taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Phew! The rumours were untrue. Diageo will not be closing down the Guinness brewery in Dublin 8, and will continue brewing the black stuff in Dublin 8, thankfully:

Diageo is to close its breweries at Kilkenny and Dundalk, significantly reduce its brewing capacity at St James’s Gate and build a new brewery on the outskirts of Dublin under a plan announced today.

The company said it would invest EUR 650 million (£520 million) between 2009 and 2013 in the restructuring.

The renovation of the St James’s Gate brewing operations is expected to cost around EUR 70 million and will see the volume of Guinness brewed there fall from around one billion pints a year, to just over 500 million.

This plant will serve the Irish and British markets and will be based on the Thomas St side of the site. The company said this would ensure that every pint of Guinness sold in Ireland would be brewed here. Approximately half of the 55 acre site will then be sold once the five-year project is complete.

Around 65 staff will remain in brewing operations at St James’s Gate with about 100 others due to transfer to the new Dublin plant. Although the company has yet to announce the exact location of its new brewery, the company says it will have a capacity of around nine million hectolitres, or around three times that of the refurbished St James’s Gate site. This new brewery will produce Guinness for export and ales and lagers for the Irish market.

Diageo said when the two Dublin breweries are fully operational in five years time it will transfer brewing out of the Kilkenny and Dundalk breweries and close these plants. This move will result in ‘a net reduction in staff of around 250′, the company said.

The company employs 800 people in its brewing operation and a total of 2,500 in the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Diageo said these two plants “do not have the scale necessary for sustained success in increasingly competitive market conditions”.

The company said it would offer those employees relocation opportunities where possible. Those for whom relocation is not possible will be offered “a severance package alongside career counselling”.

Operations at its Waterford brewery will be “streamlined” as part of the re-organisation leading to “some reduction in output”. the current workforce of 27 in Waterford would be reduced to ‘around 18′ but Diageo was unable to confirm the extent of the output reduction.

The company says the St James’s Gate site it proposes to sell and the Kilkenny and Dundalk sites have an estimated value of EUR 510 million.

The Guinness Storehouse, which receives around 900,000 visitors a year, will continue to be based at St. James’s Gate.

The company estimates it will incur one-off costs of EUR 152 million during the restructuring and says this would be treated as an exceptional cost in the fiscal year ending in June 2008.

Paul Walsh, chief executive of Diageo said: ‘Over the last twelve months we have conducted a rigorous review of our brewing operations in Ireland. It examined many options and I believe it has identified the right formula for the long-term success of our business in Ireland and for the continued global success of the Guinness brand.’

“Our ambition is to combine the most modern brewing standards with almost 300 years of brewing tradition, craft and heritage.”

Guinness has been brewed at St James’s Gate for almost 250 years. Guinness extract produced at the Dublin site is exported to more than 45 countries.

Tags: beer, brewing, dublin, dublin-8, guinness, history, ireland, st-james-gate, thomas-st

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about good shopping experiences I’ve had. Here’s a couple:

SoleTrader.co.uk: I’m a terrible shopper. I hate shops, I always wind up having to visit them at their busiest times on the weekend, and the last time I tried to go shopping for a new pair of shoes, I got caught in torrential rain, fell over and broke my thumb instead. seriously. So feck that.

Instead, I resolved to buy them online, and that I did — from SoleTrader. They had a great range of trainers, I found what I was after, the price was grand, and delivery on time. Shoes are always the same size — their sizes are standardised, after all — so naturally they fit fine. All in all, it worked out great.

Be Organic: these guys operate in North Dublin, delivering bags of organic fruit and vegetables to your door, weekly. We get the Essential Fruit Bag and the Mini Box, with a bi-weekly bag of spuds on top, for EUR 32 per week. The quality of the food is absolutely fantastic, there’s never any spoilage or wilting, and it’s always fresh and delicious. Compared to supermarket fare, it’s leagues ahead. They’ve also been grand and flexible when we need to tweak the order slightly — for example we have a veto on celery, and that’s not an issue at all. The only problem would be that they’ve recently increased their prices… but unfortunately that seems to be a general problem in Ireland these days!

Tags: dublin, food, good, organic, plugs, shopping

Mike Culver, Amazon’s “Web Services Evangelist”, will be in Dublin next week to evangelize about the goodness that is Amazon S3, EC2, SQS and so on. It seems he’ll be talking at the following locations:

• in the Auditorium of the Digital Exchange, Crane Street, Dublin 8 on Tuesday October 30th, 3-5pm; here’s a flyer the Amazonites have been passing around. (upcoming.org page)

• according to Damien, later that evening, he’s in the Westin Hotel on Westmoreland St., D2, starting at 7pm; note, it seems you need to book places at this, see Damien’s post.

• and again at the Irish Linux User’s Group on Thursday November 1st at 19:30 in the Irish Computer Society in Dublin (map).

I guess these are all going to be same talk, bar the Q&A ;)

There was some kind of an ICTE get-together mooted for Friday 2nd.

Also, the ILUG annual general meeting is scheduled on the following Saturday, 3rd November, also at the ICS. Gareth Eason notes ‘we’re hoping to start at 3pm sharp, with talks from Dave Wilson (HEAnet), Frank Duignan, John Looney (Google), and others, followed by a relaxing wind-down in the Schoolhouse pub later on.’ (upcoming.org page)

Hopefully I’ll get to at least one of the AWS talks (probably the Digital Exchange one) and the ILUG AGM… busy week!

Tags: amazon, aws, dublin, ec2, icte, ilug, ireland, linux, mike-culver, s3, social, talks

A last-minute notice — the Irish Linux Users’ Group are organising an introduction to Open Streetmap tomorrow:

Open Streetmap : An Intro

The ILUG committee is organising an introduction to the Open Streetmap project on Saturday, 1st September, 2007 in Dublin.

This will include info on how to use your GPS and upload your data to the project, to contribute to a free and open map of the world.

The Hamlet Pub, Balbriggan (N 53.61396 W 6.20608 degrees)

Sat, 1st Sep 2007 2pm ~ 5pm

If you have a GPS and a laptop, please feel free to bring them. Wireless internet is available in the venue.

To register interest, please e-mail chairman-at-linux.ie

Tags: balbriggan, dublin, geowanking, ilug, ireland, mapping, open-streetmap

I just got this missive from the new Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin:

The SCIENCE GALLERY is seeking EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST for Festival of Light projects.

Calling all techno-artists, playful scientists, renegade engineers, architects, sculptors, lighting designers, fashion designers, guerilla projectionists and inventors…

The Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin is developing a two week FESTIVAL OF LIGHT as its launching programme in January 2008 which will celebrate the art, science and technology of light through a range of installations and events in the Science Gallery and around Dublin’s city centre.

We are seeking proposals for installations, events and workshops. You can download our Expression of Interest form here. We would like this to reach far and wide so please forward this onto anyone you think may be interested in submitting!

If you would like to discuss your ides with us or would like further information prior to submitting an Expression of Interest Submission please contact Elizabeth Allen at elizabeth.allen /at/ sciencegallery.org .

I’m looking forward to see what happens with this; hope it works out well.

Tags: art, dublin, galleries, ireland, science, tcd, trinity

A few weeks ago, I was in Tesco Clearwater when I spotted something I wasn’t expecting; a tray of fruit labelled “Mangosteen“.

Mangosteen are delicious. In Thailand, they’re called “the queen of fruit” (with the oh-so-stinky and not quite as enjoyable Durian as the king). We once spent a week on a Thai beach snacking on bags of the things; they’re so good.

Unfortunately the tray was empty. :(

Ever since then, every time I’ve gone back to that Tesco, there’s been no sign of the mangosteen; not even another empty tray! Thing is, I now know they’re importing them, so I’m really jonesing… if any Dublin taint.org readers happen to spot some, please (a) be sure to buy some for yourself and (b) let us know where you found it!

Tags: delicious, dublin, food, fruit, ireland, mangosteen, tasty, tesco, thailand

Given that I’m trying to get a new house in order, here’s a topic close to my heart right now — massive IKEA store approved for Dublin:

An Bord Pleanála has given the go-ahead for the construction of a massive IKEA outlet in the Ballymun area of Dublin. Legal restrictions on the size of retail developments had already been changed to allow the Swedish furniture giant to build a 30,000 square foot shop in the area. However, several objections were received from the National Roads Authority, Green Party TD Eamon Ryan and a number of businesses which said they would be adversely affected by a huge increase in traffic on the M50 motorway. An Bord Pleanála has now decided to grant permission for the project, subject to 30 conditions aimed at preventing traffic congestion, protecting the visual amenity of the area and promoting sustainable development.

This is long overdue, and something Ireland’s been crying out for — the price and quality of furniture here is dire. I’m glad to see it.

The details are up on An Bord Pleanala’s site, including the Board’s conditions. For ease of reading, I’ve converted it to HTML using OpenOffice.

This one strikes me as potentially annoying:

A schedule of parking charges shall be applied to car park users (other than coaches and buses which shall not be charged for parking during opening hours) [...]

At least two months prior to the opening of the proposed development for trading, an initial schedule of charges shall be agreed in writing with the planning authority. Where the daily peak hour two-way traffic flows as measured by the automatic traffic counters do not comply with the thresholds set above, the schedule of parking charges shall be varied as directed by the planning authority until compliance is achieved, save that breaches or non-compliances of a very minor or trivial nature or arising from exceptional circumstances may be disregarded at the discretion of the planning authority.

Reason: To minimise traffic impacts and avoid serious traffic congestion.

Tags: dublin, furniture, house, ikea, ireland

Great! Patricia McKenna just called around, canvassing our area — and just got a serious telling off from the wife ;)

Catherine — unsurprisingly, given that she’s a zoology Ph.D — was fantastic, hitting every key point of the issue: that we’re both long-time Green voters who’ve been forced to not vote Green this time around, due to this MMR issue and the anti-science/pro-hokum angle it represents.

Interestingly, she claimed that her stance on MMR was always her own point of view, and that it wasn’t party policy — and that it was mentioned on the party website was a rumour put about by the PDs.

While it turns out that Dr. Ruairi Hanley, the author of this letter to the Indo is indeed a PD (didn’t realise that!), Treasa at Winds and Breezes also noted it appearing on the Green Party site, as follows:

Questioning the Benefits of Immunisation

There are significant question marks about the effectiveness of mass immunisation programs. We would launch a major study of the benefits of these programs looking at all aspects of health

So Treasa — are you a stealth PD rumour-monger? ;)

Worth noting that at no time did McKenna reassure C that her policy would not become government policy if the Greens were elected… as an elected representative, surely her own policies would influence the government’s thinking?

Tags: dublin, dublin-north-central, election, election2007, green-party, ireland, irish-politics, mmr, patricia-mckenna, voting

We’re in the run-up to a general election here in Ireland, and I live in Bertie’s constituency. For the past year or so, things have been pretty quiet, but in the last week there’s been a sudden flurry of activity and direct postal mail from Bertie’s office — and from many departments of local government, too:

Mon Apr 23:

• Fianna Fail: “Fianna Fail delivers on education in Dublin Central”, tabloid newspaper.

• direct from the office of Bertie: a photocopied letter from the Environmental Health Officers of Dublin City Council about the standards of rented houses “in my area”.

Tues Apr 24:

• HSE: “Parents Who Listen, Protect” leaflet, a full-colour glossy handbook “on building good communication in families and communities” “as part of a national initiative on child protection”.

• Dept of Environment: a leaflet on the “National Climate Change Strategy, 2007-2012, Main Points”. Printed on recycled paper, naturally ;)

Fri Apr 27:

• Fianna Fail Senator Cyprian Brady: “dear resident, please vote for me” — one-page full-colour glossy.

• Spring 2007 “Central News”, “Official Voice of Fianna Fail in Dublin Central”, a 16-page tabloid newspaper, featuring stories like “Smithfield: the Temple Bar of the Northside” (like Temple Bar, but with more winos and Children’s Court, and less stuff!)

Mon Apr 30:

• HSE: “Need a doctor urgently? Call D-DOC out-of-hours GP service”, full-colour glossy leaflet.

• from Bertie: Evening of Election Letter. “Good evening constituents” etc.

It’s a veritable flood of full-colour glossies! Could be worse, I suppose — I hear the PDs have been blanketing selected Dublin constituencies in free books. However I suspect grimy Dublin 7 is a little off their list (see “winos”, above).

It’s worth noting that a good half of this flood (which I’ve coined Bertiespam to describe) isn’t from Bertie’s constituency office — it’s from government departments like the HSE and the Department of Environment. It’s funny that we hadn’t heard a peep from them all year, then once an election looms — “here come the voters! look busy!” ;)

What bertiespam have you been getting?

Tags: bertie-ahern, bertiespam, dublin, election, election2007, ireland, irishelection

Dublin hackers/software people — don’t forget! Bar Camp Dublin is happening on April 21st — that’s 9 days from now.

It should be interesting — there are 93 attendees signed up already, and I see a good few familiar names I haven’t run into in a while! The last Bar Camp was a good opportunity to meet up for some very informal talks, and this looks likely to be the same.

Sign up here, go on…

Tags: barcamp, barcampdublin, dublin, ireland, software

I’ve long held green views, and have always voted green — I believe climate change, damage to the environment and pollution are extremely serious problems, especially for Ireland. At the same time, I also believe that science and technology has a key place in a better, greener future — a Viridian, bright green / electric green viewpoint, in other words.

Given this, I was really shocked and appalled to hear (via the lovely C) of an interview on Today FM with Patricia McKenna, a Green Party candidate for my local constituency of Dublin Central — one I’ve voted for before, no less! — in which she revealed that she believes in the thoroughly discredited scaremongering regarding a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and has taken the appallingly irresponsible position of not allowing her children to be vaccinated.

This blog post discusses the interview, which was broadcast on Today FM’s The Last Word show on Tuesday 13 March. Here’s an archived podcast of that interview so you can listen to it yourself, and here’s a local copy of that WMV file in case that first link expires any time soon.

Here’s a transcript of the part of the interview once the issue of vaccination is brought up. Matt Cooper is the host of the show. Keith Redmond is an opposing candidate, for the PDs. The timestamps are in minutes and seconds from the start of the audio file.

• 8:30: Patricia McKenna: Parents have the right to choose what they opt to do, and in relation to some vaccinations, there are serious question marks hanging over them but that’s not what we’re talking about here…

• 8:44: Matt Cooper (clearly annoyed): No its not, but now that it’s up there, couldn’t it be irresponsible for parents not to vaccinate children against serious issues (sic), if they don’t have reputable scientific facts to back up the decision not to vaccinate?

• 8:54: Patricia McKenna: Many parents in this country have chosen not to vaccinate their children in relation to the MMR because of the links to autism.

• 9:00: Matt Cooper: Utterly untrue, totally unproven, absolutely bogus and false.

• 9:02: Patricia McKenna: Hold on a second…

• 9:03: Matt Cooper: Andrew Wakefield has been utterly and totally discredited in relation to that. Anyone who doesn’t give the MMR vaccine to their children because of a fear of autism is almost in danger of endangering their child themselves. We’re going to have a rise of measles again in this country because of people not actually giving the vaccine.

• 9:17: Patricia McKenna: First of all, we’re moving away from the issue…

• 9:22: Matt Cooper: Yeah we are, but it’s come up now, let’s deal with it…

• 9:23: Patricia McKenna: It’s come up, right. Eh, have you had the measles? I’ve had the measles, and I’ve got over them well, I have a strong immune system, my 10 year old son has had the measles…

• 9:30: Matt Cooper: And you are aware that unhandled the measles can have very serious side effects?

• 9:33: Patricia McKenna: Look — the side effects that are linked to the measles are in relation to… there are other things linked to it in relation to the child’s well being initially. Now you just look at the number of people when you were young, all of your peers I would say have had the measles as with mine, and I think we have a tendency to over-indulge in vaccinating our children and vaccinating ourselves, because what we need — our immune systems are getting weaker and weaker by the day, it’s a — I think we need to be very careful about how we actually approach this so that when medicines are necessary, we will not be immune to them…

• 10:08: Matt Cooper (interrupting): Do you know that children have died of the measles in this country in the last 5 years?

• Keith Redmond: because of views like that.

• Patricia McKenna: Well I’m saying is that, as far as I’m concerned…

• 10:18: Matt Cooper (repeats): Do you know that children have died of the measles in this country in the last 5 years?

• 10:30: Patricia McKenna: The children that have died of the measles because of other complications (sic), not the measles themselves.

• Keith Redmond: that have not been vaccinated.

• Patricia McKenna: Not the measles themselves, but other complications, right? Now if you’re saying that parents should — it’s a bit like –

• Keith Redmond: Matt, can I just come back to…

• 10:32: Matt Cooper: Sorry, one second Keith. Would you also concede Patricia, that there is absolutely no link between the MMR and autism, that that link was a bogus link put up by Andrew Wakefield who has been completely and utterly discredited and it has done an awful lot of damage, the misrepresentation of his views in relation to the MMR and autism.

• 10:50: Patricia McKenna: Well in relation to the MMR, I am not satisfied that it’s safe, and I am not satisfied with the idea of lumping a whole lot of vaccines — different vaccinations together en masse, inducing them (sic) to our children — but having said that, parents should have the right to choose and decide what is best for their children…

• 11:06: Matt Cooper: But would you concede that Andrew Wakefield, who is the man that pushed that whole agenda, was exposed as a fraud?

• 11:11: Patricia McKenna: But the jury is still out in relation to…

• 11:15: Matt Cooper: No, it’s not.

• 11:16: Patricia McKenna: Yeah well I’m sorry but the jury is still out in relation to how safe the MMR is. And I think it’s unfair to label all parents who decide for their own children’s safety, that they may not want to go down the route of vaccination, that they’re being irresponsible, because I wouldn’t consider myself irresponsible, I would consider I want what’s best for my child.

• 11:37: Keith Redmond: [again says something]

• Matt Cooper: Give Keith a chance to come in.

• 11:41: Keith Redmond: This totally exemplifies the Greens’ approach to any kind of science. We have a woman there who knows, in her heart of hearts, that her argument is wrong but refuses to admit it because it relies on science. Now, we have exactly the same issue with flouridation — we know the science, we know the facts, and we still have this scaremongering every now and again. And the Green Party are totally irresponsible and you’re right, they are frightening parents across the country right now and it’s absolutely reprehensible.

My god, this insanity has me agreeing with a feckin’ PD!

This is luddism, pure and simple. Matt Cooper is spot on the money – children are dying in Dublin because of this “my child, my rules” selfishness and simple inability to understand the science surrounding vaccination as a public health policy.

This is appalling. To put it bluntly, there is no fucking way I’ll be voting Green if this kind of cargo-cult, anti-science superstition is the kind of shite they’re espousing these days. …and if you think I’m feeling strongly about this, you should hear my (zoologist) wife.

But it goes on — here’s a letter to the Irish Independent on this issue from Feb 9 2007, which raises another worrying factor:

… until two days ago, there was a statement on the Green Party website informing voters that there were “serious question marks about the benefit of mass vaccination programs”.

Furthermore, the party promised that there would be a “major review” of vaccination if they were returned to office.

Now that these statements have apparently been removed from the Green party website are we to take it that they are no longer Green policy?

This blog posting at Winds and Breezes also notes this. So — is this official Green policy or not?

Update: In the comments, it was noted that McKenna is pretty much acting alone in this; it, apparently, is not Green Party policy at all. I’ve updated the title to reflect that it’s only one constituency’s candidate that needs to be shunned.

Also, Conor O’Neill has a great idea over here:

I was thinking further on this yesterday and I realised what the Greens need to do in order to be taken seriously… They need to become the “Party of Science”. Proper environmentalism is based on rigorous science and strategic thinking. Every policy they define should be backed up with rock-solid science and a detailed long-term financial analysis proving why it is in our best interests to adopt them.

Man, I would love to see that!

Tags: autism, badscience, dublin, elections, green-party, greens, health, herd-immunity, ireland, luddites, measles, mmr, patricia-mckenna, politics, vaccination

I’m moving house. Naturally, first priority after getting the keys is getting the broadband set up ;)

Current broadband: BT DSL. Supposedly “up to” 3Mbps — however, as with most DSL connections in Ireland, it’s rate-adaptive RADSL, which means it trades off connection speed against distance to exchange and line quality.

Sadly, this has really deteriorated since the last time I checked! A “bing” test between the BT-supplied DSL router and the far end looks like this:

BING    10.18.72.1 (10.18.72.1) and 193.95.142.243 (193.95.142.243)
        44 and 108 data bytes (1024 bits)
193.95.142.243: minimum delay difference is zero, can't estimate link throughput
193.95.142.243:  6.966Mbps 0.147ms 0.143555us/bit
193.95.142.243: minimum delay difference is zero, can't estimate link throughput
193.95.142.243: 19.692Mbps 0.052ms 0.050781us/bit
193.95.142.243:  4.697Mbps 0.218ms 0.212891us/bit
193.95.142.243:  3.261Mbps 0.314ms 0.306641us/bit
193.95.142.243:  3.170Mbps 0.323ms 0.315430us/bit
193.95.142.243:  2.479Mbps 0.413ms 0.403320us/bit
193.95.142.243:  2.723Mbps 0.376ms 0.367187us/bit
193.95.142.243:  2.688Mbps 0.381ms 0.372070us/bit
193.95.142.243:  2.716Mbps 0.377ms 0.368164us/bit
193.95.142.243:  2.065Mbps 0.496ms 0.484375us/bit
193.95.142.243:  1.984Mbps 0.516ms 0.503906us/bit
193.95.142.243:  1.270Mbps 0.806ms 0.787109us/bit
193.95.142.243:  1.017Mbps 1.007ms 0.983398us/bit
193.95.142.243:  1.002Mbps 1.022ms 0.998047us/bit
193.95.142.243:  1.008Mbps 1.016ms 0.992187us/bit
193.95.142.243: 983.670Kbps 1.041ms 1.016602us/bit
193.95.142.243: 993.210Kbps 1.031ms 1.006836us/bit
193.95.142.243: 987.464Kbps 1.037ms 1.012695us/bit

--- 10.18.72.1 statistics ---
bytes   out    in   dup  loss   rtt (ms): min       avg       max   std dev
   44   762   758          0%           2.524     3.858    19.083     2.194
  108   762   762          0%           2.639     4.187    58.273     3.079

--- 193.95.142.243 statistics ---
bytes   out    in   dup  loss   rtt (ms): min       avg       max   std dev
   44   762   761          0%          13.061    20.025    78.689     8.226
  108   762   760          0%          14.213    17.954    61.137     4.697

--- estimated link characteristics ---
host                              bandwidth       ms
193.95.142.243                      987.464Kbps      10.536

987Kbps is not 3Mbps any more, not by a long shot. I’d say I now have a lot of new friends adding contention at the ol’ DSLAM. I’m paying way too much money for what I’m getting :(

(Update: actually, it may not be contention. Judging by boards.ie traffic, high-contention situations in Ireland are usually faster in the mornings and daytime, then slower from 4pm-9pm as the commuters and kids get home — however, this slowdown is pretty consistent across all times of day.)

(Update 2: as of right now, late afternoon on Apr 12, it’s the worst I’ve seen it — packet rates of 600Kbps, and packet loss of 5%-20%.)

On top of this, they have the really annoying daily disconnection policy, which I have hacked around with IPv6 and a VPN, but which still manages to waste my time and cause aggravation, even after frickin’ months of pissing about.

For this, and the packaged phone service, I’m paying just under EUR 60 per month, including all call charges and VAT.

At that price, Eircom are offering a pretty good bundle — free connection, free modem, 2Mbps downstream, 256Kbps upstream, unlimited free local and national calls at all times, 5% off calls to mobiles, 10c/min calls to the UK and US.

Now, a drop to 2Mbps may seem a lot, but bear in mind I’m getting just under 1 right now! I’m pretty sure the new gaff will have similar-quality lines and exchanges. Also, if I get the 2Mbps line, and the attenuation and S/N statistics indicate that it can support 3Mbps, I can always upgrade pretty easily.

The only problem now is getting over my revulsion at buying from Eircom, ugh…

Am I missing something? Does that Eircom bundle not include line rental maybe?

Tags: broadband, bt, dublin, eircom, esat, esat-bt, home, ireland, lazyweb.ie

Myself and Tom were in a taxi last night, stopped at a stop light, when I noticed something odd.

A girl, about 20 or so, walking along the path stopped beside a bag of recycled rubbish, and bent over as if she was tying her shoelace. Instead of fixing her lace, though, she quickly ripped a hole in the (transparent) plastic bag, grabbed a crumpled Fanta can, and walked off.

WTF? anyone got any theories?

Tags: cans, dublin, odd, recycling, rubbish, wtf

Coworking.ie is a new community-driven coworking group-blog and promotion site, set up by Jason Roe.

Coworking’s a pretty cool idea — ‘a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.’ Great news for us teleworkers.

I’ve subscribed — it’ll be interesting to track development of this concept, in Ireland and elsewhere…

Tags: coworking, dublin, ireland, jason-roe, telecommuting, teleworking

Well, that was fun! Taint.org didn’t make the shortlists, but I went along anyway just to hang out — and lots of chat was had accordingly. Got to finally meet up with a few people I’d chatted with online, like Nialler9 — and with a few old friends I don’t get to see often enough: Antoin, Elana, Brendan, Clare Dillon (ex-Iona!), and another ex-Ionian, Aisling Mackey. A good laugh.

Have to say though, it seems a vote from me was the kiss of death in many of the categories: Sarah Carey, Blogorrah, Ireland from a Polish perspective, and (the late lamented) TCAL all got my thumbs-up in the shortlist voting, and all wound up missing out on the chunk’o'lucite. Sorry about that guys. ;)

Thanks again to Damien for organising the whole do! It’s great to have an event like this to bring each of our disparate blogs physically together for a bit of community.

By the way I’d like to point out that, in contrast to the Blogorrah Bock the Robber mafiosi, I had a real moustache… ;)

Tags: blogging, blogs, dublin, iba2007, ireland, irishblogawards

Plug plug plug: next week is the 2007 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival — some great movies being shown, I’m looking forward to it. Most of all, though, I want to recommend Small Engine Repair, which I’ve written about before. It’s being shown in the festival at 6:20 PM on Wed 21st Feb in IFI 1 — tickets can be booked online here, at EUR 9 apiece.

Writer and director, Niall Heery, won the Breakthrough Talent Award at this year’s Irish Film and Television Awards at the weekend. Nice one Niall!

Go see it if you get a chance — it’s a fantastic movie, in my opinion. And be sure to vote for it for the festival’s Audience Award…

Tags: awards, dublin, film, friends, ifta, ireland, movies, niall-heery, small-engine-repair

I don’t know what’s going on with An Post, the Irish postal service, these days — I’ve been having some pretty bad luck with them.

For my birthday, I was lucky enough to be given a Thingamagoop — it took a while (hey, they’re hand-made) but was shipped on Nov 7th from the US. Bleep Labs accidentally shipped me two, apparently, but only one has arrived — on Nov 16th, 9 days after shipping. The other one’s still AWOL nearly a month later.

I then ordered something from Sendit.com on Nov 17th, as a birthday gift for Nov 30th. It was shipped from their Belfast offices on Nov 18th, and still hasn’t arrived to date. Sendit were champs, however, and refunded the purchase as soon as I rang them on the 30th (I’d recommend their services, no problem).

Finally, SpamAssassin was lucky enough to win a Linux New Media Award 2006 for ‘Best Linux-based Anti-spam Solution’ — nifty! As part of this, a (physical) trophy is apparently winging its way from Germany, and was apparently shipped on November 27th. Guess what: no sign.

In other words, in the past month, 75% of the parcels sent to me seem to have gone AWOL. All I can do is hope that they’ve just been delayed, rather than suffer a worse fate. In particular, I hope that trophy turns up — it’s the only physical award we’ve ever received :(

Can anyone think of a good avenue to track these down? The website seems pretty negative, and what I’ve heard seems to be along the lines of ‘turn up at the sorting depot, cross your fingers, and see if they’ve been misdelivered’. Ick.

Tags: an-post, dublin, ireland, post

Well, that was quick!

Right after posting this, I hear about Labour’s new transport strategy for Dublin. Here’s the top 3 items:

• Labour will increase the Dublin Bus fleet by 50% (500 buses), significantly increasing frequency and reducing waiting times.

• Will complete the Quality Bus Corridors, and greatly reduce journey times.

• Will introduce a EUR 1 per-trip fare for adults and a 50c per-trip fare for children.

The flat-rate fee structure makes a lot more sense than the confusing and rip-off-ish current model, whereby if you don’t know in advance how much a particular journey is going to cost, you’re given a useless receipt instead of change. This wierd and rip-off-ish policy has certainly stopped me from catching buses in the past. In general, flat-rate pricing models appear to encourage use in other fields. And the increase in the fleet is obviously a fantastic idea. Fantastic stuff!

Read the full policy paper here (as a PDF).

Tags: dublin, ireland, labour, politics, public-transport

Via Lean comes this, I think from the Irish Times:

One-half of Dublin drivers would never use bus - survey

One-half of all car drivers in the greater Dublin area say they would not switch to travelling by bus, even if services were improved, according to a new survey.

Unreliability, long waiting times and poor connections were cited as the main reasons for not taking the bus in the survey carried out for the Dublin Transportation Office (DTO).

As many as four out of five people expressed dissatisfaction with traffic congestion and access to the Luas.

Just over 35 per cent of those surveyed were satisfied with the quality and upkeep of roads, and with facilities for cycling. Over one-half said they were happy with the reliability, frequency and cost of buses.

Almost 2,500 people were interviewed for the survey and a similar number of travel diaries were compiled. The car is the main form of transport in the region, used by 45 per cent of respondents. Some 18 per cent relied on the bus and 16 per cent said walking was their main form of transport. Just 2 per cent used the Luas more often than other modes of transport, and 3 per cent used the DART or local train. Two per cent cycled and 1 per cent relied on taxis.

Of those who said they might switch to the bus, over 60 per cent said more frequent services was the main change needed. Accurate timetables and stops closer to destinations were also called for.

Respondents linked transport by car to comfort, convenience and reliability. In contrast, buses were viewed as being for older people and people with no other choice. Bus transport was favourably viewed for going out socially and for being reasonably priced.

The Luas was seen as modern, while DART and train services were viewed as fast and safe. Cycling and walking were viewed as healthy and environmentally friendly, but for young people.

Great figures — they sound pretty accurate.

The novelty of being home in a (relatively) bike- and public-transport-friendly city has worn off for me by now — I’m now more familiar with buses that aren’t a dumping ground for the homeless and mentally ill, and that do actually tend to pass both your origin and destination in a single journey. But that was in Orange County, possibly one of the most public-transit-hostile societies in the developed world, and compared to a more sane standard, Dublin still has a major problem.

By the way, it’s interesting to note Ireland’s move OC-wards on many fronts. When I got back, I was shocked to see tubby children being driven to school by mobile-phone-wielding, SUV-driving parents — the very worst aspects of US suburban-sprawl life being happily parrotted over here. :(

Tags: cities, cycling, dublin, life, public-transport

Nat at O’Reilly Radar mentions that Multimap have added a public API . It’s great to see more sites adding public APIs, but sadly, as I note in a comment there, Multimap isn’t any use for me — they, along with Google and Yahoo!, have really crappy Irish mapping. Their geocoders (the part that turns an english-language address into a GIS coordinate pair) are pretty much non-functional for Ireland.

I moved from the US to Ireland earlier this year and found this pretty frustrating, after the joys of using the US mapping sites to get driving directions etc.

Thankfully, another contender has emerged recently — Map24.

They have a great geocoder for Ireland, and very reliable directions, which are even accurate for some of the more baroque one-way-system traffic-management changes that Dublin’s city planning department have come up with recently. The look and feel of the website is a little clunky in Firefox — not as smooth as Google’s — but it has some nice AJAXy touches now and seems to be heading in the right direction.

Interestingly, they now offer a public API for third-party mashups, and even offer an API for their geocoder — so someone preferring the Google look and feel could mash that up, using Map24 to find the coordinates and Google to display an area map! (Actually, I think that may be how John Handelaar’s earlier hack worked – I note in the comments that he mentions Map24 provide Lycos’ mapping backend. aha.)

Anyway — Map24 — if you’re looking for a good Irish mapping/driving-directions site, it’ll do the trick.

Tags: directions, dublin, geocoders, google, ireland, map24, mapping, multimap, yahoo

Blurred Keys: Blogorrah.com - the start of empire building with ‘very few overheads’. Blurred Keys, “an Irish media blog”, brings the revelation that Blogorrah “copies” Gawker.com.

Honestly, though, this is blatantly obvious — and I’d consider it unfair to call this “copying”. It’s simply taking a successful format and adapting it to the local market, and doing so very well indeed if you ask me.

Blogorrah is a hilarious read. If you’re Irish and you’re not subscribed, you’re really missing out… it’s the funniest thing on the Irish web these days.

Tags: blogorrah, dublin, funny, ireland, weblogs

Adrian Weckler posts details of Vodafone Ireland’s new flat price datacard; costing 50 Euros per month, including VAT; fully flat rate (hooray, something useful at last!); and they claim that they’ll be rolling out HSDPA, which offers 1.2Mbps to 11Mbps rates, ’starting in Dublin in October’.

Those are great numbers, but further info seems thin on the ground; they haven’t bothered updating their own website yet, amazingly.

Anyone got further info? What rates does it offer right now? How would one order such a beast?

Tags: 3g, dublin, hsdpa, ireland, mobile, vodafone

Optimo have a new mix up — the First Hour Mix:

Here’s the fourth in a brief series of mixes where we present something a little different. This mix isn’t really a mix in the conventional sense but rather 17 tracks blended together. To us, the first hour of Optimo, or to be more accurate, the ‘Espacio’ part of Optimo (Espacio) is a vital part of the night. It is our chance to play absolutely what we like without thinking about the dancefloor.

It’s a great mix — certainly not dancy, but some really interesting tracks here. The Optimo guys put together some really great music.

In fact, I went to see them play last Saturday — or, at least, myself and a couple of mates tried to. Supposedly, they were supporting The Juan Maclean at the Bud Rising festival over the weekend, but the show was such a shambles, without anyone having a clue when it started or who was on stage at any time, I’m pretty sure we missed their set entirely.

On top of that, it was EUR20 in, and to add insult to injury, the only lager on sale was Budweiser! I mean, I wouldn’t mind that if the “Bud Rising Festival” deal meant free entrance, but charging 20 squids and then cutting off the supply of decent booze as well, is just a crime.

Ah well, the Filthy Dukes were pretty good at least.

Tags: bud-rising, budweiser, dublin, festivals, ireland, live-music, mp3, music, optimo, sponsorship

So, now that I’m back in Dublin, I’ve taken a quick look around for ways to keep up to date on upcoming live gigs — and found that the situation, frankly, sucks. In particular, almost none of the sites are offering RSS or Atom feeds yet.

Having said that, Waxy and Leonard’s Upcoming.org is doing quite nicely for the Dublin metro area:

• Upcoming.org: Dublin Events

And lots of credit for the promoter, MCD, who seem to be just about the only Irish listings site who offer RSS:

• MCD.ie News and Events

This is fantastic, but — naturally — they don’t cover events put on by their competitors. ;)

Apart from that, it’s pretty shoddy. Lots of late-90’s-looking websites out there, and no feeds in sight. Thankfully, Feed43, and some perl scripting, is on hand to allow me to take matters into my own hands.

Entertainment Ireland offer a pretty good music news section — but sans feed. Feed43 saves the day:

• Entertainment Ireland: Music News

And, surprisingly, Ticketmaster, of all sites, is turning out to be a great way to find out what’s on in Dublin, listing pretty much all ticketed events in a nice, clean, succinct format. Unfortunately, the highest location resolution it offers for Ireland is the country as a whole. However, this can be worked around by subscribing to individual venues, such as Crawdaddy or The Village. (This has a happy side-effect of narrowing down the types of music — I can skip finding out that The Eagles are playing, since they won’t be playing at Crawdaddy ;)

For some reason, though, Ticketmaster haven’t got around to offering their own RSS feeds. Not a problem — in response I’ve hacked up tm2rss.cgi, a little script which scrapes the venue pages and produces RSS:

• Ticketmaster: events at The Village
• Ticketmaster: events at Crawdaddy

For other venues, simply take the venue URL (for example, http://www.ticketmaster.ie/venue/198641 for The Village), add the numeric venue ID in place of NNNNN in this URL: http://taint.org/scraped/tm2rss.cgi?v=NNNNN , then use that as the Feed URL in your feed reader.

Tags: atom, dublin, events, feeds, gigs, ireland, listings, live-music, rss, syndication

I just received a very nice info-pack through my front door regarding the new Dublin Metro line, which is in planning at the moment; it seems they’re soliciting feedback from residents near the proposed routes. Nicely done.

Right now, Dublin has an embarrassment of good public transit, at least when compared to my previous home in Orange County. There, public transit is actively campaigned against.

My favourite claim: that it ‘increases crime’ — in other words that poor people from Santa Ana would come down to Irvine and steal stuff, which they couldn’t do with vehicular transport, for some reason.

The OC Weekly thought it was pretty funny, too — and an opposing group comprehensively debunked it. Still, it seemed to work; while I was living in Irvine, I got to see the Centerline proposal gradually whittled down until it was finally killed off. During that time, in contrast, Dublin built the Luas.

Unfortunately it doesn’t exactly go where I want to go, but you can’t always have everything. ;)

Tags: commuting, dublin, irvine, octa, ocweekly, public-transit

Heads-up, Dublin geeks: Vint Cerf will be speaking at the Dublin Googleplex on Thursday.

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it myself — I had to visit the UK this week. Pity; I would have loved to hear him speak :(

Tags: dublin, google, lectures, vint-cerf

While driving around Ireland on a wedding-location-scouting trip, we started receiving texts talking about riots in Dublin; I texted a friend, and got a reply along these lines: “Celtic-topped scobes run riot through O’Connell St, torching cars in Nassau street, hospitalising cops and Charlie Bird. madness!”

I thought he was joking, but nope. A load of IRA-slogan-shouting scumbags really had been allowed to run riot — with paving stones of all things left unsecured in their midst! — and it quickly got way, way out of hand.

The blog coverage is excellent, with lots of photos. I suggest starting with Indymedia Ireland, these Flickr photos and the links on this weblog. It appears the gardai really fell down on this one.

For what it’s worth, I was in town a few hours later, and the rest of Dublin was trouble-free — just the usual Saturday night goings-on. O’Connell St. was still a rubble-strewn mess when I passed through on Sunday, though.

Tags: dublin, ireland, policing, politics, riots

Greetings from sunny Dublin, Ireland! (really!)

I’m now back in taint.org’s native timezone, although precariously set up and experiencing occasional interruptions. If you’re waiting for a mail from me, it may take a little more time.

I did have time to be interviewed last week by Karlin Lillington for this Guardian story:

To make sure customs agents could read his cat’s chip to match him to his Pet Passport on return to Europe, Mason bought his own scanner at a cost of some £200. “I didn’t want to risk the cat being impounded for six months’ quarantine at Heathrow,” he sighs.

It’s true.

Happy to be back — I think. Looking forward to my first pints, in over a year, of creamy Guinness in its native habitat. I also have a couple of half-written weblog entries I wrote on the plane, too…

Tags: bubba, cat, dublin, guardian, guinness, home, meta, rfid, travel

Passing this on for readers in Ireland — this sounds like an interesting event. From the FSFE-IE mailing list:

On the morning of Friday November 18th, IFSO is organising an event hosted by MEP Proinsias De Rossa about preventing software patents in the EU. Topics covered will be:

• An analysis of the software patent directive;
• a discussion of Free Software and computer security;
• an introduction to IFSO/FSFE and their work;
• the future of legislative obstacles to the development and distribution of software.

The event will be held in the European Parliament Office in Ireland, and spaces are limited. Participants are therefore asked to register their intent to attend. See here for more details.

Tags: dublin, free-software, fsfe, ifso, ireland, labour, open-source, patents, swpats

Irish techies, mark your calendars! Various Irish bloggers are proposing a Tech Camp Ireland geek get-together, similar to Bar Camp in approach, for Saturday October 15th.

Ed Byrne and James Corbett are both blogging up a storm already. I’d go, but it’d be a hell of a trip ;)

I would say it needs a little less blog, a little more code, and a little more open source, but it does look very exciting, and it’s great to see the Bar Camp spirit hitting Ireland.

Tags: barcamp, dublin, ireland, tech-camp-ireland

Dublin: Sorry to the non-Dublin readership, I’m sure you all are getting quite bored of this by now. But anyway…

According to jd on the discussion page, the new owner of the Stag’s Head is Louis Fitzgerald, who picked it up for EUR 5.8 million.

Reportedly, he’s ‘the biggest publican in Dublin’ (sic), and owns The Quays in Temple Bar, The Palmerstown House in Palmerstown, The Big Tree on Dorset Street and The Poitin Stil in Rathcoole — and Kehoe’s on South Anne Street. Quite an empire.

I’ll have to leave the speculation on Fitzgerald’s pros and cons to more recent residents of Dublin, but I agree with jd’s comment: ‘hope he does half a good as job as the Shaffrys, and the bicycles are left outside rather than on the ceiling,’ Amen to that.

Tags: discussion, dublin, fitzgerald, head, louis, non, owner, page, palmerstown, readership, stag

Dublin: Lean forwards on this story from today’s Irish Times. Sadly, it’s behind their subscription firewall, so I’ll just snip out a few choice quotes from Philip Shaffry, the current owner:

‘(The Stag’s Head) has been part of my life for three decades and I’ve been running it for 10 years,’ he says. ‘I’ve two small children and I’m living 10 miles out of town, so I’m hoping to find a pub a bit out of the city centre. But of course I’ll miss this place. I have got really attached to the clientele and the crowd that comes in.’

Looking around at the Victorian bar, opulently decorated with mahogany panelling and a red Connemara marble bar counter, Shaffry is confident there will be no changes to the building.

‘They won’t be able to touch it. This is the crème de la crème, the jewel in the crown, of Dublin pubs. It has been here since 1760, although it was completely refurbished in 1895. This is a grade-one listed building.’

But the bad news?

There are no State laws regulating some aspects of the pub, namely his family’s refusal to allow music - live or otherwise - or television in the bar. Any new owner could change this tradition, says Shaffry, which is a source of concern for some regulars. (….)

A spokesman for CBRE Gunne, which will auction the pub this afternoon, says there had been ‘enormous interest’ in the premises from Irish and international buyers.

Eeek! The guide price is 5 million Euros, if you fancy a shot.

Thanks for Philip for his excellent stewardship — here’s hoping any new buyer will keep his approach. That approach made the Stag’s what it is today — the best pub in Dublin. (In my opinion, at least ;)

Tags: approach, bar, building, crme, dublin, irish, owner, pub, stag, story, today