Teknovis

There will be local elections in Ireland in early June, so the candidates are currently trying to get as much publicity as possible. The Internet now forms a crucial part of most candidates’ campaigns. However, some candidates have more interesting online presences than others…

Emma Kiernan is an example of such a candidate. Her official web page contains the follow corporate looking photo:

Official Photo of Emma Kiernan

However, until recently Emma Kiernan also had a publicly accessible Facebook account. This contained some less formal photos, such as this one:

Facebook photo of Emma Kiernan

It is debatable which photo is more likely to gain votes for her, but I guess that it depends on which segment of voters she is trying to attract!

This story comes from Elections Thread. Alternatively, I could have posted this article as yet another story of people not realising the loss of privacy associated with Facebook. I expect more similar incidents in the future…

Tags: Facebook, Ireland

WolframAlpha – view the demonstration, look at the examples, and try it! It looks very impressive!

I am currently trying to get two friends who might find it useful to try it! One of these friends uses a lot of mathematical tools and the other friend works with genetics.

Tags: WolframAlpha

The latest figures from the IEDR show that a total of 9,781 .ie domains were registered in the first quarter of 2009. Registrations in Q1 2009 were up by 28% compared to Q4 2008. The previous highest number of registrations was recorded in Q1 2008 with 9,092.

For the full story see Record number of new .ie domain registrations in Q1 2009.

I actually think that this is really impressive in the current economic climate!

Tags: Ireland

A friend (who is currently considering starting a blog) told me about an interesting email service that he uses called Mailinator.

Actually, I used to achieve something like this using a catch-all. I thought it was very useful for giving individuals and companies spontaneous email addresses that I could later convert to a real email account. However, it does make you very vulnerable to spam :(

Tags: Email, Mailinator, Spam

Sometimes URLs can become very long, and this can be problematic in certain circumstances. I usually notice then when I send or receive an email containing a URL, but the email software forces a line break in the middle of the URL. Therefore, the link cannot be clicked :( I am also notice this in Twitter, because the URL can consume a lot of my valuable characters!

Luckily, there are several websites that allow you to rewrite a long URL as a short URL.The websites that I am aware of are (in no particular order):

• tinyurl.ie
• short.ie
• tr.im (Cool URL – thanks to Blacknight for making me aware of this one!)
• TinyURL.com
• bit.ly

I have not used any of these enough yet to determine which is best!

Tags: bit.ly, Blacknight, short.ie, TinyURL.com, tinyurl.ie, tr.im, Twitter

Tonight I had to use the eflow website for the first time. I am lucky that I do not have to ever suffer the M50! This is a motorway that almost circles the capital city (Dublin), and it is the busiest road in Ireland. There is a toll to pass one bridge on the motorway, and until recently you could pay the toll at the bridge using cash. I have never understood why you could not pay using your credit card like most of the EU! Recently a barrier free system was introduced, and infrequent travellers must now pay the toll online within 48 hours.

This morning some Spanish friends of mine arrived in Ireland. They rented a car at the airport, and the set-off for the west of Ireland. I was talking to them this evening by phone to determine if they had passed the toll bridge on the M50. I know that they travelled on the M50, because they told me that they were on a road that looked like a motorway except everybody was parked. Yup – that is the M50 :( However, they were not sure if they crossed the toll bridge.

As a precaution, I got the registration number of their rented car, and I visited the eflow web site. My expectation was that I should be able to enter the registration number, and that the website should tell me what was due. This however is not possible!

Indeed, the website is so bad that I can enter any random Irish registration number and pay for any small number of trips!

So I paid the toll in the end for the rented car, even though I am not sure if it was due or not.

Next I thought that I would phone eflow to try and confirm if the toll was due or not. Unfortunately, eflow only advertise a 1890 phone number. I detest these, as I describe in Say No To 1890!. The national number provided on SayNoTo1890 went to voicemail because it was after 17:00 when I phoned, even though the eflow website states that customer service is open until 23:00 :(

Tags: eflow, Ireland, SayNoTo1890

Yet another employee getting into trouble with her employer due to the information she published on Facebook – ‘Ill’ worker fired over Facebook.

And still there will be more…

Tags: Facebook

I just read that the Belgian Government has ordered 17 ISPs to block access to four websites. According to the largest ISP, this is the first time that this has occurred. The censored websites in this case contain details of convicted paedophiles. For more details about this see Belgium govt blocks access to website.

In general, I am in favour of making information public. However, I am also a strong supporter of privacy. So I do not know yet if publishing this information is good or bad.

However, I do think that trying to block access to these websites by forcing ISPs to police network traffic is both stupid and ineffective. In my opinion, this type of action only raises the profile of the censored websites! I suppose that it is typical of pushing a political solution into a technical arena.

Tags: Belgium, Censorship, ISP

Today RTE launched its on-demand video player, which is unimaginatively called RTÉ Player. I have not had a chance to try it yet, but I already watch a lot of RTE current affairs content on demand. Perhaps my biggest misgiving about the new player is the fact that it is browser based, rather than utilising a separate standalone application.

For more details about this story see RTÉ launches catch-up TV service.

The BBC launched a similar on-demand video player over a year ago called the iPlayer. This caused excessive network usage at that time for BT, and this resulted in extra charges to end-users. This highlighted the increasing problems in the relationship between content producer and content distributor. Ultimately, they will both need to work together! To read more about this see Jaw Jaw, Not War, War.

The next logical step in the roll-out of IP based video on-demand is to supply end-users with set-top boxes. Indeed, this is already being considered for the iPlayer according to BBC, ITV and BT plan to bring iPlayer-style services to TVs. I wonder will RTE do this also!

Tags: BBC, BT, RTE

A friend sent me this cool Internet based subway map last week. (Click to see the original 2.6MB version.)

Web Trend Map 2009 (Copyright Information Architects)

It was developed by Information Architects, and you can read more about it in Web Trend Map 4 – Final Beta.