Damien Mulley

Yes I’m on Facebook. Sssh. It’s better than LinkedIn, though still woeful. Anyways, since there isn’t a central place for finding people in Ireland who have spare time to do some programming work, I created a Facebook group called “Will code for food – Ireland”. Add yourself to it if you want to do some nixers, foxers etc. I’m sure using the word code will annoy some people. 🙂

Update 4: Issues with caching on WordPress.com, see comments from Donncha below. Thanks Donncha!

Update 3: WordPress are aware of whatever this is. Zero day exploit?

Update 2: Seems it isn’t just Feeburner. Said “security” site showed up the in the WordPress.com feed of OffTheMeatrack as well. Twenty spotted that one. So is someone hacking WordPress which in turn changes the feeds of the sites?

Update: Changed the post title. Seems this is happening with more than one site. Michele is getting the random blogs for blog feeds he has subbed to.

Is it Om’s Feed or Feedburner itself?

This is what I get for the feedburner feed of the GigaOm site:

Anyone else getting this?

It goes to this website.

From the press release:

O2 Broadband, through a wireless USB modem, will enable up to 10GB of data to be downloaded as standard per month, with no additional charges for occasional usage in excess of this. O2 is the first mobile provider in Ireland not to automatically charge customers if they exceed the 10GB usage limit, subject to fair usage policy.

The service will initially be available for a three month introductory price of €15 per month for those with an existing O2 post-pay voice connection or for new post-pay customers taking a voice connection*. It will be €20 for all other customers. Following the three month promotional period, the monthly cost is €30 (with voice connection*). For all other customers the cost is €40 per month. The USB modem will be priced from €69 (all prices quoted are inclusive of VAT).

I’ll be trialing it this week to see what it’s like. I’m going to try and get clarification on the “occasional usage” line.

Update: So basically 02 are saying, don’t ride the system and everything will be ok. If someone goes over they will be informed if they will be charged if they further go over the cap.

Mark Garavan talks about PR lessons when dealing with the Irish Media. Mark managed PR for the Rossport Five. Everyone should listen to this, be they in PR or lobbying or “other”.

Via Jack Yan is a free download of the fourth edition of the book “Detective Marketing”.

Fun and games as Washington DC madam can now disclose her phone records.

What’s the name of that thing, you know the thingy that does the.. Answers here.

Tims Times moves as well.

Nice article on Green coworking.

Watch two YouTube videos at the same time. Cos that is interesting….

ComReg now have more powers. Will PaddyPower take bets on whether they’ll ever use them?

Meanwhile in Green sellout news (news to me) they are telling their people to vote for FF councillors.

Amiina (to gently ease you into a Monday morning):

Ratatat is a New York City electronic music duo consisting of guitarist Mike Stroud and synthesizer driver and producer Evan Mast. They’re another band playing at Electric Picnic. Their song “Lex” has redefined the summer for me. You know those songs that change everything and tweak the bits of the musical part of your brain that have not been tweaked in that combination before? For me, that was “Lex”.

and here is them playing “Lex” at the Guggenheim Museum:

You can download the tune here.

Thank god someone started taking the piss out of Steorn:

If you like it and would rather this than the real Steorn got the attention, then DIGG it here. This also got mention on Techcrunch.

One of the many bands at Electric Picnic:

I recently went to Lisbon for a week to attend the HP Labs University event. It was an all-expenses paid trip, courtesy of HP. This year was the 10th anniversary and they really looked after the 350 journalists and analysts they brought along. There were 10 talks to choose from over the week and we were told to choose 5. Some were very academic and a bit long. The talks I put myself down to attend were:

• Original HP ink cartridges vs. alternatives.
• Connections: The future of personal computing.
• The reviewers guide to printers.
• Future.
• Inside the HP camera.

I skipped the last one on the last day after hearing a lot of feedback from journalists saying it was mind-numblingly boring and far far too academic. Instead I went to the bar, surfed the net and wrote up my notes on the event. It was pointed out to be afterwards that I skipped the talk. I told them why. 🙂

Highlights:

• Actually liking a 3 hour talk on ink and cartridges. I guess it helped with the enthusiastic HP staff and the funny Germans who did some testing on reseller cartridges and released a survey on it. I’d like to do my own survey here to see how refiled cartridges do. From the tests done by the indepdendent German company, the pageload is way way less and the fade speed is rapid.
• The night out at the Casino, where we never got to gamble but did watch a show that was a bit like Cirque de Soliel.
• Meeting Haydn.
• Meeting Rusty and Simon and other UK journalists.
• Talking tech shite with Kerry Gaffney from Porter Novelli til about 5am on the last night. Kerry could easily give a technology journalist a run for their money with the breadth and depth of her tech knowledge. Very professional and good fun.
• Finding myself having immense fun at a big massive samba thingy in an ampitheatre. I made noise by shaking something. I rocked.
• The “Future” talk where HP demonstrated the MScape technology, Pluribus and other stuff that is still NDA’d. I’ll blog about these in other blog posts in the next while.

Flickr set from event.

Were I HP, next time I’d cut the talks down a bit more and do a little more practical stuff and less on the mathematics behind some stuff. I’d also include some “unconference” type talks where it basically is a group discussion. They have 350 technology journos captive, it would be good to get their collective intelligence to do more than write up the event. See what their thoughts on future trends are, for example. All in all it was worth going to and hopefully we’ll see more Irish journalists there next time.

The Blakeotron has some nice pics of the Letterkenny skate park.

Annie has moved too.

Maybe we should go back to paper, if all our data is stored on weird tapes and devices?

With AllofMP3 gone, here are some alternatives.

Bill Gates saves the gays, again.

Via Una is the Mentos Intern. Oddly addictive.

Via Loic Le Meur, Jyri Engeström from Jaiku at MoMo Amsterdam. I saw this young guy around Reboot minding his kid, little did I realise he was one of the Jaiku founders:Absolutely terrifying BASE jumping video:

Conor has started a discussion about running an initiative to get college grads to start their own startups with financial help and help from experienced people:

• Every summer we run a Hothouse in one/more of the colleges
• It is open to those who graduate that summer or the following summer
• 10 weeks long
• Build something you can demo
• You’ll have subsistence money to live/eat
• A limited company will be formed for you and all legals/IP taken care of
• You’ll get introductions to everyone you need to help you get the thing built
• You present your product at the end

This model works well in other countries.

Alan O’Rourke has also added his comments to this:

My proposal is to take a group of students from varying disciplines and combine them into a well rounded business group, give them space and a basic support wage and let then run at a project for the 3 summer months.

Its an idea heavily inspired by Joel of FogCreak software and their development of CoPilot.

A group of 3 students, consisting of a developer, a designer, a marketing person.

For me, there definitely needs to be a mix of business and techies for these startups. Not insulting tech people but you also need to be a shark to survive and I think that’s the issue with many startups. You need someone that dreams of swimming in a sea of money and not about efficient code. You need someone that will go out and be all about taking money off people whether you have a great product or a fantastic one.

Dennis Deery too has some comments too.

Let’s keep this going.