In light of the fact that unemployment has reached 11% what can the government do? Here is my 10 step plan to save Ireland.
1. Number one priority is to keep people in work. The government must do more to prevent companies on the brink for going under. We need to keep people in work rather than unemployment.
Look at the German aproach.

2. Reduce taxes(for the time being). Yes you read the right. Right now Cowen and his cohorts intend on rising taxes. Yet in a recession when people are not spending money and consumption falls the last thing you would want to do is exacerbate this by reducing the amount of money people have to spend.

3. Remove tax exemptions. Plough money into infrastructural projects. Aiming to create/retain jobs.

4. Massive increase in spending(borrow it) for the key sectors that are our future: bio-technology ,telecommunications, R and  D etc.  Focus on the industries that will see Ireland grow into the future

5. Cull senior bankers. Heads must roll. Send a message to the international community that crony Ireland is a thing of the past and an honest place to do business. Show the international community that we are disgusted with this corruption and this period of cronyism is coming to an end. Pay reductions across the board for banks funded by the taxpayer. Bring back regulation, the bankers cannot to trusted to police themselves.

6. Cull financial regulator, they have failed us.

7. Set up asset management company I.E bad bank to free up credit for business.

8. Reduce the public sector wage bill. Pension levy is a step in the right direction. Now address the pay unbalance between the private and public sectors.

9. Mortgage payment holiday period to see the newly unemployed through a tough period.

10. Replace the inept government. Obvious this one. Our government squandered the riches of the Celtic tiger. When we should have been developing indigenous enterprise, the government inflated the property industry causing the bubble. This type of short term thinking is typical of this government however along the way the government managed to increase they own wages and become among the most highly paid public servants in Europe. Remember the current Taoiseach who is attempting to save the economy was the minster of finance during the years the government squandered it all.
The real winners of the Celtic tiger along with the government were:

• The civil servants who through the social partnership enjoyed 10 to 30 higher wages than private sector equivalent positions plus incredible benefits.

• The lawyers who enjoyed fantastical pay due to the endless tribunals to investigate our government.

That’s should do it for the moment.

Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide

For those of you who have not heard, Adobe Air represents a fantastic advance in web development technologies. By using the HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the standard bread and butter for web developers, you can leverage those existing skills to create fully fledged desktop applications. Complete with standard OS install, uninstall procedures, custom taskbar(XP)/dock(Mac) icons, the works!

No messing around with C and MFC ( the horror!! ) when developing WinXP apps any more. Plus an Adobe Air app is platform independent. You can build an Adobe Air app and it will run on any OS that has the Adobe Air runtime installed. And what’s more, the Runtime Install procedure is the thing to behold too for it will install painlessly the first time you decide to download an Air app.

Adobe Air will change the way we understand the web, and continue to blur the line between the OS and the browser. It’s my guess for web technology of the year.

I mean literally.

Sign up for a developer slot in the Orkut sandbox and create one of the sample applications. Try the Sample Example: List Friends example

I use an exact copy of the code supplied by Google but when I try to run the application on Orkut, it doesn’t work, giving the following error.
Error:

opensocial is not defined

var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();

This ‘opensocial’ object provides the actual ’social’ aspect of the Google OpenSocial API. Yet it’s not found.

Something is up here.

My guess is that Google rushed the release of this api, not caring about quality assurance, to knock the wind out of the mounting Facebook hype.

Or maybe I’m just bitter because no one from Google as admitted to developers that there is a problem/bug with their api, expecting everyone to waste their time bumping into the same obstacle again and again.

Oh yeah and the Orkut server dies every couple of minutes with some silly error about ‘bad, bad server, no brownie points for you’.

Please….

Blog Tip: Creating a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes

Startpages are gaining in popularity with Netvibes boasting of the user base of 5 million. The concept reminds me in one sense of the ‘portal page’ concept of the late 90s. Damn that makes me sound old.

The idea being you could start your internet session at this page that provided a collection of stories and articles. At the time the content was company specific, the Eircom portal page offered some news but mainly pushed their services. But the usefulness of a portal is determined buy the relevancy of the content, the one size fits all portal approach the late 90s could not deliver to the individual on an individual basis. You start to search and Google become everyone’s start page.

These days the technology has come along way and utilising the aggregated web served by widgets, users can create ‘personalised’ startpages, the next generation in portals.

Interesting times ahead for the web industry.

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