gary’s web sofa

Paul Walsh has taken up the challenge organising an independent body to represent the interests of Irish web based companies. He’s already got a couple of the local heavy hitters (Damien Mulley and Fergus Burns) on his side, and he’s done this before with the British Interactive Media Association, so he’s no enthusiastic novice.

It would be nice to have a body representing native industry for a change. The only companies in this industry getting any mind share from government are the foreign ones, who may provide lots of jobs and pay lots of taxes, but they take their profits home at the end of the day.

Ireland Inc. Let’s just do it!

An update on yesterday…… I viewed the FAQ before I went out to buy one for myself in the morning as an early Christmas present and it specifically says that SkypeOut isn’t supported “…as 3 already provides you with great value calling to normal phone numbers around the world“. I think I’ll hold off for a while then….

3 Skypephone FAQ

3, the Irish 3G mobile phone operator announced a mobile phone that runs Skype, and an offer that looks on the surface like you can use SkypeOut to avoid paying 3 for most of your calls. They’ve hit the shops, and Damien Mulley, Irish tech blogger extrordinaire has got his hands on one.

As long as you top up with €20 a month, even the data transmission is free. In theory you could use up the €20 on Irish mobile calls (where 3 are about the same price as SkypeOut) and use SkypeOut for everything else, thereby getting very close to the absolute cheapest call rates anywhere….. on a mobile!

It seems that 3′s Skype client is actually a bit of a cheat though. These guys say that the software actually makes a standard local voice call, and it’s only at a central hub that the call gets routed over the Internet/Skype network. It makes sense, seeing as the Skype clone (IM+) that actually does a full Skype implementation has fairly major lag, due to the weedy CPUs in most smartphones.

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Testing out the 3 SkypePhone

The California Golden Bears played the Washington State Cougars a couple of weeks ago but got totally upstaged by the half time show. The band choreographed an amazing tribute to video games such as Pong, Mario, Zelda, Mortal Kombat and Pokemon. The Tetris segment is amazing.

Cal Band- Video Game Show 2007

 VMware recently announced the first beta of their free low-end VMware Server 2. It is a beta, and as such the sensible part of my brain tells me to stay away and let someone else take the pain. Unfortunately the gadget & gimmick loving part of my brain made me install it on my mail/web/everything else server that had a perfectly functioning v1.0.4 setup. Bad idea!

Version 1 has this very nice web UI for monitoring, starting/stopping, and tweaking stuff, and a separate Windows/Linux application for creating new VMs and accessing the console of each one. Version 2 has dispensed with the application and instead relies on a beefed up web interface, with a browser plugin to display the consoles. Unfortunately being beta, the web UI is ugly and unfinished, and there’s so much un-optimised debug code the VMs run at less than half the speed they did on the old version. I run Debian Linux web, email and SyncML servers, a Windows XP desktop, and the odd test Linux VM, all on a single 2.4GHz Celeron Dell server that I got for free. Obviously the beta had to go…..

Rolling back the server and toolset installs was a bit long winded, but it was straightforward enough. What wasn’t straightforward was un-scrambling the network config. Each VM has at least two interfaces, usually bound to the host system’s wireless interface (I keep the server in my garage, where I can’t hear it, so there’s no Ethernet out there) and a “host only” LAN for NFS, backups etc. The reinstall remapped everything arseways.

VMware Server 2.0 Beta – VMware