Ryano Stuff

As an iPod Touch owner I was impatiently awaiting the launch of the iPhone 2.0 software, which allows you to download custom applications from the iTunes App Store to run on your iPod. Lots of cool stuff had been promised, including games such as Super Monkey Ball, Cro-Mag Rally, Tetris etc. Apparently half of the applications released at the launch of the App Store were games. In Ireland, however, the App Store only displays one lonely game, the less than inspiring Mr Potatohead simulator Mr. Shuffle.

A thread on Apple’s support discussions site throws out all sorts of theories, and documents users’ attempts to get answers from Apple on the problem. Some posters put it down to the general shoddiness of treatment of Irish customers (no movie rentals or TV shows from iTunes after 2 years), others to some difficulties with the Irish censors. Responses from Apple staff indicated that developers had simply decided not to release their games in Ireland for some reason. This theory was quickly discounted:

So Apple expect us to believe that every games developer in the world decided to not make their games available in Ireland? Sounds more like a default excuse to me. “We dont want to look into the problem, so we’ll just blame the developers”

Somebody even wrote to the Irish Film Censor’s to confirm that they don’t have anything to do with the matter. Somebody else emailed one of the game developers, Pangea Software, who responded as follows:

Something has been wrong with the Ireland store since Thursday because only 1 game is showing up. There should be 200 games. Apple knows about the problem, but it looks like it still isnt’ fixed yet. Hopefully they’ll have all the games up there soon.

So it’s Apple’s problem after all, but they don’t seem to be in a hurry to fix it. Tomorrow will be one week since the store went live, and I can’t imagine the fix is technically complex.

In the meantime we have to make do with Mr. Shuffle, which doesn’t look like it’s worth €2.39 to me. However, I couldn’t resist posting a sarcastic review to iTunes. It probably won’t show up, so the text is below:

The one and only

I’m a huge fan of this app because it’s quite simply the only game worth buying from the App Store if you live in Ireland. In fact, it’s the only game you can buy from the App Store if you live in Ireland. Apple quite rightly feel that we Irish need time to get to grips with the complexities of Mr. Shuffle before we can be expected to deal with the likes of Super Monkey Ball.

Update: They posted my review! They obviously don’t read these things too carefully. And the games are finally starting to trickle in: Mr. Shuffle has been joined by MotionX Poker, Platinum Solitaire, SuperPong and Bubble Bash.

Dublin City Council has put public WiFi for Dublin back on the agenda, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that IBEC are agin it:

“In effect Dublin City Council would be diverting public funds to put existing WiFi operators out of business, causing redundancies, and it could have an overall negative impact on the broadband market through what boils down to below cost selling.”

This is the sort of response I predicted in some comments I left on John Carroll’s blog back in July. To quote myself:

Switching on a citywide hotspot would be an admirable public service by the City Council, but it would bring them into immediate conflict with existing commercial interests, i.e. broadband and WiFi access providers like eircom, BT and BitBuzz. These companies would view any free or even cut-price access as unfair competition with their own offerings. This is almost certainly what lies at the root of the City Manager’s reluctance to push this one forward.

IBEC’s claims of prospective redundancies (which I don’t take seriously) should be set against the overall competitive advantage Dublin would gain as a city blanketed with cheap wifi. However in this case protecting the interests of existing players has weighed more heavily on IBEC’s mind than achieving an overall improvement in the economic environment in the city.

The City Council’s service wouldn’t compete with commercial broadband, but it’s true that it might result in loss of business for commercial providers of wifi hotspots. However there are still plenty of furrows for these providers to plough, and it would actually be of benefit if they were to concentrate on switching on hotspots in trickier locations than the city centre.

I am not without sympathy for the hotspot providers (one of the founders of Bitbuzz is a friend and former colleague of mine), but it seems to me that they are reaping the benefit of an artificial WiFi shortage in the city. If the whole city can be turned on cheaply, why should consumers be forced to pay high hourly rates and mess about with vouchers every time they want to get online in the city centre? Why should we have to find a cafe or bar to work in when WiFi can be provided in other public spaces?

IBEC “urges the Council to meet with industry to discuss their proposals and find a sustainable way forward”. I don’t doubt that their idea of a “sustainable way forward” is one in which the profits of their members are sustained. If the Council doesn’t agree to cut them in for a taste, I fully expect that at least one operator will threaten legal action in order to stop it going ahead. Such are the difficulties faced by anyone trying to provide a new public service in today’s ideological climate.

I love to hear about the new and exciting ways in which the Internet and related technologies are going to transform our political system forever. I’m directly involved in such efforts myself, fiddling about with a number of projects whose aim is to apply the web to politics or vice versa. However I can’t bring myself to believe the predictions of those who tell us that we’re entering into an era of web-based democracy. From Karlin Lillington’s recent piece in The Irish Times titled “Web-based politics and democracy for the 21st century” (subscription required):

In the past in Ireland, air and print- time for politicians and parties was highly controlled around elections and the domain of the established media. However, that is all going to change. New technologies and services enable all sorts of small guerilla actions by individuals who can, anonymously if they wish, post unflattering or flattering material on a candidate onto a blog, a picture site or a video site. Likewise, expect candidates and parties themselves to use such tactics, probably anonymously of course, but not always.

I expect this is true, although I’m not sure if the impact of such activity, and of the other examples of “web-based politics” provided by Lillington, will be significant enough to justify her closing line:

Politicians and political parties, welcome to 21st-century web-based democracy. This is your official wake-up call.

I have a very simple theory about the role which the Internet and related technology will play in the next election. I’ve been sharing it with anyone who will listen for the past couple of years, so I may as well spell it out here. In summary, there is a small but increasing cohort of voters who will use the web sites of candidates as their main point of reference in deciding where to allocate their votes. That’s it.

You’ll note that my theory doesn’t mention blogging, the disruptive influence of the citizen media, guerrilla YouTube videos, or reinventing politics for the Internet age. In other words, it’s not a very sexy theory. But I believe it to be valid. There are a lot of voters out there for whom the web is the first point-of-contact when shopping, researching, or just browsing for fun stuff, and I expect many of them will take the same approach when deciding on where to direct their votes. They will expect each candidate’s web site to clearly lay out the candidate’s position on the main issues of concern, to demonstrate a track record of activity on these issues, and to generally convey the impression that the candidate is worthy of their vote.

Some voters may be influenced by what they read about candidates, parties, and policies on blogs and online discussion forums. Having hung around politics.ie for a few years now, I’ve seen a few minor examples of posters changing certain political opinions after engaging in online debate. Here’s a thread on which you can find a couple of examples. However, the vast majority of people who enage in debate on these sites are already politically committed, and in many cases are out-and-out party hacks. In my view this is not a medium through which to secure the support of floating voters.

It seems to me that blogs, podcasts, videos etc. will have a negligible impact on the outcome of the election. This doesn’t mean that candidates shouldn’t make use of them, indeed I think they can go a long way towards conveying the messages I refer to above. However no web-savvy voter is going to be swayed purely by the fact that a candidate has managed to embed a grainy YouTube clip on their site. Judging by the YouTube efforts of candidates to date, it seems more likely that they’re opening themselves up to derision from web-savvy voters rather than winning them over. Candidates should be looking to enhance their core messages with a certain amount of online enagement, but shouldn’t expect that votes will be won purely on displays on technological mastery.

In light of all of the above, I have decided it would be a useful public service to identify instances of hyperbole on this issue as I encounter them. Any articles I discover will be linked here with the tag “Hypewatch”, and I would encourage anyone who wants to contribute to this effort to use the same tag. I’m not suggesting that everything so tagged is completely over-the-top, just that it contains predictions which have yet to be tested in the white heat of an election campaign. In this way we can return to the issue after the election and assess which predictions held true, and which turned out to be, well, premature.

La Fonera is a nifty little gadget that lets you get hooked up to the FON Wifi community, which is a network of publicly available wifi hotspots maintained by volunteers. However there are some problems when using it with a Mac, and specifically a MacBook it seems. After wrestling with this over the weekend I thought I should post my experiences.

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Florian Müller of the No Software Patents! campaign has posted an article claiming that Ireland is pushing for software patents because we are economically dependent on Microsoft and other US software companies:

Given his obvious bias, Irishman Charlie McCreevy should never have been entrusted with the control over the process on the software patent directive. Unfortunately, in his role as recently appointed EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, he is the most powerful man in the process. That man is a Microsoft vassal. Bill Gates’ wish is McCreevy’s command. We are not talking about an impartial politician but about someone who even vowed in a speech in the European Parliament that he would vigorously represent certain interests. If he is not stopped, then he will abuse the power of his office to wreak havoc to 24 EU member countries only to do what he thinks is good for one country — his own.

Those accusations may sound quite strong but they are based upon facts. Let’s look at the way things work in Ireland for those U.S. software companies like Microsoft.

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The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) have been briefing newspapers on the “legal minefields” new owners of iPods and other digital music players may face. From an article in this week’s Sunday Business Post:

Dick Doyle, the managing director of Irma, told The Sunday Business Post that it was “against the law’‘ to copy music onto iPods and other devices. “People should know that private copying from one medium to another is illegal,” he said.

“There is no private copying exemption in Irish law. You cannot burn downloaded music onto CDs. You cannot transfer it onto an iPod.”

Thousands of iPods were bought in the run-up to Christmas by people hoping to download music onto them from their CD collection or internet sites. But Irma’s Doyle said that anyone doing so would be breaking the law.

“People think that if there is no commercial gain that they can do it,” he said. “They can’t.”

While the article unhelpfully mixes up a number of related issues (illegal downloading, ripping from your own CDs, burning legally downloaded music to CD), it does appear that IRMA are keen to remind people just how few rights they enjoy in relation to sound recordings. It’s not clear whether they are planning to come after you for ripping your CD collection onto your iPod, but they do want you to know that Irish copyright law offers no exemption for this activity. Having read Chapter 6 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000, it appears they are technically correct. The only exemption I can find which might apply is that of “Fair dealing: research or private study“.

Is this a timely reminder that the law needs to be amended to take account of the entirely reasonable activity of transferring your own CD collection onto your own digital music player?

Slashdot carried a story a few days ago about car sharing services (car clubs) in the US. It qualifies as “news for nerds” because of the technology used to manage bookings and control access to the cars.

I’ve always thought that car clubs should be tried in Dublin, as they address both the traffic and parking problems. I managed to get an objective to support car sharing schemes included in an early draft of the new Dublin City Development Plan; it will be interesting to see if this survives into the final version, which is due in February.

For more on car clubs, check out this article from the Guardian.

One of the main projects I’ve been working on for the past few months has finally come to fruition: an upgrade of the email service at dublin.ie. In early December we upgraded 11,000 users from a system based on @Mail 3.6 to one based on @Mail 4, running on new hardware with about 10 times the storage.

The upgrade has finally allowed us to start dealing with the spam issue effectively, as @Mail 4 has built-in support for SpamAssassin and users can make use of Bayesian filtering to train the spam filter. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, on a typical day we block more than 50% of all messages received as spam. Today’s stats are 12,254 messages received, 14,453 blocked by the spam filter.

As part of the upgrade, we also created an email service for another public service agency, which will be run on a pilot basis. In 2005, dublin.ie will be introducing a premium version of the email service for a small annual fee, but the intention is to always provide a free version.

The Graphing Calculator Story is a bizarre and strangely touching story of how the Graphing Calculator which used to ship with every Mac was developed by a couple of programmers who were effectively volunteering at Apple without the company’s knowledge. It’s interesting that everyone involved, including those who assisted the pair to continue their work despite the fact that they had no clearance to be in the building, were motivated by the desire to see good work reach completion.

The new site www.NoSoftwarePatents.com, which was launched yesterday in 12 languages, may provide a focus for the campaign against software patents in the EU. Florian Müller is managing the campaign, which has the backing of three corporate partners: 1&1, Red Hat, and MySQL AB.

Here in Ireland, The Irish Free Software Organisation (IFSO) are leading the fight against software patents. Their software patents page lays out the current status.

Wired News are carrying an article about the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in elections.

I spent most of the last election campaign wishing I had some way of linking my database of voters to street maps. This stuff is not rocket science, but the biggest impediment seems to be the limited availability of the geographic data itself, i.e. maps. In Ireland there seem to be two main suppliers of map data: the Ordnance Survey and a company called Mapflow. Both charge rates which would put this outside the budget of most campaigning organisations.

I’m trying to get my hands on an Airport card to go into a G3 iBook. As this is more or less an obsolete product, I thought I’d be able to pick one up cheaply so I could mess about with getting the two laptops in the house wirelessly networked.
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