Archive for the ‘Computing Technology’ Category

Data retention and vehicle tracking

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

Just before I came home for Christmas I was Paul's guest on MediaGeek on WEFT. We had intended, originally, to talk about the state of community media in Ireland and Europe generally, but ended up spending most of the show talking about the Data Retention compromise that had just passed ...

Data retention mission creep

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

Terrorism. Organised crime. File sharing. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? That's what the music industry seems to think in Europe, where they are lobbying for the proposed data retention directive to beextended to cover all criminal offences, including piracy, and not just "serious" crimes, as the original proposal ...

Professional tagging

Monday, October 31st, 2005

As if the annotated audio idea wasn't enough, today I got pointed towards details of the BBC's programme catalogue - a 7 million line database - which is being prototyped on a Rails framework. Of interest, of course, is that the database was developed and maintained by professional librarians, so ...

Annotated audio

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

Given my critical approach towards digital audio it's easy for people to characterize me as Luddite in tendancy. I'm not sure if it will help to say that I find this technology to be absolutely fascinating.

Digitizing radio – a discourse

Friday, October 21st, 2005

Here in Urbana we're in the process of working to get our new radio station, WRFU, on the air. It's a whole lot of work, but thankfully we've got a good group of people working on it. We're also going to get help from people around the country when we ...

AIM status as communication tool

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

When I started using my current iTunes track as an AIM 'available' message - in response to seeing various people use it for messages such as going for grocerie soon. Wanna join me? - one of my friends pointed me towards this essay.

Help with MT installation

Monday, September 26th, 2005

As part of my work on another site I need a copy of the mt-load.cgi file for Movable Type 2.661. Anyone happen not to delete this when they installed MT, or, alternately, keep a copy on file? Unfortunately it appears that I deleted the copy I was keeping archived at ...

Data retention push continues

Monday, September 12th, 2005

Various news items in recent days point towards developments at an EU level regarding data retention. This is, of course, an issue prioritized by Blair in the wake of the London bombings, and I've written on several occasions previously regarding the earlier push for an EU directive requiring long periods ...

Omnibus edition

Thursday, July 28th, 2005

I've spent most of the past week or two travelling and entertaining visitors, so I've fallen a little behind in posting various items that I would generally try to cover on this blog, so it's time for a bumper compendium:The website for Radio Research Ireland, a new network of individuals ...

Costing a wireless network

Friday, July 8th, 2005

Sascha has produced a good analysis of the costs of a wireless network along the lines of that being developed by the CUWiN project. I'd like to comment on - and hopefully improve - the estimates for bandwidth costs and the number of nodes required. Sascha estimates bandwidth costs at $600 ...