James Galvin

I’ve been watching the Sopranos from start to finish since I got some boxed sets last Christmas. Lots to say about them, but I’ll keep it short for now.

Currently, I’m on season 4, and just watched this episode, “Watching Too Much Television”, where Tony and Ralphie devise a “HUD” scam (Housing and Urban Development). Basically, the gangsters buy up some low cost property in a disadvantaged part of Newark, get someone to value them at a high valuation, and then sell them to the government at the inflated price to be included as part of a low-income housing scheme. Tony makes a lot of money out of it.

Fast forward about 12 hours to a discussion I had with my brother yesterday, telling me about this thread on an Irish property website called The Property Pin.

Cork City council has purchased 96 apartments for social housing in a development at Atkins Hall, Lee Road, Cork City for a fee of €25,365,000. This apartment development has been on the market for 7 or 8 years but has had poor sales because it is located in a former mental institution and my fellow Corkonians being a somewhat superstitious lot were none too keen to move into the building. Step forward Cork city council to bail out the developers by buying up all their unsold stock at an average cost of €264,218.75 per apartment.

Apparently Cork City Council’s plan is to house elderly residents in the former mental institution that most Cork people like Rymus wouldn’t live in if they were offered with a free car and a cheque for €300k. And it’s also on a steep hill outside the city with no buses or essential services in the area.

So the council swoops in and pays above the odds for 96(!) apartments that were having a hard time selling. I’m not an expert in the property market, but if I were buying an apartment which has been sitting on the market for years, I would try bargaining to bring the price down a bit. If for some reason I wanted to buy 96 of these apartments, then I would be reasonably confident in my ability to haggle a few grand off the price tag, wouldn’t you? Somebody should tell Cork City Council that usually when you buy in bulk you’re supposed to save money.

Piecing together what I’m reading on the rest of this thread, what we have effectively is this: a developer buys this entire place from the government in the 90s for £900,000. They do up the apartments, sell a bunch of them to private buyers, and then flog the rest of them back to the government for nearly €26 million. You can be sure there’s some crooked valuer in there signing off on the hefty valuations too, and a couple of fat cats lapping it up.

As far as I can see, the only difference between this scam in Cork, and the Sopranos in Newark was that Tony Soprano was dealing on a much smaller scale (haggling over $7,000), and the HUD scheme actually made sense for the residents. Or maybe I’m just watching too much television?

Via Brendan Kehoe on the Irish Internet Users Group on the Irish TVLicence.ie website:

The TV Licence Online system supports Internet Explorer 6 or Version 7 for Windows only at this time.

We have detected that you are using another browser. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t use the TV Licence Online service at this time.

Don’t these people realise that Firefox has a 38.6% market share in Ireland and growth rate of 55%? Those were the statistics from last summer anyway, but even if they’re inaccurate now it makes no difference.

TG4 site has been discussed several times on ILUG recently due to its lack of Linux support. TG4 can be used with Firefox, or on a Mac, and at least they have some excuse based on the fact that they are streaming video, which is a bit more difficult than clicking a few buttons to “renew my licence”.

I’ve sent a mail to tvlicence.web at anpost.ie; not to “register my desire to use another browser”, but to register my disgust that it is unsupported for absolutely no good reason. Whoever developed this TV Licence part of the An Post website has forgot about rule no. 2 of web application development:

• Rule Number 1: no animated gifs or smileys that talk to you.
• Rule number 2: if you’re going to actively exclude a huge chunk of your users, you better have a very good reason.

I noticed this article on RTE site about a new website Irish-Roots.

The website was officially launched today on the Jeanie Johnston in Dublin by Arts Minister Séamus Brennan and Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.

Such big names from both sides of the border, a high profile launch like this surely means the project was heavily funded. So I was interested to see how it stacked up vs Web 2.0 offerings like Geni. Suffice to say that Irish Roots is unlikely to be featured on TechCrunch any time soon.

I’ll excuse the system for being painfully slow, this could be related to a spike in traffic following the initial launch. I’ll get over the odd fact that, despite access to (allegedly) millions of records, I get 0 results when searching for “John Murphy”. I’ll forgive the awful (yet somehow award-winning) design, since you would expect this from any web project remotely related to the Irish government (just ask Eoghan.) I’ll even turn a blind eye to the domain name (a .net AND a hyphen!)

But I’m finding it difficult to overlook the blatantly obvious fact that once again, some fatcats in the Irish web industry have slurping up never-ending expenses in return for amateur work, safe in the knowledge that our beloved government will never think twice about pouring massive amounts of cash into some disastrous tech project. On the contrary, they’ll celebrate its launch with champagne and caviar. On the Jeannie Johnston, no less.

I don’t have the facts to hand, so maybe I’m way off with my assumptions and this is just a badly run private venture. I did find this (outdated) article quoting some figures, interestingly enough arguing the case that placing all of these records online to begin with is ultimately damaging our tourism. It cites a Sunday Times article from 2005:

Since 1997, the Irish government has invested 2.5 million Euro into a project known as the Irish Genealogical Project. While this project has the potential to further hurt the Irish tourism economy, it is currently behind on its digitization schedule. The Irish Genealogy Ltd., which is in charge of the project, wanted to be 90 percent finished by 2007, but “because of a lack of FAS trainees, the work has slowed to a trickle and, at current rates, it will take more than 20 years to input the 3.2 million church records outstanding.” [6] Now, Irish Genealogy Ltd. is planning on outsourcing the project, an unexpected plan considering Ireland’s reputation as a technological country, and one that will further remove economic benefits from the country (Burns, 2005).

So it has been trickling away for another few years since. God alone knows how many FÁS trainees have come and gone on the project, and this is what we’re left with. A disastrous website designed by BRS Systems (surely this isn’t the same BRS Systems that specialises in providing Internet based IT solutions to golf clubs across Ireland and the UK?). And not only that: the promise that whoever is milking this gargantuan cash-cow can continue to do so indefinitely.

It is free to do a general search on the site, but €5 for a more detailed search thereafter.

The Irish Family History Foundation, which runs the website, says all money goes back into making the site bigger and better.

If you’re an Apple fanboy like me, you have waited all this time for the iPhone to arrive. Not a dirty hacked iPhone, but the real deal. It comes courtesy of O2, as expected. You check the price tag and see that they are not bumping up the price of the phone significantly compared to in the UK, surprisingly. Good stuff. Then you see the Paddy tax. Rip-off Ireland lives on in O2’s call charges. I think I might take Pat up on that bus to the north to get an unlocked iPhone.

“There is no excuse for paying such high prices and getting so little in return. The minutes, the text bundles and the data package are completely inappropriate for Irish people and the massive difference in what Irish and UK and Northern people get for the same price suggests that they’ll throw any old scraps at the stupid Paddys.”

I’m posting on behalf of someone who has lost their dog in the Knockraha area (near Glanmire in Cork).

The dog went missing two days ago, a quiet male dog, part spaniel, pictured here:

Please send me if you know of anything.

Any Irish bloggers hosted on Blacknight, be warned that they have decided to clamp down on the issue of servers getting overloaded by popularity surges on Wordpress-based sites.

As far as I can tell, Blacknight have always been good on traffic spikes, and whenever some guy gets dugg or stumbled it was well handled. Michele recommends using a different blogging platform like Movable Type, or else installing a cache plugin. One thing to note - I had Wordpress wp-cache plugin enabled in my installation for a long time, even upgraded it when there were new versions. Didn’t realise that this isn’t enough, and I had to edit a line in the wp-config.php to actually activate the caching.

As per our Acceptable-Usage Policy, we might have to suspend any site that causes issues like this. Putting it simply - if you’re not being a considerate neighbour we might have to shut you down until you behave.

This is definitely a fair policy, but Michele, I hope I don’t need to point out what is wrong with this sentence from a “how to win friends an influence customers” perspective.

For some reason probably known to everyone except me, months will pass with no significant Irish tech-related events, then a bunch of them come together at once. Like Bus Éireann, if you’re lucky. Looks like the end of Feb/early March is one of the hotspots this year - Web2Ireland has all the latest news on upcoming events in Ireland. It might be difficult for me to pick and choose which [un?]conferences to attend. I’m considering Creative Camp (well done on the new website) in Kilkenny Castle. I suppose Blog Talk will have to be on the list, seeing as it’s being held in Cork.

If it’s not bad enough that I’m attending a conference about blogging, well I have to admit to skulking in the shadows of the social media darkside this month, caught in the maelstrom of Twitter. Never thought I’d get hooked on it, I always assumed it was just a big club full of narcissistic attention-whores who liked to bash Robert Scoble in 140 characters or less. Good for tracking events like the Irish election. It made more sense to have everyone migrate over to the technically superior Jaiku.

I was going to write a big long post apologising for having doubted Twitter, trying to convey what is so great about it, and to get a few more Irish people using it. But Damien has summed up enough just now on his blog. If it’s all about the conversation, there is no doubt that Jaiku has failed, there is no buzz. Also, there is something superior about the non-linear flow of conversation on Twitter - while it is more difficult to accurately follow what’s going on, it is easier to dip in and dip out with the added advantage of not having to read through a string of boring posts like a forum (chez Jaiku). I can’t help feeling that reading in 140 character chunks is somehow affecting my brain - not just the way I read and write but the way I talk and think. Who knows what evolution is going to throw up in a few decades if we keep this restriction.

All Twitter needs now is more normal people; dentists, fishermen, students, accountants… anything other than the same old “early adopters” that you see popping up everywhere droning on about the latest additions to the Facebook API. It will be great when there are hundreds of Cork people bopping around in the Twittisphere spewing their thoughts on Munster rugby or traffic on the South Link. My profile is here (jgalvin) so add me and I’ll reciprocate (as long as you’re not a bot or a spammer or something).

On a completely different note - kudos to all involved at Two Tits and a Vote, an armchair campaign to advocate for better women’s health care in Ireland. Starting with postcards to Mary Harney.

Dunphy was on form on RTE last night. Accusing the FAI of “flying kites” in the media to soften the impact of the appointment of Terry Venables as Irish football manager, Dunphy comprehensively hammered Venables and urged the public to shoot down this kite before it is too late. The 21 minute segment can be viewed by Irish residents online here. Note Bill O’Herlihy’s crafty contribution towards the end.

After all the coverage that Eircom got over their security problems, Irish Broadband have attempted to capitalise on the situation with this press release: “Irish Broadband routers are totally secure”. I don’t know whether they are trying to lure any confused/misguided Eircom customers to switch providers, or whether this is an attempt to console their existing customers, but this is an irresponsible message to send at a time when the public has finally begun to take note of internet security.

This line in particular is rotten to the core:

This password, being set by the customer, is not derived from the serial number of the modem or the network name and is therefore completely secure.

Ignoring the 58,700 results that I get in Google for “crack wpa”, even if the encryption method is somehow 100% unbreakable, just ask Paypal what happens when you allow the user to pick his own password.

When Eircom responded to their security issue last week, their reply was responsible and honest (for the most part). They qualified their statements with the standard disclaimer known to every first year computer science student and network technician: “it is widely recognised in the industry that no wireless access can be deemed 100% secure”, noting that through policy and advice to customers, they are making an effort to minimise the potential vulnerability. This is the textbook response.

Eircom gave their customers a false sense of security because some programmer made a genuine mistake (and he would have got away with it if it weren’t for those pesky kids). Irish Broadband are doing the same thing - unnecessarily allowing their customers to overestimate their security - but what is their excuse? Either they’re completely ignorant, or they’re blatantly lying.

Conor O’Neill has these tickets up for grabs for the Web2Expo in Berlin.

This is the deal; the Irish (or Ireland-based) blogger who makes the best suggestion for an original Web Application with an Irish focus will win the tickets.

Well Conor, as much as I’d love to go to Germany for that conference, if I thought up a truly great idea for an Irish web app then I would probably keep it reasonably quiet until I’ve got something started. I would worry that if I publicly announced my great Irish web app idea: “Christy Moore Song Generator”, someone would come along and steal it.