Pat Phelan has announced Twitterfone. Great design, and a nice handy app for anyone who uses Twitter a lot. A particularly good one for long journeys in the car. Now all I need is a hands free kit, and a text to speech plugin for my phone.
And better late than never: another mobile/web app on the way, courtesy of Paul Walsh. Follow Wubud on Twitter to find out more.
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 I did find this (outdated) article quoting some figures, interestingly enough arguing the case that placing all of these records online to begin with is ultimately damaging our tourism.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.
From Techcrunch UK:
The finer details of the long-awaited Skype phone announcement from mobile operator Three break this morning, but quite a lot is known already about the deal which the network hopes will revive its flagging fortunes.
A mobile phone from Three will be available in UK, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau and Sweden, allowing you to make and receive phone calls using Skype, by pressing a ‘Skype’ button on the handset. I’ve always been amazed by the lack of options we have in Ireland for wireless Skype handsets. In the past, I tried some wi-fi handsets from Linksys and Belkin, and they were both atrocious. As much as I can’t stand Three, I will be keeping my eye out for this one, although it is a shame that you are only allowed to make Skype calls to other Skype numbers by the looks of it.
Very big organisations tend to stick rigidly to a logical naming scheme made up of short location codes and numbers. That’s fair enough, since you need some structure when you have over a thousand servers on site. I personally would argue against it, because I have done my time as a lowly server technician at Intel. I was the guy who accidentally reboots the production server, IRSF24XHIJ1000MUP025 instead of the backup server, IRSF24XHIJ1001MUB025, costing the company thousands. Twice. I did suggest renaming the hostname on all production servers to include the string “_DONOTREBOOTTHIS_”, so that the new guy will think twice when as he’s typing the hostname into ssh/rdesktop to give it a kick.
But those of us on a small or medium-sized network don’t need to glean any information from the hostnames, and naming your devices (along with inserting witty comments in scripts) is about the only creative outlet a sysadmin has. Trying to think up a clever theme is not as easy as it sounds. There are rules.
You cannot copy anything from the last place you worked, you cannot rob them from someone else. Esatclear were my inspiration, bloaty.esatclear.ie, slimey.esatclear.ie, fester.esatclear.ie, some of their names if I remember correctly. Bloaty. The perfect hostname. Six letters, easy to pronounce, broad vowels, two strong syllables. I would laugh out loud whenever I saw someone connect to IRC with bloaty in the hostmask. I assume that bloaty was swallowed by the BT acquisition, and no longer exists, but this does not mean it is back on the market.
As tempting as it may be, you cannot resort to naming your servers:
The unfortunate reality is, the exact words “I scp’ed a backup of the database over to wiggum yesterday, should I restore it to flanders or to moleman?” have surely been asked at least twice in recent history, somewhere in the world.
Similarly, you can forget about anything relating to Star Wars, Tolkien, Battlestar Galactica. I would rule out sci-fi completely.
There are some exceptions to this rule:
And relatively easy to spell, too. There’s nothing worse than frantically trying to connect to iphigeneia or clytemnestra when some service is hung. I’ve heard of people using old discarded root passwords as hostnames. That’s a nice idea, but how are you going to tell someone to reboot x41BnnT994p in a hurry? Remember, a maximum of three syllables, ideally two, and as little room for misspellings as possible (”is that ist or est“)
Take, for example, Bond villains:
While zorin and graves are definitely solid choices, blofeld and lechiffre are likely to cause some problems.
If you still lack the creative spark, this site will provide some inspiration.
| Subtlety: | 3 |
| Nerd factor: | 4 |
| Pronounceability: | 5 |
| Total Score: | 12 |
| Subtlety: | 7 |
| Nerd factor: | 10 |
| Pronounceability: | 6 |
| Total Score: | 23 |
| Subtlety: | 7 |
| Nerd factor: | 10 |
| Pronounceability: | 3 |
| Total Score: | 20 |
| Subtlety: | 6 |
| Nerd factor: | 9 |
| Pronounceability: | 7 |
| Total Score: | 22 |
It is not necessary to encompass all of your devices with one unifying theme. A series of loosely related themes is OK. For example, if you opt for an elephantine theme (dumbo, manny, ganesh, stampy) for your servers, then you might name your routers and firewalls after famous rats (nicodemus, roland, cluny, splinter).
Within a theme, it is also worth carefully considering that each device is given the most suitable name. In the criminally over-used Greek Mythology theme, you certainly wouldn’t want to waste an Olympian name like zeus on a lowly mp3 server. Unless it’s meant to be ironic… which would be the only excuse for using this theme to begin with.
The most important thing about your naming scheme is that it means something to you personally, or to the guys who would be using it. Nobody said it would be easy, deciding on your naming scheme requires work. At some point you might ask yourself “why am I wasting my time on this?” Just think of the cold winter days when food is scarce, would you rather ssh to proxy2 or to deathadder? Your legacy will live on in years to come, when the new guys are still trying to figure out which host does what.
MAXroam has launched today - congrats to Pat and Cubic Telecom.
I have seen other travel SIM services. Why is MAXroam better?
The common method for all “alternative roaming” SIM’s is to originate their service in somewhere like Latvia, Estonia or Liechtenstein, or via a UK-based toll-free phone number. This approach doesn’t work very well. We know because our first product “Roam4Free” used this method.
The problem is that people have to call a strange country code just to call you. It just isn’t intuitive and it isn’t user-friendly. With MAXroam we have made the service work as you would expect plus we’ve added a lot of new features that you will have never seen before.
Looks like a very useful product. A nice feature is that you can add up to 50 different phone numbers on the one SIM card. Only downside for me is the minor hassle of having to unlock my old phone and set this up. I would never admit this, but I’d sooner pay €150 to get the MAXroam SIM bundled with a new phone.
I had been planning on touring Eastern Europe earlier in the year - had it all mapped out, from Croatia to Estonia, but was forced to come to terms with the fact that I just couldn’t afford it. So I’m pleased to get the chance to attend the the 5th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing in Timisoara in July, where I will be presenting my results on “the Greedy Formation Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks”.
Four days of hardcore technical presentations will probably be a bit much, but if I get through it without my head exploding then hopefully the experience will be of some benefit to me. There are some interesting talks, and the city of Timisoara is meant to be a nice place, so I am looking forward to going there.
To think that I was amazed by that wooden and leather laptop a few days ago. Now BoingBoing have linked to EcoGeek - an article about wooden computing. Wooden monitors, mice keyboards… this guy even has a wooden iPod:
Unbelievable… check back here in six months because I will surely have my own modded masterpiece well underway by then, this has inspired me.
From the site that brought you the cockroach-controlled mobile robot, and the functional lego crossbow: here are the top 5 most creative laptop mods. The one shown below is made of wood and leather. I love these things.
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