Tagged "internet"

Visit to CERN

I am currently in Switzerland on a business trip. In between work, I managed to get some time over the Swiss national holiday to visit the CERN. CERN is world famous for the invention of WWW and of course most recently, the almost certainty that the Higgs Boson (aka. “The God Particle”) - the particle that gives energy mass - exists. The CERN tour is completely free and highly recommended. I visited the Atlas experiment with a colleague (who just so happened to have a Phd.

All About Platforms

If your passion is in technology, you often sigh with the marketing buzzwords used in sales. Cloud Computing doesn’t actually mean anything specific (or could mean a lot of things). It’s that a lot of things to a lot of people who makes it useful as a term, an ideology, a way of explaining why you-oh-so-need-to-do-this-now. Cloud computing for me is a platform description. I think of the myriad of hosting companies who offer a platform to build your service atop.

Research proves video games lack harm

I am not a big gamer; I primarily love systems and how they work. I do own a PS3 (amazing hardware I might add) and I prefer FPS and generally devious natured video games (like the GTA franchise). Does that make me a bad person who wants to kill people? Of course not; nothing could be further from the truth. But some people stick their fingers in their ears and shout “LA LA LA Columbine LALALA Terrorists LALALA Violent Video Games!

Geek Thug - "I Had to Beat Up a Girl"

I just read one of the most informative and insightful blog posts of my entire life. Half serious a guy takes a look back at when he had to beat up a Girl. Weird stuff! Yes, you read that right, I had to beat up a girl … not a woman. She was asking for it and she deserved it. I Had to Beat Up a Girl

Nokia N810 Tablet to hit the shops soon...

Nokia have announced an upgrade to the N800 Internet tablet, called the N810. I suspect its called that because it is more of an incremental upgrade than a total visual refresh it was going from an Nokia 770 to N800. Here it is: (Picture Courtesy: Internet Tablet Talk) It sports a nice new hardware keyboard; inbuilt GPS (For satellite mapping) and OS 2008 (an upgrade to the operating system it runs).

Microsoft settles with Eolas over Internet Explorer

Microsoft has settled with Eolas over a number of patents regarding browser plugins which chicago based Eolas filed patents for in 1998. A jury in Chicago then found Microsoft guilty of infringing on Eolas’ patents and was told to pay $521m US Dollars in ‘damages’. That ruling was overturned and a fresh trial ordered which was due to start very soon, but it seems Microsoft has decided to pay out:

Updates and New look

Just a note on the new look, hope you like it. I am very fortunate to be running Wordpress, the world’s best blogging tool (and it is open source). I looked up the fabulous theme site to go with it, and I came across this one and liked it very much. The last design was my own, but I had awful trouble implementing to look the same in all browsers (especially Internet Explorer, even the latest one, argh).

My Plan to Digitise my past, for the future

I am embarking on a journey I believe everyone should: digitise as much photo, video and documents you can. It serves as a record of your existance, a guide to people of what your life was like. Why? is the most obvious question you might ask. Well I will tell you what prompted me, which is the culmination of a lot of different things. This brings me to the first reason: Television.

BBC to host Multi-OS Debate and My First Web Auction

BBC are putting together a Mac, Windows and Linux user, to debate the pros and cons of being a users for each operating system. While this in itself is good news (more airtime for alternatives), most of the comments are highly in favour of Linux, then Mac and lastly Windows. This is part of the BBC’s coverage of Windows Vista. My hope for the future is that Mac and Linux gain at least 10% each (20% total) over the next 5 years of the home desktop market, as this will push innovation forward, like AMD and Intel competition.

Free Domain name off AOL, too good to be true?

AOL, the longtime dialup king, who esperate to keep customers at its’ site who have switched to broadband, is offering free dot com and dot net domains. There are a few caches however, one must be in possession of a US mobile phone (cell) number. Luckily I have a cousin stateside willing to help out ;-) . I got to register NeilGrogan.com (My actual name) which I hadn’t bothered with before.

Home made server...

I managed after ages of trying hard, to get my NAT transverse to work :-) !! This means the computer sitting in my house should be reachable worldwide at dueyfinster.com. It’s login screen is from Ampache music center, a php+mysql solution to a large music catalogue such as mine. It means (for those who can login :-) ) that my whole collection is streamable, downloadable, rateable and generally all round goodness and what you’d expect from a top class open source media+web application!

IEDR too stringent? Sorry about my email!

We all want to stop spam and phishing domains, it hurts the Internet and confidence in it. Their is a lot of debate on this issue, even from the registrars. But I believe, as I know there are probably many out their like me, that the Irish Domain Registry have taken this one step too far. One only has to look to Slashdot to see what the rest of the world thinks about our backwards, censorship-driven domain registry.

Wiki, Awards and Wifi

Well the last couple of weeks have been interesting! You will notice the website is now a wiki based on Wikipedias engine, metawiki. I had a load of problems with making the theme work with a wiki with loads of menus. I think I did well considering I only spent about 3 days doing it. The code still aint how I want it and some features were lost, such as rss and del.