Friday 27 June 2003

Friaco Fiasco Both Ireland On-Line and UTV are touting a product they are calling flat rate internet. It's not flat rate of course. It's just a way of buying a fixed number of minutes for a fixed amount of money. The Ireland On-Line Anytime ad is particularly misleading. It actually says there's no need to count minutes when in fact there is. 180 hours sounds like a lot but for a business it can run out very quickly. I'm typically on-line for 8-10 hours per day, which is one of the reasons I'm switching to ADSL, but more of that later. So the battle isn't over yet. 7:24:30 PM    comment []  Google It!

Irish bloggers meeting July 5? Karlin Lillington asks: Are people still interested in meeting up on Saturday, July 5th? If this only has so-so interest, we can do something late in July. Or of course, someone else can set something up! I am away in mid-July. [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]] Well are we? Spread the word and if you're up for it, go over to Karlin's 'blog and either e-mail her or leave a comment saying so. Update It looks like the meeting is going ahead in the Davenport Hotel, just off Merrion Square from 2pm onward on July 5. See you there. 6:56:25 PM    comment []  Google It!

First X-Prize astronauts announced Canadian Arrow, one of the teams competing for the X-Prize to send three people to an altitude of 100km, return them safely to Earth and then repeat the mission using the same craft within less than two weeks, has announced its first astronaut team. They are (l to r) Larry Clark, Capt. David Ballinger (ret), Jason Dyer, Terry Wong, Capt. Ted Gow and Yaroslav "Yarko" Pustovyi. [SPACE.com] 6:41:08 PM    comment []  Google It!

Luas operator loses UK rail franchise Connex Rail, the company chosen to operate the Luas, whenever it materialises, has lost its franchise to run trains in Kent and Sussex. According to the Strategic Rail Authority the decision was made based on the company's financial performance rather than its operational one. Officials here have said that if Connex does not do a good job running the Luas it can be stripped of the franchise. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition] 6:21:30 PM    comment []  Google It!

Mars Odyssey finds more subterranean ice Data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft currently orbiting Mars suggests there may be more subsurface water ice on the planet than previously thought. According to scientists analysing the data, the probes' neutron and gamma-ray spectrometers found high concentrations of water in the northern polar regions. Scientists found similar concentrations of ice in the southern polar regions last year. [spacetoday.net] 6:14:42 PM    comment []  Google It!

What's an XML-RPC URL? I've just downloaded a plug-in to allow iPhoto2 to send pictures directly to my blog. But I neede to know what my blog's XML-RPC URL is? Anyone know where I can find out? 2:55:52 PM    comment []  Google It!

Table quiz victory My friend Pádraig O'Méaloid organised a table quiz to raise money for his upcoming science fiction convention Phoenix Con. I was on a team with James Shields and two others whose names I forget - apologies gentlemen - and despite a bad start we pulled ahead in the second last round and just about managed to stay there. All credit to James Shields who answered the final question of the penultimate round correctly thus giving us the one point lead we needed. 1:59:16 AM    comment []  Google It!

If it's Tuesday, this must be Berlin I met with Pascal Cagni, wrote my copy and filed it on Monday night. Congrats to David Milar, Apple's every reliable PR man for getting the loud music turned off. After scarfing some of the food, I headed for the hotel, making it there by about midnight. The room was quite nice, almost a suite in fact. As usual, however, despite being so very, very tired, I hardly slept. I woke just before 7am local time, and after showering and dressing, headed down for breakfast and then to the press room where I resent my copy as a backup. After that it was out for a quick tour of Berlin. I had spent a week there in 1984 but the city I saw that morning was completely different. Back then, the city was dominated by The Wall. The Western side was prosperous and lively while the Eastern side was poor and shabby. But even in the West, the presence of the wall could be felt. The city was under siege and the inhabitants were determined to party as if to cock a snook at the wall that kept them in, or out depending on your point of view. But today the wall is gone and it's difficult to imagine what the city was like before. There is no distinction any more between West and East and in fact it is the Eastern part that now seems to be in the ascendant, probably due to the fact that there is so much new building going on there. The presence of the wall is still marked. A line of grey cobbles marks the line of the wall and a section of it is preserved, although preserved is a relative term as tourists are wont to take pieces of it for souvenirs. Checkpoint Charlie is stil there but traffic moves freely through it. All that is left is the guardhouse and the sign warning that you are leaving the American Zone. We got back to the hotel in time for the Quark briefing, followed a little later by the Apple Technical Briefing. I managed to get a picture of myself with the new G5 so if anyone out there doubts that I have got my hands on it, shame on you. We also got a briefing on the iSight camera, which was particularly useful as that was one of the bits we missed from the keynote. The iSight is apparently available now for o169 plus VAT and works with iChatAV. iChatAV will be built into Panther but will also be available for purchase for those who want to use it with Jaguar. The bad news is that to use the camera you need a G5, G4 or G3 600MHz. Which means it won't run on my iMac (except as a very expensive audio-only microphone) but it should work with my soon-to-be-delivered PowerBook. I was quite impressed with the iSight and iChatAV. The demos we got were obviously over very broad pipes but when my DSL connection goes live shortly, I should be able to get similar results. We shall wait and see. As soon as the briefing was over, it was off to the airport and back to Dublin, via Amsterdam. 1:51:31 AM    comment []  Google It!

© Copyright 2003 David Stewart. Last update: 01/07/2003; 17:50:31.