I logged on and laconically hit the link to choose a permanent username.

My preference, mlennox, was gone, but mark.lennox wasn't - success!

Apparently some people have been stymied by the process and/or lack of name availability.

Sucks to be them

See you at facebook.com/mark.lennox

15 Apps rendered obsolete by the New iPhone

These developers had to know that there apps would eventually become obsolete. They were fixing basic functionality on the phone, things that should have been there but weren't but were likely to be fixed, so I don't feel too bad for them.

If Apple removed these apps from the store after the launch of the new phone, THEN, I would cry foul.

I have used Photobox.ie for a few years now and I've been very happy with the quality of prints that you can order from them, not to mention the price!

I hadn't used the service for a while, but I was pleasantly surprised to notice (half-way through using the Java-based upload app) that you can now FTP in to your photobox account and upload photos that way. Much easier for someone like me!

Just point your favourite FTP client (I highly recommend Filezilla) at ftp.photobox.com and away you go.

Sadly, no FTP for flickr. Everytime I need to upload more than a few photos to Flickr it fails.

So it goes.

My intention was to try out the tutorials, look at the examples and see if it was worth dipping my toe into the world of developing for the gPhone. I'm a convert.

The wife of one of my work colleagues works in Google and she had received a google phone, one of the HTC G1 which I thought looked a little clunky on any videos and in pictures, but to hold it in your hand is a different experience. I liked it. I like it a lot. As much as I liked my experience with the iPhone.

I was surprised, but still wary of the operating system and how you interface with that.

The SDK comes with an emulator which gave me a very good idea of how the phone works. I've been quite happy with the operating system, which seems pretty easy to use and the on screen keyboard works well enough, again, at least as well as my iPhone experience.

The android alliance is only beginning to come into its own. Being a collection of hardware and software manufacturers, the android platform can look forward to a great deal of support on all levels. Couple this with the fact that you have Google masterminding this, and the fact that the barrier to entry for developers is very low (see below), I think there is a bright future for the soon to be many gPhones.

There are some major pros that would encourage me to not only develop for the android platform but also to buy an android phone. Currently I have my eye on the Samsung i7500 (which is nice and sleek but doesn't seem to have the digital compass of the G1) but it seems that is not supported in Ireland yet - 10 years of prosperity and we are still in the digital stone-age!!!

The pros:
Java
All development is done through Java. This is a good thing because Java is very similar to C#, which I am most familiar with. Plus its a lot better than the iPhone Objective C, which requires you to use nasty things like malloc and its ilk - yuck, manual garbage collection...

Opensource
Mostly. Its a good thing. People jump on board and push the code in new and interesting directions. Plus, unlike the iPhone OS, you can try and get Android running anywhere you like without fear of legal action.

Very, very, very low cost of entry
If you want to start developing for the iPhone you need to either own or buy some very expensive items: at least a mac mini (the SDK has an emulator), and then at least an iPod Touch and a developer licence ($199) to test the app in the wild.
With Android you need a PC, then download the SDK, install Eclispse and you are good to go. If you want to see it on a device you do need to buy a google phone (if you live in a country that supports it...) but then you can install the apps on your phone without having to go through the android market.

Android market
The Android market is a funny thing. The website is less than compelling and there are no download links. Eh?

The reason is that each Android phone will have its own android market app. that will allow you to access the android market and download any applicaiton you like.

But what if the phone manufacturer doesn't want you to download baby shake, or the latest your-face-as-jesus application? No problem. You can host your application on your own site where people can download and install it directly, and/or pop it up on one of the many thrid party android app markets that are appearing.

So, to wrap up, the google phone will be my next phone and I *will* be developing applications for it. I don't think the google phone will have the iPhone application milionaire phenomenon that we have seen, but I think any developer worth their salt will be able to earn a decent boost to their income.

One thing I am not worried about is being shot by a teenager. The other is dying from swine fever (and hopefully I don't have to eat humble pie on this one ;) ).

The reason is modern communications, human nature and facts.

Firstly; modern technology.

Columbine was the first school massacre where the unwilling participants had access to communication devices that could not be cut off from the outside world. Essentially this just spread the panic that the victims felt to the police and from there to the waiting world. The bottom line is that if you are stick in a classroom you know feck all about where the gunfire and explosions are coming from and who is responsible for them. In the case of Columbine, large amounts of gunfire and explosions could be attributed to the police.

In the case of swine flue we have people expressing their anxiety in much the same way. They panic, they wonder, they worry, they expostulate and all in an uninformed, or rather, an ignorant way. They cannot know what the results of contracting swine fever wil be or how likely they are to contract this newest bogeyman of virology.

Instead, each reasoned question they ask leads to a certain drop of unreasoned panic, which, multiplied by the same factors that fan flame wars out of control, results in deep, unreasoning panic within the populace as a whole. Sometimes too much information is a bad thing.

Human nature is a large part of this process. It is a well known fact (perhaps proverbial) that shouting 'Stop Thief' will elicit no response, but yelling 'Fire' will have galvanise people into helping you. In the same way, a simple request for information regarding something that could possibly harm anyone turns into a statement of fact; 'Could I get swine flu from eating bacon' can become 'Some people have contracted swine flu from eating bacon'.

However, the facts are on our side.

More people die from tripping and falling in their home, more people die from chocking on their own food, more people die from auto-erotic asphyxiation, EVERY YEAR, than people have been killed by flu epidemics and school gun slayings - ever.

So, relax, and enjoy your bacon sandwich at your local school. You'll be fine.

I haven't done enough to stop rendition through Ireland - have you?

The poor little thing will be frozen under carbon dioxide ice for a year during the martian winter, so not much hope of a reboot,even with its lazarus circuits.

Mars Phoenix' tweets have been captured for posterity (helped a little by staff in the ground control centre)

We hardly knew ya.

You : Someday you will die, and hopefully it will be screaming and with my fingers wrapped around your throat. Meanwhile, I have to deal with the fact that you have poisoned my life with your bullshit.

Die. Just die now you piece of shit. Take your spawn and dive off a cliff.

And when you die, take this hatred with you - I don't need it, I don't want it.

I fucking hate you with every atom of my being and watching you die a painful and lingering death is, sadly, one of the goals of my life.

However, I would never precipitate your demise - I think you are perfectly capable of that. Someday, you will piss someone off enough that they will just take decide to take your life and mangle it in the same fashion that you ahve magled mine and many others.

In short : Die, die, die, you piece of shit.

...suffice to say, I have contacted someone regarding therapy.

The first, and the one I have thought about the longest, is Peru. I remember seeing a picture of Machu Pichu in an old history book my father had as a child. I remember being dumfounded by the image. It looked so amazing and ethereal and yet so familiar. Anyone who knows me, knows that I don't believe in spirituality or para-psychology; I keep an open mind and give any claim the benefit of the doubt until it is clear that, sadly, there is no doubt.

My reaction to this picture or at least me recall of my reaction to it, might give pause for thought if I didn't hold such strong convictions. For what it's worth the picture always looked like some kind of a home to me - my home - a place familiar, comfort, happiness. That's the emotions I connect with it, make no supernatural connection, I don't, even if I did at a younger age. Maybe that is the enduring appeal of the place, that youthful wonder at imagining a life lived far from all I knew.

I would dearly love to spend a few months in the high mountains of Peru with some remote tribe, becoming part of the daily life of their tribe. I have some crazy notion about helping them build a rope bridge across a deep canyon. It's a romantic notion that I hope to someday fulfil, at least as far as rope bridge buidling; I draw the line at bridge building aver bottomless ravines.

There is something about high, remote places that appeals to me, although I could never be a climber. I grew up in Howth where we regularly climed to the top of the hill of Howth with sheer cliffs assailing us at every turn and only the prize of a fantastic view at the remote peak driving us on.

I love to ski, and a big part of that is being at the top of a mountain in the early morning watching the sun rise behind mountains while the wind blows drifts of snow from the peak. It gives me a deep sense of calm to be there and works even with the remoteness of memory.

High places, are simple places: cold, remote, free of complexity, free of ambiguity, it's a challenge - do or do not, there is no try.

The other place I would love to visit is McMurdo sound in the Antartic. I don't quite know why, but I remember a friend telling me about Jello Biafra drilling holes into ancient glaciers and pushing microphones deep, deep into the hole to record the clicks and cracks of ancient ice making its daily grind. Later, as I learned to love skiing, I loved the expanse of snow and the cold.

I don't for a minute think I could step into that environment and prosper. I do think that months of daily grind and misery (as it may be...) would be worth the transcendent moment that I would see the sun rise and fall in a matter of minutes, illuminating a wind-swept, seemingly endless expanse of ice, snow and rock.

Call me weird, but sitting beside a pool in the sun just doesn't appeal to me.

Apparently CO2 has no correlation with global temperature, expect that it follows - with a lag of hundreds of years - the mean global temperature; follows not sets.

It's all about the sun baby.

Higher sun spot activity has a very strong, positive correlation with higher mean global temperature.

Now you know.

This of course does not mean we can blithely pollute our atmosphere - I like fresh air thank you very much.

For Kubuntu (my choice of distro) we now have KDE4 as standard. I'm not so sure about that, but mainly because I haven't used KDE4 much. I installed the desktop with 8.04 and grabbed a few upgrades but the conversion for most apps wasn't quite there yet making it feel like it was a proof of concept rather than a fully fledged desktop.

Having said that, I am looking forward to installing 8.10. Sadly, I'll have to do a clean install as I managed to fuck up my perfectly good installation of 8.04 by experimenting, again.

Just sayin....

I mean, drainpipe trousers, heavy metal, peach fuzz moustache and long hair - that's just cruisin' for a bruisin'.

Seven-year-old 'escapes' from Alcatraz

It lights the fire of the imagination.

Hopefully I don't have to tell people that a seven year old gave me an infection :)

Holy moley. This kind of stuff strikes deep chords in me. That's why this TED talk sends shivers down my spine. Check this out.

The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in the shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for eighteen years. Two nine year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spent in their natural mothers womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of their great mother. For this entire time they are encultured into the values of their society. Values that maintain the proposition that their prayers, and their prayers alone, maintain the cosmic - or we might say the ecological - balance.And, at the end of this amazing initiation suddenly they are taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of eighteen, they see a sunrise. And, in that crystal moment of awareness of first light, as the sun begins to bathe the slopes of this stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory and the priest steps back and says "You see. It is really as I have told you.It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect".
They call themselves the elder brothers and we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones who are responsible for destroying the world.

It goes up, way up, from there. Seriously - hang in there for the description of the shit knife.

We have a lot to learn about communicating with each other, and a lot to learn about communicating with ourselves, but even more to learn about the different ways we can commune with our world - there is no one true way

^* I don't believe in the super natural but this still makes me wonder...