Submitted by johnh on February 21, 2008 - 13:26.
Item: Adult return ticket from Cork Kent to Dublin Heuston. €60.
Item: Adult return ticket from Cork Kent to Kilkenny MacDonagh, via Dublin Heuston. €49.
Try it for yourself.
Submitted by johnh on January 19, 2008 - 17:58.
RTÉ Radio 1 will go dark on 567kHz in eight weeks.
Yup, the so-called national flagship station will at that point become unavailable to:
a) Anyone in the sticks who can't pick it up on FM
b) Anyone listening on a receiver which doesn't have FM (they didn't need it, they listened to Radio 1).
c) Anyone at sea, who probably isn't using it to pick up the Shipping Forecast at the moment. (Though, to be fair, anyone thick enough to listen to Met Eireann instead of the UK Met Office shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 LW more or less deserves to drown.)
d) Touchy subject, this one: Anyone in Northern Ireland outside the FM coverage area. Officially, that's all of them. In practice, it's Goodnight Coleraine because it's almost impossible to buy a long wave receiver for less than a hundred pounds anymore.
e) Liverpool, Manchester, Stranraer and the M6/M74 corridor through Cumbria and up to Glasgow. No Irish people there, though, so not to worry, eh?
And finally, since it's Saturday and this is my gaff:
f) Anyone listening on a weekend who would rather not, on balance, listen to a bunch of people who know fuck-all about football talking about football, nor any extended coverage of the bloody GAA.
I live in Cork, so my radio options are extremely limited anyway, but right now there's exactly one station available on the band which is neither playing inept sport coverage nor trying to spoonfeed aural prions directly into my brain (And now on County Sound, and on Red FM, and on 96FM, it's the daily Simply-cocking-Red/ Damien-"RhymingSlang"-Blunt/Lighthouse-Family 20-hour marathon!).
It's Radio 1 on medium wave, with its "Second Helpings" slot all afternoon. If they shut down the service, I will no longer be able to set a clock radio alarm for lunchtime on a weekend for fear of having reheated pretend-live reports shouted in my ear from Stamford Bridge over the IRN satellite by some wanker who ended up on the sports desk at the Eckythump Telegraph because he was too thick to pass his court reporting exam.
Never fear, though - this alternative programming strand "is also available on RTÉ's trial digital service, RTÉ Choice". Whoop-fucking-ee.
Allow me to demonstrate:
On the left, a crude map of the Pale (shaded red) about 550 years ago. On the right, RTÉ's entire universe of editorial interest, and the total extent of RTÉ's digital radio transmissions. That's the footprint of the Three Rock and Clermont Carn transmitters, shaded dark green.
If you're not in that space, you can't receive RTÉ Choice. It's not on Sky, it's not on FM, it's not on AM. It's not even on the intertubes. Chances of DAB being extended to the rest of the country during a period where the state-funded broadcaster and the regulator haven't even decided what format to broadcast in when it comes off trial? Zero.
So enjoy what's left of Raidio Éireann while it lasts. You have two months.
Meanwhile, let's see if any of us can figure out why RTÉ is so institutionally wedded to a six-hundred-year old boundary, shall we?
Submitted by johnh on September 8, 2007 - 17:00.
...but if you want to poke about inside the newly-spectacular Google Maps, I've once again been doing my job as "that foreign guy with the map stuff".
In ascending order of interest:
This would be big news, so I'm going to hold off on the "about bloody time" comments for today. Well done, Google - now let's follow through and release it, eh?
Submitted by johnh on June 24, 2007 - 09:55.
Ring the bells. Hang out the bunting.
Yahoo Maps has already given all and sundry full permission to use its satellite imagery as something we can trace into Openstreetmap.
I've just noticed this morning that the satellite imagery for Ireland has jumped up in resolution to the extent that we can now trace streets here. Yay.
At this point in the narrative I usually don't bother to mention that I tried a street-level lookup just in case, and it didn't work.
Not today!
How about "387 Blarney Street, Cork, County Cork, Ireland"?
It gets better. That pin was really put in the right house. Really: look up the road at number 64 instead to see what I mean.
Oh, my. Could it possibly get any better than this? Well, yes. If we were wishing beyond our wildest hopes and dreams, they'd have added all this new sexiness to the Yahoo Maps Geocoding API. But that would just be a silly thing to ask for. Wouldn't it?
Submitted by johnh on June 17, 2007 - 18:31.
For people in the future who come looking...
The Sky installer will try to do the normal thing and set the box up with a dialing prefix of '142'. This is the 'anti-141'. Its purpose is to make sure your Sky box carries caller ID when it phones home.
Your Digiweb Metro phone line can carry this call, even though it's VoIP (they're using cable telephony protocols rather than regular SIP VoIP).
However, 142 doesn't work on Digiweb Metro. In fact you don't want a dialling prefix at all.
To set your box correctly, choose 'Services' on your remote and then key in '401 SELECT' to expose the technicians' menu. Dialling Preferences is option 3. Press the red button to reset all these options to the factory default of tone dialling with no prefix. Press Select to save this and make a call. If nothing happens, press Select a few more times until it starts dialling.
If the call is unsuccessful you'll get a full-screen error. If it works, you'll get dropped back to the main Installation menu. At this point you're done and can push 'Back Up' a few times. Et voila. You will now not be disconnected for not phoning home.
Submitted by johnh on May 25, 2007 - 12:17.
Because you don't need to travel to Dublin to sit in a room and watch television </only joking, guys>.
Chat with others as the results start coming in, and/or post/watch the progress at Kildarestreet.com.
See you in there. Some well-configured users can click this link and join in right now. Everyone else - server is irc.freenode.net, channel #kildarestreet.
Submitted by johnh on April 30, 2007 - 14:00.
I'm only bringing this up because it's relevant to what follows, but I maintain that Twitter still sucks (it was down all night again last night, by the way and its user-hostile and flaky nature just bit another respected ex-colleague).
That said, and moving right along to the real point of this post, there's a lot to be said for the idea that maintaining a blog could be simpler. Today I'm going to share with you the real reason I don't post here as often as I should.
It's because I post elsewhere. Some years ago I unilaterally that evolt.org's predominantly-social IRC channel could do with its own blog. That decision was based predominantly on having tech-envy of two illustrious predecessors: The Daily Chump, powered by a Python bot penned by its members; but above all 2lmc's spool. 2lmc was once a house in Islington containing several twentysomething perl programmers (including my former business partner who's now doing something complicated at Flickr). The spool, then, was partly software written by people I know -- but mostly it was also a very funny blog written by people I know (it's very much less active these days since the house was scattered to the four corners of the tech universe).
Unable to source the code at the time to run 2lmc's bot, I settled on the Chumps' engine. And so spool.evolt.org was born.
Someone posts a link, and it either sits there for others to follow at their leisure, or the rest of the group leaves comments on it. These could be more related links, dumb pictures, or (most usually) snark. (Apparently the kids are calling this a 'tumblelog' now because they don't know it's been around forever and -- at the risk of reigniting a debate with James yet again, it seems everything has to be invented all over again indefinitely by the less-geeky ones who didn't see it the first time.)
This format's bluddy grate. It's social (it's written by everyone in the group or any ad-hoc subset thereof). It's quick and dirty, like all good tech is. But -- and here's the Twitter reference -- it's insanely easy to write. I can make a new post by copy-and-pasting something off my browser's address bar and pressing Enter.
Compare that to writing this. I need to attempt to cram everything into some sort of logical order despite sleep deprivation, after logging in and typing it all into a web form, then checking and unchecking a bunch of stuff and submitting and rechecking. And then editing out the inevitable typo or three. Blogging software these days is great as a simple content management system. But for actual blogging, for throwing a bunch of stuff up or covering something in real time? These IRC things are so much better.
In 2005 I was running a then-rather-well-known political blog before and during the UK general election campaign. In the last week I set up a second blog to cover as-it-happens election news and invited the world and her dog to join in on election night.
The channel was packed on election night, and twenty or more people were posting results in real time as they arrived for the sixty-odd people in IRC and another several thousand hitting Refresh watching the IRC blog on the web.
In other words, it's been tested in action during an election and it was a) successful and b) inclusive, but most of all c) great fun.
So here's today's new project: KildareStreet.com. News and commentary as it's posted elsewhere, sifted by whichever group of people ends up coalescing around it. Plus as much snark as you like because, let's face it, no matter how much heat is generated in the next 23 days we can be pretty sure there won't be any light.
Come on down and try it for yourself. #kildarestreet on Freenode.net -- the IRC bot doing all the work has been christened 'ceanncomhairle'.
After the election I imagine I'll keep it going to cover whatever comes next, but right now I've got no idea how it'll turn out. More interesting that way.
Submitted by johnh on February 12, 2007 - 15:00.
So, I was just reading something from Scrivs a moment ago and right there, in the middle of a post from a web designer discussing the subject of web development, was this (highlighting added by me):
Very, very well played, sirs. If you ever want to hire real web developers instead of people who only know how to slap stuff around in Dreamweaver, I'll be happy to pass on some details.
But still - clever use of the Googles, what?
Submitted by johnh on February 10, 2007 - 13:45.
Someone -- I have no idea who -- apparently nominated me last month in the 'Best Design' category at this year's Irish Blog Awards in Dublin on March 3rd.
I discovered this news just now, because apparently I'm on the shortlist.
So, whether you want me to win because you think this site looks nice, or if you just think a thick piece of perspex which is almost precisely the same size as the wee pane of glass from a lavatory window would come in handy round here...
(* Don't vote often. Once is plenty.)
Submitted by johnh on January 31, 2007 - 20:12.
You have only to spend a few moments on Politics.ie or PROC or certain parts of Boards before reading the considered thoughts of some knuckle-dragger culchie on the topic of keeping Ireland Irish-only. Sometimes it's straightforward neo-Nazism. Often it's the slipping tongues of Sinn Fein voters -- half a lifetime's Fridays spent in pubs on the Holloway Road gives a person insight into the way it's all Irish Freedom until the second pint causes the mask to fall and uncover nothing more noble than venal sectarianism, 'wog'-hating and misogyny.
The relatively shocking part, as Conn says, is the way these troglodytes don't even bother to keep it among themselves. In the UK and (most of) the US this racism is almost as deep but its adherents do at least shut up about it in company. Here, it's socially acceptable.
[Minor detour - at a much lower level this insularism is applied to me, too, including by some of the supposedly-enlightened crowd who read this. I claimed my Irish passport eleven years ago, finally moved over a year and a half back. Sadly I sound wrong. "You're not Irish and you never will be," said one of the attendees to me at BarCamp SouthEast the other week. It's not easy to determine, meanwhile, whether any of this is related to our total isolation here or not: when you subtract events like BarCamps and the Blog Awards, we've been out of the house to meet one or more people exactly once in 18 months.]
There's an obvious logic, obviously, to describe the fuckwittedness of the anti-immigration fools. But since when did these morons ever respond to logic?
I'm slightly more interested in considering the era of Ireland which people like me would call the dark ages and most supporters of the current government consider to be the good old days. After the revolution was strangled in infancy and replaced by a cabal of fundamentalist Christians, what was an economic disaster area continued to get worse. The census shows how this bizarre mixture -- of "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" and a farm fetish not seen before or since except in Maoist China -- resulted in people leaving in ever larger numbers. Or in other words, the victims of this medieval tosh rarely got the opportunity to fight back.
I'm strongly of the opinion that Ireland doesn't have overseas voting at least partly because Dev and Company were seeking to avoid getting bitchslapped by all the people they effectively expelled from the country by starving them out.
When I see a nation where even the people who want change never pick up the baton "because you can't change anything" and "sure all the politicians are the same", I wonder how many of them ever had anyone in their upbringing who both a) disagreed and b) didn't emigrate. Natural selection would suggest that emigration bred hopelessness, inertia and a fearsome conservatism which will take much more than the last 15 years to fix.
