Damien Mulley

Concentrating when studying

10 questions you should ask in an interview

RSS to Javascript generator. Use this generator to display and format RSS feeds on your website.

RSS Mix – Mix any number of RSS feeds into one unique new feed! Maybe Planet of the Blogs could do something like this for users that don’t want some irishblogs displayed to them ? Would take a bit of processing power though.

Seth describes another digital divide though this one is more about choice than availability. Interesting nonetheless.

Since Bernie is away I’ll take over covering what the Sunday Tribune is saying about IrishBlogs until Bernie comes back, and here we go…

That’s When I Fell for the Leader of Iraq

There was an election this week, apparently, on that other island, and a bit of this one. Much of the last phase of the campaign had been about re-fighting the Iraq War, so it was fitting that one of the world’s most famous bloggers, Salam Pax, who became famous for blogging the Iraq War from Baghdad as it happened, got into the mix.

He’s been filing reports from the heavily Muslim Bethnal Green constituency, where George Galloway is running as an anti-war candidate. Harry’s Place chronicles the pro-Iraq War Iraqi trailing the dyspeptically anti-Iraq War/pro-Saddam Hussein Galloway.

And Best of Both Worlds notes that Salam Pax isn’t the only visitor with a stake in the election – there are all the “Overpollstered, overpaid, and over here” American political consultants, like those mentioned by the New York Times in its coverage this week.

BOBW quotes the NYT as mentioning one adviser known in certain Irish back rooms – like St. Luke ‘ … a senior adviser to Senator Kerry’s campaign, is a friend and sometime adviser to Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer and almost certain successor to Mr. Blair eventually – it’s Bob Shrum”

And it adds “No doubt Shrum can take advantage of his visits to England to see another client — Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who’ll need advice on the latest rabble-rousing policy proposals to disguise the abject incompetence and cravenness of his government. ”

Meanwhile , American blogger It Comes in Pints? revealed that he once worked with Conservative MP and Spectator editor Boris Johnson in the Conservative Research Department in the mid-1990s, so he had a front-row seat on the Tory meltdown from which they have yet to recover, recycling the observation that “the worst thing that ever happened to the Tories was winning the 1992 election.”

Take him out? Ooh, I’d Rather Just Take Him

Twenty Major made some satrtling “revelations” about a Dublin criminal known as the Little General:

“His real name has not been released but I know who he is. Obviously then I can’t name him but I can tell you some things about him and you should tell all your friends so that when they hear about the Little General they immediately associate these things with him.

So here are some facts about the Little General from Dublin:

Searching for Damien results in:

15th in Google.com
15th in Google.ie
11th in Google.co.uk
9th in Yahoo.com and Altavista.com

This seems mainly due to Planet of the Blogs IrishBlogs and the technorati irishblogs section. I’m quietly confident that I’ll hit the top ten by years end.

Via Engadget is the networked emoticon device. Pretty cute.

OpenBSD BitTorrent encrypted server
Blurb:

the data you copy to the server gets encrypted and the data you read from it gets decrypted, all on-the-fly…

How to make a homemade cheap TiVo with a spare computer. Nice howto that’s been seen on many a website but if you were to purchase all the software in this tutorial it’d cost a fair old whack. There are loads of open source alternatives out there these days. Such as here.

keeping to the TV theme: The BBC allows viewers to upload and share their videos. How cool is that ?
Blurb:

BBCi has launched a programming service for digital satellite viewers that showcases short films made by regular people across the UK. The service, dubbed Your Stories and accessed 24/7 by pressing the red button.

BlogPulse – Search the blogs. Woeks a bit faster than technnorati. Handy for vanity searches or to check what the latest buzz is. Look at the stats:
Total identified blogs: 10,603,693

New blogs in last 24 hours: 39,909

Blog posts indexed in last 24 hours: 359,639

New tagging blog. Contributors are: Christian Crumlish, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Don Turnbull, Gene Smith, Jon Lebkowsky, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, Peter Merholz, Timo Hannay.

Mosh Girl. Just look and laugh.

Thinker – A Cognitive Psychology Resource.

What I Would Be Thinking About If I Were Billy Joel Driving Toward a Holiday Party Where I Knew There Was Going to Be a Piano. Hilarious.

My liege, and madam,–to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night is night, and time is time.
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief

From here:

Lord’s Prayer 56 words
23rd Psalm 118 words
Gettysburg Address 226 words
Ten Commandments 297 words
U.S. Dept of Agriculture Order on cabbage pricing 15,269 words

Anyone got any Gov papers of late ?

Listened to the Last Word tonight and they had on Mary O’Rourke, the leader of the Seanad is her title now. There was a debate about RateMyTeachers and Mary decided to have a laugh and suggested RateMyTD. That’s actually a good idea Mary. Now despite the fact that in the non-web version of RateMyTD aka the General Election you got *puts on eurovision country voting voice* “Mar-eeee Ooo Roo-ark null pwointe*, you are still for such a system.

In the tradition of They Work For you the UK website that rates MPs and tracks their voting patterns and speeches, I think we should have the Mary O’Rourke endorsed RateMyTD.ie do the same thing.

I did an irishblogs search for RateMyTD and it seems Planet Potato already mentioned the idea.

The day ends in a “y”, time for another Google post. Google has launched Google Webaccelerator which basically speeds up your web speed by caching everything on their servers. The odd thing is that it is designed for broadband users. I’d much prefer if it was done for all those on 56k connections or worse. They need it most. It says 56k users can still use it though.

This might prove to be a privacy nightmare though as Google is now actively caching websites and they are acting as a proxy. The world’s biggest proxy ? Given the fact that they happily censor sites to keep the Chinese and American Governments happy, will they do the same when they become the worlds biggest web proxy ?

It’s more than search now, this is the start of content hosting. Is the next move to offer actual server space for websites ? They are now hosting our email, our photos and recently have started on hosting our videos. Since you can charge for your video content, I wonder will they bring in payment systems for accessing other content on websites they’d host ? In the short term I wonder what kind of traffic decrease will webhosters see and in the long term will they make less from their hosting business ? How long before Google hosts 20% of the web ? Do we really want one company to control it all, even if their public motto is “Don’t be evil” ?

More details from Search Engine Watch

When the President Talks to God – Bright Eyes on Leno

Really good protest song, very surprised Leno’s people allowed this on:

“When The President Talks To God”

When the president talks to God
Are the conversations brief or long?
Does he ask to rape our women’s’ rights
And send poor farm kids off to die?
Does God suggest an oil hike
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Are the consonants all hard or soft?
Is he resolute all down the line?
Is every issue black or white?
Does what God say ever change his mind
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Does he fake that drawl or merely nod?
Agree which convicts should be killed?
Where prisons should be built and filled?
Which voter fraud must be concealed
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
I wonder which one plays the better cop
We should find some jobs. the ghetto’s broke
No, they’re lazy, George, I say we don’t
Just give ’em more liquor stores and dirty coke
That’s what God recommends

When the president talks to God
Do they drink near beer and go play golf
While they pick which countries to invade
Which Muslim souls still can be saved?
I guess god just calls a spade a spade
When the president talks to God

When the president talks to God
Does he ever think that maybe he’s not?
That that voice is just inside his head
When he kneels next to the presidential bed
Does he ever smell his own bullshit
When the president talks to God?

I doubt it

I doubt it

—
Meanwhile the music press shows how clueless it is when it comes to Johnny Cash and Nine inch Nails.

As I mentioned previously I thought it was only going to be a matter of time before GPS and Google Maps were integrated ane possibly Flickr, and now they have thanks to GeoBloggers. Check out some of the photos, really really cool.

This would make a nice addition to the Eirepreneur open source map of Ireland.