May
28
2007
I mentioned earlier that only one of the candidates (Eric Byrne of Labour) standing in the Dublin South Central constituency in the recent General Election was an active blogger.
Well, it turns out that Byrne just missed out on the fifth seat by a whisker. The incumbent Aengus Ó Snodaigh pipped him by a mere 69 votes on the 10th count. Byrne’s blog hasn’t been updated since Thursday, the day of the election. Hopefully he’ll add another entry with his thoughts on the count. While I wouldn’t be a supporter of his politics, it’s certainly refreshing to see a politician blogging, and actively giving us (the electorate) an insight into what drives him. Let’s hope that more elected TDs take up his example.
A few other observations about this constituency. A couple of the independents managed to do OK, but never really challenged for a seat. Joan Collins (an anti-bin tax candidate) stuck it out the longest – until the 7th count – when she was eliminated with 3362 votes. The collapse of the PD vote nationally was in plenty of evidence here. For some unknown reason, the PDs ran two candidates in Dublin South Central, who, between them, only managed a paltry 923 votes.
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no comments | tags: election | posted in Home
May
28
2007
Read/WriteWeb has just posted an entry about The Semantic Technology Conference that has just finished in San Jose, California.
Looks like the DERI guys were well represented at the event.
It’s a sure sign that things are about to take off in the semantic web world when you have plenty of start-ups working in the space. This area is certainly going to be very interesting over the next few years.
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no comments | tags: deri, semantic, web | posted in Home
May
10
2007
In my recent post on the Dublin South Central election, I provided a URL for Tony McDermott’s website. A comment I received pointed out that the correct URL is http://www.tonymcdermott.ie/.
That makes a lot more sense. However, when one does a Google search for Tony McDermott this site doesn’t show up in the first five pages of results (I stopped looking after that). So even if it is the correct site, how many people are going to find it? Perhaps it’s because it’s a new site, and the search engines haven’t indexed it properly, I’m not sure…
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no comments | tags: election | posted in Home
May
9
2007
The general election in Ireland has been called for May 24 – a little less than three weeks from now.
I live in the Dublin South Central constituency – a five seater. Four of the sitting TDs (MPs) are running again, with only Gay Mitchell bowing out.
Here’s the full list of candidates, linked with the most personal web presence that I could find for each of them (via Google).
Here’s a brief analysis:
- Of the four standing TDs, only two have their own web sites (Ardagh and Mulcahy). The other two (Ó’Snodaigh and Upton) rely on their party’s page.
- The only noticeable presence I could find for two of the new candidates (Catherine Byrne and Ann Marie Martin) were their entries on the Dublin City Council web site.
- Three of the candidates have their own website (McDermott, McGuinness and McNamara). Two of those have pretty poor URLs, for different reasons. McDermott’s URL is completely obscure:
http://moptxaal.websteps.ie/fulcrum.html?ep=5, and McGuinness’s URL (http://www.workersparty.ie/) looks like it belongs to the Workers’ Party, not just his candidacy. McNamara is a well known musical figure in Ireland, and his website reflects that. He does have a page on the site dedicated to his candidacy in the election
- Only one candidate, Eric Byrne, has his own blog!
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2 comments | tags: election | posted in Home
May
9
2007
Thanks to this entry from Aidan Finn, who incidentally is now working in the SFI funded DERI, I finally got around to putting up a simple FOAF file on my blog.
Adian’s post is pretty clear, but there are a few minor adjustments necessary to get it to work in Typo:
- The
foaf.rdf file should be created in the ~/typo-4.1.1/public/ directory.
- To create the auto-discover link (point 3 in Aidan’s steps), put the following in the
<head> of the default.rhtml file in your theme (e.g. ~/typo-4.1.1/themes/azure/layout/default.rhtml):
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "/foaf.rdf", :media => 'all', :rel => 'meta', :type => 'application/rdf+xml', :title => 'FOAF' %>
- Don’t forget to empty the fragment cache in Typo’s admin panel to force the new
default.rhtml to be used.
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no comments | tags: foaf, rails, typo | posted in Home
May
9
2007
Hmmm, it appears that the Ghostpaper theme that I’m using for this blog doesn’t show articles when you select them by their permalink.
I’ll have to investigate. In the meantime, I’m switching back to the default Azure theme.
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no comments | tags: rails, typo | posted in Home
May
9
2007
I wrote previously about the Ideas Programme run by the ERC that I was briefly responsible for. The deadline for the Starter Grants has just passed, and we have been informed that the ERC received a total of 9,167 applications from across Europe, of which 126 were Irish.
Given that only 200—250 grants will be awarded, that means that there are going to be an awful lot of disappointed people: a success rate in the region of 2.5%.
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no comments | tags: erc, fp7 | posted in Home
May
8
2007
As I mentioned in a previous post, a new version of Typo is available. I upgraded this evening, and here’s the steps that I followed.
- Check out the latest version from the SVN repository:
$ svn co http://svn.typosphere.org/typo/trunk typo-4.1.1
- Copy over my old
.htaccess file:
$ cp ~/typo-4.0.3/public/.htaccess ~/typo-4.1.1/public
- Copy over my old
database.yml:
$ cp ~/typo-4.0.3/config/database.yml ~/typo-4.1.1/config/database.yml
- Update the database schema
mysql> select * from schema_info;
+---------+
| version |
+---------+
| 50 |
+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
$ cd ~/typo-4.1.1
$ rake db:migrate
mysql> select * from schema_info;
+---------+
| version |
+---------+
| 63 |
+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
$ cd ~/typo-4.1.1/themes
$ tar zxvf ~/typo-4.0.3/themes/ghostpaper.tgz
- Copy over my uploaded files:
$ cd ~/typo-4.1.1/public
$ cp -r ~/typo-4.0.3/public/files .
You might notice the absence of a backup step at the start of this process. I n general the db:migrate action appears to be very robust and trustworth. However, I have a scheduled backup of my DB anyway, so I didn’t need to do it explicitly. However, I would certainly recommend it as a first step.
Total time – about 30 minutes. Not too bad.
Thoughts? On first blush, it certainly appears to be snappier than 4.0.3. The other noticeable change is an improved admin interface. So far so good – looks like a worthwhile upgrade. Recommended.
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no comments | tags: rails, typo | posted in Home