Inside View

Barcamp Cork Take Two

ALONG WITH EIGHT THIRD LEVEL STUDENTS, I will walk Leeside and into the Webworks of Cork on Eglinton Street, in order to attend Barcamp Cork II on the first of November. As an unconference, you can't really expect much but the preliminaries for this Saturday event promise to offer as much hallway conversation as sit-down chatter. In a perfect world, there would be a gender balance softly imposed but in Irish technology circles, more women than men sweat over the keyboard. We're not helping the balance because our contingent is two-thirds male. Hopefully, there will be fruitful doorstepping on hand because our DV camera crew and first year audio recording specialists want to accomplish a few creative multimedia tasks for academic credit. See you there?

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Cork Webworks, Eglinton Street, Cork, Ireland. It's on the map: 51.8974, -8.4645 which Google Chrome thinks is very close to the Long Island Bar and Chief O'Neill has a proposed list of talks.

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Telling the Free Wifi Story

FOR SEVERAL MONTHS NOW, James Corbett has been nudging me to add my information about free and open wifi nodes to the OurMaps.ie project. Among other things, those maps are a mash-up of community information about where you can connect to the internet for free using wifi services in restaurants (like me in the Havana Tapas Bar at left), homes and kerbside. I've seen people pull to the side of the road outside our home where we have an open wifi node (SSID mellifont_friary) and the neighbours in the B&B down the street tell us they've seen our router blasting a signal to their south-facing rooms, much appreciated by traveling laptops. I believe the Irish government could win a lot of good will by funding a subnet inside every local authority that puts a 12 megabit per second outside every library, social welfare office, community information centre and council parking lot. The government agency could easily throttle connectivity by limited session length or type of service and in one fell swoop, the government might get something productive out of all the MANs dug into the pavement in Ireland. That aside, there are plenty of free and open wifi nodes appearing more frequently throughout Ireland. At this point, every Irish city has a hotel offering free wifi. My favourite is the Cork International Airport Hotel's offerings because you can sit in some of the most creative corners while uploading videos, checking e-mail or holding a virtual meeting with Online Meeting Rooms. As a deep recession heads towards Ireland, free and open wifi will cost less than drowning your concerns in an evening of pints. So having the service in the air is a nice way of dealing with the downturn.

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Image uploaded to Flickr using  Havana's free and open wifi node in George's Street, Dublin 2, Ireland.

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Two Free Dublin Wifi Spots

RUNNING UP AND BACK to Dublin is often fraught with issues for me since we're talking about major opportunities for traffic delays when I'm on the roadways. Yesterday's trip took me into several interesting spaces and although I experienced the single-worst communication snafu in the 21st century, I connected to my cloud of information by using free and open wifi in the Havana Tapas Bar and again in the Digital Hub of Dublin. The big chimney at left met me on my way back to Heuston Station and back along the rail line to Thurles. Like many others I read, my underway 3G experience is pock-marked with miles of black spots on the railway. I'm not bothered as most people because I manage my email via a POP service and that seems to work just fine with even a hint of O2 wireless service. And I harvest more than a day's worth of feeds to read on my Nokia E90, all aggregated locally on my Nokia E90 with no need for internet connectivity. Now it's back to the grind at the desk, trying to figure out how to tie together a day of walking Dublin for two cohorts of my creative multimedia degree students in Tipperary Institute.

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Three Reasons

NOW THAT IRELAND is feeling recessionary winds, my local BMW dealer is feeding me reasons to upgrade the batmobile to something that's more fun to drive while saving the planet. Unfortunately, the sales crew want to take more than €40,000 from me before I get the keys to a new drive, so it's not going to happen before 2010. Nonetheless, I am intrigued enough by three reasons given for me to stay with the BMW 3-series.

Serious Carbon Savings. BMW has this catchy EfficientDynamics initiative that has resulted in saving grams and millimeters all over the sedan. Other cars in its class look portly by comparison. I've looked at carbon tags on the Audi A4, Jaguar X-Type, Lexus IS220d and Merceds C180--all left behind with their larger carbon footprints.

Ridges. I like waxing ridges on cars, an addiction acquired with my first car, a Corvette. BMW humours me with a new ridgeline on the 3-series bonnet that evolved from the cloth-covered Gina concept car.

Stop-Start. Like most BMWs, the 3-series shuts down when the car is in neutral and at a dead stop. This alone won't save the planet but in my weekly driving, I know it will save me at least the cost of a pint a Guinness. Knowing that, I am keen to drive to more urban pubs, saving publicans and the planet in one simple movement.

I am off to convince my unflinching wife of the logic of upgrading in the winter of 2010. Stay subscribed to my photostream to see the results.

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And none of the three reasons include getting a cup holder.

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In Search of Luddites

ONE WAY to tell if college students are Luddites is to determine whether they author their own personal music collection, like mine on an iPhone or Nokia E90. I have fewer than 50 students on my current enrollment rosters--a real shame and perhaps a call for analysis under the microscope of value for money. Five years ago, more than 85% of my college students were actively ripping, burning and sharing music. In October 2003, those students preferred to keep their music in MP3 formats, although the most experienced had a combination of MP3 and CD formats to ensure their collections play on the widest variety of machines. When it comes to stamping out Luddite behaviour, nothing works better than connections to personal music collections. So I'm asking my students about their music collections again this year, and showing their responses in the Friendfeed Communicators room.

6.9m iPhones

IN A CONFERENCE CALL, Apple reported quarterly earnings that surged 26.1% over the year-ago period. The numbers: net income of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 per share, on sales of $7.9 billion, compared with earnings of $904 million, or $1.01 per share, on sales of $6.2 billion for the same period a year ago. Those results beat the consensus earnings estimate of $1 billion, or $1.11 per share, on sales of $8 billion, reported by Thomson Financial. These numbers do not recognise revenues and earnings related to the iPhone. If those positive results were factored into the quarterly earnings statement, Apple would have reported earnings of $2.4 billion on sales of $11.58 billion, thanks to the effects of the subscription-account method used to tally profits and sales from sales of its iPhone and AppleTV.

Two Years Tweeting

AN OLD CALENDAR ENTRY reminds me that in October 2006, I sent a few messages from a table at the IIA Net Visionary Awards to the Twitterverse. Fewer than 200 Irish people were using Twitter back then and nobody sitting around my table was tweeting at the time but at least two of the 10 people at the table are regulars on the Irish Twitter timeline now. And at least 500 people in Ireland have become tweeple who I know by their nicknames on Twitter. In fact, there's a mainstream feel about Twitter--although I think it's still a long way away from being something your normal taxi driver would comprehend.

Irish Sunday News

I DON'T COVER current events in my blog but I like making a short video of the tech news found in the Sunday papers. This is the first time in five years that I haven't bought the Sunday Tribune--I've quit it and replace its declining page count with the upmarket Sunday Telegraph. By the way, the keyframe at left counts as tech news. It's a photo in Champions: Portraits by Anderson & Low, to benefit the Elton John Aids Foundation. [0] Closer to the geek side of tech, Stephen Fry mentions some of the gear he carries in his suitcase and since a few people reading Twitter didn't buy the Guardian yesterday, I made a Qik video about his bag of cables.[1] Fry is one reason I believe traditional papers have more life ahead of them than Damien Mulley would allow. Peter Preston makes the point that "a Guardian surge online that brings in more than 23m unique users a month on top of a million-plus print readers isn't carnage." [2] But we all know that there is no love between today's twentysomethings and the newspapers their parents read around the family homes. Actually, many of those in their twenties and lots of their parents click into blogs for their daily flow of information. [3] Naughton wants "English departments in all universities to start studying blogging sytles, for example the way in which accomplished online writers use hyperlinks."

Exceptional Cameraphones

I CAN COUNT ON ONE hand the number of gadgets that were taken from my desk by people who admired what they saw. But when my SonyEricsson C905 went missing in the company of super-cameraman Tom Murphy, I knew something very important had occurred. Tom knows his cameras and he immediately appreciated the C905's clever operating capabilities along with its exceptional 8.1 megapixel resolution. He walked away with the solid-feeling phone while we were standing in front of the Cork Webworks, snapped a photo while walking across the River Lee towards a welcome cup of coffee, and recorded a short video with the phone in the rain. And he did all those things without using the manual, on a phone that had not been charged from the first time it left the box. My immediate first impression is that this piece of test equipment, valued at a little more than €500, needs to remain in my care. It's perfect for those cameraphone moments around the house, recording "first" things that our little daughter delights in doing. Within a week, I'll offer a more comprehensive review. For the moment, all I have to show are a few images shot with the most capable cameraphone I have ever used.

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Flickr isn't finding C905 images but I have a C905 set.

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Truly Green Conference

IN A CLEVER MOVE, it@cork sets aside a few inches to outline how its planners are trying to be as environmentally-aware in the ramping up of a 26 November Technology in Business Conference. But one very obvious omission from the organisers' tick-off list is virtual conferencing. There are paragraphs of information about memory sticks instead of paper printing, carbon offsets, a water buffalo (my term) instead of water bottles, and helpful pointers to public transport links. Some of these ideas are worthwhile suggestions for others to consider. However, I wonder why there's neither a mention of virtual conferencing as a service or as a pointer to how we've facilitated virtual attendance during Podcamp Ireland and during several meetings of Limerick OpenCoffee. From my position at the receiving end during ICS talks and as one of the occasional camera operators for Tipperary Institute, I know the technology we employ from Online Meeting Rooms is very robust and interactive. Perhaps the it@cork organisers should look into engaging one of our third level camera crews (seen in operation at left) for an afternoon session, if only to add another layer of social responsibility to this well-run event.

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it@cork -- "How we are making the event green" in the SAS Radisson, Little Island, Cork, Ireland.
Damien Mulley -- "GreenIT"

Five years ago: Bloggers in the Clarence. One has since passed away.

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