Warning: non-tech political gripe ahead...: Don't know about you, but I sure can't see a single reason why FIVE members of the Oireachteas (Irish parliament) need to go to Colombia to attend the trial of the three Irishman accused of being IRA members and supporting the FARC guerillas. The taxpayers may not be paying for them to go, but they are paying for them to do work at home. If the government is concerned about the fairness of the trial, then send a representative/observer. Families, schmamalies: this is clearly an attempt by the political party beleagured by this issue and which risks suffering enormous damage if the three are found guilty (Sinn Fein) to make it look as if there's great official Irish govt support for these men.

God knows the international media coverage will be massive anyway, as the US government in particular has already said it has deep concerns about what, exactly, these men were doing. There are several examples in the past year of cases arising where clearly innocent Irish citizens spent ages in vile foreign prisons after non-trials (for non-political reasons, I should add), & the govt did nothing significant until people began calling Irish radio talk shows!  So why should the govt. now support having five TDs go out, in their official roles as TDs, for these three? And gimme a break with that ridiculous reason that there should be 'cross-party support'. Surely the country's in enough of a mess that these TDs have plenty of other pressing issues to concentrate their minds. Why not do something constructive and send Charlie McCreevy five economic advisers instead?

AltaVista Makeover: A Better View. Top dog among search engines in the Net's early years, AltaVista wants that distinction back. A new look and a promise to provide more relevant results could be steps in the right direction.  [Wired News]

I remember when AltaVista first was set up -- it was one of the first examples of how the web could spread information 'virally'. It seemed everyone in the then-relatively-small web world knew about AltaVista in about a week. At the time the main competition was Yahoo and other sites that classified websites into directories -- not the same thing as being able to search the whole web by keyword. AV got very fusty and confusing, though -- Digital/Compaq put too much other junk on the pages, then you could buy your position in the results, and then sex sites etc started manipulating the results with metatags, making nearly every search a frustration. Google stepped in as our search saviour. It will be pretty hard to wean Google fans away, I think. But I'll have to give good old AV a try.

StreetTech asks, is this PDA cool or what? Why don't we have the Pogo here (heck... it comes from just across the water in the UK). The BlackBerry is too expensive (both hardware and contract) in Ireland and is aimed at a business audience, while the XDA is very nice indeed but expensive too. This is tiny, cheap and cheerful and web/email-enabled.

Also from StreetTech comes Gar's Tips on Suckless Writing (thanks, Boing Boing for the link). Excellent stuff -- if you're an aspiring writer/journalist (or an experienced one) this about says it all.