Well my beloved Man United have done it again! Well done lads!!!
In a tightly fought competition they came out on top again to win the league by 2 points. That’s another item of my new year predictions 
TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay $110m the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) for failing to hand over logs on the activity of users of their website.
The landmark ruling will send shockwaves to the thousands of small torrent search websites and maybe even some of the larger ones that offer a similar service to the one TorrentSpy offered before it shutdown in March of this year.
TorrentSpy in effect, was nothing more than a torrent search engine. It never held or stored any copyrighted material on it’s server. However, it did allow users easily find copyrighted material.
So in effect, TorrentSpy has been sued because it “linked” to copyrighted material, something that Google, Yahoo! and MSN do all the time with their search engine.
A simple search on Google will give you “links” to millions of copyrighted material. Here’s a very simple example of this http://www.google.ie/search?q=intitle%3a%22index+of%22+eminem
Why don’t the MPAA doing anything about this? Is the muscle behind the larger corporates a bridge to far for them to fight in their war against copyright infringement??
A friend of mine just recently completed his driving test. Luckily for him, he passed, but just about. One of the bad marks he received that had him close to failing was for “misleading”. He received the bad mark for thanking someone for letting him out of a junction. It was misleading of him to do this according to the driving test.
I was aware of not being allowed to do this when I did the test myself, but just hearing that he was close to failing the test for this, really got me thinking about it.
The test for me has always been about making us drive like robots. In reality, the only time people drive like this is in the driving test. If everyone went around not thanking people with gestures for common road courtesy, what would road rage be like then?
I don’t usually do this, but since someone else is blogging about a (so far) successful campaign that we were involved in, I thought “what the heck?”.
So here it is - Blue Sky Mortgages Ireland - Number 2 on Google.ie for “Mortgages”. Now if I’m honest, I’m not 100% convinced the latest Google SERPs are going to last that long - so while it’s there, lets talk about it! 
I’ve talked before about the importance of a web designers role in the proper preparation for search engines when designing a website and to be honest our job would not have been easy if it wasn’t for the work of David Behan.
David designed the site perfectly, not only from look and feel, but also from it’s preparation for the search engines. If every site was designed in this way, we wouldn’t have much work!
Of course there was always the consultation and strategising, but the on-site work was mostly already done. So well done David, we need a few more like you in the industry!
Well aren’t you happy you are not living and paying tax in Italy right now?
In an act that can only be called a case of ’sour grapes’, Italy’s outgoing government published every Italians declared income and contributions on the Internet.
Ever since NTL decided to cancel their airing of Scuzz TV music channel, I have been listening to the terrible so called Rock music that Kerrang say they play… whatever…
So if I wanted to hear any new bands or the last rock track, I had to visit the Scuzz TV website and check out the latest videos they were playing. This didn’t really suit me, I’m not the type to constantly log on to my website, that’s what RSS feeds are for. Unfortunately, Scuzz TV don’t have an RSS feed, so I set myself the task of trying to generate one externally from their website.
I came across a few services that provided you with the ability to take a website and generate your own RSS feed from any website on the web. Unfortunately some of the cooler ones such as Dapper didn’t do a very good job of the Scuzz TV website.
For a techie, the best one I came across was Feed43.com. It’s not a pretty interface and would probably frighten off most joe soaps, but from a developers point of view, it’s pretty neat.
So for those of you that want some heavy rock music right to your RSS feed reader - here’s one I made earlier http://feed43.com/0078156555271608.xml :)
Just something that annoyed me this morning while cycling to work listening to NewsTalk 106 and I have to get it out!
Fiona Neary, executive director of the Rape Crisis Network Ireland was being interviewed in relation to the statutory rape case where a Donegal teenager (15 year old) is being charged with raping a 14 year old girl. The Donegal lad is claiming discrimination because of his gender, in that it was consensual sex and he wonders why the girl is not also being charged.
Granted, it wasn’t fair to be asked about an individual case in her interview, when put to her if she thought it was fair for the law to discriminate by gender in the case of statutory rape, she simply sat on the fence and avoided answering the question.
Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting her to agree or disagree with it, but to blatantly ignore the question just annoys me. Surely we should expect someone in this role to have some sort of opinion on the law. Surely she either disagrees or agrees that there is something not right with the current law.
Just my two cents anyway!
It’s all about getting the simple things right in my opinion. And the simple things is where Windows Vista seems to be falling down.
I tried to unzip a 5mb file today, Vista told me it would take 20 mins and after 5 mins waiting, I believed it.
So I went off and downloaded and installed 7-zip (www.7-zip.org) and that unzipped it within 50 seconds, which was still quicker than waiting on Windows Vista to do the job.
There’s something wrong with your unzipper in Vista Mr. Microsoft!
EDIT: Oh and for those of you who would prefer not to install 7zip or another compression tool, aparrently if you disable the “Superfetch” service in Windows, it will work faster. The theory is that it is slow because Vista is trying to index the files.
I wrote an article back in December of 2006 about how I was overcharged by BT for my broadband and total talk package that I signed up for at the end of that year.
In that article I mentioned that I would keep an eye on my bills to make sure they weren’t trying to overcharge me again. Well, I didn’t and yet again I have been deceived.
Since signing up for the BT Broadband & Total Talk package, I should have only been charged for calls made to mobiles, international calls and any calls that went over 59 minutes. All landline calls to Ireland and the UK are supposed to be free (once not longer than 59 mins).
After the mess the made of billing me when I opened the account, I didn’t think I could possibly be stung again. But low and behold, I have. Like a sucker with too much money to care, I didn’t even bother keeping an eye on my bill. Since I use my mobile most of time, it’s very rare that I’d make a call from home. So when I got a bill for over €100 I thought I’d check just to see what I was wasting my money on.
It turns out that BT were charging me for calls to Ireland and the UK, when they weren’t supposed to be.
But that’s not my issue, mistakes happen all the time. But when you email a support email address and the person at the end refuses to acknowledge an issue and puts the blame back on me, I have a problem with that.
I emailed BT support and a girl responded a day later telling me what I already knew, that the charges were for calls to Ireland and the UK. In my responding email, I told her I was aware of this, but that I shouldn’t be charged for this as I was on the Total Talk package. A day later, the response comes back that I am not in fact on the Total Talk package. And she pointed out that I was in fact on the Talk option, not the Total Talk.
I responded and said that this was obviously an error since I had always been on the Total Talk package from the day I signed up. I also noted that the amount I was being carged was in fact for the Total Talk package which is €47.50 a month and not the €39 a month that the Talk package is charged at.
She responded another day later to say “I can confirm that you are not being charged for the Total Talk package”. As simple as that - in her eyes, the case was closed.
So, on to the phone I go and try to talk to someone as I clearly was getting nowhere with the email support. However, when I rang, the girl at the end of the phone refused to talk to me about the issue because I had been using the email support - have you ever heard such utter madness???
Anyway, I got a bit annoyed with her, which I tend not to and all she could was tell her supervisor who was supposed to have rang me by now… but yet again, still no response.
I’ll keep you posted on the outcome - but so far, it’s not looking very positive!
This one takes a while to get to the best bits, but it’s definitely worth the watch. I just can’t wait to see games (not that I’m a mad gamer or anything) that are developed using this technology!
Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote
All this software is developed by Johnny Lee. Nintendo should really hire this guy… http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
