Over the past year, I’ve contributed a handful of readings to the wonderful Starship Sofa science fiction podcast. Ciaran O’Carroll and Tony C. Smith began the show in 2006, as an in depth discussion of the life and works of a variety of New Wave and Golden Age Science Fiction authors. Ciaran left the show last year, but far from this being the harbinger of podfade, it spurred Tony on to new heights of fevered podcasting activity. The Sofa began to acquire the audio rights to a host of science …

Synopsis:
I detail my experiences with a Wordpress hack across multiple shared hosting sites, the steps taken to recover Wordpress and secure against future attacks.
Introduction:
On the December 15th I discovered a number of my Wordpress installations had been compromised. Rather than a concerted attack, this was likely the result of widely available scripting tools that allow ‘crackers’ to exploit known vulnerabilities in out of date Wordpress installs. Due to the large number of Wordpress installs on my server, and a reluctance to run bleeding edge software, I’d been a little …

For subscribers of this blog (and it does get one or two hits), who’ve been wondering why I haven’t been updating with greater frequently, I’d like offer an explanation.
There’s a profound fragmentation going on right now in online identity. The change from isolated web sites (with technical, and in the early days, financial barriers to entry) to readily updatable, easily subscribable, often free blogs, acted to more tightly integrate the public web. An unfortunate side-effect of newer forms of blogging, more sophisticated social networks, and the surfeit of emerging …

As Twitter leaves the realms of ‘joiner geek’ social network, and (partly due to it’s integration with platforms like Facebook), becomes a more popular and diverse service, its utility is being more rigorously critiqued. What is Twitter for? Its a cogent question. In a world of blogs, microblogs, and social networks, what’s the use of twitter? Is it merely a loose knit social network, or a (nano) blogging platform? Is it just the latest fad? Lets look at some real world uses of Twitter, how its utility differs from more …

Social Network ‘Facebook’, has made an enormous splash this week with the release of the ‘Facebook Platform‘, an opening up of the mature Facebook API to internal widgets with access to Facebook’s ‘core functions’. Whilst this move has been criticised by some influential members of the syndication community, it places Facebook at the forefront of mashup’s and the read-write web. In one fell swoop, Facebook has become a socially enabled aggregation platform.

‘Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a “social graph,” the …

I spent about eight hours yesterday working out how to do this. A working method was surprisingly hard to come by, so hopefully this will be of use to someone. Luckily it’s really easy once you know how. This technique should work not just for YouTube, but any other flash video site, like Google Video, DailyMotion etc.

An article by Mike Elgan in Computer World Magazine, laying the boot into e-books, has sparked a surprisingly intelligent discussion on Digg. According to Elgan, e-books are bound to fail because..

They aren’t cheaper – both the hardware and content are more expensive
Content is available on other platforms (e.g.: PC)
People love paper books

Just back from Barcamp Ireland 3. What a day, so packed I couldn’t possibly get to half the talks (which ran concurrently), but I managed three lectures and the panel discussion. The event was held in the beautiful Digital Hub, off Thomas St in Dublin. The building is fantastic, with bare brick walls and natural lighting throughout, and would make a fantastic billionaires studio apartment.
I’ve posted some wikified notes. I grabbed several mini interviews, on TFM’s sweet but pricey Roland wav recorder (check out the uber cheesy website), not enough …

Apologies for the performance of this site over the past week, my host Dreamhost seem to be going through one of their periodic screw ups (always of greater length and severity than admitted to on their status page). This has meant that all of the sites I host, including Trinity FM and Technolotics, have been reacting slowly or not at all. Hopefully the situation will resolve itself over the next few days.
In other news, my wonderfully creative friend Andrew and I were having so much fun producing astoundingly erudite and …

The Venice project, a mysterious beta application from Kazaa and Skype creators Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, has being variously hailed as the future of television, and the application which may finally bring to its knees the aging last mile bandwidth of the internet itself.
Retitled in mid January to ‘Joost‘, TVP is an IPTV application. That is, a program designed to carry high resolution video direct to consumers via the internet, rather than through satellite, cable or terrestrial broadcasts.
On the technical end, Joost uses both the UDP (to stream video …