Inside View from Ireland

Setting up New Laptop

I'VE A NEW DELL M2400 LAPTOP running side-by-side a Dell D620 and realise it will take several days to pull all my required programs onto the rippingly-fast Dell Precision laptop. Part of its speed is down to Windows 7. Most of its speed comes from being free of bloat. Besides Microsoft Office and Visual Studio 2005, I've just the basic Windows accessories. I'll be intested in discovering what legacy programs and shell extensions fail to install. Because I want rocket speed to complement the Firewire services that will connect to this lightweight baby, I'm going to use a clever mouse with this laptop. Here's the first hour's tick-off list of programs installed on the new laptop:

Three to Watch

UPDATED 5 JAN 09 with a photo, hyperlink and a citation of a third guy, Shane McAllister.

MY WEEKEND NEWSPAPERS tell me that I should be continue watching two guys who feature in my regular flow of online activities. The Limerick Leader fingers Patrick Collison (at left, seated in the centre) and The Irish Times cites Aodhan Cullen. Patrick has shared entrepreneurial ideas at Limerick Open Coffee on the heels of selling his start-up Auctomatic. Aodhan's Statcounter powers the stats package behind my blogs.

The Irish Times says, "At the age of 28 Aodhan Cullen is already a seasoned technology entrepreneur. At 12 he started his first business typing CVs for his Dublin neighbours and at 18 founded Statcounter.com, a free advertising-supported service that boasts over two million members and generated a profit of €750,000 last year. It allows websites to track the number of visitors they attract and other important data such as how they found it. Statcounter, which Cullen runs with his wife Jenni, is totally self-funded and has been rebuffing approaches from US investors. After investing heavily this year, 2009 will see them competing with the big boys."[1]

Irish Small Business Tech Trends

IN A SURVEY of Irish IT infrastructure, Business Plus magazine finds "technologies that used to be out of the range of SMEs are now coming within their orbit." [1] After asking a wide range of solutions providers what they're recommending to improve their clients' business functions [2], no Irish business consultant interviewed recommended a blogging platform (unless you count Sharepoint), the establishment of a presence on a social network (i.e., Twitter, LinkedIn, IGOpeople), and obvious Irish cloud computing solutions (i.e., OnlineMeetingRooms, PutPlace) also go unnoticed. Those interviewed normally flog their expertise and their paid services. When viewed year-on-year, these kinds of stories show readers where the engine of Irish enterprise (the SME sector) is placed. Here is a cursory listing of "technology trends SMEs should be aware of:"

Personal Web Proxies

KILKENNY -- Both Russell Beattie and Danny O'Brien have been talking about Personal Web Proxies. The idea is on my personal watch list.

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Danny O'Brien -- "That proxy thing"
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Smallest Website

GUIMP -- Go visit the smallest Website on the planet. Then learn what Intuitis is all about.

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Image from the front page of Guimp
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Why PDF

KILKENNY -- Adrian Weckler launches mini-rants from his soapbox column in the Sunday Business Post and last Sunday's column was no different as he rounded on PDFs. After reading his diatribe, I started to think that Weckler may never have used the Adobe Portable Document Format for anything except to read material on the Web. If that's the case, I think he needs to discuss with marketing staffs why the PDF is their format of choice when presenting the company image in the framework of a printable document. I think he should sit down with CFOs who use information in their PDFs to set down terms and condition for licensing of software products. Then he should consider the opinion of the 27 Internet co-ordinators employed by county councils and hear how their use of PDFs cuts the cost of licensing expensive mapping software.

While some may argue that the PDF file abuses bandwidth, confuses search engines and locks up browsers, there are compelling and revenue-generating reasons to promote the Portable Document Format in today's connected world of collaboration.

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Adrian Weckler edits Computers in Business for The Sunday Business Post. Bernard Goldbach teaches best practise in web development for Tipperary Institute.
Sent as mail2blog by Nokia 9210i O2 connection at the Kilkenny Train Station.
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Web Hosting Ireland

HOST ie -- Along with 800 other clients, I depend on the reliability of web services provided to me by Novara Technology Group. My blog content sits on Compaq DL320 & DL380 servers in one of Ireland's leading data centres, Nevada Tele Web Hosting Ireland. I've spoken to several of the Host.ie engineers and I believe they have some of the best Linux hosting in Ireland. I can see from my server logs that their 24x7 monitoring is backed up by sophisticated management services. The combination gives me confidence in maintaining uninterrupted operations of my blog.

Novara runs a fully Cisco switched network, equipped with some of the finest hardware I have seen in a single serviced location. Their capabilities span from hosting and back-end services that have served me well as a long-time blogger.

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Fully redundant Compaq server hardware from Host.ie depicted in the picture.
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Towards transparent electronic voting

KILKENNY -- Major concerns about the electronic voting mechanisms continue to be expressed in Ireland. Some of the concerns echo comments made on other continents. I believe more consultation should be done before electronic counting mechanisms eliminate the transparency needed by tallymen in Irish elections. The software used to record votes needs to be opened at the source code level for several reasons: (1) to ascertain whether passwords are embedded in source code, (2) to evaluate the level of encryption in the system, (3) to analyse reasons for denying printouts of ballots cast being made for individual voters.

Antoin O Lachtnain raises additional issues concerning layouts of ballots, tallying methods and polling stations. All deserve to be part of an informed national debate because the envisioned system does not inspire confidence.

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There have been several calls to vet voting machines by Irish software developers. These calls need to be followed up by informed debate.

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Wired News and Open -- "More calls to vet voting machines"
Antoin O Lachtnain -- "Electronic voting: putting voters first"
Sent as mail2blog by Nokia 9210i O2 TypePad connection at the Kilkenny Train Station.
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Developing applications for Smart Devices

BAWNTAMEENA E1 -- The .Net compact framework will supposedly bring "write once, run on multiple (MS) devices" capability to Pocket PC devices. It works like a browsecap file which has the abilities (such as screen size and colours) of most devices in it and the .Net Mobile Controls "automagically" display the best content layout for the device.

Visual Studio .Net 1.1 upgrade has default support for the mobile controls and a pocket PC device emulator. This is supposed to help ASP.Net developers to start becoming smart device developers for applications that run through a browser when connected and applications that are installed and run locally on the actual device.

Nokia uses the Symbian OS and Java. At a recent Nokia Developer Conference in Dublinl, I learned that development consists of selecting a specific "profile" for a specific device and then deploy to that device only.

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Craig McFadyen on Open
Visual Studio and DevX articles
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Sent as mail2blog by Nokia9210i O2 service.

Irish Microcontent

BEN HAMMERSLEY saved his best column of the year for the warmest day of 2003, reporting on the writers and artists who are earning money in the form of Internet micropayments.

It's a theme I first explored for those on Arthouse courses back in 1996. Weekly visitors still find my online course notes about the topic. Hammersley provides a listing of simple yet effective ways of making small bits for bytes of content. I'm thinking about a few ideas for Irish microcontent that he didn't mention and I wonder if he dismissed them after discovering they're not viable.

In true "trackback" fashion, I will bring my online notes into this TypePad space and watch the discussion ensue. I've got a busload of students interested in this topic. They want wages as much as they want to earn degrees.

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Ben Hammersley -- "Making the web pay" in The Guardian, 7 August 2003
Sent mail2blog on Nokia 9210i O2 connection from Kilkenny, Ireland using genuine Irish pixels.

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