Looks like heading down to Cork the night before is the only sensible option for capture all the good stuff at BarCamp Ireland .

Anybody planning drinks/eats on the Friday night?

I tried Jurys Hotel as recommended on the Barcamp Ireland Web page to no avail, they said no rooms available. I then tried to book the same hotel using gtahotels.com and got a choice of several hotels in Cork, including the Jurys Inn. The booking was 3 euros cheaper than the price quoted on the Jurys Hotel page to boot.
However be warned, your card is debited when you make the booking.

I’m by no means the most prolific blog reader, but even I find myself cherry picking from my blog roll on occasion. The criteria for selection are pretty crude actually,

1. Are you near the top in my bloglines viewer (Eirpreneur wins on this count)
2. Do you post less than once a day? (nothing worse that discovering 200 unread items after a few days, digg and engadget stand up and take a bow).
3. Can I read it in 5 minutes or less

So in no particular order the blogs I’ll hit nearly everyday that they have content,

• Eirpreneur : Good round up of Irish startup news
• Sarah Carey – GUBU : Sarah was the first Irish blogger I read regularily and as I know her, it always gives her posts a certain spice.
• Bernie Goldbach – Irish Eyes : Nice perspectives on technology from Bernie (but if he keeps that del.icio.us autoposting stuff going he’s heading for the high road :-))
• David McWilliams : He writes well and has a larger worldview than most Irish journalists
• Sharpcast : Competitor website, ’nuff said.
• Dave Winer – Scripting News: Dave always has a point of view, he writes beautifully and if you missed it on the web, Dave will generally link to it sooner or later.
• Jonathan Schwartz: As CEO of Sun, Jonathan blogs once in a while. I read it because he has balls and if anybody can save Sun from themselves he can.
• I, Cringely : Robert Cringely writes a column once a week and always has something worthwhile to say about the tech industry especially when it comes to the six pack, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, HP, Yahoo and Google.
• Robert Scoble : Lost some of his lustre since leaving Microsoft, but still a good link source, if Dave Winer doesn’t get it Scoble will.
• Darren Barefoot: Darren worked wih me in Cape Clear (which is where I met Sarah Carey) so the personal relationship extends to the blog. He also is definitely “quirky” in a way that I like.
• InfoWorld Top News : Keep up to date on TechNews with this one site. Ads are big and the articles are small, but nobody does it better.
• Mike Arrington – TechCrunch : Great competitor watch site.
• Dilbert : You need a reason?

Many of of my blog hits come in from people searching for “google”, who actually type “goole”. Goole locks onto joedrumgoole.com and the rest is down to Googles preference algorithm for hits.

It appears that domain names beat link rankings.

If like me you thought The Digital Hub died along with Media Labs Europe then you should take a visit as I did today. The PDC HotHouse Program I am on finishes at the end of September so we are looking for new office space. The Digital Hub offers two kinds of office space to elegible companies (your company must do something related to Digital Media), the Digital Depot and The Digital Hub proper.

The Depot is associated with Enterprise Ireland so they need to endorse your project before you can take up office space there. The offices are housed in the old Guinness printworks beside the Window just off Thomas street. The outside is a 1950’s build but the inside is very Web 2.0 with pastel colours and lots of steel and glass. Office space comes at €55 per desk per week and that includes furniture, broadband (3mb link) and a VOIP phone. You also have access to meeting rooms at no extra charge.

If you want something more traditional (or don’t have an EI endorsement) you can go the The Digital Hub itself. They are currently renovating space in an old redbrick down towards St James Hospital. Space there is €75 per desk per month with similar broadband and VOIP facilities.

The Hub offers a range of other services to companies including a website and forum for companies in the hub to communicate and a CEO forum to allow exchange of ideas and to provide some social networking.

All in all I was very impressed and I hope to move into the Depot (EI willing!) in October.

..Lovely simile over on Chris’s Deconstructing Software blog.

Had first play around with Amazon EC2 today. Its great but it needs few things to really make it fly (these could be provided by Amazon or third parties).

1. Decent key management tools (preferably linked to smart card or USB storage devices)
2. Web based management interface
3. Swing based graphical tools to augment the command line tools
4. DNS management to allow allocation of sensible names to the nodes
5. Network monitoring for all live nodes (liveness, CPU load, disk space at least)
6. Scalability infrastructure that adds new nodes based on thresholds set by user and removes them in the same way
7. S3 filesystem integrated directly into Linux Kernel
8. Diff tool to compare two AMI images for differences
9. The ability to load and store AMI images somewhere other than S3
10. Support for Windows and OS-X images

He’s hard.

I’ll just quote you one,

“Chuck Norris once challenged Lance Armstrong in a “Who has more testicles?” contest. Chuck Norris won by 5.”

Ogden  Nash : “People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.”

Ogden has obviously not had to call out a emergency plumber or glazer in Dublin recently….