Look, it’s quite simple. Allow me to explain.
View from the balcony in Feurteventura
Observe: Blue skies. Sunshine. Deity-cursed PALM TREES, for pete’s sake. This is what it’s meant to be. This is an environment in which humans feel well and life is good.
So why is it that we’re stuck with THIS?
NOT RIGHT!
One of the problems with running a dual boot WinXP/Linux system, apart from the fact that you rarely boot into Windows except to play games (and so you tend not to play games much – though FreeSpace2 SCP is helping there!), is that if you have a shared media folder that sees frequent creation and deletion of large files (say, for example, if you were bittorrenting cookery shows or news shows on a daily basis), the shared media folder tends to lead to a high fragmentation rate on the Windows partition (it has to be on the Windows side because while Linux can read and write NTFS with ease thanks to ntfs-3g, Windows has… issues with ext3). As in, 62% fragmented.
Defragmentation in progress...
And then you start to realise why your dual-core 64-bit 3GHz machine with the 4Gb of RAM is stuttering while you’re trying to learn how to make pork wellington (like beef wellington but with pork tenderloin).
So you boot into Windows, flag the partition as dirty because the defragger won’t work until chkdsk runs, reboot to run chkdsk (which takes three hours to complete), then log in and fire off the defragger. A dozen times. And then, with fragmentation at 59%, decide to try a better debugger. Download the free trial of O&O and fire that off, and wait….
and wait….
and wait….
…*sigh*
That’s a whole day and all night so far, and still the damn disk isn’t happy.
I’m seriously thinking of just saying “Feck it” and erasing the Windows partition, expanding the Linux partition to take the whole disk and just using Virtualbox (which I do 95% of the time that I need anything on windows – which is literally to maintain one single diagram that hasn’t been translated from Visio to Dia/Inkspace/Xfig yet, and to be able to test websites with IE).
The more you look at legislation in this country, the nastier an opinion you develop about it. You’d be able to forgive minor errors, small awkwardnesses, even larger problems so long as the common good was served, but the more I look at statute law in Ireland and more critically, at how it is drafted, the less charitable I feel about the drafters. Much of the stuff I see, I see through the Firearms Acts – that stuff I talk about elsewhere.
This time, though, it’s more apropos to here. The new Broadcasting Bill 2009, currently on it’s last stages in the Oireachtas and about to become the Broadcasting Act 2009, has a lovely little sting in it.
In section 140 (the definitions), it defines “television set” to mean:
any electronic apparatus capable of receiving and exhibiting television broadcasting services broadcast for general reception (whether or not its use for that purpose is dependent on the use of anything else in conjunction with it) and any software or assembly comprising such apparatus and other apparatus;
Nice little bit there. What it basicly means is that if you have no TV and you watch Youtube over your broadband connection (or download video footage and watch that), then you need to have a TV licence.
Yeah, that’s a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? We’ve the worst broadband rollout in the EU, in a nation where we prided ourselves on being the gateway to the EU for IT companies, where we have fancy plans for rolling out high-speed broadband to every sheep farmer in Mayo (and wireless broadband for their iPhones while they’re out with the sheep); and now we’re charging a 160 euro tax for those who opt to have broadband installed.
You wouldn’t mind if there was some ethical claim they could use to justify the tax. Maybe, like the TV licence, we’re using what is, notionally at least, a national resource (like the electromagnetic spectrum, or the airways, or the roads or whatever). Except that we’re sourcing our broadband from private companies over private telecomms nets (the national infrastructure was sold off to private investors during Eircom’s IPO). So there’s no national resource in use.
Maybe we need the RTE site to get content? Except that, well, RTE doesn’t broadcast anything other than news on their site and even that won’t work for Ubuntu or Debian linux thanks to dodgy flash players. Plus, opting out of RTE isn’t possible as it’s pushed out there and the claim then is that if you can receive it (which I could – I just have to reinstall a different proprietary OS on my machine for a few hundred euro) then you have to pay the licence fee.
And what about the rise of mobile broadband? You can watch youtube on your iPhone, so now you need an iLicence as well? Legally you would.
So the medium isn’t a natural resource, its provision is done purely as a private business affair, and there’s no provision of content involved. So how in the name of little blue apples does Eamon Ryan think that he has some sort of claim or right to charge a tax for this? It’s ridiculous!
Methinks someone’s forgotten the last time that the Government did something stupid about technology and the e-voting debacle that ensued when the IT community pointed out that the people involved didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. And this one is aimed at people’s pockets, and the pockets of businesses. Hard to see this not causing a problem down the line.
www.IrishInternetTax.com may get interesting soon enough…
More details and discussion here on boards.ie and here on politics.ie
So this is what I’ve been up to for the last year; building this pretty much from scratch (rebuilding it in fact) and getting it to the launched stage. Everything from low-level C code for custom servers, to custom freeRADIUS modules (again in C) to the MacOS and iPhone/iPod Touch clients I’m writing at the moment (Will, if you’re reading this, I’m finally using Objective C again 
), and all the project management and dogsbody stuff you’d expect.
Fingers crossed it works properly 
METAKALL USER TRIAL KICKS OFF IN TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
For Immediate Release
METAKALL USER TRIAL KICKS OFF IN TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
Dublin, April 10 — Metakall, a WiFi authentication and metering system, has begun its second user trial in Trinity College Dublin this week for students and staff, allowing access to the internet from mobile devices and allowing them to make phone calls over the internet in cooperation with FreeSpeech.ie.
Metakall, which is funded by an Enterprise Ireland grant, may be among the first of 300 companies to spin out under the new joint TCD/UCD Innovation Academy announced last month by the two colleges along with the Taoiseach, Tanaiste, Minster for Finance and Minister for Education.
Headed up by Dr.Hitesh Tewari, an expert in internet micropayments, the project has a working system but is still working on usability, testing, and on creating new clients for different platforms. Several companies including Eircom and O2 have expressed interest in the technology developed by Metakall, and talks are ongoing regarding a possible installation in San Jose.
The Metakall system was initially trialled in August last year in TCD. Significant changes have since been made to the technology, which consists of a client which runs on the user’s laptop or mobile phone, connecting them to the wireless internet system on the TCD campus as well as in satellite sites in Trinity Halls, St.James’ Hospital and Santry.
This client, which runs under Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and the new Windows 7 operating system, as well as on several mobile phones, utilises Metakall’s Zero Touch Authentication technology to allow users to use the internet on their netbook or phone. Clients for MacBooks and both the iPhone and the iPod Touch are in active development. Clients for Google Android and the Palm Pre are planned.
Those students and staff who are interested can find out more and sign up for the trial, which has places for up to a thousand users, on the Metakall website at http://metakall.dsg.cs.tcd.ie.
Ultimately, the team hope to spin out and form their own company to market the technology commercially at home and abroad. Metakall received 400,000 euro in funding from Enterprise Ireland for the initial development of their technology.
PHOTOS AND GRAPHICS:
http://metakall.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/Press/Metakall.jpg
http://metakall.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/Press/MetakallUSBKey.jpg
http://metakall.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/Press/MetakallLogo.png
CONTACT DETAILS:
Hitesh Tewari, Principal Investigator htewari@cs.tcd.ie 087 212 2008 Distributed Systems Group School of Computer Science and Statistics Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 Mark Dennehy, Project Manager mark.dennehy@cs.tcd.ie 085 774 7546 Distributed Systems Group School of Computer Science and Statistics Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2
Er, kindof anyway. My old Enovation desk just got showcased on Desked:
After the debacle that was the attempted upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, I sat back and thought about using Ubuntu for a while. In fact, I’d been thinking about it when I wrote the blog post on the upgrade. And the conclusion I came to was this; I started using Linux with Debian, way back in the days when 3.0 was in testing; I used it on my desktop, on my laptops, on my robot, on the lab server and anywhere else it could fit; and I stayed with it up to the point where I needed some hardware support and was too lazy to build from source, and tried Ubuntu because “all the cool kids were doing it”.
And that was a bad mistake. They may bar me ever re-uping with SAGE for saying something as basic as this in public, but stability is far more important than having the suspend-to-ram function working or faster graphics regardless of whether it’s a mainframe or a laptop, if that is, you’re actually doing work with your computer. I did know that at one point. I blame reading too many Rails sites
At any rate, plugged in the external 1394 hard drive, backed up everything (~50Gb in under an hour, sweet), stuck in the netinst cd for Debian Lenny’s amd64 version (feck it, if it didn’t install, I had the i386 handy as a fallback), walked through an incredibly improved installer process, and now I have a pristine system running Gnome, KDE (3), Openbox, Windowmaker, XFCE, LXDE and matchbox (for a project).
The only nonstandard thing in here is that I went and got the 1.2.1 version of Mercurial from the testing repository by hand because otherwise it wouldn’t hg pull from the 1.2.1 repos in the lab.
It’s very stable, it’s got support for everything, and the parts which don’t work are trivial (starting wireless after the wireless kill switch is used seems to be utterly broken and hibernate isn’t working either, nor are the brightness softkeys but there are menu options).
So that’s that, the Kubuntu experiment is over. Back to Debian and breathing easier…
What *bangs head on desk* was *bang* I *bang* thinking?
I tried KDE4 before, I didn’t like it. I downgraded back to KDE3 just to get something that worked. I know my new toy upgraded to Intrepid without problems, but that was running Xubuntu, not KDE, so why did I think that a quick apt-get dist-upgrade to Kubuntu 8.10 was going to work on the machine I have all my precious, precious data on? (more…)
You know, most folks think we’re pretty expensive as places to get a telephone line go. The thing is, they’re wrong.
Chart showing line rental charges across the EU
Turns out we’re the most expensive. Of any country in the world. Great thing to say about a country where the internet is fairly critical for the economy…
From Ireland Offline…
Just as a small note to anyone trying to get this to work, the fpit driver has a bug in every version of ubuntu up to and including hardy; upgrade to intrepid and you get fully a functional touchscreen again, using this xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "touchscreen"
Driver "fpit"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS1"
Option "BaudRate" "9600"
Option "MaximumXPosition" "4096"
Option "MaximumYPosition" "4096"
Option "MinimumXPosition" "0"
Option "MinimumYPosition" "0"
Option "Passive"
Option "SendCoreEvents"
Option "TrackRandR" "true"
EndSection
Just don’t try using KDE4 unless slow-motion work sounds appealing XFCE is reasonable though, so Xubuntu is an option (and what I’m running on it right now).
Now, on with the PyQT4 coding…
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