Eoin Prout

It’s been amusing listening to the FaceBook fan club telling us how it will conquer all.
Of course this is never going to happen, Open systems always triumph over walled gardens and FaceBook is a walled garden.
So I was shocked when Microsoft paid $240m for a 1.7% share of FaceBook, valuing the company at $15bn.

The day after Microsoft purchased their FaceBook shares, Google announced their OpenSocial initiative.
OpenSocial is an attempt to break down the walls around the social networking sites (and to eliminate FaceBook as a serious threat).
Microsoft probably wasn’t worried, after all they had beaten Google out of a FaceBook share (at great cost) and the sites who were partnering with the OpenSocial initiative were considered underdogs to FaceBooks alpha.

That Changed today.
MySpace to join Google OpenSocial MySpace, the number one social networking site (yes, it is still bigger) has jumped on board the OpenSocial band wagon, Apparently Google and MySpace have been in negotiations for over a year. Talk about having an ace up your sleeve.

Apparently the Peoples Republic of Cork website has been identified as a site that may harm your computer.

This is a great site I visit regularly with no negative side effects, I think the site admin needs to contact Google and resolve this issue as it will reduce traffic to the site.
StopBadWare.org provides the abilities to see reports on sites marked as harmful and for site administrators to ask for a review on the sites inclusion in the clearing house.

The same site also appears as a paid link, Should Google advertise sites it has identified as dangerous ?
Clicking on the top search result which includes the warning brings you to a warning page which gives you another chance to change your mind before continuing on to the site, Interestingly when clicking on the sponsored link you are immediately sent to the PeoplesRepublicOfCork.com site with no warning.

Every Administrator should be making sure that their site has not been included in this blacklist.

To mark its appointment as the Master reseller for CodeGear in Ireland, MicroMail hosted a free CodeGear workshop at Jurys Hotel in Cork last Tuesday (23/Oct/2007).
This is good news as my experience of MicroMail has always been positive.

Ireland usually gets lumped in with the UK by most companies, so being from Cork and having used Delphi for the last ten years it was great to have a workshop in my hometown.

The workshop was presented by two evangelists from CodeGear and they went through the latest batch of products on offer from CodeGear.
- RAD Studio 2007
- JGear Plug-ins for Eclipse 3.2
- Delphi for PHP
- 3rd Rail (Ruby on Rails)
- JBuilder 2007
- C++Builder 2007
- BlackFish SQL

I’m not a Ruby fan-boy but the 3rd Rail demo really wowed me,
I’ve never seen a functional web app which uses a database created so easily and quickly.
This could be a very successful product for CodeGear.

BlackFish SQL is the long awaited replacement for the BDE and I was impressed but I’m concerned that the licensing model CodeGear have chosen will prevent widespread take up.

I was able to raise my concerns over Unicode support in Delphi and was assured that it is on the road map and hopefully will be out sometime in 2008.

After the workshop an excellent buffet lunch was laid on and we had the chance to talk with the CodeGear people.
An interesting morning that for some reason passed completely under the IT@Cork radar ?

A while ago I wrote how Silicon Republic was annoying me by only having Headlines in their RSS feed, The headlines were short and it wasn’t possible to pick articles I’d be interested in so I stopped reading the Silicon Republic feed.

This is no longer the case, as of August 14th the Silicon Republic feed includes a summary of the story.
Will done Silicon Republic. Your once again on my reading list.

You never know how much you’ll miss something until it’s gone.

Two days people all over the world were unable to logon to Skype, Friends all over the world confirmed they were experiencing similar problems, The Skype blog published the following notification,

Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologise for the inconvenience.

A note at 20:06 GMT: We’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to send us their thoughts, concerns and good wishes. It means the world to those working so hard to resolve this thing.

Not much information and there are a lot of comments from people who depend on Skype for business use.

The problem was an inconvenience for me but for a lot of Skype users it was a serious problem

O Skype,
How and Why did you let it happen?
We use Skype and Skype-out for doing business here in Vietnam, and the damage and loss are uncountable….
Shall it be a lesson for us to rely solely on you for communication?

A vague explanation of the cause was given

Apologies for the delay, but we can now update you on the Skype sign-on issue. As we continue to work hard at resolving the problem, we wanted to dispel some of the concerns that you may have. The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.

Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock — from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose — to resume normal service as quickly as possible.

Today Skype resumes normal service.

Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal.

On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order. We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!

Lets Keep Perspective

This event has made some people reconsider depending on Skype
and others are crowing I told you so.

lets not forget that traditional telephony providers also have problems on a regular basis
Mobile-phone outage hits N.Y. borough

Phone Outage Hits Hospitals, 911 Centers

Not to mention the failure of other important systems we depend on
Blackouts cause N America chaos

And what about the big BlackBerry outage a couple of months ago ?

Systems fail, The World Moves On

Every complex system fails eventually, No one promises 100% up time, thats why the 5 nines standard is used as even the most reliable systems only promise 99.999% up time.
In Skypes case the failure was massive and lasted at least 24hrs, but it is the first time I remember Skype failing in the several years I’ve been using it, On the other hand my land-line supplied by a tradition telecoms provider fails on a regular basis.
So lets keep things in perspective, Skype went down for 24hrs and is now back up And based on past performance it’s not likely to fail again for several years.

We wanted to get a rabbit for my 5 year old niece,
So we built a hutch and drove into town to get the bunny.
€25 for a rabbit, not too bad but it was the €125 surcharge that was unacceptable.
The shop would not sell us a rabbit without a hutch, WTF!!!
We went to every pet shop we could find and they all had this bizarre policy.
Is this another example of rip-off Ireland ?

If anyone knows of a supplier who will sell rabbits in the Cork area without a hutch please let me know.

Silicon Republic has a story today about Aodhan Cullen who has been named BusinessWeek’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Congratulations Aodhan.

Two things really annoy me about Silicon Republic
first , it almost never have links to any of the companies or people they report on.
I had to search Google for Aodhan’s company StatCounter.
And secondly, the RSS feed only has the headline, not even a summary.

All done with Pivot

I should point out that Pivot is written in Delphi

In my previous rant about the cost of the mobile Internet I neglected
to mention that I was talking about 2G or less networks.

3G is an entirely different beast.

Tom Raftery in his blog gives the low down on 3G costs.
Irish mobile broadband becomes more compelling

3 network passes on iPhone
3 also point to the high cost of 2G networks as the reason their not going to
support the iPhone.

So if you a serious user of the mobile Internet the 3G is a great option.

The only problem is that most people are still on 2G or less so we still need to
care about bandwidth.

The Coming of Gmail

When Google released GMail they eroded the two primary advantages of the desktop email client, Storage capacity and POP access.

Before GMail, web based email restricted users storage capacity to a couple of megabytes, users could access their POP accounts but only if they paid a premium for this service, Gmail allocates a couple of gigabytes and are continually increasing it, and Gmail allows users to access a number of POP accounts free of charge.
How long will it be before GMail uses GEARS to enable it’s use off line?
Add this to all the other advantages inherent in web based email clients, why would anyone still want to use a desktop email client?

Not everyone has broadband

Not everyone has a fast internet connection and using web based email on a slow connection is painful.
What they need is the solution which requires the lowest possible bandwidth.
Enter the desktop email client.

An email client such as Thunder Bird can be configured to only download the headers while leaving the rest of the message on the server, the user can then decided what important enough to download in full. This is an extremely efficient use of bandwidth.

The Future

I don’t think desktop email clients have much of a future, as high speed internet connections become even more common the need for desktop email clients will decrease and they will become a niche product.

Maybe this is an indication of what will happen to other types of desktop applications in future, Just look at Google Apps for a hint of what is possible.