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Quake 3 on iTouch

Sunday, April 6, 2008

This looks cool. It is impossible to play an FPS game properly on a touch screen small handheld device, but this would be perfect for watching demos (match replays). If Quake 3 runs this well then I’m assuming other old OpenGL games like QuakeWorld will be supported too. I look forward to being able to watch a demo while sitting on the bus or something.

Filed in Apple, Games, Quake | | Comments (0)

Why Cork is More Corrupt than The Sopranos

Monday, March 24, 2008

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.

Atkins Hall

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?

Filed in Cork | | Comments (4)

Colour Inspiration

Friday, March 21, 2008

Via Sabrina on Twitter, Colour Inspiration Contest Winners. Some inspirational colour palettes for designers. Very nice.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)

Forkd – A Site for Sharing Recipes

Saturday, March 15, 2008

I visited Forkd today after seeing some a review on TechCrunch UK (& Ireland). It is basically a social network for sharing recipes. Coincidentally, I had just been looking for a good recipe site with user-generated content. I’m sure there are plenty of websites doing this same thing, but Forkd has a really cool vibe. Mike Butcher hits the nail on the head:

“Note the way they are calling this a “Feta” not a Beta version – it’s part of the overall fun, easy going feel of the site.”

The “Feta” pun is perhaps slightly lame, but it ties in with loads of internet in-jokes scattered around the place that TechCrunch readers would pick up on, ranging from slightly cheesy to very funny: “It’s your turn to mash up” or “I baked you a cookie. But I eated it.”. I actually laughed out loud at some of the testimonial quotes:

forkd

Maybe this is a sign that I’ve been spending too much time staring at this monitor, immersed in the world of web 2.0, but this site was genuinely a joy to use. Check out the sign-up form, for example:

forkd signup

I hope there are some web application designers reading who can appreciate this as much as I do. The beauty of the tomato to indicate the required fields. The prompt to enter password again “with feeling”. I have not gone insane, but after the nightmare of Irish-Roots and TV Licence sites, it is so refreshing to come across a project that has been thoroughly thought out. And crucially it doesn’t fall flat by trying to be cute or too clever.

Kudos to the developers Isotoma, it looks like they really know what they’re doing. The design is decent, and I like the company blog, they even list their To Do list and tick off the items as they complete them. If it sounds like I’m gushing with praise, I haven’t even started on the site’s cool features. Best thing is to try it out yourself and let me know how it goes. The only problem for me is that I have no recipes of my own to add so I’m waiting for my neighbour (in the Last.fm sense of the word) to appear so that I can benefit from the service. All the Gastonom.ie folks and Conor, I hope ye sign up and share your knowledge. Which makes me wonder, why isn’t there a hRecipe microformat?

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)

TV Licence Online – Unsupported Browser

Thursday, March 13, 2008

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.
Filed in Ireland | | Comments (4)

Irish Roots Genealogy Site – Another Disastrous Waste of Money?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

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.

Filed in Ireland, Technology | | Comments (9)

Are You Going to Creative Camp?

Thursday, March 6, 2008

I just signed up for Creative Camp, a one-day event in Kilkenny Castle this Saturday. There are currently 108 sign-ups, including a lot of familiar names and and some interesting talks are proposed. Looks like a good way to spend a Saturday, and it is completely free. I’ll be there with my hurley.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)

Irish Pulse – a "Microplanet" for Irish twitterers

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Justin Mason has just launched Irish Pulse. An aggregator for Irish Twitter users.
I think it is a nice tool. It lets me see what other Irish people are saying (beyond the 70 or so that I follow). It shows me replies that don’t show up in my feed, and I’m guessing that it also shows a bunch of mysterious missing tweets, because I’m sure I don’t see half of this stuff that I should be getting.

One concern for me is that the pure convenience of an aggregator like this might discourage new people from joining the conversation. I originally signed up to Twitter to follow breaking news and tap into the information that is out there (e.g., Blacknight downtime over Christmas). By actually immersing myself into the stream of consciousness, joining Twitter, adding all of these people that I “kind of” knew, the system came to life and suddenly it all made sense.

Irish Pulse is like reading an IRC log without actually being in the channel, a bunch of uninteresting one-liners from faceless people with stupid names, with the occasional nugget of value here and there. Irish Pulse collapses Twitterspace, flattening it into the log of an IRC channel during a netsplit (a lot of the participants can’t really see each other). People who hate Twitter are not going to change their minds. People who aren’t familiar with Twitter, or are considering creating an account might feel that this meets their needs, and miss out on Twitter’s extra dimensions.

I like Irish Pulse, and I recommend that everyone does what Justin suggests: “read it: bookmark and take a look now and again.” It gives you an opportunity to step out of the crowd for a moment and take a look around from the balcony. But if you haven’t yet created a Twitter account and seen it from the inside, then I would advise you not to rely on Irish Pulse as anything more than another buzz aggregator.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (3)

The iPhone in Ireland…

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

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.”

Filed in Apple, Ireland | | Comments (8)

Review of There Will Be Blood

Sunday, March 2, 2008
““
4 stars

A very unusual film, without the first word of dialogue spoken until 14 and a half minutes in. Not much of a plot, it is all about one thing: the character of Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) – an oil man who becomes consumed by his mean and greedy streak. “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.”

As a film overall, it was lacking some of the critical elements that make up a great flick, and deservedly played second fiddle to the superior No Country For Old Men. There Will Be Blood did manage to land two awards (Best Actor, Cinematography), and to say Day-Lewis deserved his would be a huge understatement. Some great scenes, especially the moments involving Eli that make the audience guilty of Daniel’s own admission: “there are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.”

Rated 4/5 on Mar 02 2008
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Filed in Movies | | Comments (5)