Copacetic

Seeing as how the US wants passenger manifests for all flights outbound from Europe, lets see the same thing produced for all European bound flights from the US, Miltary, CIA, Civilian or otherwise.

Can you say quid pro quo?

The Corpo cut two full traffic lanes off O’Connell St. in the last greate re-org but still no room for cycle lanes? I cycled down there for the first time this morning during rush hour and it was bloody murder. How about some joined up writing on the cycle lane front Dublin Corporation?

So the Taioseach and the Dail observe a minutes silence for the International Violence against Women day (25-Nov). But in the the same breath the Irish Times reports today (23rd November page 4) that the Sexual Assualt Treatment Unit (SATU) in Dubin, which is supposed to be manned 24×7 has been forced to close over the weekend for the past month.

So if you are raped you have to wait for up to 48 hours before you can be examined in order to collect the medical evidence that is vitally necessary in all rape prosecutions.

Hospitals say the problem is lack of funding, HSE says its lack of expert personnel.

Meanwhile women who are raped at the weekend must suffer on while somebody else sorts out this problem.

Several commentators have remarked that Sun’s decision to make Java available under the GNU Public License is unusual. Why did they not use the standard Sun CDDL license? Well the CDDL was crafted with a specific some specific goals,

• Allow Sun to Open Source Solaris
• Prevent Solaris key features from leaking into Linux by applying an incompatible license
• Allow relicensing with Apache-like flexibility especially to (Sun would love Dell to ship solaris on their servers)

So why the GPL for Java. Well despite all kiss and make up shenanigans between Sun and Microsoft, Sun would still dearly love to stick it to Microsoft in a big way and it has always seen Java as the key tool to pick the Microsoft lock on the market.

So the thinking goes, if we CDDL it (CDDL is a variation on the Mozilla license, which is a variation on the Apache License) then Microsoft gets to grab the code and do any number of things that would ruin Jonathan Schwartz’s day e.g.

• Fork Java and create an incompatible version that only runs on Windows (they tried this before)
• Swipe any cool virtual machine technology that Sun has developed and plug it straight into the Microsoft C# engine
• Gratuitiously extend Java so that developers are sucked into building applications that only run on Windows (a pretty standard Microsoft tactic)

The GPL prevents all this because the highly integrated nature of most of Microsoft’s technology means that the they key GPL constraint of linking to a GPL component entails extending the license to all linked components means they would have to open source most of the .NET framework. That is not going to happen anytime soon.

Its a double whammy for Sun because practically all the compilers on Linux are GPL licensed, so they dovetail nicely into that collection. Who’s not to say that Java could eventually migrate to the GNU backend so that Java just becomes another personality on top of that engine. They would reap huge portability benefits for very little work.

Tricky one for Microsoft, they can ignore Java and watch as the rest of the platform work (most importantly mobile) embraces this new language, but that won’t work becuase the mobile platform is a key plank of Microsoft’s strategy going forward. Or they could adopt it properly as a Visual Studio language, but it would always be a second class citizen becuase of the linking restriction.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Almost makes you feel sorry for the poor sods, especially after stuffing their whole  Visual Basic community with VB.net.

Andrew McNeile gave us the three ingredients for a successful elevator pitch as part of the last Hot House training session for HotHouse 10. He pointed out that an elevator pitch should be,

• Compelling (I have to have this product now!)
• Unique (I can’t get it anywhere else)
• Demonstrate real end user benefit (This solves a real problem for me)

Ciaran Bradley CEO of Sentry Wireless won our internal competition on the day hands down with a brilliant description of his new product KidSafe. 

His website give the full low down on the product better than I could,

Kidsafe benefits for parents

• Prevents mobile bullying and anonymous text messages
• Denies access to premium inappropriate services
• Allows phone to be locked during school or after midnight

Kidsafe benefits for mobile operators

• Differentiated services for parents
• No impact on core network
• Opportunity for increased ARPU /retention
• Device independent
• Works on voice, data and text
• Allows targeting of new markets responsibly

 Barcamp Ireland – SouthEast is on in Waterford on the 20th January 2007. Can’t grok stuff in January at the moment, but I may sign up later. If we are going to hold regular Barcamps I think infecting each one with a theme would be useful.

I registered a domain for a mate today. It had to be a .ie domain and even though I am a .ie conscientious objector I will perform the act for friends in need.

Blacknight.ie has good hosting offers for low-end users and they are an accredited .ie registrar and are cheaper (by 50%) than direct registration.

Unfortunately their order Wizard has one nasty bug which must be loosing them a lot of business. On the page below, you are expected to enter a county. 

 Its highlighted in red, but the workflow happily lets you proceed and fill in a pretty heavy duty multi-part form later on in the workflow. It then complains that the county is missing but there is nowhere to fill in the county at that point. Very confusing.

On the plus side, I rang up blacknight.ie and their support desk spotted the problem immediately and were able to indicate the fix. Still I had to rekey all the registration, address and VISA content again.

Two simple fixes are apparent here. Either, stop the user proceeding at the above screen (why do you need the county at this point anyway, you could just remove this field) or allow them to add the county when putting in the rest their address.

I would guess many people abandon the cart and this point and head somewhere else for a solution.

If ISPs (e.g. GoDaddy, Network Solutions) supported a REST API to DNS then applications like Google For Domains wouldn’t have to throw users to the wolves when it comes to configuring CNames and aliases.

Instead you could just give your credentials to Google and they could update your DNS entries directly. Most ISPs discourage direct fiddling with users DNS entries (for good reasons), but with the ability to customise your URL now a feature of Google for Domains, the need for non-skilled users to access this data is becoming more important.

LouderVoice, Conor O’Neill’s new venture sneaked out under the covers in the last few days. Definitely in the “one to watch” category. I remember Brian Caulfield muttering to me after BarcampIreland about how Conor’s proposition was “very interesting”,  Praise indeed!

Sxoop, PutPlace, LouderVoice, hmm, a few more and we’ll have a proper little boom on our hands…

We’ve quietly put up a proper website for PutPlace.com in the fast few days and as it hasn’t fallen over, consider this a mild invitation to run over there and pre-register for the beta. You can do the survey to boot and help make the world a safer place for Digital Content.

What does PutPlace do? Helps you to find, organise, secure and share  that huge and growing pile of photos, video, music, emails, documents and blog content that is building up day by day on you PC, phone, laptop and Media Centre.

So run along over there and register and we’ll send you a private beta invite real soon now.

BTW: Some of you may have come across us by our previous name Secantus, same product different name. It happens, we’ve got over it, you should too