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Month: December 2010

Links for 2010-12-31

Published December 31, 2010

Links for 2010-12-16

Published December 16, 2010

  • opendata.ie : ‘to help citizens access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Irish Government and public sector authorities; to improve access to the Irish Government data and to establish an innovative platform that can demonstrate to government how and why they should share data’
    (tags: open data ireland open-data open-source free datasets)

  • RunwayFinder shut down by patent trolls : “While we appreciate your offer to shut down the website to stop future infringement, we notice that your website is still operation. And without further information from you, our only means to assess the potential damages is the observation that your website had 22,256 unique visitors in July 2010. Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale. This damage calculation exceeds $3.2 million per month in lost revenue.”
    (tags: patents swpats patent-trolls flightprep runwayfinder aviation web law)

  • The Background Dope on DHS Recent Seizure of Domains : according to this, the US Dept of Homeland Security is “seizing” domains through a back-channel to Verisign, since they directly control the .com TLD’s nameservers. Expect to see dodgy sites start using non-US TLDs, names in multiple TLDs a la Pirate Bay, and eventually IPs instead of DNS records
    (tags: tlds dns security dhs seizure domains cctlds filesharing icann immixgroup)

Links for 2010-12-13

Published December 13, 2010

  • Accentuate.us : ‘We are proud to announce the free and open-source Accentuate.us, a new method of input for over 100 languages that uses statistical reasoning so that users can type effortlessly in plain ASCII while ultimately producing accurate text. This allows Vietnamese users, for example, to simply type “Moi nguoi deu co quyen tu do ngon luan va bay to quan diem,” which will be automatically corrected to “M?i ng??i ??u có quy?n t? do ngôn lu?n và b?y t? quan ?i?m” after Accentuation. To date, we support four clients: Mozilla Firefox, Perl, Python, and Vim, with more to be added shortly.’ cool
    (tags: accents language web-services typing text-entry ascii unicode characters)

  • The Day MAME Saved My Ass : ‘Publishers would have people believe that MAME and the emulation scene is the root of all evil, that it promotes piracy and ultimately hurts the poor, starving developers slaving away on the game. Not only is this claim patently false, it ignores the fact that many developers use things like MAME, mod chips, and homebrew development utilities to help us overcome the day-to-day frustrations caused by the people behind the real problems in our industry.’
    (tags: mame games coding legal spy-hunter emulation rips takedowns)

  • Digital Socket Awards : ‘We’d like you to nominate the longlist of best music of 2010 on www.digitalsocketawards.com. From this, 26 blogger judges from towns and cities all over Ireland will each score their top choices to reach a shortlist of three finalists in each category. The winners will be announced on 3 February 2011 at a live event in Dublin’s Grand Social.’
    (tags: blogs blogging irishblogs music mp3 mp3blogs ireland awards)

I made a sled

Published December 5, 2010

Facing yet another day of being snowed in, with Dublin’s icy roads and footpaths driving us all stir crazy, I came up with this:

More pics, vid — fun!

Links for 2010-12-03

Published December 3, 2010

Links for 2010-12-02

Published December 2, 2010

Links for 2010-12-01

Published December 1, 2010

  • Barry Eichengreen on the Irish bailout : ‘The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year. This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable.’
    (tags: ireland economy bailout eu euro)

  • Video: Robots Explain The Irish Economic Crisis : Pretty good explanation, actually
    (tags: news ireland robots youtube debt eu politics economy)