Jun
27
2008
Great writeup for putplace
Joe Drumgoole‘s start-up putplace got a great mention on Read/Write Web a few days ago, nicely co-inciding with their public launch.
Jun
19
2008
Hilarious curmudgeon going on about OmniFocus
This is a screencast about a user’s difficulties and indeed extreme frustration with using OmniFocus.
Absolutely hilarious – check it out.
With thanks to Daring Fireball.
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Jun
18
2008
NDRC gets its first projects funded
Silicon Republic is reporting that the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) has just funded its first tranche of projects.
There’s nothing on the NDRC website at the moment, but I presume that the announcement there will follow shortly. NDRC is an interesting body – it’s a private company, wholly owned by the Government, and set up to facilitate what they call “translational research” projects. Translational research is a term often reserved for translating medical research into clinical practice. In the case of NDRC, they are using the term much more broadly – namely as the process of translating academic, basic research into industry projects and to fulfil an industry need.
While not directly associated with SFI, many of the researchers involved with NDRC are also SFI Principal Investigators. It will be very interesting to watch NDRC as these projects develop and evolve.
Well done to Ben and his team in getting the first few projects out the door.
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Jun
18
2008
DCU President is blogging
By way of Damien and Eoin, I’ve learned that Prof. Ferdinand von Prondzynski of Dublin City University has started his own blog.
This is, as far as I know, the first Irish University president blogger, but hopefully we’ll see many (or at least six) more.
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Jun
18
2008
Throwing the switch
In my last post, I mentioned that I was considering moving back to WordPress. We’ll I’ve gone ahead and done it.
Unfortunately, mephisto was getting too frustrating to use, and in particular the lack of a webservice API to allowing blogging clients to post made it untenable to continue.
To effect the port I followed the instructions in this post. In general, it all went fine, and without a problem. I have noticed a few caveats which will require a bit of manual work:
- mephisto does not have the concept of a page, in the same way that WordPress does. When you convert the one post categories in mephisto, these show up as regular posts in WP. I had to manually create WP pages, and cut and past the content in.
- I will have to manually move the assets (images) over from mephisto to WP. In fact, I’ll probably move them to a 3rd party (e.g. Flickr or Smugmug), and not have to deal with porting them again.
Other than those relatively minor niggles, everything appears to have gone just fine. Many thanks to those who wrote the relevant scripts.
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Jun
12
2008
Switching to WordPress?
Couple of links saved for future reference:
I’m certainly not the only one dissatisfied with Mephisto. I like the idea of Mephisto more than the realisation of it. I use WordPress for a bunch of other sites/blogs that I run, and feel that it’s a much more mature, stable and performant platform.
Ideally, the way forward, I believe, is to have a single blog database foundation schema (probably WP’s), and to be able to build multiple different engines on top of that. Then, if you’re unhappy with Mephisto or whatever, you can always switch back.
Might investigate that if I have a chance…
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Jun
10
2008
o2 Ireland announces iPhone 3G
After Apple’s triumphant launch of the iPhone 3G yesterday, o2 Ireland have their announced support for it from July 11. So far so good – can’t wait.
The only fly in the ointment appears to be the very crappy data limits that attach to all of the plans: 1GB per month. Quote:
All iPhone tariffs include anytime minutes, texts and a 1GB data bundle.
Pat Phelan has blogged on this a number of times, including the latest announcement. Hopefully, with guys like him pushing, we can convince o2 to relax their data caps. In this day and age, 1GB download per month is nothing – particularly if you’re going to use the iPhone as a go-everywhere, do-everything device, which is certainly where it’s headed.
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Jun
4
2008
Metropolis and the Central Remedial Clinic
TechCentral.ie posts an entry on the collaboration between the TCD GV2 guys in the SFI-funded Metropolis project and the Central Remedial Clinic.
The story is also carried by Silicon Republic and Electric News Network.