antoin@eire.com

This article on the UK Design Museum site tells the story of the British motorway and general road signage system, designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. It begins:

Determined to illustrate the haphazard state of British road signage at the turn of the 1960s, the graphic designer Herbert Spencer drove from central London to the recently opened Heathrow London Airport and photographed each of the road signs that he came across along the way.

Perhaps it is time for someone to do something similar for the drive from Naas via the M50 ring-road to the Airport. It would certainly be an interesting project to do over a few Sunday mornings.

According to this press release, Microsoft welcomes Ireland’s ‘no with comments/conditional approval’ vote and NSAI’s consultative committee unanimously agreed to the conditional acceptance of the Office OpenXML standard.

I am glad that Microsoft welcomes the decision. However, the account above was not what happened at the meeting of ICTSCC last week as I recall it. In my recollection, Microsoft voiced a sustained objection to voting in this way. Microsoft was supported in a call for voting ‘yes’ by representatives from ICTIreland, Intel and CP3. There was nothing unanimous about it.

Also, to clarify, the committee involved, the ‘Information and Computing Technology Standards Consultative Committee’ does not have the final say in voting on standards. Its role is purely consultative, to provide advice to the NSAI in accordance with Section 10 of the National Standards Authority of Ireland Act 1996. The making of a final decision lies with NSAI itself.

Ireland has voted ‘no with comments’ on the OOXML/DIS 29500 proposal to make the new XML-based Microsoft file formats an international standard.
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Government Minister to delay Irish postcode system. Not such a big surprise. The plan had been to launch a scheme by January 2008, but the project appears to have become mired.
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The winners of the VoteTube contest have been announced. VoteTube, set up by Simon McGarr and I (although Simon did most of the work) brought together videos from all political hues for the Irish general election. Congratulations to everyone who sent in an entry.

Really what we want to do now though, is to get people at the ‘grass roots’ to make videos about stuff that matters to them. Any ideas on how to do this would be great.

The government wants all mobile phones to be registered. According to the Programme for Government, ageed last month:

The government will … require all mobile phones to be registered with name, address and proof of identity in order to stop drug-pushers using untraceable, unregistered phones.

But I got the following email from the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources in January this year:

The idea for a Register of mobile phones was extensively reviewed by officials in the Department. There were many complex legal, technical, data protection and practical issues to be considered. In theory, a Register of mobile phones might seem like a good idea. However, having looked at the situation in other administrations, considered the ease with which an unregistered foreign or stolen SIM card can be used and the difficulties that would be posed in verifying identity in the
absence of a national identification card system, and having consulted with the Office of the Attorney General and other interested parties, it was concluded that the proposal would be of limited benefit, in that it would not solve the illegal and inappropriate use of pre-paid mobile
phones and was not practical.

The Battle of Algiers, showing in the Irish Film Institute today, is essential viewing if you want to understand the hows and whys of terror, and how governments deal with it. Most of the film is said to be quite true to what happened - Algerian women dressed themselves like cosmopolitan French girls to get access to the fashionable lunch spots of the city, and left timed bombs behind -. The whole terror organization was organized in groups of only three people in order to preserve secrecy and make the whole movement resistant to torture. Some of the people who were actually involved in the action act in the film.

Read Eoin’s blog post and sign the petition to get state broadcaster RTE to release the complete footage of the debate between Irish political party leaders to the Irish people on the Internet. (After all, they’re our politicians, and it’s our TV station, right.)

According to this report from the communications regulator, the Irish postal service isn’t getting any better. In fact, fewer letters are being delivered the next day after posting than ever before.
ComReg0728.pdf (application/pdf Object)

The story never changes with this. There are continuous problems, and there is no sign of any improvement coming down the tracks. The government has done absolutely nothing to sort this out. The postal service is a critical national resource. Letter post may be less important than it used to be, but parcel and packet delivery is more important than it ever was.
The only way the regulator has of dealing with this issue at the moment is to sanction an increase in the price of postage. It’s been tried several times, but it doesn’t seem to work. Maybe it is time to try something different? At this stage, consideration has to be given to privatizing some of the work of the postal service once again (parts of the service were privately operated until the 1980s)

Fast Forward Ireland is a film festival with a difference, and it’s on in Dublin this weekend. The participants group together into teams, and they go and make a film in 24 hours. They have as many teams as they can handle, but maybe they could put the odd person into a short-handed team?

I hope some of the films can go into Votetube.