Ah it's grand.
Sure.

Took this picture while we were down in Cork last weekend just because I thought it’s such a great little bit of art. I’ll upload the rest of the pictures to Flickr over this weekend.

Grafitti on a Cork Bridge

My recent posts have been showing off the scenery we find around us in our new home. The downside of all those fantastic hills turned out to be a lack of line-of-sight for Airwire.ie service. So I’m going to use O2’s 3G internet service as I’m unwilling to pay €25 per month for line rental before I even start paying for ADSL service which is lacklustre at best. However, I need to be able to connect multiple machines and so we need a router. I’ve used a Solwise device before at my parents place. Previous experience has been excellent so combined with the price (~€50, ex. delivery) I decided it was the way to go. The main competition to this device is the Dovado UMR or 3GN at €130/€108 delivered. The 3GN wasn’t available when I was considering devices and I must admit I may have been swayed but it is almost twice the cost.

One of the things that really attracted us to move to Moycullen was the fantastic scenery in the area. Not only are there beautiful lakes (as you can see in the previous post) but there is also a lot of woods/forestry in the area. Makes for a tranquil Sunday wander. Have a look at the rest of the Flickr set from the weekend.

Just a short post on the Irish Blog Awards 2010 – my first time to attend and Liv came along too (which was great, she got an insight into my online life). As ever, it’s great to catch up with the people you know and finally say hello in person to a number of people you’ve chatted to for ages but never actually met face to face. Of course, you won’t get to meet everyone you wanted too but that just means you have to get out more and actually travel to some events. Having the awards on my doorstep here in Galway this year was absolutely awesome.

So everyone is tablet obsessed at the moment, in the sense that they’re either loving or hating all the hype on the topic at the moment. Sitting on the plane waiting the other day I got to thinking about what I’d like in a tablet. I will admit that I’m an Apple fanboy but this isn’t about their rumoured device.

I guess we’re coming from the notion of previous tablet computers that were really just variants on laptops and the inspiration of e-reader devices like the Kindle and so on. The e-readers have changed the usage landscape and we’ve seen the functional capabilities of netbook devices so the natural progression is how the compact processing power of the netbook can combine with the convenient form-factor of the e-reader that is ‘just-so’ functionally. We’re not looking for a complete computing device replacement but we probably do want a bit more than an e-reader offers. So this is what I came up with for my ideal device: I want a 10 inch touch screen – I know this makes it less portable but when I think of what I would want to display I can’t see a smaller screen doing the job. I want to be able to view technical manuals on this so that I can have the feel of flipping through a reference manual while I’m working on something. I also want to be able to ‘scribble’ notes though I say scribble quite loosely – I really don’t want a stylus. Why bother? Dragon Dictation on the iPhone has shown that we have the technology in the right form factor for dictation. I want to be able to think aloud while I read and get that noted down in a meaningful way. Of course you’re probably going to want a secondary input method when dictation doesn’t quite work or doesn’t suit what you’re trying to record and this is where I think the predictive texting soft keyboard you see on the iPhone and similar devices would suit. Except I don’t want it docked to the bottom of the screen, let me bring it up over the screen area where I want the note. In a way I guess that replicates pencilled in notes in the margin of schoolbooks. Page turning/flipping has to be easy – again we already have the tech there to detect motion so how about letting me easily flip a page with a gesture and flip many with a more vigourous gesture? Maybe this pushes a little too far – I’m not convinced it does.

DSC_2272

Originally uploaded by JamesGallagher (ciotog)

I don’t know why I really like this photo (not a technically good photo) , I just do.

Borne out of trying to get a meaningful view of Galway City Council meeting minutes (see Council Meetings) is a pet project of mine to parse those minutes. The idea being to extract contextual information like the councillors and officials present, the agenda items, the chronology & outcome of motions and similar information. I haven’t fully considered the end presentation – since I’ve been inspired by KildareStreet.com I may look at the open source software used there. Of course, the document is written for people to read so this presents a challenge to automate. I’ve opted to use Perl and so far have opted to split the document (after converting to plain text) based on a list of pre-defined section headings i.e. agenda items:

This was my big cycling project of the year and truly was fun. I’m debating putting an internal gear hub on it in 2010 but currently being advised against it. Well worth reading the set of posts I did recently on it:

Part 1: http://www.jamesgallagher.ie/new-bicycle-fun-part-1/

Part 2: http://www.jamesgallagher.ie/new-bicycle-fun-part-2/

Part 3: http://www.jamesgallagher.ie/new-bicycle-fun-part-3/