of geek gear with you on the road, it might pay to invest in SCOTTeVEST gear. It's first-rate Technology Enabled Clothing The TEC Sport Jacket and hidden cargo pants hold more things than I normally carry in my bags. The jacket costs $250 and the pants $110.

Who invented podcasting

SCRIPTING -- Dave Winer questions the origins of podcasting by pointing to comments and discussion related to himself and Adam Curry. His concerns also point to the way history is made and revised at internet speed. Let the record show that Harold Gilchrist was audioblogging well before "podcasting" was coined. And Audible enjoyed a brisk trade in downloadable audiobooks that I first saw in use on Amtrak in 2001. One thing for certain, podcasting did not start at BoingBoing because anyone searching that gigormously popular site will discover that its search engine knows "nothing of this 'podcasting' of which you speak. Despite the enormous breadth, depth and obscurity of the Boing Boing posts over the years, your oddball query has us stumped. Have you considered the possibility that 'podcasting' is a nonsense phrase that is the product of your fevered imagination? Cos that's my bet."

Halloween Wind-up

KILKENNY -- I used to carry pictures of the homes I lived in when traveling back through the 15 different communities that served as my home throughout the US. I started thinking about encountering the current residents of those homes when reading a humourous Byrd Report on the run-up to Halloween. What a way to wind up a homeowner--tell them you know the ghost in their house. From the Byrd Notes version of a drive-by visitor: