Teknovis

I am a big fan of free speech, and I really dislike censorship, especially at state level. I feel this way about both the Internet and the traditional media.

I think that freedom of speech in relation to the Internet is quite good in Ireland at the moment. Everybody here can legally view any websites that they want. At least I am not aware of any blocking of illegal sites. As far as I know, it is even legal to view child pornography in Ireland! (However, it is illegal to intentionally store it, and that is what people get charged with in court. Yes, this does create a great technical argument!)

Unfortunately, many other EU states do impose blocks on certain sites in order to censor them. For example, I think that most EU states have bans on web sites relating to, or glorifying, Nazism. Of course it is fairly easy for me to have this view in Ireland, since we never experienced the atrocities that most of the EU experienced within the last 100 years.

I have two main problems with Internet censorship:

• It is often technically infeasible or pointless
• It often creates a huge artificial interest in the censored subject

TechCrunch has an article called German Politician Blocks Local Wikipedia which demonstrates both of these points perfectly!

Tags: Censorship, Germany, Ireland, Nazism, Pornography, TechCrunch

The 2008 Golden Spider Awards were announced last night in Dublin. Congratulations to all of the winners!

The Golden Spider Awards are in addition to both the Net Visionary Awards and the Irish Web Awards. It is impressive (or surprising) that there is room for all three awards in Ireland!

The winners that caught my attention were:

• TV3, because its website has improved significantly since I last saw it.
• Ordnance Survey Ireland, because its online mapping facility is really cool! (I wonder will it remain free!)
• Sentry Wireless, simply because I never heard of it, and it is in an interesting space in the market!
• Damien Mulley – Irish super-blogger!
• Boards.ie. I am familiar with this website, and it deserves recognition for taking the generic concept of a bulletin-board and turning it into a popular website. I wonder has this been replicated in any other countries? I am not actually very fond of Boards.ie, because I find it is full of opinionated local trivia that is of little use.

Most of the other winners are easy viewing :)

However, I have to say that I am slightly sceptical of the Golden Spider Awards due to the fact that so much money is involved in them!

Tags: Boards.ie, Damien Mulley, Golden Spider Awards, Irish Web Awards, Net Visionary Awards, Ordnance Survey Ireland, Sentry Wireless, TV3

Blacknight have an article on a recent domain name auction in Camera.co.uk Sells For 35k.

The article highlights the sale of what was perhaps the most interesting domain – camera.co.uk. There was a reserve of $15,000 for this domain name, and it eventually sold for $35,000!

I guess that not everybody feels that the economy is all doom and gloom at the moment!

Tags: Blacknight

I was talking with a friend of mine who is a senior computer science lecturer in one of the universities in Dublin. He was telling me that he recently advertised two new post-graduate studentships, and that the recruitment process was significantly more difficult than he expected!

Each studentship was for three years, and it included a stipend of up to 20,000€ per annum (this is tax-free) and an allowance for travel and equipment. The studentships were advertised online, and in the relevant journals.

My friend received a large double-digit number of applications. The majority of these applications were from applicants in Asia, and not a single application was from an Irish applicant!

So why are Irish graduates not interested in pursuing post-graduate research? Perhaps it is due to the falling calibre of Irish students in technical professions. Alternatively, perhaps it is because Irish students prefer to pursue lucrative jobs after graduating. I wonder will this change as the economy deteriorates.

This is not the first time that I have come across this situation. In fact, I believe that Irish students are in a minority in most of the research labs in the universities in Dublin. The worrying thing about this trend is that it will make it increasingly difficult to attract multinational companies to establish research centres in Ireland. Additionally, there is little benefit in the Irish tax-payer providing educational benefits to Asian students!

Tags: Ireland, Recruitment

I learned today that this is Dublin City Enterprise Week. I never heard of this week before, but some of the events in the program look interesting.

Unfortunately, the event that interested me the most is fully booked :(

HTC has unveiled its latest PDA – the HTC Max. Most of the features are similar to its latest PDAs, but the HTC Max has one significant additional feature – it supports WiMax!

I have heard lots about the data capabilities of WiMax, but I have not heard of any details of any live networks. I did hear that the telcos are quite concerned about WiMax, and the “over-the-top” possibilities it offers to users.

The full details of the HTC Max are described in HTC unwraps ‘world’s first’ WiMax, Wi-Fi phone in Russia.

Tags: HTC, PDA, WiMax

The BBC is well known for its in-depth, and meticulous, reporting in articles. It is one of these articles that caught my attention this morning… Indeed, I would go as far as to say it was the most interesting article that I read all week!

The article I am referring to is How do avatars have sex?, and it provides a fascinating insight into how avatars have sex in Second Life! The beginning of the process is:

First you need to buy genitals

I can see why this step is important, but it is not something that I would have thought of before reading the article! Just as in real life, these come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colours. The article then describes how the new purchase can be used:

You can touch and jiggle about a bit and you can emote and gesture in a way the other person would see

The article then goes on the explain the full process, for those of you who are interested ;)

Wow – I really never expected to be writing about sex on this blog (or indeed any blog)! I wonder if sex will become the most clicked tag in my tag cloud ;)

Tags: Avatar, BBC, Second Life, Sex

A friend informed me that there is an OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) meeting next week in Dublin. I never heard of this organisation before, but it seems to have good support from its industrial members.

The event is on next Tuesday evening, and there will be three different presentations:

• Potential risks of the offline Internet by David Rook (Realex Payments) and Conor McGoveran (onformonics)
• Internet insecurity and breaking the workflow by Eoin Keary (Ernst and Young)
• Implementing a Risk Based Approach to Developing Applications Securely by John Wood (Fortify)

The event is free, and everybody is welcome! The full event details can be found on the OWASP Ireland Local Chapter web page.

Tags: Ernst and Young, Fortify, Onformonics, OWASP, Realex Payments

I got an email this morning advertising a free event in Dublin tomorrow for Drupal users and developers.

The full event details can be found in Drupal Ireland Meeting – Dublin.

Tags: Drupal

I have always been a very organised person for most aspects of my life, regardless of whether these aspects are real-world or digital. Unfortunately, I am also quite a forgetful person :( So notebooks and diaries were always a big part of my life! These ingenious tools enabled me to know where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there, and what I was supposed to be doing there!

So it made perfect sense for me to buy a PDA when they first became available. That was so long ago that I cannot even remember what make and model it was! I am probably one of the few people who had a PDA before I had a mobile phone! Since then I have had several, but I usually use each one for a few years. I normally wait until there is a significant technological advantage to me in having a new one. So the technological advantages that have caused me to upgrade to date are:

• The introduction of a colour screen (even if it was only 256 colours!)
• The ability to use the PDA as a mobile phone (and carry one less device)
• The ability to use WiFi (I cannot live without it now!)

Finally, I suspect the next technological advantage that will cause me to upgrade will be a touch-screen, mainly because it will only require one of my hands. The fact that they look so slick is an added bonus :)

So what do I currently use? A black HTC P3600 (otherwise known as the Trinity) running Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0. HTC actually make a lot of the branded PDAs for other well known manufacturers. This is what it looks like:

HTC P3600

I am not going to write a full review here, because there are already plenty of reviews online. Also, I do not think that it is still available to buy! Instead, what I will do is write about the features that I use most often, the useful applications that I have installed, and the bugs I have found in it that are not well documented anywhere else on the Internet!

Perhaps the single questions that I am asked most frequently about it is “Should I get one?“. My answer to this is always “Yes, if you are the sort of person that currently makes lists on paper and keeps a diary“.

In general, mobile phones and PDAs are devices that I have a strong personal interest in, and I have worked with them in the past in a professional capacity. So I expect to write about them a lot on this blog!

Tags: HTC, Microsoft, Mobile Phone, PDA, WiFi, Windows Mobile 5.0