2007 July Archive at Tom Raftery’s Social Media

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Archive for July, 2007

Climate change

Published

Tom Raftery

on 11/7/2007

in Global Warming and climate change

. 18 Comments

They had snow the other day in Buenos Aires.

Texas has had one of the wettest June’s on record with Marble Falls getting 18″ of rain overnight!

Australia is suffering from a drought for the last five years which is threatening to destroy 40% of its agricultural output.

The UK has had one of the wettest June’s on record with some people in Hull still unable to return to their homes.

And despite the weather here in Ireland of late, it seems that according to the Met Office, temperatures in Ireland have been gradually climbing for the last 27 years!

And some people still deny that climate change is occurring? Incredible.

Flock 0.9 beta released

Published

Tom Raftery

on 11/7/2007

in Browsers

. 4 Comments

Flock’s latest version of their browser, Flock 0.9 was released this morning and I must say I love the new look.

The integration with sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube is great but there are still a couple of wrinkles to iron out.

For instance, there is a Feeds sidebar. You would imagine that if you are on a site which has a feed, you should be able to drag the site from the address bar to the sidebar and have it added. Not possible.

Also, there was a button on the button bar which, if you dragged an image over it, it opened the uploader for uploading the image to Flickr. That has been moved to the small Flock Toolbar and is easy to miss. It should be possible to add it back to the main toolbar.

I’d like to see some kind of FaceBook and Twitter integration there as well - they are the sites du jour at the minute.

The memory footprint certainly seems to have improved with this release which is good because previous releases were total resource hogs.

The idea of the Web Clipboard is an interesting one. I’ll have to see if I can get into using it.

The built-in blog editor is too bare bones to be of use though. It can’t see your blog categories, for instance. And i can’t get the Media Bar to open on my Mac (it opens fine on my Vaio) - no idea what is going on there.

Overall though, despite the criticisms above, this release is a big improvement and I’ll continue to use Flock (it is my default browser on Mac). Keep up the good work guys.

Video interviewed by Loic

Published

Tom Raftery

on 10/7/2007

in Web 2.0, cix and climate change

. 1 Comment

Loic Le Meur, France’s best known blogger and organiser of the Le Web conference interviewed me recently by Skype Video.

Previously I had panned Loic very publicly for the way he handled the Le Web conference last year. Loic starts this video by asking how he can do better this year. Soliciting people’s opinions is a great start Loic. Loic finished by asking me to be on the advisory board of this year’s Le Web. I’m now on the advisory board of the Le Web conference, the Web 2.0 Expo in Berin and I’m chair of the organising committeeit@cork annual Business in Technology conference. Phew!

For the majority of the interview (from 06:30 onwards) we talked about CIX, how to make data centres carbon neutral (while at the same time facilitating bringing more wind energy onto the national grid!) and the energy efficiency strategies we have designed into the CIX data centre.

I’m going to be printing out the screen grab from this video and using it to scare away the neighbours kids!

Nokia N95 vs E65

Published

Tom Raftery

on 10/7/2007

in Nokia and Telecoms

. 6 Comments

Well, I handed back my review model Nokia N95 yesterday and already I miss it. Paul Giltinan from Choice Communications was good enough to lend it to me to try out for a number of weeks. Now though I am back to my trusty E65. Sniff!

Here are a few quick thoughts on the N95 and how it compares to the E65

Likes

The screen
The 5mp camera
The built-in Wifi

Dislikes

The keypad
The battery
The GPS

Slightly more detail:

The screen on the N95 is fantastic. It is big and can display in either landscape or portrait. The E65’s screen has the same resolution but is much smaller so it doesn’t look nearly as impressive.

The camera in the E65 is appalling, as I have already noted and while the N95 camera is slow (press the button, count to 10, *click*), the quality of the photos and video from it are impressive.

The built-in wifi is great in both the E65 and the N95. The screen on the N95 is big enough that you can actually browse web pages on it. The E65’s screen is a bit too small for that. Both phones are great for VOIP client software and where I live in Cobh, the call quality over wifi is significantly better than the expensive GSM alternative!

The Keypad on the N95 has a tacky, plasticky cheap feel to it that took some getting used to and was unexpected in a phone of its cost. The E65’s keyboard is more crisp and reassuring.

The battery life on the N95 has been panned but I didn’t find it too bad. It will quite easily go a full day on a charge so I used to simply charge it overnight and I rarely had problems. The times I did have problems were when I installed and used Fring on the phone. It completley sucked the life out of the battery (esp on 3g). If you have an N95, don’t install Fring, unless you have spare batteries or plan to keep it plugged into a power source at all times.

I never got the GPS software on the phone to see a satellite (or satellites) so I can’t comment on how this would work. Having said that, the fact that I couldn’t get it to see a satellite at all should be comment enough!

As a quick aside, I also tried installing the Jaiku mobile client on the N95 but for some reason it wouldn’t connect over wifi and wanted to connect over 3G. At the data prices in this country, I don’t think so. Uninstalled.

So would I, given the choice, put my money down for an N95? If cost were no object yes, but given that I already have the E65 and there is little between them in turns of functionality, there is no way I could justify buying one now.

Interestingly, the part of the phone which appeals to me most is the big screen and this is the feature of the iPhone which people seem to love too.

Unseemly haste in Vista SP1 a sign of desperation?

Published

Tom Raftery

on 9/7/2007

in Vista and Windows

. 2 Comments

I came across two Vista related stories on Techmeme this morning.

The first from Ken Fisher on Ars Technica, talks about how Microsoft’s OEM partners are struggling with the number of customers who want to downgrade their computers from Vista to XP. Ken goes on to state

the “must wait for Service Pack 1″ meme is also so firmly established that Vista uptake will continue to be soft among businesses for quite some time, certainly into early 2008 when we expect to see Vista’s first service pack

Then I read Mary Jo Foley’s story about how Vista’s first service pack (SP1) will be released in Beta next week and released to the public in November after an unusually short testing time of four months (previous service packs have taken up to a year in Beta before being released).

According to Mary Jo,

hereâ€™s a list of other fixes likely to make it in:

* Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines (Yeah, I know Microsoft said Viista shutdown speed wasnâ€™t an issue. Guess users werenâ€™t so crazy, after all.)
* Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
* Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
* Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
* The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
* Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

Two things occur to me
1. The haste to get SP1 out the door seems to speak to nervousness on Microsoft’s part about Vista sales. No surprise there. Vista is still quite buggy and
2. If SP1 is rushed out the door, there is the possibility that bugs will be introduced by SP1 which will further erode confidence in Vista!

Microsoft need to tread quite carefully on this one.