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February 2003

The Biz Blog?

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It’s amazing what some people will pay for if it has a shiney wrapper. I think my thoughts on this are best summed up by paraphrasing a certain credit card company’s ad campaign. Cost of my Blog package = $0 To think somebody would pay for it = priceless Read on… CNN.com – Red Herring… Read More »The Biz Blog?

Car Insurance – The National Leveller

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Well I guess it was inevitable but the rollover of yesterday into today saw my car taken off the road due to the unjustified cost of insurance in this country. You’d think that with a couple of years claim/accident free driving with a full licence that it would make some difference towards reaching a realistic figure for my premium. Alas, no! This is the country we live in; an unregulated farce in which commercial entities have free reign over legally enforced items such as car insurance.

Insurance costs have only risen since the introduction of the MIAB report. The points system is praised for its effect yet no insurance benefits have been seen. Since the equal status bill of 2000 was passed more and more insurance companies are blatantly discriminating against gender and age. I cannot name these companies for legal reasons but it doesn’t take long to compile this evidence from web-based quotes. Give it a try enter your details as a female and then the same details except as a male. Some companies won’t even quote you, others will have roughly Eur 1000 in the difference. Then mess around with the age issue for a bit of rage inspiring fun.

Read More »Car Insurance – The National Leveller

Refactoring the business

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Interesting read from the blog of Jon Udell where he interviews Ward Cunningham (inventor of WiKi) about the current strain of XP (extreme programming) and how the “job” generally gets done. Read on Jon Udell: Refactoring the business

Patriotic Hackers?

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Well I guess with all the nonsense going on at this time in the world it is only natural that a press story like this should exist. Sort of on the lines of “think not what you can hack for your country but what your country can hack for you”. Read the full article on… Read More »Patriotic Hackers?

You lazy foaf!

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Well it’s lunch time and I’m hungry but still I can’t resist one more XML-based entry to my blog. This time around I have encapsulated some of my personal information in a FOAF file (an RDF description of myself). FOAF stands for Friend Of A Friend and you can create your own FOAF simply enough… Read More »You lazy foaf!

GeoURL

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Well since the whole world is gone Geo-sensitive and the blogging community is being engulfed by a geo-location service known as GeoURL. I too have decided to link up my site. The little green button below the search facility on the main page of this blog will help you to view my neighbours in cyberspace.… Read More »GeoURL

Getting SOAP from Amazon

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It’s about 4 months now since I first read about Amazon opening up its databases to queries from web services. Some have dubbed it the Amazon API 🙂 However, it’s only now that I have gotten around to reading a little more about the service and a tutorial from Developer Shed that I fully realise what this means for the future of online trading…

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What ever happened to the W3C?

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Interesting blog entry from Mark Pilgrim about what happened to all those wonderful standards released by the W3C. It seems like a reasonable snapshot of how too many working groups and activities can render a standard unused. Worthwhile reading Semantic obsolescence [dive into mark]

Another blow to music sharing

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Yet another digital indentifier is attempting to stop the online music sharing problems for record companies. CNN have the full story so read on…

Project your thoughts

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The latest add-ons for the mobile computing user. Everyone needs a keyboard for typing any amount of text on a PDA but keyboards are bulky and not that mobile. Could projection keyboards be the answer Mícheál Ó Foghlú’s Weblog