Ronan’s Blog

The SSIA scheme (Irish Government Savings Scheme, toping up savings with an extra 25% over 5 years) has hit maturity right on time to coincide with the announcement of the General Election (Surprising, Huh?) and over a half a million accounts are maturing today, releasing over €7.5 billion to Irish Savers.
SSIA’s mature today releasing €7.5bn to savers

Now the property market has slowed down at the minute, because of the uncertainty over the future of Stamp Duty, which is expected to be resolved directly after the election. I wonder will these pay-outs kick-start it again? Will people actually start spending their SSIA’s immediately?
Personally, I’ve had my SSIA since the start of January and since then I’ve been suffering from Post-SSIA depression. Not because the free money giveaway has finished, but rather because I have this big lump sum sitting in my account with no idea what to do with it. Originally I thought that I would pay-off my car loan, sell my car, and buy a newer one with some of the cash (No luck selling my current car though) and then I would know €10,000 off my Mortgage (but my Bank Manager/Dad was not really able to tell me if that was a good idea or not). So right now I still have the lump sum sitting there with no idea what to do with it.

Unusual Sponsored link from Google 

I’ve been using Google Reader for my RSS and Podcast subscriptions for the past few months and its pretty damn good. However, today I wanted to lookup an old item that I had read yesterday. Finding it was not easy. Since Google made their name in searching, I assumed that the Search function would have been a prominent tool on the page. It is not.

To Search, I had to mark all items as read, then click the “Home” link, then click the “directory” link (which only appears when all your items are read), the use the “Search for feeds” functionality to search for feeds with the keyword you are looking for and hopefully turn up the result you want on the first page.

Not exactly ideal.

I think that a Search function is required to search your existing feeds, allowing you to specify a date range also. I know that I’d use it.

Two interesting articles have appeared in the past two days, one claiming that Blu-Ray has built up a big lead in the US market (Blu-ray builds big lead in US, mag claims)

With the second one saying how HD DVD is set to really dominate, with Walmart putting its influence behind that format (Slashdot | Wal-Mart Begins Massive Push For HD DVD )

The first article has some statistics, but I’d like to see their sources for them, i think the true “winner” will be established when there are comparable statistics from one retailer (e.g. Amazon) who sells both formats without pushing one over the other.

Then again we may never actually see a “winner” if dual format players become the norm, it’ll just be the movie studio’s deciding which format to publish their movies on.

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I have ever seen !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-u9SzVdVGI

I’ve been watching with interested as a whole lot of people get excited about the new “My Maps” functionality in Google Maps. It looks quite impressive, but is really nothing new, well not to me anyway. We’ve been writing on-line digitizing functionality for a few years now adding more and more functionality with every release, the difference being that our product is a commercial one, which you will not find too many free-to-access public deployments of it which allows digitizing functionality.

Google Maps and our product have always had quite a different focus/market position and this is the first time that they’ve crossed paths (Ignoring the export to KMZ functionality I wrote last year). However, rather than starting to worry about another major competitor, I maintain the same position that I had when writing my Thesis (gCommerce - How GIS is facilitating modern business), that publicly available mapping solutions will just increase the usage of on-line maps and ultimately lead to generating more business as a whole for the industry.

I do feel a vague sense of jealously watching all the praise that I am reading for the “My Maps” functionality, but such is life I guess !

Google Maps: My Maps

I came across this article today where Wired News editor Michael Calore uses only Google Applications for day-to-day tasks. It sounds interesting and heavily reliant on an fast and reliable Internet connection. I can’t really see this becoming commonplace, since the speed of desktop applications will always be faster than anything online.

I’ll just stay tuned for the Desktop versions of/shortcuts to the Google Office tools
Livin’ la Vida Google: A Month-Long Dive Into Web-Based Apps -

I just downloaded and installed the Spyware Doctor Application from PC Tools, which comes as part of the Google Pack software suite. The Google pack suite now downloads as an excellent updater tool to which you can add additional software and automatically update other applications too. Interesting the Updater has Pause and Resume download functionality, which makes me think that Google already has the makings of a good download manager application (like GetRight).

Anyway, whenever I see free Anti-Spyware or online Anti-Virus Scans I usually run them on a whim to see what they turn up and usually I just get tracking cookies and the like. My PC is obviously patched right up to date too. So I feel my PC is pretty secure and I’m happy to use it for online banking and other private work.

Not this time. Running the Sypware Doctor I found 2 Key Loggers (Registry), and one Backdoor entry application on my PC !!! This really surprised me, since I have always had either ZoneAlarm or Kerio Sunbelt firewall running as well as AVG Resident Shield and I regularly run the Lavasoft Anti-Spyware tool. I can’t believe these serious spyware items were on my PC.

Spyware Doctor comes with a running active shield too, which I will be leaving on from now on.

EDIT: I’ve just run the same software on my work PC (behind a corporate firewall) and found 314 Infections, some of which are very serious!

Canadian Spatial data is now available online for download for free.
Its a bit disorganised in the various formats e.g. dxf & e00 files for Vector data), personally I would have preferred to have Oracle Spatial dump files available for download, but each to their own I guess.

The data by area and data types, but there’s so much data in there that it may take a while to find what you actually want or are interested in. Then the data format may be difficult for you to use without some conversion software. Organising by data format might have been a good idea also.

Download here: http://www.geogratis.gc.ca

OK, this is getting a bit annoying.
With the new Microsoft approach of delivering urgent and high priority updates ahead of its monthly patch releases the constant need to re-start machines is really annoying. Especially if (like me) you have two office PC’s left on all the time, with multiple application constantly open.

When Windows 2000 was released were we not promise fewer restarts? This promise/selling point was continued with windows XP (See here), but now seems to have been totally disguarded. Surely an Update Engine inside Windows can restart only the service or component necessary!