Copacetic

Fergus has posted his keynote slides from the IWTC Conference on slideshare.

Barry here from IrishDev.com. We are releasing 50euro day passes for the final day of the Irish Web Technology Conference.

Pay on the day, the schedule commences at 9.15am so aim to arrive at 8:30 – 8:45am.

Schedule includes online Brand Engagement, business blogging, data protection, open source licencing (by the daddy himself, Russ Nelson form New York) IPR fro online activities, MS Volta, agile web development (Exoftware), mobile web (Roccoco) Developing secure web apps, enabling trust on the internet (Paul Walsh – Segala) Semantic Web (John Breslin) SEO (hobo), Google Analytics (IQ Content) – see
http://iwtc.firstport.ie

Price includes lunch, brochure, and special laptop bag.

Send an email to patricia@irishdev.com or call her after hours on 087 924 3392 to confirm you place.

Lastly, remember tonight is Irelands first technology pub quiz – we have companies, user groups and even friends who have formed teams of four – if you want to enter simply turn up to the CineWorlds tonight.

Its all happening this week on the conference front in Dublin.

From Tuesday through Friday we have the Irish Web Technology Conference hosted at the Cineworld Complex on Parnell Street. Fergus Burns and Conor O’Neill will be presenting and I would suggest you also try and catch Paddy Holohan of Newbay. Paddy has made more money from software in the last twenty years than is probably legal . If you are really stuck, you could kill and hour with this guy.

The IWTC unfortunately clashes with two other great events I want to attend this week as well. XCellerate 2008 is a tabled as “Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland” but seems to heavily focussed on an (impressive) lineup of irish presenters including Brian Caulfield, Chris Horn, Bernie Cullinane and Shay Garvey.

Its only a half day affair so in theory you could nip across to The Ballsbridge Court (aka the Berkeley Court) for the morning if you wanted to catch up on what appears to be a ISA conference from 5 years ago, dug up and dusted off.

The real clash comes with the ISA Conference next day which has some great speakers but the worst website I have ever seen (did I say website, web page! more like). Guy Kawasaki, the ex Apple Evangelist, A-list blogger and sometimes VC at Garage Ventures is paired with Anthony Williams the co-author of Wikinomics. These are world class speakers and its a real coup for the ISA to get them to come to Ireland. The ISA Conference is hosted at the O’Reilly Institute, UCD in Belfield.

Then to cap it all off on Saturday we have the Irish Blog Awards, organised by Irelands most prolific blogger, Damien Mulley for the third year in a row. This will held at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin (just behind Trinity). Entrance fee is €10 and a good night is guranteed for all.

Don’t even get me started on BlogTalk 2008 which kicks off on Sunday in Cork.

Prices are as follows:

• IWTC : Four Days, 41 speakers : €245 but €189 if you pre-register online
• XCellerate 2008 : Half Day, €100 or 450 bundle which gives you access to the ISA Conference
• ISA Conference : Members €250, Non members €300, Incubation Centre Member €200
• BlogAwards : €10 on the door

I think the keepers are the IWTC for the scope of its presenters, the ISA conference for Guy and Anthony and the BlogAwards because Damien sensibly organised it not to clash with anyone else.

I shot this picture in my local Tesco’s supermarket recently. This is the printer cartridge aisle. I know printer ink is more expensive than vintage champagne (or human blood for that matter). But this enormous mountain of ink is only a tiny representative sample of the totality of form factors for ink delivery out there.

Each time Dell or IBM or HP produce a new printer they seem bound by some crazed anti-reuse cancer to produce a completely brand new delivery system.

The obsession with eluding the cartridge refillers (who are doing the planet and our pockets a great service) must stop and some kind of move to a standardised delivery system has to be the future for this industry.

Can you say carbon footprint?

TechLudd Limerick kicks off in the George Hotel next Thursday the 21st at 7.00pm. Make sure to register so you can be sure of a seat

See y’all there on the night.

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole
This is a serious horn for cyclists. I came across it outside the Stephens Green centre and couldn’t resist trying it out. You grab the handle in front on the forks and lift and press. It is car horn loud!

Great for drivers in the cycle lane.

Digital Tagging is for pussies.

Niall Larkin at the Digital Hub

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole
Digital Tagging is for Pussies.

The little dot above is meant to be a whole image, but the shit, shit, shit (did I say it was shit) wordpress editor while displaying it correctly in edit mode, obliterates it to a pixel when viewed via the main blog page. To reproduce, post a photo from flickr and edit the title. See the next post for a correct view.

I see Mary Hanafin is defending the current and by implication previous governments disgraceful role in special needs education in ireland. Always the big numbers are tossed out casually, 900m on special needs. (But it looks more like 20m on this page).

But where is it going? Two years is average time a child will wait who requires clinical psychological assessment. That is two years after the requirement for assessment has been determined by a state nurse, two years after, for a two year old! That is twice the childs life to date. Every single pratitioner in the field advocates early diagnosis and early intervention, but how can you intervene when you don’t know what the issue is?

What do parents do in that two year limbo?

Then the whole system is structured to remove aid at every step of the way, to eliminate opportunity, to reduce cost. Once you reach the level of primary education the whole rich and enormous wide spectrum of special needs is broken down into four categories and you’d better hit two or better still three for if you want any of that 900m.

The government have fought tooth and nail against ABA because they were strong. In similar cases such as the army deafness cases where they were weak they bent over so far it was hard to see their heads for their arses.

But strong against children?

And worse children who are at a disadvantage?

TechCrunch thinks SalesForce may be hawking itself to Oracle for $75 a share. I never know whether the prices make sense in these deals, but from a technology perspective it would be a huge win for Oracle. Oracle has been trying to get into the OnDemand space for years, but their OnDemand offering is shit, not to put too fine an edge on it. They have failed abjectly in every attempt for reasons such as,

• Channel conflict
• Obsession with build all their own technology (e.g. network management and storage management tools)
• Failure to re-architect the Oracle database to suit an OnDemand architecture (sensible out of the box defaults for a start)
• Failure to create a single OnDemand organisation, instead spreading the activity throughout the global support organisation
• Failure to price appropriately
• Failure to deploy billing infrastructure to bill appropriately
• Failure to deploy any kind of virtualisation at the OS level
• etc. etc.

SalesForce has solved all these problems and they have solved them using Oracle as a backend. They would inject the appropriate engineering/support DNA into Oracle and make the whole OnDemand effort more customer focussed.

Makes sense, but will Larry bite?