Friday and some neat little links

Well I'm all good to work on more podcasting.

Some other people also like Rainbows End. Boingboing are also doing their bit to ensure that net censorship can be avoided in China. Seems India is making its presence felt in Central Asia (see also).

Skipping back to politics - HOWTO: Kill A News Story (see also), an interesting article ''SMS/MMS, Bluetooth and Viral Mobile Politics - A Spanish Example" and I wonder if the way forward for politicans is simply to blog and podcast, seems like Labour's Dominic Hannigan is going down the blog route. Seeing as members of the Oireachtas can get 3G cards and Blackberries now and with the latest rumour that all members are going to be offered dictaphones with the ability to transfer recordings to a PC in the near future, it seems podcasting will soon be rife through out Leinster House but for the meanwhile you'll have to settle for Senator Joe O'Toole's podcast.

Random links from the edge

Russia - an unreliable partner when thinking of European energy independence, Independence Inc. or the possibility of Private Military Contractors and Microstates relationships both from ComingAnarchy (Also take a look at their Far East Travelogue).

Thinking to the needs of all those who have recently bought houses, how about grass driveway which you can park on without destroying the grass. Another suggestion could be a smart hydroponic garden for that indoor countertop herb pot.

On the tech side - how about this for a 3D Desktop.

Back from ICAD in London

It was a very busy week last week at ICAD06 where I presented some of my current research. There are some photos from Till ( here, here and here). The concert in the ICA was great and I even picked up a couple of books in their great bookshop - The Enchantments of Technology, Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. It was a really great experience and I got some good feedback on my work and I'm very happy with the results.

Monday - More Coffee Ted!

It's one of those days - coffee - and yes it does seem to make us all more suggestable! The new borders of the world - check out how the the Middle East and Central Asia could very easily look like.

Bill Buxton on the benefits of simultaneously evaluating three designs using paper prototyping. A follow up to Friday's posting on possible US-China-Taiwan scenarios is the Scorpion strategy, which in essence is Taiwan wading into the fray by selectively targeting choice targets such as the Three Gorges Dam and thus making the potential cost of attacking Taiwan rather bloody for China. Two interesting articles from the Coming Anarchy blog on "The Coming Micro-States" (Montenegro and the effects for former Soviet countries - South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karbagh or Transdniestria) and on "The Next Taliban" (Somalia).

Labour have gone and got a web strategist.

Weekend Treats

Been a busy week so blogging has been a little slow so here is a bunch of stuff that has bubbled up from my feeds and browsing.

Some really cool images of the sun or Sunscapes, a link to the documentary on the killing of Det Gerry McCabe, speaking of YouTube - the question is 'Can YouTube swing an election?', a nice little beachside Cabana would be great for the weekend, some nice urban wind turbines and solar lampion's. The honey badger - don't ask ...

Nice articles on "Building A Tag Cloud in WordPress", "Arts and Crafts for the Digital Age", can we trust those big MNCs (Coca-Cola, Nestle, Nike, etc) ?, check out the latest green ethics audit. Another one on predictive markets and from the same site, what if the desktop was presented as a sphere instead of a plane ?

For the more scenario minded - how about the assassin's mace or shashaujian scenario between the USA and China - with China's "Win victory with one strike" showing how China could really knock out the USA. Speaking of attacks, how about the Soviet method for attacking infection using bacteriophages which could have more relevance today given the growing number of bacterial strains which are becoming more and more antibotic resistant.

Finally - Magic in User Experience Design and the related magic wand postings from Mike Kuniavsky have got me hooked on Quicksilver and xGestures.

Friday's Tech - Bits And Pieces

Here's a few interesting articles for the weekend:

• UML Diagrams Using Graphviz Dot


• Circuit Design With Quartz Composer


• Brite - A Ruby compiler/interpreter for the .NET platform


• MIDAS: Multifunction In-Dorm Automation System


• Adaptive Path's new blog - Their entry on a summer reading list is particularly recommendable.

The Pirate Bay saga continues, Mikael is saying that those in favour of the Pirate Bay site, have goneand DDOS'ed the Justice ministry in Sweden and will continue to lock out service until they're allowed back online. Bloody MPAA and US trying to enforce US laws in the EU ..... Hang on - we're in the EU with our laws and customs !

Dail HEA Video Streams

Due to some issues when you are surfing with proxies/browsers I've posted the links to the servers streaming the Dail live from HEA net. rtsp://bob.heanet.ie/dail or rtsp://jay.heanet.ie/dail and http://bob.heanet.ie/dail or http://jay.heanet.ie/dail and mms://bob.heanet.ie/dail or mms://jay.heanet.ie/dail. It seems to work with Windows Media Player but not with Real Player, I'm pretty sure its the result of the filtering process at the proxy server I'm using. Seanad coverage is also available at any of the URL's above by replacing 'dail' with 'seanad'.