I’ve just read up on some of the Lisbon treaty. Ireland are the only country in Europe that will be holding a referendum on this treaty. It’s due to take place on the 12th of June.

One major issue I have with this treaty is giving the EU power to set our taxation levels.

The European Central Bank (ECB) already controls our money supply and interest rates, as it does for all countries in the euro zone. Currently, inflation in the euro zone is at 3.6%. However, inflation in Ireland is currently at 5%. Our economy is not tightly linked to that of mainland Europe.

We’ve lost control of our money supply, by joining the euro. It essentially leaves us with taxation to attempt to control money circulating in our economy. I know taxation is a very political issue, and is only altered once a year during the government’s annual budget. But, increasing tax will reduce money circulation, reducing tax will increase it.

A topical example to illustrate this : if the government were to increase tax on petrol and diesel, it could aid in reducing inflation. Initially, it would cause an increase in inflation, but as people felt the pinch, they’d use cars less, buy less fuel and, over the medium to long term, lead to a reduction in inflation.

I, personally, would not like to see the last semblance of monetary control we have handed over to Europe.

I got a bunch of the stag photos and put them up, but I’m still waiting for a few more. I’ll upload them when I get them.

It’s been a while since I posted anything up here, so I’m going to try and cover a few topics now. I started a new job developing payments routing software with ACI Worldwide in February, so I’ve been busy enough over the last few weeks.

To start with, I’ll mention http://photos.jmadden.eu, which I’ve just set up. This is a Plogger install that I can fill up with our photos. At the moment, all that’s up there are photos of Lou’s hen night in Killarney this year.

That leads me nicely on to my stag weekend, which was this past weekend (4th, 5th & 6th of April). I had a brilliant weekend, really enjoyed it & it was brilliant to have such a great bunch of friends around for the few days celebration! Thanks to everyone who made it. When I get a few photos in from it, I’ll put them up too.

While on the topic of photos, I also grabbed PloggerPress to integrate Plogger with WordPress, so I could have pages & posts of just photos. It works perfectly, but I’ve made a few changes to make it work a bit better for what I want. Firstly, I found a minor bug in it that I notified the developer about this evening. On line 150 of plogger-press.php, change

$url=substr($path, $number);

to

$url=preg_replace(“/[ |(|)]/”, “_”, substr($path, $number));

Plogger replaces certain characters (the one’s I noticed for the above change were ‘ ‘, ‘(‘ and ‘)’) with underscores. This ended up with some of the thumbnails for photos not being shown because the link for the ‘img src’ was incorrect.

As well as this, I added an ‘add_filter(“wp_head”, “my_head_func”);’ so I could alter some styling. I put a ‘class=”image”‘ into the ‘<img>’ tags so I could style them (borders, padding etc.) just to look a bit better.

Lastly, I’ve had very little time to work on SvnFs lately. I’ve done a small bit of work on getting write support done, but if you want it any time soon, I’d advise grabbing it from http://www.jmadden.eu/svnrepos/svnfs/trunk. It’s available anonymously, so

svn co http://www.jmadden.eu/svnrepos/svnfs/trunk

That’s it for now. We’re only three and a half weeks away from the wedding, so I doubt there’ll be many more updates before that. I’ll put up the stag photos when I get them, but that’ll probably be it!!