First the recession, then killer pig flu, and now it looks as if my favourite software is doomed. OpenOffice exists as a project of Sun Microsystems, and Sun just got taken over by Oracle Corp. Sun has two jewels that …
Monthly Archive: April 2009
Apr
29
Taking At Face Value
I emailed Joe Duffy today. Well, I emailed the show. Joe is off sick, Damien Reilly has been keeping the seat warm. Mick Nugent was on, representing something called Atheists Ireland. (by the way, who elected Mick to speak on …
Apr
28
In The Name Of The Father
Dermot Ahern is going to make cussing a crime. The minister proposes to insert a new section into the Defamation Bill, creating an criminal offence if anyone ‘publishes or utters blasphemous matter’, leading to a large fine. ‘Blasphemy is anything …
Apr
27
Bless You
The trouble with the latest health scare (I mean swine flu, not the HSE considering shutting down a dozen emergency rooms) is that it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. After SARS and bird flu, I suspect most …
Apr
25
Doctor Who?
A man who suffered from a peanut allergy collapsed and died from severe anaphylactic shock less than an hour after eating peanut during an appointment with an alternative medicine practitioner, the Irish Independent reports today. Brett Stevens, a kinesiologist and …
Apr
24
Business As Usual
This article, like yesterday’s, is written on a computer running ‘Jaunty Jackalope’, the latest Ubuntu release. So I wondered, how much would the Irish government save switching to open source. Probably nothing. First off, they’d hire an accountancy firm to …
Apr
23
Inconceivable
![John Gormley and his senior advisors [picture from Irish Times]](http://faduda.ie/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/gormley-150x150.jpg "gormley")
The Friday Irish Times front page, which went to press an hour or so ago, has a picture of environment minister John Gormley chatting with some national school children. Gormley’s other official duty today was to announce the scrapping of …
Apr
22
Who Are You?
Over the weekend, curiosity got the better of me, and I installed a wordpress plug-in to collect some statistics on this blog. Three days is hardly sufficient time to draw any meaningful conclusions, but the results do spark some interesting …
Apr
21
Move Over Tiger, Meet The Celtic Lions
One of the handy things about Google is you can use it to get a first approximation on controversies. Take the maiden city, for example, the one known in Irish as Doire Cholmcille. There are eight million google hits for …
Apr
20
Flak Attack
Terry Prone doesn’t like me. I’m a blogging journalist, ‘writing blogs for nothing, their urge for self-expression obscuring the fact that they are undermining their own employers.’ Never mind that I’m freelance, as are most blogging journalists I know with …