It was confirmed on the NetCAT list that Netbeans 4 beta 2 will be released at the end of next week as a bundle with Java 5.

I actually read about this yesterday (mmm… can’t remember where) . ComReg, the Irish Telecoms Regulator will suspend direct dialling to 13 countries to prevent auto-diallers from racking up the phone bills of unsuspecting internet users. I sounds like a fairly good idea although I imagine it’ll be a nightmare to maintain and manage the [...]

This blogger really doesn’t like Dublin. After living there for 4 years I recognise most of the photos, characters and complaints but to be that overwhelmingly negative about the city is unfair. I was glad to leave Dublin last August (ok, I was leaving to head to Australia and New Zealand, which helped) but now [...]

Danah quotes another focus group particpant: “You’re basically standing on a soapbox and reading something out loud only with a blog it feels like there’s a big community square and everyone’s got a soapbox and they’re about the same height and everyone’s reading at the same time.” Glenn Reid, CEO of Five Across said in [...]

Over lunch I read Howard Rheingold’s article “Ecologizing Mobile Media“, in which he talks about Neil Postman’s 10 Principles of Technology (from his book, End of Education). This inspired me so much that I popped over the library to search for this book but could only find his earlier Technopoly book, which I’ve borrowed. But, [...]

It’s always interesting to see where the people you’ve previously worked with end up. Warren Daly was a overworked sysadmin at Broadcom Eireann Research but now works for HEAnet (the Irish academic network) as a security expert. He’s leading the security workshop at the HEAnet conference in Limerick [via Karlin, she back!]. If you’re attending, [...]

Perhaps this explains the spooky portrait of Winston Churchill at RAF Cranwell[pdf, flick to page27] that appears stares at you as you walk around the entrance hall.

This morning I was installing PHP, MySQL and phpmyadmin and, after getting it all working, I noticed that MySQL has support for geospatial data. Cool! Now, I can tell you’re not impressed but since my interest in mysql was actually to store geospatial data this was actually pretty f*cking good news. MySQL now supports the [...]

The National Council for Competitiveness have released the latest report on Irish prices as compared to the rest of the euro-zone. The full, 27 page, report is available [pdf] and is worth reading just for the 1-page executive summary. Tasty extracts include: 68% of inflation during the five years preceeding January, 2004 originated at home, [...]

This project sounds like something that could benefit from a similar approach as the Smog-sniffing I mentioned yesterday.