Apr 27 2011
I see that Blacknight has launched a campaign promoting .eu domain names: Invade Europe. It is catchy, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek!
It is now possible to register .eu domain names for 1, 2, 5, and 10 years. The 10 year registration is heavily discounted by 50%. It is great value, and I guess that it is representative of the fact that .eu domain names are generally not regarded highly.
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Apr 25 2011
IRCSET recently announced the results of the 2011 Postdoctoral Scheme (see IRCSET Postdoctoral Fellowship Schemes 2010/2011). The value of each fellowship is roughly 80,000€ over two years (see Empower).
According to my count there were 37 fellowships awarded this year. These can be broken down by institution as follows:
Clearly TCD and UCD are doing something right because they account for more than half of the successful applicants!
The fellowships can also be broken down by category, although these results are more evenly distributed:
It is also interesting to note how many of the names do not sound Irish!
Overall, I do not think that these fellowships represent good value for the tax payer! I say this, because I know some of the people who have successfully applied for this fellowship. In all cases, it is seen as a way to continue a career as an academic. Furthermore, the people I have known had or have no intention of remaining in Ireland or working in industry. In other words, these people want to become academics for the sake of becoming academics, and their contribution to the country will be minimal.
If it were up to me, I would fund more PhD students who then go on to work in industry!
Apr 22 2011
OK – I admit that the title of this blog post is a bit dramatic! I am of course referring to the fact that Amazon‘s cloud infrastructure was out for several hours yesterday. See Amazon fault takes down websites or Amazon cloud sinks, smothers Web 2.0 darlings.
It is a pity really, because this is the sort of incident that moving into the cloud is supposed to prevent! As somebody I know who deals with Amazon said:
Amazon keep promising us 100% reliability, because “Telcos’ five 9s are so yesterday”!
Yes – this has effected his companies cloud strategy!
Apr 21 2011
There is lots of media coverage of Apple‘s covert user tracking activities: iPhones and 3G iPads record location data without permission – research.
It is times like this that I am glad I am not an Apple user :D
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Apr 18 2011
Interesting upcoming Enterprise Ireland event: Emerging Technologies and Business Opportunities in the Location Services Market.
Hopefully, I will have the time to attend!
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Apr 17 2011
I read an interesting article over the weekend questioning the value of many web start-ups. See Sun shining on the party of the big tech chase.
It is interesting, because I certainly am sceptical of the high levels of attention that some web companies are attracting. I also think that there is the potential that these companies form the next bubble to burst. (This might take a while though due to all the other bubbles bursting at the moment ;)
I think that this video explains it best:
It is very humorous, but it is also grounded in reality! Either way – enjoy it!
Apr 13 2011
I upgraded my VirtualBox to the latest version (4.0.4) last weekend. Everything seemed fine.
Yesterday afternoon I paused a virtual machine for the first time this week, and last night I tried to resume it. To my horror it would not start, and I kept getting the following error:
Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Windows 7. Implementation of the USB 2.0 controller not found! Because the USB 2.0 controller state is part of the saved VM state, the VM cannot be started. To fix this problem, either install the 'Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack' or disable USB 2.0 support in the VM settings (VERR_NOT_FOUND). Unknown error creating VM (VERR_NOT_FOUND).
After a few minutes of panicking I discovered that this is a known bug, as described in Ticket #8182 Unexpected error about USB 2.0!. Luckily, the described fix worked perfectly for me :D
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Apr 09 2011
I heard a term for a new type of cloud computing during the week:
I remembered that I had listed the different types of Cloud Computing before on my blog, so I found the article: Cloud Computing in 2009. The amazing thing about this article is that I published it in January 2009!
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Apr 06 2011
I read an interesting news release last week from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but for some reason I forgot to add it here :o
Anyway, the article announced that Amazon will soon allow customers to run their machine instances on dedicated hardware within the cloud. For more information see Amazon VPC Adds Dedicated Instances and Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances.
This is an interesting development, because it moves the machine instances slightly away from the original spirit of the cloud. However, it does enable Amazon to compete with other existing cloud providers who were offering dedicated hardware (unfortunately, I cannot remember their names).
Mar 30 2011
DCU has launched a programme allowing students to try a university style degree over a two week period during the summer holidays. For more details see ‘Dragon’ kicks off DCU’s Summer Scholars Programme.
I think that this is an absolutely brilliant idea, especially if it helps to reduce the number of first year drop-outs!
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