Teknovis

There is an interesting, if not somewhat unpalatable, opinion piece in The Irish Times today about the future of third level education in Ireland: Learning from the global phenomenon of “universities in crises”.

In summary, there are three options presented for the ongoing funding of the Irish universities:

• Increased private sector funding.
• Increased student fees.
• Reduced costs.

I am strongly in favour of the the first and last options, and I think that the idea of student fees should be avoided. As part of reducing costs, I think that the reality of merging some of the universities needs to be considered. (This has to happen in a real sense, and not just in name.)

Tags: Ireland, The Irish Times

IPv4 addresses are due to run-out some time in the next few weeks, so there is growing media attention to this issue. In order to raise awareness, there will be a World IPv6 Day later this year. Many companies are going to temporarily switch to using IPv6, and I assume that is why that date was chosen. It could be very interesting! For more details see: Google, Facebook and Yahoo to test new net addresses.

You can test you own IPv6 readiness here: http://test-ipv6.com/

Finally, for an overview of Irish readiness see Irish IPv6 Task Force.

Tags: Ireland

Wow – all is certainly not well in Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) according to Testing times in the west.

Thankfully I have never heard most of these complaints in relation to any of the Dublin universities. However, the one exception would be that I have heard anecdotal stories about exam boards boosting grades to reduce failure numbers, even though the students did not deserve this.

I guess it is all part of the unfortunate process of dumbing-down Irish education :(

Tags: GMIT

Interesting article about an Irish software developer leading the development of the online version of Call of Duty: Black Ops: Irishman’s ‘Black Ops’.

Perhaps there should be greater awareness and exploitation of the potential of the software games industry here in Ireland!

Last weekend I needed to book Ryanair flights. I have a Visa Electron card, and I used to use it all the time to avoid the 5€ per flight administration fee. However, Ryanair changed the rules so that the only card that does not attract such a fee is a prepaid Mastercard. This is described in Why is there an administration fee when I reserve my flights?:

As a special offer to Mastercard Prepaid Debit (MP) card holders, Ryanair, will not apply an administration fee to those customers paying by this method of payment.

I am sure that the only reason for this prepaid Mastercard exception is that Ryanair can still advertise the fare excluding the fee, and it is probably the least common card type available.

Anyway, over Christmas I was lucky to receive a gift voucher for use in a large shopping centre (Whitewater). This gift voucher is actually a prepaid Mastercard, so I decided to give it a try.

Unfortunately, it did not work. I got a generic payment failure error instead of the page with my confirmation number and booking details. Perhaps this was related to the fact that I used my home address as the cardholder’s address, even though my address would not be associated with the card.

I was tight on time, so I went ahead and booked the flights using my normal credit card. If I had more time I would follow it up directly with Ryanair.

I have since read a very interesting thread describing how other prepaid Mastercard shopping vouchers have successfully been used. See Prepaid Mastercard No Loading or Purchase Charges (Works with Ryanair).

I will try one of these the next time!

Tags: Mastercard, Ryanair, Visa

I read during the week that Skype has become the world’s largest international call provider! That is amazing, and it certainly must be concerning the traditional telcos! For more information see CES 2011: Skype Steals International Scene.

I am aware that Skype had a serious outage before Christmas, but luckily it did not affect me. The $1 credit was a nice apology!

During Christmas I had the opportunity to use Skype for video calls on the latest version of the iPod Touch, and I was extremely impressed with both the quality and the ease of use. It was a much better experience than I imagined, and I could easily get used to doing all my calls like that!

Tags: Apple, Skype

Oh dear – it has been a really bad few days for the recently launched new Fine Gael website: finegael2011.com

Indeed, things have been going from bad (Hackers deface Fine Gael website) to worse (Thousands of users’ data stolen in Fine Gael site hack)!

I wonder will there be many more security breaches as the political parties try to use the Internet more in the coming months in preparation for the general election this year.

One of my ongoing hobbies is trying to understand if RESTful APIs really are better than SOAP APIs, or are they just the latest fad :)

So I found this imaginary dialogue very humorous: The S stands for Simple!

Enjoy ;)

A belated merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year! I had a great one, and hence I have not been posting here recently!

Anyway, I have previously written here about my irrational cravings for a tablet device. However, I really am not an Apple fan, so I do not see myself ever owning an iPad!

Today I think that I might have found the perfect table for me! It is the Motorola Xoom!

Motorola Xoom

For more mouthwatering details see the marketing material or the technical details.

I am really looking forward to seeing one of these!

Tags: Apple, Motorola

I read an interesting article about using Twitter while watching television today – see The audience tweets back.

I must admit that this is something that I have done, and I found it made mundane programs become very entertaining!

Tags: Twitter