Cross Dominant

@Eircom, @VodafoneIreland and others need Twitter Status Accounts

#“@Eircom, @VodafoneIreland and others need Twitter Status Accounts”

I find that the @eircom account on Twitter is generally extremely responsive and is the fastest way to get an answer to questions. @VodafoneIreland is very good too. However, they both (and O2, Meteor, emobile etc) need to implement status accounts, either a global one each or regional ones. So rather than tons of people badgering them about outages (in particular), we can go to the status account and see what's going on.

But that's just step one, since it only covers the stuff that the support people know about. Imagine if every Eircom tech had twitter on their phone/laptop and could post updates to those status accounts? We'd then know about stuff before it happens. For example, whatever is being done on our Eircom line at the minute would surely have been known about by someone in Eircom in advance.

If we'd known about the planned work before it happened and not in the middle of a Skype call to a customer in the UK, then much hassle andembarrassmenttoday would have been saved by us and the Eircom support team on Twitter.

Who needs a Mac when you have Macbuntu and a paintbrush?

#“Who needs a Mac when you have Macbuntu and a paintbrush?”

I'm at a technology workshop tomorrow and you can be sure most of the people there will have MBPs and Airs. In a desperate attempt to blend in, I have covered my old Dell D420 in a coat of Dulux Pure Brilliant White Gloss and installed Macbuntu. I'm sitting here looking at my messed up Ubuntu and giggling.

See Amazon, I WANT to give you my money

#“See Amazon, I WANT to give you my money”

Amazon on Android is a bad joke if you live outside of the US. Apart from a UK specific MP3 store, you are screwed everywhere else. So I was thrilled to get both their Android App Store and US MP3 Store working on my Irish phone this evening. (Hint: USUnlocked.com->Get US Credit Card->Create New US Amazon account->Set English-US on your phone->Buy initial apps on amazon.com incl MP3 App->Result)

What was the first thing I did? Did I rip-off some poor musician? Did I carry out copyright infringement on some record label? Did I ride roughshod over international IP law? Did I damage Ireland's reputation as somewhere an international IP brokerage could be created?

Yes I did, if you think like the idiots running the music industry.

For people living in the real world, I bought a real song with real money.

I'm sure a couple of cents will go to the musician whilst the rest goes on coke and hookers for their label and the music industry lobbyists. The sooner they can figure out how get the hell out of their own way, the sooner piracy will go back to being something only teenagers do and have always done.

Oh almost forgot, the Amazon App store on the phone is glitchy but the web buying experience is superb.

The Cloud Player is just awesome. Buy a song and store it to the Cloud. Takes a few seconds. Then stream to your phone or store locally on the phone.

It'll be interesting to see how the Google Cloud Music experience compares. I have the latest drop of the Google 3.0 player on my phone and it's so frustrating to see the streaming menu options greyed out. I also find the UI a bit confusing, as did my techie 11 y/o son. Also awful whilst driving. Needs big assed buttons.

Make an image of a live XP machine and then run it elsewhere

#“Make an image of a live XP machine and then run it elsewhere”

I blogged recently about the pain of upgrading a machine from XP to Win 7 due to the dreaded Sage. So I've continued to hold off. But I just had a total brainwave for a potential solution and it looks like it is possible.

I thought "what if I could snapshot the XP install some way using VMWare or VirtualBox?". The idea is that I could do the snapshot, save it somewhere, do a clean install of Windows 7, install VMWare/VirtualBox and then run that image inside Win7 to do any Sage work.

Turns out those fine people in VMWare are already miles ahead of me. I still remember installing a pre-release version of VMWare back in 1999 and thinking "this is gonna be huge". If only I'd had money I'd have bought stock. Funny to then be working in EMC when they bought them.

Anyway. I'll report back on whether it works for me or not. Obviously I'll try on another machine before zapping the source machine.

What new Irish Government Minister has been tasked with Open Government?

#“What new Irish Government Minister has been tasked with Open Government?”

via data.gov.uk

Short but great video of David Cameron on transparency and the right of people in the UK to Government data.

It looked like something might happen here when the previous crew talked about a Government CIO/CTO and setup the Innovation Taskforce talking shop.

Have any efforts started in the new Government? If so, by who? Not a snark, I genuinely want to know.

I'm not a visual person but

#“I’m not a visual person but”

I have to re-iterate that whoever moved the window controls in Ubuntu from RHS to LHS should be shot for crimes against UIs.

Look how horrifically ugly Chrome looks in the place your eye is drawn to most often.

As for brown and purple. The less said the better.

IOIO for Android - Hardware Hackers Delight

#“IOIO for Android - Hardware Hackers Delight”

via androidcommunity.com

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Android is the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro of this generation. Google AppInventor nails it on the software side. Now check this out: A USB breakout board with software to control it. Think of the cool things you could build!

Oooooh just had a thought. Google should buy MindStorms off Lego, integrate this IOIO, drop the price to $30 and send to schools everywhere along with AppInventor and a few dev phones.

LinkedIn on Android is rather nice

#“LinkedIn on Android is rather nice”

Imagine if they integrated it into the Addressbook? When someone rang you, the phone could display: "Bob Bobson is calling, he is CEO of Bobby Enterprises and his last LinkedIn update is that he just sold the company for 15 Bobillion Dollars"

or even better

"Dick Dickson is calling from ITPeopleForHire, he has 6,000 connections on LinkedIn and you almost definitely don't want to talk to him".

Imagine if Facebook Events allowed Apps for TV Shows

#“Imagine if Facebook Events allowed Apps for TV Shows”

I was just reading how Facebook wants TV channels to create Events for their entire EPG. It's an absolutely superb idea and one that could seriously challenge Twitter's dominance of live TV watching.

I would also be thrilled to see Late Late Show Friday and Sports Saturday disappear off to dedicated pages on Facebook instead of cluttering up my Twitter stream.

The story is a little confused between Events and Places. Can I check-in to an Event? Can Events be associated to a Facebook Places Page?

But it got me thinking. What if you had TV Show=PlacesPage -> N x Events=Episodes -> M x Apps per Event. So rather than just the standard Wall/Pics/Vids for Events, you could have the entire gamut of Apps? Now there's some incredibly powerful hubs you could build around TV Shows.

The other advantage of that is that unless I RSVPed an episode, it would keep it out of my main FB stream and I wouldn't have spoilers on US TV Shows. It also means you could have one Event for an episode of Boardwalk Empire on HBO and another one for that episode on Sky Atlantic.

Google to improve GMail Ads

#“Google to improve GMail Ads”

Based on this one, they need to :-)

Mixed laterality since 1968

13 Apr 2011, 13:28

11 Apr 2011, 21:51

11 Apr 2011, 18:53

11 Apr 2011, 14:07

10 Apr 2011, 19:10

10 Apr 2011, 17:20

08 Apr 2011, 16:27

07 Apr 2011, 17:33

07 Apr 2011, 15:46

04 Apr 2011, 17:32