Archive

Live Maps Bird’s Eye now includes (some) Irish towns

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/3/2008
in Microsoft and maps
. 4 Comments

Via Clare Dillon the Virtual Earth blog and Martha Rotter on Twitter I spotted that Microsoft’s Live Maps now includes images of Cork, Galway, Carlow, Limerick, Navan & Wexford - cool!

The Bird’s Eye button becomes active when you are over an area that Microsoft has detailed aerial imagery of.

The image below is of Cork City Hall. You can rotate and zoom to see it from other angles and sizes! Way cool.

Live Maps Bird's Eye view of Cork City Hall

According to Clare’s blog post, Dublin will be up soon as well.

Get off your high horse Ed!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/3/2008
in Browsers, Microsoft and apple
. 24 Comments

There was a big bruhaha on the intertubes over the weekend when Apple ran its software update on Windows and offered the Safari 3.1 browser download as the default selected option.

Now I am not for a second condoning this kind of behaviour. I believe opt-in is the only way to do optional updates, especially when you are adding applications to a users machine.

However, I had to laugh when I saw Ed Bott get all up on his high horse about this. Ed is a Microsoft guy so it was all the more hilarious that he try to grab the moral highground here. In his post he said:

I think Apple is dead wrong in the way it’s gone about using its iPod monopoly to expand its share in another market. Ironically, an excellent model for how this update program should work already exists. It’s called Windows Update, and it embodies all the principles that Apple should follow… The right way to do it involves these four principles

* Opt-in is the only way. The update process should be completely opt-in. The option to deliver software should never be preselected for the user.
* Offer full disclosure. The software company has a responsibility to fully disclose what its software does, and the customer should make the opt-in decision only after being given complete details about how the update process works.
* Offer updates only. Updates should be just that. They should apply only to software that the customer has already chosen to install.
* Don’t mix updates. Updates that are not critical should be delivered through a separate mechanism.

They are good principles, I have no argument with them however Ed offers these principles up as if Microsoft lived by them! Ed, you are dreaming. Microsoft are just as guilty of breaching these principles as Apple. I don’t use Microsoft software much but the last time I tried to update Windows Live Writer my default search engine was changed to Live Search, and I had to opt out or I would have had Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live OneCare installed on my laptop.

Pot kettle black Ed.

WordPress 2.5 RC1 released

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/3/2008
in WordPress
. 7 Comments

I read Matt’s post about the release of a beta version of WordPress 2.5 this morning with great excitement (sad aren’t I?) and immediately downloaded it.

The screenshots Matt put up look great and I can’t wait to try it out.

However, then I had a rare moment of clarity. Waaaait a sec Tom. Let’s not go breaking the site just yet.

Often blog software updates break plugins and occasionally themes. I certainly had difficulties with this site the last time I upgraded.

Let’s not repeat that again in a hurry.

SO if anyone has tried out WordPress 2.5, how is it looking, what are the gotchas and how soon will a painless upgrade be viable?

Del.icio.us rolls out new (Yawn) features!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/3/2008
in social bookmarking
. 0 Comments

Del.icio.us, the original Social Bookmarking site is now starting to look long in the tooth and distinctly jaded beside newcomers such as Ma.gnolia.

However, all is not lost. Despite it seeming that all the innovation was sucked out of Del.icio.us when it was purchased by Yahoo! (what new functionality have they rolled out since the acquisition?), it now appears that Del.icio.us is about to launch a new look to the website and do away with the full-stops!

Seriously though, a site re-design and getting rid of the full-stops is the best they can come up with in terms of feature add? Oh dear!

Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us has just confirmed that I made the right decision to move to you (and use your import tool to bring my Del.icio.us bookmarks with me!).

Microsoft Vista performance issues

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/3/2008
in Vista and Windows
. 10 Comments

Vista is buggy. That much is obvious to anyone who runs it but it has been improving in stability as the patches are rolled out. However it runs extremely slowly too and this became startlingly obvious to me in the last few weeks as I have been testing browsers on different platforms.

It turns out I can run Internet Explorer 8 faster on my older Mac than I can on my newer Vista machine (both 2ghz Intel core duo with 2gb ram)!

When I ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark tests on IE8, it completed the test in 9.9 seconds on my Mac (running XP in Parallels).

However, when I installed Internet Explorer 8 on my Vista laptop, IE8 completed the test in 19,906.4ms.

Vista is more than twice as slow as XP running in Parallels on my Mac.

Vista is a huge embarrassment for Microsoft. They spent a fortune developing it and you speak to any Microsoft employee now and if the topic turns to Vista they get visibly uncomfortable. To the extent that Microsoft are now starting to talk up Windows 7 with Bill Gates calling it a big step forward. It needs to be.

Will Audeo be the Universal Translator?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/3/2008
in Gadgets and hardware
. 2 Comments

A new prototype device, called The Audeo was demonstrated recently (see the video below). The Audeo is a neckband which you can train to read your brain signals and speak what you want to say!

Why would you want to do that? Is this just the gimmick for the world’s laziest person?

Well, in the video, the presenter gives two use cases, the obvious one is for sufferers of Lou Gehrigs disease, or similar who have lost the power of speech. The other, less obvious is if you are in a crowded situation and want to have a confidential phone call (as demonstrated).

The device is still a little rough (it is very slow, and has quite a limited vocabulary) but there is no doubt that it will improve over time.

The first concerns I had when seeing this was, do I really want this device telling everyone what I am thinking? But according to the New Scientist article on The Audeo, this will not be an issue:

Users needn’t worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires “a level above thinking”. Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.

Now, if only they could build translation into it as well, you would have the universal translator. I think in English, and it speaks in the language of my audience! 10 years tops it will happen I reckon!

via Mike

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