Author Archives: Donncha

Dublin Bus – Home, press ALT-i for the visually imparied version. Does it work in IE? Works in Mozilla/Galeon..

A white hat who revealed privacy holes in MSN had his hotmail account cancelled! He has a screenshot of the “Access Denied” page he saw when he attempted to login. That’s just a bit draconian isn’t it? He used an already known security bug yet he gets punished for bringing security info to the masses. *shudder*

David Harris comments on the Washington Sniper. This is the first mention of the sniper I’ve seen in the blogs I look at on a daily basis (see bar to the right for those links).

kuro5hin.org takes on the Orange Order – I find the article itself laughable and completely biased but the comments make for good reading.

Youth Defence – via IRC.

MenArePigs – Yes it’s true, we are pigs but it’s worse than you think. via referer logs.

Rick Moen on Linux Java – as ever Rick provides a good commentry on a specific subject. He also listed Linux development IDEs which is probably of use to people migrating to Linux.

Scott Andrew pointed out that the web was silent on the terrorist attack in Bali. That’s true, but the Irish media have had plenty of reports about it. A quick search on daypop shows 91 weblogs mentioned the attacks. (this number is only accurate today due to the way daypop works!)
My own piece on the attack comes in on the 3rd page where I stopped scanning.
The web and especially weblogs are US-centric. Sure, there are weblogs written by people all over the world but we’re a minority I feel. Get used to it, if it didn’t happen in the States then it didn’t happen and it probably won’t get widely reported and commented on. That’s one thing that frightens me about the influence weblogs have over Google, that bias will exist.

On the other hand, the sniper shootings in Washington have received scant attention from webloggers while it makes headlines here in Ireland and talk shows devote air-time discussing it. No matter how we feel weblogs have supplanted journalism for reporting news, if it doesn’t interest us or motivate us enough we won’t talk about it. The same occurs in any volunteer effort and is perfectly normal. (see the open source world for this -> google for “itch a scratch”)

For all European readers, imagine a bomb going off in Ibiza.. That’s what Bali was to Australians. You have my condolances. I hope they track down those murderers.