Epicness.

Eoghan lists of a rogues gallery of recent and not so recent Fianna Fáil Ministers & Taoisigh, and their records, ending with a call for the party to disband.

Rubbish! Fianna Fáil should not disband.

Corruption is the natural state of both man and government. For the vast population of the world, corruption is a way of life that secures a tolerable existence in an otherwise short, cruel and brutal life.

What makes one country less corrupt than another is the existence of a robust, independent and free criminal justice system that enjoys the popular support of the public, derived through objective, fair and clear judgements.

Punishment of convicted criminals plays an equally important part in creating popular support for this pillar of civilisation. In Ireland, we have many of these aspects in our legal system, but when it comes to the critical punishment element, voices clamouring for “progressive sentencing policies” out-shout voices demanding that the convicted be punished for the wrong doing.

This is how the killer of Garda Gary McLoughlin in Donegal, sentenced to only seven years in a glorified three star hotel in Cavan can wander out the front door and saunter across the border when the feeling takes him.

There is an unpleasant realisation. What binds what went on in Fianna Fáil, (and some other parties), the banks, the Catholic Child Abuse Scandals, Planning Scandals and many others is a weak and ineffectual criminal justice system that neither deters white or blue collar criminality nor rehabilitates those already convicted but rewards those who operate within it.

To disband would be to waste a golden opportunity to publicly cut out the cancer of corruption in their party and reinvent themselves as a proper & competent “Law & Order” party.

To disband would leave a dangerous vacuum, eagerly filled by people, groups & parties, consumed by their own self interest and greed for power & who do not share the fundamentally decent values of the majority Irish people.

Remember, in politics, as in life, winners never quit and quitters never win.

SligoToday.ie - High Achieving, but complacent?

With it’s publication earlier this month of a claim of 4,500,000 hits per calendar month for the now firmly established three year old local news gathering website, SligoToday.ie it has become a morning mainstay for those of us online in the North West.

With so much achieved, isn’t there a real and substantial risk that without ambitious plans for the future and an investment of new ideas, complacency could set in and SligoToday.ie could be overtaken by a new, hungrier and more motivated competitor that won’t make many of the trial and error mistakes that pioneers so often make?

Without any existing serious competition in the online world for local news gathering services in the North West, SligoToday.ie has a had a virtual free reign on building an online presence that provides people with comprehensive local news they are able to read before 9:00am every morning. This early morning, deadline driven ethos has provided the backbone of the website’s success, however, in the future, as audiences become more sophisticated and demanding, it will not be enough.

Already promises of implementing Sligo Today TV have begun, but not in any serious or comprehensive manner. The impression I have gotten so far from this is that the videos lobbed up on to YouTube are just an optional extra to be done when it can. If this is the prevailing attitude in SligoToday.ie, it is wrong. Video and audio podcasts should become mainstays of the website, integrated fully with the SligoToday.ie brand. By producing audio and especially video, it provides an extra revenue stream through sponsorship and advertising, but also it will provide the viewer or listener with a more comprehensive and accurate reflection of the news that can’t be provided in writing.   There are a variety of programme formats to choose from, apart from the obvious ones like news & sports bulletins and diggnation-esque type shows.

One of the pluses of a local news gathering websites around the world for both users and website operators, are the communities that grow up around them in comments sections of  published articles. Currently, there are a few gems being added to by article  commenters in an otherwise  substance free zone. Too often the comments section becomes a childish morass of name calling and badly spelt stereotypes being peddled by the usual time wasters and single issue obsessives. To counter this, and to build the comments sections of articles into something more akin to a community of SligoToday.ie users, I would begin by employing paid commenters to raise substantive points on articles and to flesh them out.

When people post a comment on any article, they do so because they want others to read it, SligoToday.ie should be helping them achieve this by ditching the IntenseDebate comments platform and moving to the Disqus comments platform. Using Disqus, it is easy for commenters to simultaneously post their comments to a variety of Social Media networks such as Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn, increasing the audience exposure of the comment, the article and ultimately the website as a whole. Everybody wins.

There are other ideas and variations of the direction SligoToday.ie is currently on that I would like to see, such as better use of photographs, mobile/tablet version of the site and all round better use of social media that is used to engage with users, rather than the current use of just outputting links to articles, but that’s for others to decide.

I’ve written this, not out of a sense of begrudgery, but as someone who uses the website on a daily basis and is better informed on what is happening in Sligo than if it wasn’t there, but I believe it is only a matter of time before another Sligo based news website is established that will overtake SligoToday.ie by innovating and improving on what came before. Just because SligoChampion.ie, SligoWeekender.ie and Ocean FM are low value websites now, doesn’t mean they will be forever.

So, here was my solution.

I set-up a Google Reader account, and added all the RSS podcast streams to a folder called Podcasts.  I then made this “Podcasts” folder available to the public in the “Manage Subscriptions → Folders & Tags” section.  Head back to the Google Reader front page, clicked on the Podcasts folder and then on the “Show Details” button.  This now presents me with a Feed URL which in my case is:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F16063141383103939780%2Flabel%2FPodcasts

Obviously, that doesn’t look too pretty, so I lob the url into notepad and do a quick find and replace, changing %2F to a /

My URL now looks like:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/16063141383103939780/label/Podcasts

I’ve added that URL into my Web Feeds folder in my Nokia N95 so it will pull down any and all podcasts I subscribe to the “Podcasts” folder of my Google Reader account. This makes the addition, (and removal, if necessary) of any new podcasts I want to subscribe to much easier and comes without any of the messiness of adding or changing anything on the N95 with it’s small keypad.

Update via Slashdot: Today Cryptic Studios will begin the open beta of Star Trek Online, opening their test servers to invitees and anyone who has pre-ordered the game. The beta will run through the 26th, and the game will officially launch on February 2nd; head-start players will be allowed in on January 29th.

See for yourself.

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Specifically, this means that I plan to construct the server/client editing and production platform for members to be able to produce their own programming from using either the in house facilities or their own computers, (Windows, Mac or Linux).

With the ESXi server I built a few weeks ago, I can safely test and deploy various network configurations and setups in minutes as opposed to hours or days, depending on what’s required.

So far, I have:

1.    SRV01-DC (Ubuntu 9.04 with DNS, Samba & NTP)
2.    SRV02-MX (Ubuntu 8.04 with Zimbra & Openfire)
3.    SRV03-WS (Ubuntu 9.04 with Apache, PHP5, MySQL & Python)

SRV01-DC will server effectively as a SAMBA Domain Controller for the editing and administration workstations.  It will support for NT4 domain level services and authenticates off the back of Zimbra’s internal LDAP server.  I hope to compliment the Samba file shares with webdav access for remote users of SSL.

SRV02-MX is the Zimbra server.  Currently I’m working off version 5.019 as I cannot, for the life of me get the new version 6 builds to play nicely with Samba.  I think the problem lies somewhere in the new LDAP config for Zimbra.  I’ve also decided to expand the Zimbra’s IM offering by scrapping it and replacing it with Openfire, which is happily authenticating of the LDAP server.  Zimbra will also handle all the email, calendaring and contact sharing for the organisation.

SRV03-WB is the LAMP server for use internally.  On it will be held the station’s music archive which will be accessible in the studio using the ZINA web based jukebox application written in PHP.

There are many things to plan for before, and I’ve not covered everything here, but any and all suggestions will be gratefully received in the comments below.

Bottom line: I’m bored and I still have a few bob – What to do?

The only surprise was it took me so long to decide to do this.  I’ve decided to start a project to keep my mind busy and as many of my skills up to date.  I’m going to build an ESX server that will provide all the network services for a business with ~ 200 staff using only free and/or open source software.  And blog about it!

I tweeted @aaronmckenna at Komplett with a few questions on the hardware requirements which he forwarded onto their techs and a day or so later I had my hardware list.

I added the D-Link Wi-Fi Card as I also wanted to test out if I could run a Wireless Access Point off the box as well.  The case, a NOX Cube, was chosen because of its size, had a handle on the front for ease of transport and just looked a bit cool with the glass windows and internal blue light!

The parts arrived last Friday and I began assembly on Saturday.  After a few incorrect connections from the front panel of the case to the motherboard, I eventually figured it out, pressed the on button, and there was light!

To come: Installation of the ESX server from VMWare and building a Virtual Machine.

Will report back later….

Update: This was shockingly easy, took me 2 mins to do. If all else fails, RTFM!

I really need a challenge!

Earlier last month, Zimbra release a beta version of their new Collaberation Suite.  This is now version 6 of the increasing popular rival to Microsoft’s Exchange.

Last year, I setup the open source flavour of version 5 with Samba.  Following some helpful How2Forge instructions, I was able to setup an old box as a Domain Contoller and Communications Server.  With some more jiggery pokery, I was also able to add Openfire to the mix and replace Zimbra’s own IM service.

Play around with a hosted demo account on Zimbra’s website and see for yourself.