Technology Blog

I don’t know what’s going on with An Post, the Irish postal service, these days — I’ve been having some
pretty bad luck with them.

For my birthday, I was lucky enough to be given a
Thingamagoop — it took a while (hey, they’re
hand-made) but was shipped on Nov 7th from the US. Bleep Labs accidentally shipped me two,
apparently, but only one has arrived — on Nov 16th, 9 days after shipping. The other one’s still AWOL nearly a month later.

I then ordered something from Sendit.com on Nov 17th,
as a birthday gift for Nov 30th. It was shipped from their Belfast offices on
Nov 18th, and still hasn’t arrived to date. Sendit were champs, however, and
refunded the purchase as soon as I rang them on the 30th (I’d recommend
their services, no problem).

Finally, SpamAssassin was lucky
enough to win a Linux New
Media Award 2006 for ‘Best Linux-based Anti-spam Solution’ — nifty! As part of this, a (physical) trophy is apparently winging its way from Germany, and was apparently shipped on November 27th. Guess what: no sign.

In other words, in the past month, 75% of the parcels sent to me seem to have gone AWOL. All I can do is hope that they’ve just been delayed, rather than suffer a worse fate. In particular, I hope that trophy turns up — it’s the only physical award we’ve ever received

Can anyone think of a good avenue to track these down? The website seems pretty negative, and what I’ve heard seems to be along the lines of ‘turn up at the sorting depot, cross your fingers, and see if they’ve been misdelivered’. Ick.

Tags:an post dublin ireland post

This post was written by Justin, source: An Post: 75% lost-parcels rate so far

Well, that was quick!

Right after posting this, I hear about Labour’s new transport strategy for Dublin. Here’s the top 3 items:

• Labour will increase the Dublin Bus fleet by 50% (500 buses), significantly increasing frequency and reducing waiting times.

• Will complete the Quality Bus Corridors, and greatly reduce journey times.

• Will introduce a EUR 1 per-trip fare for adults and a 50c per-trip fare for children.

The flat-rate fee structure makes a lot more sense than the confusing and
rip-off-ish current model, whereby if you don’t know in advance how much a
particular journey is going to cost, you’re given a useless receipt instead of
change. This wierd and rip-off-ish policy has certainly stopped me from
catching buses in the past. In general, flat-rate pricing models appear to encourage use in other fields. And the increase in the fleet is obviously a fantastic idea. Fantastic stuff!

Read the full policy paper here (as a PDF).

Tags:dublin ireland labour politics public transport

This post was written by Justin, source: Labour’s flat-rate bus tickets

Via Lean comes this, I think from the Irish Times:

One-half of Dublin drivers would never use bus - survey

One-half of all car drivers in the greater Dublin area say they would not
switch to travelling by bus, even if services were improved, according to a
new survey.

Unreliability, long waiting times and poor connections were cited as the main
reasons for not taking the bus in the survey carried out for the Dublin
Transportation Office (DTO).

As many as four out of five people expressed dissatisfaction with traffic
congestion and access to the Luas.

Just over 35 per cent of those surveyed were satisfied with the quality and
upkeep of roads, and with facilities for cycling. Over one-half said they
were happy with the reliability, frequency and cost of buses.

Almost 2,500 people were interviewed for the survey and a similar number of
travel diaries were compiled. The car is the main form of transport in the
region, used by 45 per cent of respondents. Some 18 per cent relied on the
bus and 16 per cent said walking was their main form of transport. Just 2 per
cent used the Luas more often than other modes of transport, and 3 per cent
used the DART or local train. Two per cent cycled and 1 per cent relied on
taxis.

Of those who said they might switch to the bus, over 60 per cent said more
frequent services was the main change needed. Accurate timetables and stops
closer to destinations were also called for.

Respondents linked transport by car to comfort, convenience and reliability.
In contrast, buses were viewed as being for older people and people with no
other choice. Bus transport was favourably viewed for going out socially and
for being reasonably priced.

The Luas was seen as modern, while DART and train services were viewed as
fast and safe. Cycling and walking were viewed as healthy and environmentally
friendly, but for young people.

Great figures — they sound pretty accurate.

The novelty of being home in a (relatively) bike- and public-transport-friendly
city has worn off for me by now — I’m now more familiar with buses that aren’t
a dumping ground for the homeless and mentally ill, and that do actually tend
to pass both your origin and destination in a single journey. But that was in Orange County, possibly one of the most
public-transit-hostile societies in the developed world, and compared to a more
sane standard, Dublin still has a major problem.

By the way, it’s interesting to note Ireland’s move OC-wards on many fronts.
When I got back, I was shocked to see tubby children being driven to school by
mobile-phone-wielding, SUV-driving parents — the very worst aspects of US
suburban-sprawl life being happily parrotted over here.

Tags:cities cycling dublin life public transport

This post was written by Justin, source: Dublin transport survey

Nat at O’Reilly Radar mentions that Multimap have added a public API . It’s great to see more sites adding public APIs, but sadly, as I note in a comment there, Multimap isn’t any use for me — they, along with Google and Yahoo!, have really crappy Irish mapping. Their geocoders (the part that turns an english-language address into a GIS coordinate pair) are pretty much non-functional for Ireland.

I moved from the US to Ireland earlier this year and found this pretty frustrating, after the joys of using the US mapping sites to get driving directions etc.

Thankfully, another contender has emerged recently — Map24.

They have a great geocoder for Ireland, and very reliable directions, which are even accurate for some of the more baroque one-way-system traffic-management changes that Dublin’s city planning department have come up with recently. The look and feel of the website is a little clunky in Firefox — not as smooth as Google’s — but it has some nice AJAXy touches now and seems to be heading in the right direction.

Interestingly, they now offer a public API for third-party mashups, and even
offer an API for their
geocoder — so
someone preferring the Google look and feel could mash that up, using Map24 to
find the coordinates and Google to display an area map! (Actually, I think that
may be how John Handelaar’s earlier
hack worked
– I note in the comments that he mentions Map24 provide Lycos’ mapping
backend. aha.)

Anyway — Map24 — if you’re looking for a good Irish mapping/driving-directions site, it’ll do the trick.

Tags:directions dublin geocoders google ireland map24 mapping multimap yahoo

This post was written by Justin, source: a plug for Map24

Blurred Keys:
Blogorrah.com - the start of empire building with ‘very few overheads’.
Blurred Keys, “an Irish media blog”, brings the revelation that Blogorrah
“copies” Gawker.com.

Honestly, though, this is blatantly obvious — and I’d consider it unfair to
call this “copying”. It’s simply taking a successful format and adapting it to
the local market, and doing so very well indeed if you ask me.

Blogorrah is a hilarious read. If you’re Irish and you’re not subscribed,
you’re really missing out… it’s the funniest thing on the Irish web these
days.

Tags:blogorrah dublin funny ireland weblogs

This post was written by Justin, source: Blogorrah

Adrian
Weckler posts details of Vodafone Ireland’s new flat price datacard;
costing 50 Euros per month, including VAT; fully flat rate (hooray, something
useful at last!); and they claim that they’ll be rolling out
HSDPA, which offers 1.2Mbps to 11Mbps
rates, ’starting in Dublin in October’.

Those are great numbers, but further info seems thin on the ground; they
haven’t bothered updating their own
website
yet, amazingly.

Anyone got further info? What rates does it offer right now? How would one
order such a beast?

Tags:3g dublin hsdpa ireland mobile vodafone

This post was written by Justin, source: Vodafone Ireland’s flat rate mobile data card

Optimo have a new mix up — the
First Hour Mix:

Here’s the fourth in a brief series of mixes where we present something a
little different. This mix isn’t really a mix in the conventional sense but
rather 17 tracks blended together. To us, the first hour of Optimo, or to be
more accurate, the ‘Espacio’ part of Optimo (Espacio) is a vital part of the
night. It is our chance to play absolutely what we like without thinking
about the dancefloor.

It’s a great mix — certainly not dancy, but some really interesting tracks
here. The Optimo guys put together some really great music.

In fact, I went to see them play last Saturday — or, at least, myself and a
couple of mates tried to. Supposedly, they were supporting The Juan Maclean at the Bud
Rising festival over the weekend, but the show was such a shambles, without
anyone having a clue when it started or who was on stage at any time, I’m
pretty sure we missed their set entirely.

On top of that, it was EUR20 in, and to add insult to injury, the only lager
on sale was Budweiser! I
mean, I wouldn’t mind that if the “Bud Rising Festival” deal meant free
entrance, but charging 20 squids and then cutting off the supply of decent
booze as well, is just a crime.

Ah well, the Filthy
Dukes were pretty good at
least.

bud rising budweiser dublin festivals ireland live music mp3 music optimo sponsorship

This post was written by Justin, source: Optimo vs. Bud Rising

So, now that I’m back in Dublin, I’ve taken a quick look around for ways to
keep up to date on upcoming live gigs — and found that the situation, frankly,
sucks. In particular, almost none of the sites are offering RSS or Atom feeds
yet.

Having said that, Waxy and
Leonard’s Upcoming.org is
doing quite nicely for the Dublin metro
area:

• Upcoming.org: Dublin Events

And lots of credit for the promoter, MCD, who seem to be just
about the only Irish listings site who offer RSS:

• MCD.ie News and Events

This is fantastic, but — naturally — they don’t cover events put on by their
competitors.

Apart from that, it’s pretty shoddy. Lots of late-90’s-looking
websites out there, and no feeds in sight. Thankfully, Feed43, and some perl scripting, is on hand to
allow me to take matters into my own hands.

Entertainment Ireland offer a pretty good music news
section — but sans feed. Feed43
saves the day:

• Entertainment Ireland: Music News

And, surprisingly, Ticketmaster, of all sites, is turning out to be a great
way to find out what’s on in Dublin, listing pretty much all ticketed events in
a nice, clean, succinct format. Unfortunately, the highest location resolution
it offers for Ireland is the country as a whole.
However, this can be worked around by subscribing to
individual venues, such as
Crawdaddy
or The Village. (This has a happy
side-effect of narrowing down the types of music — I can skip finding
out that The
Eagles are playing, since they won’t be playing at Crawdaddy

For some reason, though, Ticketmaster haven’t got around to offering their own
RSS feeds. Not a problem — in response I’ve hacked up tm2rss.cgi, a
little script which scrapes the venue pages and produces RSS:

• Ticketmaster: events at The Village
• Ticketmaster: events at Crawdaddy

For other venues, simply take the venue URL (for example,
http://www.ticketmaster.ie/venue/198641 for The Village), add the numeric
venue ID in place of NNNNN in this URL:
http://taint.org/scraped/tm2rss.cgi?v=NNNNN , then use that as the Feed URL in
your feed reader.

atom dublin events feeds gigs ireland listings live music rss syndication

This post was written by Justin, source: RSS Feeds for Events in Dublin

I just received a very nice info-pack through my front door regarding the new
Dublin Metro
line, which is
in planning at the moment; it seems they’re soliciting feedback from residents
near the proposed routes. Nicely done.

Right now, Dublin has an embarrassment of good public transit, at least when
compared to my previous home in Orange County. There, public transit is actively campaigned against.

My favourite claim: that it ‘increases
crime’ — in other words that poor
people from Santa Ana would come down to Irvine and steal stuff, which they
couldn’t do with vehicular transport, for some reason.

The OC Weekly thought
it was pretty funny, too — and an opposing group comprehensively debunked
it. Still, it seemed to work;
while I was living in Irvine, I got to see the Centerline proposal gradually
whittled down until it was finally killed off. During that time, in contrast,
Dublin built the Luas.

Unfortunately it doesn’t exactly go where I want to go, but you can’t always
have everything.

commuting dublin irvine octa ocweekly public transit

This post was written by Justin, source: Public Transit == Crime

Heads-up, Dublin geeks:
Vint Cerf will be speaking at the Dublin Googleplex on Thursday.

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it myself — I had to visit the UK this week. Pity; I would have loved to hear him speak

dublin google lectures vint cerf

This post was written by Justin, source: Vint Cerf speaking at Google on Thursday

While driving around Ireland on a wedding-location-scouting trip, we started receiving texts talking about riots in Dublin; I texted a friend, and got a reply along these lines: “Celtic-topped scobes
run riot through O’Connell St, torching cars in Nassau street, hospitalising cops and Charlie Bird. madness!”

I thought he was joking, but nope. A load of IRA-slogan-shouting scumbags really had been allowed to run riot — with paving stones of all things left unsecured in their midst! — and it quickly got way, way out of hand.

The blog coverage is excellent, with lots of photos. I suggest starting with Indymedia Ireland, these Flickr photos and the links on this weblog. It appears the gardai really fell down on this one.

For what it’s worth, I was in town a few hours later, and the rest of Dublin was trouble-free — just the usual Saturday night goings-on. O’Connell St. was still a rubble-strewn mess when I passed through on Sunday, though.

dublin ireland policing politics riots

This post was written by Justin, source: Dublin Riots

Greetings from sunny Dublin, Ireland! (really!)

I’m now back in taint.org’s native timezone, although precariously set up and
experiencing occasional interruptions. If you’re waiting for a mail from me,
it may take a little more time.

I did have time to be interviewed last week by Karlin
Lillington for this Guardian
story:

To make sure customs agents could read his cat’s chip to match him to his Pet
Passport on return to Europe, Mason bought his own scanner at a cost of some
£200. “I didn’t want to risk the cat being impounded for six months’
quarantine at Heathrow,” he sighs.

It’s true.

Happy to be back — I think. Looking forward to my first pints,
in over a year, of creamy Guinness in its native habitat. I also
have a couple of half-written weblog entries I wrote on the plane,
too…

bubba cat dublin guardian guinness home meta rfid travel

This post was written by Justin, source: RFID in the Grauniad, and back in Dublin

Passing this on for readers in Ireland — this sounds like an interesting event. From the FSFE-IE mailing list:

On the morning of Friday November 18th, IFSO is organising an event hosted by MEP Proinsias De Rossa about preventing software patents in the EU. Topics covered will be:

• An analysis of the software patent directive;
• a discussion of Free Software and computer security;
• an introduction to IFSO/FSFE and their work;
• the future of legislative obstacles to the development and distribution of software.

The event will be held in the European Parliament Office in Ireland, and spaces are limited. Participants are therefore asked to register their intent to attend. See here for more details.

dublin free software fsfe ifso ireland labour open source patents swpats

This post was written by Justin, source: IFSO Seminar In Dublin