Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I mentioned the AOL and user data cock-up a couple of weeks back. Now, according to a story on CNET today, 2 people have been left go from AOL and CTO Maureen Govern has resigned as a result.
For the people whose data was leaked, many of whom were readily identifiable, this will be cold comfort.
I drove to Dublin on Saturday. I had a couple of small jobs to do and I was going to the Blogger meetup in the Market Bar afterwards.
Now I don’t know Dublin well at all so I was mighty relieved when a friend offered me the loan of a Sony GPS unit for the trip. It was the Sony NV-U50 and I would have been literally lost without it!
The user interface could definitely stand some work (it took me a good while to figure out how to get it to plot a course to a destination) but once underway and following its instructions, it brought me to the door of my venues flawlessly. I didn’t even have to think about where I was going.
Who else makes these in-car units and which ones are best (i.e. easiest to use)?
I’d love to take one to Spain in a couple of weeks when we go there on holidays
I was watching the Spanish news on TV this lunchtime and they reported a story about 3 fishermen who were rescued after being adrift at sea for 9 months! Intrigued and not catching all the story ‘cos of my crap Spanish! I Googled it and sure enough the story is well reported.
However, a little further reading unearths some rather unsettling facts. Seemingly,
two other men on the boat had died during the ordeal… the two dead men had hired the other three to make the fishing trip, and denied speculation they may have set out to pick up drugs at sea, a common activity on Mexico’s Pacific coast, which often serves as a transfer point to the United States
Is it just my suspicious mind or does it seem strange that the two men who died were the boat’s owners?
I saw a post on Pat Phelan’s blog today about Steorn which sounded a little incredible, so I looked a little deeper into it.
The background is that an Irish company called Steorn put a full-page ad in the Economist saying:
At Steorn we have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy…. We are therefore issuing a challenge to the scientific community: test our
technology and report your findings to the world.
Full page ads in the Economist don’t come cheap so if this is a hoax, it is an elaborate one!
According to Wikipedia’s entry for Steorn, Sean McCarthy, CEO for Steorn said in an interview with RTE:
What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy, [...] The energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy.”
I hope they prove me wrong but personally I don’t believe a word of it - see the promotional video and judge for yourself.
My hosting company is running two different web stats programs on the log files for this site - Webalizer and Awstats.
Same log files - you’d think they’d come up with something like similar results - not a chance!
In the Webalizer stats I am wildly popular:
Ok, maybe not wildly popular but when you compare the figures with the Awstats results, you can see I am far less popular according to Awstats:
For instance, look at the number of Visits for the month of July (the most recent month for which we have all the data). According to Webalizer this site had 135,352 visits in July whereas Awstats only has 30,035! Look at the number of pages served in July. Webalizer has this site serving 333,461 whereas Awstats has it only serving 178,395.
How can such enormous differences be accounted for? Which one do I believe? I honestly have no idea!
By the way, the peak in May/June has to do with the Web 2.0 controversy!
Catherine Wall of IT@Cork asked me to mention IT@Cork’s upcoming Java event.
Simon Ritter of Sun Microsystems and Adrian Colyer from Interface21 will address developers in the Radisson Hotel, Cork on October 3rd. Simon is a Java Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems. He specialises in looking at emerging technologies including grid computing, Auto-ID, robotics and wearable computing. Adrian is the leader of the AspectJ open source project and a well-known industry expert on the topic of aspect-oriented programming (AOP).
The it@cork member rate is €30 per person and the non member rate is €75 per person. For group bookings and discounts, please email admin@itcork.ie or call 021 2307011.
[Disclosure - I am on the steering committee of IT@Cork]
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