Tom Doyle :: TALK

This year, my ultimate Christmas present was a Blu-ray player. However, with the average price of a decent Blu-Ray player being around €300, I thought it might as well get a bit more bang for my book and go for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) which cost only €360 (from play.com).

I had loads of plans on what I’d do with it when I got it. I really wanted the new PS3 to become my media centre, where I could utilise all of the many media files I have on my computer. My first plan of attack was to do the most nerdy thing and install Linux on the PlayStation. After I did this, I realised that it was a pretty poor way of doing things as it runs quite slow.

What I really needed was something simple that could play all the files I have on my computer. After much searching I found a great little program called TVersity.

TVersity is a free program that acts as a media server and can be easily accessed from your PlayStation 3. The beauty of this software package is that if the file you want to play from your computer is not supported by the PS3 natively, TVersity will convert and stream it to the PlayStation in a supported format. I tested streaming an 8gb MKV file over my local wireless network and it worked seamlessly.

Not only can you stream your local files, you can also set up RSS feeds such as YouTube for example, and access them from your PlayStation with ease.

If you, like me, needs something to get use out of their HD TV, download TVersity, hook it up with your PlayStation and enjoy the fun!

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From the 1st of January 2009 anyone planning to rent or sell their property will be expected to have a Building Energy Rating certificate. However there is much debate whether you need one if your property has been for rent or sale prior to the 1st of January 2009.

According to CJ Walsh (Architect & Fire Engineer), you only require a BER cert if your property has been up for rent or sale after the introduction date. This means we can ignore all the marketing blurb feed to us by the BER rating people that sell us a doomsday scenario if we don’t have one.

So before you go wasting any money, make sure you get some sound advice…

In a half time interview on Setanta Sports, Graham Poll admitted that premiership referees give preferential treatment to top players where big decisions are concerned. Commenting after John Terry was given a straight red for a rash tackle on Everton’s Leon Osman in the Everton versus Chelsea Premiership game, when asked “surely everyone should be treated the same, whether he is England Captain or a 17 year old playing his first game”, Graham Poll said:

“In theory Yes, but in practice no, because you know that there is other stuff that comes with it.”

For years fans of premiership football have been hugely frustrated with the referees inconsistency in terms of their decision making in games, whether big or small. Well know we know why. Referee’s have been for years claiming that it’#s never their fault, but come on, this surely isn’t a healthy situation and something that the FA should take a serious look at now after this claim by one of their past “great” referees.

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It was reported today that there was a growing concern that Dell plan to axe 2,000 jobs in it’s plant in Limerick, Ireland. In a last ditched attempt by our government officials, Mary Coughlan and Willie O’Dea travelled to Texas to meet with Dell executives. Dell have confirmed that with falling demand, they are likely to go ahead with cost cuts.

Time will tell, but it looks like the writing is on the wall…..

http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/1221/dell.html

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We’re finishing up today, so it’s very unlikely that I’ll get a chance to post again until we return.

So Happy Christmas to you all and best wishes for the New Year!

Today was the day that we sent out our lovely Christmas Card…. ahhhhh…..

Anyway, one thing I had to do was scour through my contacts in Outlook to find the people I needed to send the card too. Unfortunately for me, I never use the contacts storing feature in Outlook. I’m a fan of the inbuilt email contacts history, you know the one, you start typing a.. and it will automatically complete the rest for you, just like your browser address bar. I don’t know where I’d be without it.

But of course, this is useless when you are sending mass emails. After you’ve added one address, you’ve to go back to the start all over again and scroll until you find your next target.

I thought, “there had to be an easier way to do this” and as you would expect a quick search on google - “LET ME GOOGLE THAT FOR YOU” - and there it was…. NK2.info

You have to locate your latest .NK2 file on your PC (a search for *.nk2 should find it for you). Once located, you can open it with the NK2.info program and export your contacts to a CSV file.

I did notice though after using this program, my autocomplete in Outlook now has most contacts email addresses all in uppercase. Nothing worth complaining about though, it saved me hours of work at the end of the day!

Google, the foundation who were once proud of the fact that their software relied totally on a democratic process in the form of their algorithm to display to the top sites on the web, open the doors for a future that may not be so “democratic”.

Marissa Mayer stated in an interview:

“Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.”

So is she saying that sometime in the near future, Google’s staff will decide who should be on top?
To it looks like they will manipulate the search results to favour what they believe should be top of the pile.

You could argue that this is what their software already does although in a very complex manner. Basing their algorithm on a link popularity score, meant it was easily manipulated by SEOs across the world. But do they really need to make this a manual process?

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Another major bug has been found in IE, enough to make Microsoft issue a “brown alert”.

You can find out more about the vunerability here >>

You can also take the US Cert’s adive on preventing yourself from being vunerable at http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/493881

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So it looks like we’re off again, the Government looks set to ask us to go to the polls again and vote on ratifying the Lisbon Treaty.

What’s different you may ask? Well it hasn’t been officially announced yet, but so far it looks like it’s just going to containt a set of declarations but not actually change a single paragraph of the Treaty.

Surely no-one is going to be fooled by this move, are they???

According to recent polls, it looks like they will. It will be a sad day for democracy if this goes through. Obviously “no” means nothing to the Government this country elected…

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As I continue to search for Christmas presents online, I have to admit I still get quite frustrated with Irish retailers online.

Over the weekend I search for an online jewelry store to purchase a gift for my mother. Instantly I was bombarded with jewelry websites that I can only say have been “left behind” in terms of the Internet. It was extremely difficult to find any decent Irish jewelry shop where searching.

I did find one that looked like it did everything I was looking for - the famous House of Ireland store. Everything looked good for a while as I browsed through the site, there was plenty of choice unlike other sites I had visited. One thing stroke me though, the prices were displayed in US Dollars by default. As their shop in Dublin is hugely targeted at the US tourists, I thought, ah no big deal, I’ll just choose Euros from the drop down menu.

After doing this, I noticed the price difference was staggering. A Waterford Crystal vase was $260, but when converted to euro it was a huge €240. With today’s exchange rate, it should have been in the €200-205 price bracket. I assume the difference in price is because they have displayed the dollar price minus the VAT and when you change to euros, it instantly adds the VAT price on. This is all well and good if they didn’t display dollar prices by default.

From a tachnical point of view, there is quite a lot they can do to prevent this sort of confusion for the customer. IP location software is widely available on the Internet, it would have taken a programmer a few hours to display the currency based on the customers location. Not 100% reliable I know, but in most cases would work pretty well.

The site itself is built in some flavour of either osCommerce or Zen Cart. Both of these packages have ready build modules to handle situations like this.

Better still, a simple notification that the dollar price didn’t include VAT would also prevent people from getting suspicious in the difference in price.

All in all - it looks like there really are no decent Irish Jewelry stores online. If you know of one, please let me know!

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