1848 Tricolour Celebration
1848 Tricolour Celebration
Thomas Francis Meagher is a name well known in Waterford City. A celebrated revolutionary who made his mark on Ireland and also across the waters in America. Most people pass by his statue, on horseback, at the Tower Hotel every day, probably without being aware of what may be his most significant legacy to Ireland.
In 1848, at 33 The Mall, Waterford City, Thomas Francis Meagher flew a flag from the building. A flag that represented his views of Ireland’s political state and his desire to see peace prevail upon the land. That flag bore the colours green, white, and orange – colours to which Meagher aligned the Irish catholics (the green), protestants (the orange), and everlasting peace between the two (the white). This vision went without official recognition until eventually in 1937, the tricolour was formally adopted as Ireland’s national standard.
Today, a symbol of the Irish people, all over the world, the tricolour is proudly flown at sporting events, international festivals and anywhere that Irish people go. To many internationals, it symbolises neutrality, friendliness and the “craic” of the Irish. It is fitting that Meagher’s vision for peace, symbolised in the flag, should prevail across the globe as a welcomed and friendly nation.
In honour of the events of 1848, when the now official tricolour of Ireland was first flown in Waterford City, a celebration is planned for March 5th and 6th. On March 5th, following a Mayoral reception of guests, a Leviathan political theatre event will take place at the Theatre Royal – tickets available from the website. The first Leviathan event in the area, this promises to be a great evening of good-humoured and topical discussion on the subject matter of “the impact of flags and emblems on politics and nationhood”. On March 6th, from 12:45pm, The Mall will play host to a reenactment of the tricolour’s first unveiling. Thomas Francis Meagher (portrayed by an actor) will march up The Mall carrying the tricolour which will then be flown from the centre pole outside the Waterford Crystal showrooms. In attendance will be the Irish navy who will observe protocol while the flag is hoisted and also high profile guests of honour from the U.S., France and Canada. The Canadian Ambassador to Ireland, His Excellency Loyola Hearne will address the public and accompanying speeches from the Mayor of Waterford City, Mary Roche, and also Mayor of St. Herblain M. Charles Gautier will set the stage.
A presentation of a replica of Meagher’s famous Club ’82 jacket to representatives of the New York 69th Infantry Regiment will take place against the backdrop of music from The Barrack St Band and local soprano, Donna Roche whom will give a recital in Christ Church Cathedral from 12pm and whom will also sing our national anthem during the flag raising ceremony. Craic agus ceol is expected to follow in the nearby pubs and a great family day out is to be had.
This promises to be a very special event that will attract many people to the city and raise Waterford’s profile on the international stage.
Full details of the event can be obtained from the official website http://www.1848tricolour.com/
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March 5th and 6th - can't wait! It promises to be a great event for all.
Think like the web or even like Jon Udell
Back in 2000, the patterns, principles, and best practices for building web information systems were mostly anecdotal and folkloric. Roy Fielding’s dissertation on the web’s deep architecture provided a formal definition that we’ve been digesting ever since. In his introduction he wrote that the web is “an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system” that aims to “interconnect information networks across organizational boundaries.” His thesis helped us recognize and apply such principles as universal naming, linking, loose coupling, and disciplined resource design. These are not only engineering concerns. Nowadays they matter to everyone. Why? Because the web is a hybrid information system co-created by people and machines. Sometimes computers publish our data for us, and sometimes we publish it directly. Sometimes machines subscribe to what machines and people publish, sometimes people do.
Given the web’s hybrid nature, how to can we teach people to make best use of this distributed hypermedia system? That’s what I’ve been trying to do, in one way or another, for many years. It’s been a challenge to label and describe the principles I want people to learn and apply. I’ve used the terms computational thinking, Fourth R principles, and most recently Mark Surman’s evocative thinking like the web.
Back in October, at the Traction Software users’ conference, I led a discussion on the theme of observable work in which we brainstormed a list of some principles that people apply when they work well together online. It’s the same list that emerges when I talk about computational thinking, or Fourth R principles, or thinking like the web. Here’s an edited version of the list we put up on the easel that day:
Be the authoritative source for your own data
Pass by reference not by value
Know the difference between structured and unstructured data
Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions
Push your data to the widest appropriate scope
Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber
Reuse components and services
1. Be the authoritative source for your own data
In the elmcity context, that means regarding your own website, blog, or online calendar as the authoritative source. More broadly, it means publishing facts about yourself, or your organization, to a place on the web that you control, and that is bound in some way to your identity.
Why?
To a large and growing extent, your public identity is what the web knows about your ideas, activities, and relationships. When that knowledge isn’t private, your interests are best served by publishing it to online spaces that you control and use for the purpose.
Related
Mastering your own search index, Hosted lifebits
2. Pass by reference rather than by value
In the case of calendar events, you’re passing by value when you send copies of your data to event sites in email, or when you log into an events site and recopy data that you’ve already written down for yourself and published on your own site.
You’re passing by reference when you publish the URL of your calendar feed and invite people and services subscribe to your feed at that URL.
Other examples include sending somebody a link to an article instead of a copy of the article, or uploading a file to DropBox and sharing the URL.
Why?
Nobody else cares about your data as much as you do. If other people and other systems source your data from a canonical URL that you advertise and control, then they will always get data that’s as timely and accurate as you care to make it.
Also, when you pass by reference you’re enabling reuse (see 7 below). The resources you publish can be recombined, by you and by others, with other resources published by you and by others.
Finally, a canonical URL helps you measure how the web reacts to your data. If the URL is cited elsewhere you can discover those citations, and you can evaluate the context that surrounds them.
Related
The principle of indirection, Hyperlinks matter
3. Know the difference between unstructured and structured data
When you create an events page on your website, and the calendar on that page is an HTML file or a PDF file, you’re posting unstructured data. This is information that people can read and print, and it’s fine for that purpose. But it’s not data that networked computers can process.
When you publish an iCalendar feed in addition to your HTML- or PDF-based calendar, you’re publishing data that machines can work with.
Perhaps the most familiar example is your blog, if you have one. Your blog publishing software creates an HTML page for people to read. But at the same time it creates an RSS or Atom feed that enables feedreaders, or blog aggregation services, to automatically collect your entries and merge them with entries from other blogs.
Why?
When you publish an iCalendar feed in addition to your HTML- or PDF-based calendar, you’re publishing data that machines can work with.
The web is a human/machine hybrid. If you contribute data in formats useful only to people, you sacrifice the network effects that the machines can promote. If you also contribute in formats the machines understand, they can share your stuff amongst themselves, convey it to more people than you can reach through word-of-mouth human networks, and enable hybrid human/machine intelligence to work with it.
Related
The laws of information chemistry, Developing intuitions about data
4. Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions
When people publish calendars into elmcity hubs, they can assign unique and meaningful URLs and/or tags to each event they publish. And they can collaborate with curators of hubs to use tag vocabularies that define virtual collections of events.
The same strategies work in all web contexts. Most familiar is the first order of business at every conference attended by web thinkers: “The tag for this conference is ______.” When people agree to use common names in shared data spaces, effects like aggregation, routing, and targeted search require no special software.
Why?
The web’s supply of unique names (e.g., URLs, tags) is infinite. The namespace that you can control, by choosing URLs and tags for the things you post, is smaller but still infinite. Web thinkers use thoughtful, rigorous naming conventions to manage their own personal information and, at the same time, to enable network effects in shared data spaces.
Related
Heds, deks, and ledes, The power of informal contracts, Permalinks and hashtags for city council agenda items, Scribbling in the margins of iCalendar
5. Push your data to the widest appropriate scope
When you speak in electronic spaces you can address audiences at varying scopes. An email message addresses one or several people; a blog post on a company intranet can address the whole company; a blog post on the public web can address the whole world. Web thinkers know that keystrokes invested to capture and transmit knowledge will pay the highest dividends when routed to the widest appropriate scope.
The elmcity example: a public calendar of events can be managed in what is notionally a personal calendar application, say, Google Calendar or Outlook, but one that can post data to a public URL.
For bloggers, this principle governs the choice to explain what you think, learn, and do on your public blog (when appropriate) rather than in private communication.
Why?
Unless confidentiality precludes the choice, web thinkers prefer shared data spaces to private ones because they enable directed or serendipitous discovery and ad-hoc collaboration.
Related
Too busy to blog? Count your keystrokes
6. Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber
Our everyday calendar programs are, in blog parlance, both feed publishers and feed readers. Individuals and organizations can publish their own feeds to the web of calendar data while at the same time subscribing to others’ feeds. On a larger scale, an elmcity hub subscribes to a set of feeds, and in turn publishes a feed to which other individuals (or hubs) can subscribe.
Why?
The blog ecosystem is the best example of pub/sub syndication among heterogeneous endpoints through intermediary services. Similar effects can happen in social media, and they happen in ways that people find easier to understand, but they happen within silos: Facebook, Twitter. Web thinkers know that standard protocols and formats enable syndication that crosses silos and supports the most open kinds of collaboration.
Related
Personal data stores and pub/sub networks
7. Reuse components and services
In the elmcity context, calendar programs are used in several complementary ways. They combine personal information management (e.g., keeping track of your own organization’s public calendar) with public information management (e.g., publishing the calendar).
In another sense they serve the needs of humans who read those calendars on the web while also supporting mechanical services (like elmcity) that subscribe to and syndicate the calendars.
In general, a reusable web resource is:
- Effectively named
- Properly structured
- Densely interconnected (linked) both within and beyond itself
- Appropriately scoped
Why?
The web’s “small pieces loosely joined” architecture echoes what in another era we called the Unix philosophy. Web thinkers design reusable parts, and also reuse such parts where possible, because they know that the web both embodies and rewards this strategy.
Related
How will the elmcity service scale? Like the web!, How to manage private and public calendars together
The master of online living and organisation speaks again. We would do well to listen and perhaps even adopt a point or two. It would make many things more streamlined.
iTunes gifting scam
Surfers who link their debit or credit card to iTunes have reason to be cautious after a Reg reader found his bank account plunged into the red overnight following £1,000 in fraudulent iTunes gift purchases.
Reg reader Peter woke up one morning last week to discover an email informing him of a "£10 Monthly Gift for wqfaqapk445@hotmail.com", an account he'd never heard of.
Apple describes iTunes Monthly Gifts as a "great way to give a gift that keeps on giving". The vouchers, sent to a recipient's email address, can be used to purchase music and audio books from the iTunes Music Store.
Peter checked his iTunes purchase history, where to his horror he discovered scores of these "Monthly Gift" purchases – all of which had been generated within a short space of time on 19 January, but only one of which generated an email.
As a result of the fraudulent purchases, Peter's bank account plunged from its £700 positive balance to £300 into the red, forcing him to borrow from friends in order to pay household bills until the mess was sorted out.
Peter promptly contacted both Apple and his bank (HSBC) over the scam. Apple responded with an automated message before suspending his iTunes account, a day after the damage was done. HSBC reacted better, restoring funds to his account so that Peter was able to make his mortgage payment, and sending him a form so that he could confirm in writing that he had had nothing to do with the disputed transactions.
Peter – who has had an iTunes account for years, spending an average of around £5 a month and never using it to make a gift purchase – is highly critical of Apple's handling of the matter.
"After years of buying Apple products and using iTunes to buy some music and apps now and again, they'd taken the whole day to get back to me and basically claimed no responsibility or offered any help," Peter, who works in IT and is aware of the security issues around online accounts, told El Reg.
"How is it even possible for iTunes to be used as some type of glorified bank account? Why the hell would I want to use iTunes to transfer money to people?
"It it completely unacceptable that Apple has turned iTunes into some type of pseudo-PayPal without the security measures, monitoring and care being taken to run something so important," he concluded.
Peter is unclear on how his iTunes account might have been compromised. Phishing attacks (or worse) aimed at iTunes users are far from uncommon – though Peter reckons it's more likely the hacker guessed his password rather than he mistakenly handed it over. In general, malware infection or the use of the same password on another site that falls victim to a hacking attack are routes towards becoming a victim of this type of attack.
It's unclear how Peter's account was compromised (we'll probably never know) or how many other people might also have been affected by the same scam. The fraudulent gift purchase most closely resembles the mass compromise of iTunes accounts linked to PayPal, widely reported in August 2010.
A quick search of "iTunes + fraud" reveals that Peter's case is far from unique, with other victims who link their iTunes account to a debit card account also waking up to discover hundreds of dollars in fraudulent purchases. Unlike the iTunes / PayPal scam, the many victims of iTunes-related bank fraud were not all hit around the same time, so the minor variant of essentially the same scam has escaped media attention, at least until now.
Peter's tale of woe raises questions about whether iTunes ought to allow monthly gifts, given that it is a secondary facility that appears to be easily abused. "iTunes isn't just a system for buying a bit of music; it's turned into a banking system that can wipe out your finances and put whole families into financial limbo," Peter warns. ®
This has made me think twice about my iTunes a/c. I had a problem some years back were I was accidentally charged by Apple for something and it took months to resolve. I'd hate to go down that road again.
PS3 Not Reading Discs?
Almost a terrible start to the new year. My beloved PS3 that I use for Blu-ray much more than I use for games, stopped reading discs on me. I was playing a game of Street Fighter IV when it quit on me and hung the system forcing a reboot. After that it wouldn't read a game disc nor a Blu-ray movie disc. Frantically searching for a solution, failing to believe it might be hardware, I came across numerous that ranged from hidden menus to bash it hard. In the end the solution that worked for me was so simple. Just start a downloaded game and exit it the way it should be exited. After that, hey presto, all was restored to normal. A bit worrying that an unpleasant game exit could cause the system to stop reading discs but there you go. At least the solution was painless. Hope this helps somebody else.
Rare lunar eclipse tonight
The last full lunar eclipse happened in February 2008.
(Credit: NASA TV)A rare drama will play out in tonight's skies: a full lunar eclipse on the winter solstice.
The last one occurred in 1638, according to NASA, and tonight's may be only the second one in the last two millennia.
"Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638," Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory, who inspected a list of eclipses going back 2,000 years, said on NASA's solstice lunar eclipse page. The next lunar eclipse on the winter solstice won't be such a long wait, though. It's expected in 2094.
Skywatchers expect the eclipse to occur over a three-and-a-half hour period, starting at 10:33 p.m. PT today and ending 2:01 a.m. PT tomorrow. The Earth's shadow will completely cover the moon for about 72 minutes, according to NASA's eclipse page. The shadow is likely to have a reddish hue.
A lunar eclipse happens when the sun, Earth, and moon align--with the Earth in the middle. By virtue of that placement, there is always a full moon during a lunar eclipse. Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse is viewable for quite some time and is safe to view. Tonight's lunar eclipse will be visible across North America.
The last full lunar eclipse occurred nearly three years ago in February 2008. The next full lunar eclipse is expected to occur in 2014.
NASA is hosting several events to give more insight into the full lunar eclipse, including live Web chats today and a live chat with an astronomer during the eclipse.
If you're interested in learning more about the history of lunar eclipses, check out this Wikipedia page. It discusses the first known mention of a lunar eclipse in China in 1136 B.C. and includes other interesting facts about eclipse-related events throughout history.
Further reading: Images: Don't miss the total lunar eclipse
A must see for anyone with a remote interest in visible things! Set to turn the moon red, in an event not seen since 1638 according to NASA. Can't wait!
IP Freely
With all the talk in the tech world about running out of existing IP space, we sometimes forget that the man in the street might not fully grasp what the problem is or why anything is being done about it, above and beyond the telephone exchange solution of prefixing yet another leading number to phone digits. Here's an interesting piece that was passed onto me by Miguel.
Nigel Farage MEP on the Irish Crisis
I couldn't have said it any better myself. I have long been of the opinion that the EU and the Euro is a very bad idea for small and non-self-sustaining countries such as Ireland. It might work for a different collective but not for us fringe countries who could never influence the workings of the machine that is the EU bureaucratic system. The game is up, as Mr. Farage says. Sadly democracy did die recently with the passage of the Lisbon Treaty - died through the persistent rejection of the peoples vote on the treaties and also by removing the power to vote from so many other states' citizens. Nuclear winter has nothing on what the EU is capable of doing to the lives of millions.
Angry Birds to land on consoles
Rovio, the developer behind the multi-million unit-selling mobile phone game, Angry Birds, says its working on versions for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.
There are no release dates yet for any of the console versions, but they are likely to be offered as downloadable titles.
This is the latest announcement by Rovio about their intentions to adapt its multi-million selling game to other platforms and mediums.
An Angry Birds social media game for Facebook is scheduled for next year, Rovios's chief executive Mikael Hed has spoke to Variety about the possibilities of turning the game into a film. A line of plush toys for the game is also planned for next year.
Since its launch last year in December, Angry Birds has proved massively popular. It's still one of the app store's best-selling apps, with more than seven million downloads of the paid version of the game and 13 million of the free one.
In the game players take on the role of the titular birds who are out for revenge against a group of pigs who have stolen their eggs.
The player fires the birds at the pigs who are hiding in makeshift forts, in order to destroy them.
- Nick Cowen
© Telegraph.co.uk
Yeehaw!! Great news for the creators but I personally think that the future of this game lies in handheld Android/iOS devices with HDMI out ports so that the game can be played as usual but on a big screen.
Hitler plans to Save Ireland
Following along a long line of Hitler video parodies, this latest one doesn't fail to amuse either. Classy in a distasteful way.
This is what the SAR Helicopter means to the Southeast
Kayaker rescued off Wexford coast
Tuesday, 30 March 2010 17:37A man who was reported missing while kayaking off the coast of Co Wexford has been rescued by helicopter this evening.
The Waterford Rescue Helicopter rescued the man, who had been missing for a number of hours, off Slade, Co Wexford.
He has been transferred to Waterford Regional Hospital.
AdvertisementAfter the alarm was raised earlier today, lifeboats from Dunmore East, Fethard and Kilmore Quay were launched to search for the man.
The helicopter assisted in the search with some local fishing vessels. The LÉ Orla arrived on scene as well to assist.
To think that a government would risk doing away with this service, potentially costing so many lives for a measly saving of €1M per year - beggars belief! Thankfully it has also been announced that the service will be kept at Waterford rather than scaled back as originally suggested by the government. This is a huge relief to everyone living in the Southeast as we all have to look after each other down here - there's little support from elsewhere.
