… I’m off! Effectively what happened yesterday with respect to Fianna Fail TD Ned O’Keefe when he was told in true Fianna Fail democratic style to vote the same way as the party had chosen to and not express his own views. The context: Yesterday Mary Harney faced a vote of no confidence with respect to her position as health minister. Ned O’Keefe was openly critical of the government for failing to provide a good health system and was in favour of change. He was told however that the party stance was that they would support Harney and that he would have to tow the line. The result: For the first time that I can recall right now, a Fianna Fail politician has shown that he has a mind of his own. Ned chose to resign his position in the government rather than put up with the nonsense party politics that avoid any change at all. Fair play Ned, sorry to hear that your own party wouldn’t stand by you but nice to know that you stood by your views and didn’t buckle under the lack of democracy in Fianna Fail.

I recently heard some discussion about a new book by Diarmaid Ferriter, entitled “Judging Dev” that is being forced into the secondary school curriculum this year by the Department of Education. One of the key components in Ferriter’s undertaking was supposedly to deconstruct the sometimes harsh character of Eamon de Valera, Ireland’s well-known figure from the revolutionary times surrounding 1916. By all accounts, the book is supposedly a very good piece of work and worth a read. I really must get a copy myself to check it out. However, what I would have issue with is that this book, although using original documents and photos is very obviously set out to tell a one-sided story of the life of one of Ireland’s more controversial politicians and presidents. My question: Is it right to enforce this literature upon students when there is no interpretation to be done. Here we have a written artefact that conveys a very serious message to students, possibly contradicting sources read elsewhere and it becomes a compulsory piece of course material. I worry moreso that this work has been brought in by a Fianna Fail government who, no doubt, wouldn’t mind a different historical perspective on Dev being instilled in young minds. Personally I’m all for the inclusion of proper literature into the education curriculum but I don’t think that openly one-sided accounts of a person’s life should be allowed without contrasting material. Any chance of a book on Collins, Minister?

It would appear, from this Reg article, that the iPhone-omenon that swept the US earlier this year is not translating similarly across this side of the pond. I have to say that I’m not totally surprised by that news. Any uber-geek that really wanted an iPhone before it was released recently in the UK probably already has one. Anyone else probably isn’t that bothered. The article goes on to say that perhaps lots of units were bought as presents? If so, then what a miserable failing of a new product launch, that people didn’t even want to buy them for themselves. The problem is that the US loves Apple, it’s Mom’s home-made apple pie. People love the idea of being seen with something sexy like their movie star counterparts and the iPhone fits that bill. Lots of people who subscribe to American ideals have iPhones too and then there is the other group of genuine enthusiasts. For me, the iPhone will never be a good idea until such time that pocket-sized nuclear power stations become available to power the device and even then I’ll have issue with needing Sellafield slacks to carry a media player and a phone when I can already do that without contract fees, without much inconvenience, and without any lesser experience. Mobile phones are like Hollywood movies, there’s a new one every month and only the really good ones will last and be remembered for their hugely successful box office takings not for gradually gaining ground. People in the UK and Ireland enjoy style and more importantly function. Both of these are already being met without the need for outrageous contracts and I can’t see many being lured into such when they can carry an iPod Touch with their preferred phone. source: Reg Hardware

I’ve had a Maxtor 300GB NAS drive for a few years now, serving as a back-up solution and also a samba share for my digital music files and videos. I recently saw somebody else’s NAS solution, a DLink DNS-323 with RAID options for the two drives that it holds it also boasted an iTunes server that got me thinking and a little jealous.

Then I started thinking more about how nice a touch screen would be in my study to control my media library and be able to relax while reading a book or kicking back after a tough day. Sadly a 17″ touch screen is coming in at about Eur 550 and I don’t really want to go that far in terms of expense. So, a thought came to me, my iPod Touch; what a perfect solution! I could dock it and connect a decent set of speakers, use my uPnP DAAP server to remove the 16GB storage limit of the iPod and play all my content. I could move it about the house with me, use it as an entertainment unit when guests are around and never have to worry about copying content from place to place. Sadly Apple haven’t yet enabled the iTunes software on the Touch to be like the desktop client and you can’t connect to network shares. So, please, please, please Apple, please release a firmware update with an iTunes client for the Touch that allows the discovery and connection to network DAAP shares. It would certainly be the icing on a very nice media cake.

Today was one of those Sundays when I just didn’t feel like doing anything at all. So I plonked myself in front of the TV and watched brainless shows for a while. As it happened, this braindead activity lead to a thought provoking moment. I was watching a music channel and they were playing videos of heavy metal from the 80′s G’n'R, Bon Jovi, etc. As I watched, I wondered; as a child of the 80′s I grew up with a leaning toward the heavy metal bands of the time and remembered that this was devil music, the stuff you’d hide from your folks unless you really wanted to rebel against something. Listening to it this morning I wondered why my folks and other’s thought that this music was that bad? Maybe we have become so desensitised by modern viewing and listening that it no longer seems avant-garde; perhaps there are too many other things, far worse, that neutralise our viewpoint. Paul Watson wrote something similar a while back regarding dance music and our generation but I wonder, in the same vane, will the nursing homes of our latter years be playing the rock anthems that signified rebellion and devil worshipping, or so we were told?

A few days ago I was very happy to finally return to using Safari as my main browser on OSX. A few days on there are still things that are upsetting me about it and which I wish Apple would fix as it has to be simple enough to do so.

… or is their latest patent just a wind-up? According to this article in the Reg’s Hardware site, Nokia have lodged a patent for a device that looks somewhat similar to the famed Sidekick communicator that every celebrity under the sun has. However, the laterally sliding screen on this device is slipped into one of two positions by the use of a rather archaic turn-screw type appendage at the end of the phone. The latch-like mechanism slots the screen into two different positions where different features are available, e.g. photo cam vs video cam. Underneath the sliding display is of course the expected keyboard, in QWERTY format for all those who learned how to type with two fingers. It’s certainly an interesting idea… source: Reg Hardware

Just noticed by accident that Google Docs now works in Safari on the Mac, or at least in version 3 of Safari. I know that it didn’t work in version 2 up until a few weeks back but can anyone still running v2 confirm this? Safari 3 is really matching up to what I want from a browser now. However, there are a few small bugbears. For example, GMail doesn’t seem to update automatically any more, i.e. I have to click my inbox link again to see if I have new mail, in addition when I get new mail or read all mail the title bar in the browser doesn’t appear to update to say that I have no more messages, etc. Not really that much of an issue but it’s the little things…

Yes, the layout of the blog has changed again for the second time this year. When I moved server and upgraded to the latest version of MovableType 4 I discovered that there were a few changes in the template structure that would have required a few changes on my behalf. So, I decided to be lazy and use one of the many styles from the Stylecatcher plugin instead. Perhaps that will change in time to come. Also the old template that I hacked together was getting a little cluttered and this one looks a little fresher; maybe just because it’s new? Anyway if anyone notices any problems please let me know. Thanks!

Greetings, I’m back writing again after a wee break of moving server with the site. Took me a while to set everything up again and I’ve noticed that I have one or two folk I need to reply to. Apologies for the delay. Anyhow to get the ball rolling on a new era: I see that the good people at Apple have decided that the non-Beta version of Safari 3 should not be contained purely within Leopard and have released the browser upgrade in the OSX update 10.4.11, available now. I have resisted temptation to try out the Beta til now but having just upgraded I have to say that my needs have finally been met. The spellchecker is built into the text fields now, resizable text fields are pretty cool and finally I can bookmark a collection of tabs so that I don’t have to go opening them all again (it’s a pity they didn’t extend this to session management though – Apple are you listening?). However, all in all it looks pretty good and us Tiger folk who haven’t yet splashed out on Leopard can enjoy at least one of the spoils of Leopard life in our procrastination.