September 2006 Archives

I'll be at Bar Camp in Cork today.. .. I'm just grabbing a quick coffee and checking some mails before heading up to the city The lineup looks like it could be very interesting See you there!

The clock is ticking.... Nominations for the 2006 Net Visionary Awards close on September 29th so get nominating! I'm delighted to say that I've been nominated in two categories this year - Entrepeneur and Blogger!

I'll be burying myself in domain disputes over the next couple of weeks as we have decided to pursue the actions regarding several infringements of our intellectual property. As one of the domains in question is a .eu it will involve an ADR, which will be quite costly. However I have no intention of letting a cybersquatter get away with infringing our IP. We tried the relatively "nice" approach, so now the gloves are coming off

Since Feedburner rejected me I have been looking for other RSS ad solutions... Yesterday I got an email from Text Link Ads offering me access to their beta of Feedvertiser. Less than 24 hours later they launched the service! Apart from the obvious attraction of being able to make a bit of cash from your feeds you can also use the platform to push your own products, services or even affiliate links (I'll probably be using it to push other sites / projects of mine) Darren Rowse has already given a comprehensive review of the service

Inex, the Irish neutral exchange hit it's highest peak to date earlier this afternoon with traffic across the exchange being recorded at 882.8mbps It seems this also coincided with questions in the Dail (Irish parliament) :)

Anyone know of any decent guides to IPv6 that are really idiot proof?

It looks like US ISPs may be hit with Data Retention as well, though it's not clear how long they will be expected to hold on to the data.

Why on earth can't someone in Microsoft create a knowledgebase entry for a known issue? Thank God Jimmy found the solution (on a non-Microsoft blog!!) to the black screen issue we had run into. As per the blog entry that provides the solution: The solution is so simple as well ... Gah!

I'm on a large number of mailing lists that cover a wide range of topics including open source software, web technologies, spam filtering, dns, networking and a range of other topics.

Nearly all of the lists show who the message poster is and allow them to include their own email signature.

Only very rarely does any of the list content get "out of hand".

Unfortunately not all lists are made equal.

The Enterprise Ireland eBusiness list is not equal by any stretch of the imagination.

Why?

All messages to the list are moderated, so any hopes of a "conversation" or "discussion" are doomed to failure.

If you post a message at 9am in reply to a message that appeared at 8.45 am it may not make it to the list until hours later.

The moderation of the list also includes the headers and all other "normal" content associated with emails.

If the poster has included a signature this "may" be included, but there is no guarantee. (On the plus side the twenty line signatures favoured by some people are banished)

For example, this morning someone posted the following: So who is asking the question?

How can you respond to them? "Dear Anonymous"??

On other mailing lists you are "laid bare".

If your posts are seen to contribute positively then any messages from you will be viewed with a higher level of respect than those from a "newbie".

That's how peer networks tend to work.

You become a "trusted" source and your opinion increases in value.

Anonymous lists are a bit like anonymous comments on blogs.

They lend little value to the "web".

It could be argued that forums lend a degree of anonymity, however they generally encourage the development of an online identity that is as identifiable as a person's "real" name.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been up and down to Cork a few times, as well as a trip to Clare and a couple of trips up to Dublin. Each and every time I've had delays due to roadworks. This evening I sat in my car for about 35 minutes outside Durrow (at least I think it was Durrow). Is the entire country one big set of roadworks with pockets of road in between?

According to a reports in the Guardian superthin models are not as acceptable as before. In an interesting move the Madrid fashion show banned overly thin models.

Although I've had some really good experiences on eBay, one vendor's practices make me sick to the stomach. Shendenetworking market themselves as: However they actually sell counterfeit Cisco equipment. When we queried this with them one of their staff replied: BUT if you look at any item these scammers are selling you'd get a very different impression We found out the hard way when we sent a defective switch into Cisco recently. It's a lot safer to buy from the likes of Hardware.com!

Remember canned Irish air? How about "genuine" New York garbage? I was half listening to Morning Ireland this morning when they interviewed Justin Gignac, who literally sells rubbish. For a "mere" $50 you can get a signed and numbered cube of NYC rubbish (garbage). The $50 includes free shipping worldwide. You can find out more on his website.

Peter in Edenweb is the genius behind the nice new shiny logo for the webmaster forum: I think it looks great! He even did a nice little favicon to go with it

Until recently I was under the impression that search engine spiders conformed to "sane" standards. If a page returns a HTTP status code of 404 you would have thought that the page / link would be removed from the index. Seemingly this is not the case... I've now been advised that I should try to use either a 410 status code There are some interesting differences between the two HTTP responses: While the good old 404 response code is defined as: That's a bit of a head wrecker. I suppose if you know exactly which pages you want to remove, then a 410 response code is easy enough to generate, but in my case it isn't. I'd either have to change the 404 page to a 410 for the entire site, or simply wait it out.

Dear Recruitment Agency Yes I post to mailing lists. No, that does not give you permission to email me as if pulling my email address from there was "acceptable". Thanks Michele

Yet another UK company is trying to scam Irish business with charming threats of domains being registered by others.. This seems to happen every 3 to 4 months... In any case I've posted a sanitised version of one of their emails on the company blog if anyone wants to read about it.

Today's El Pais digital has the inevitable article about Apple's latest releases. It also has a couple of cute Flash animations to explain how an iPod is put together and how to use iTunes to get content from El Pais. El Pais seems to be one of the better sources for funky Flash animations to go with the latest events. Now why don't any of the Irish papers do something similar?

I'm currently running a competition of sorts to choose a new logo for the Irish Webmaster Forum Anyone who'd like to give it a go is welcome The prize isn't monetary in nature, but you will get recognition and a nice link on all pages of a highly optimised site with a very targetted audience

Ripe is proposing a further two policy changes with regard to IPv4 allocations. One is in relation to the allocation periods, while the other is in relation to the number and way blocks of IPs are allocated

I'm not sure when the entire Twink phone message thing came out, but it certainly puts her in a more interesting light... the famous message (NB: Very strong language)

Frank Michlick explains in simple terms the latest big change in the big bad world of domain names: .com and .net go EPP The most significant part of this change is that you will need an authorization code for transfers as is currently the case with .org, .biz and .info As Frank points out there may be issues with getting the code: And he's being really diplomatic about it :)

I was talking to Alan earlier today and he mentioned that they'd started offering some free content from Sheep Stealers. I'm not in the least bit interested in GAA sport, but I find the free flash game totally addictive.. If you want to add the game to your own site there are a number of methods available. See the site for details [ http://www.sheepstealers.ie/hurling/play.php ]
Game by www.Sheepstealers.ie

I see that Dan King has started a blog. What confuses me a bit is that he is hosting it in the US. Doesn't he trust his employer's service? It seems like a very odd choice to make...

The French branch of the Amazon empire is 6 years old. Happy birthday! I've been buying DVDs off it for the last couple of years as I either couldn't get them elsewhere or found that I was being charged premium rates. For example Banlieue 13 (District 13) has been available on DVD in France since late 2005, whereas the English version was only released on DVD in the last fortnight.

I did a short piece with one of the guys from PR Web the other day about our new Ruby on Rails solution. I hope I don't sound too crazy :) It's available in a choice of formats ....

Some things get on my nerves:

I've bought two gadgets from iWorld in the last couple of months and I have to say I am really impressed. Their site and service simply works. There are no silly delays. You get nice informative tracking emails and best of all your order arrives nice and quickly (courtesy of DHL) I just got my latest toy - I can't wait to play with it this afternoon / evening :)

If you spend much time on blogs and forums you may have noticed that the admins are bringing them closer together. Tagging forum posts or viewing "tag clouds" may have been a dream (or nightmare) a year ago, but now it is becoming increasingly popular. Over the past couple of months I've been working on the Irish Webmaster Forum and have been playing with a number of mods. One of the coolest ones I've come across is VBSeo (aff) which not only takes all the pain out of making a vbulletin forum search engine friendly, but also adds a number of really cool bloglike features to it. The latest release candidate adds "social bookmarking" directly into the forum posts, so you can easily send a post / thread to a number of popular social bookmarking sites. You can now send pingbacks to blog posts and vice-versa directly from a vbulletin forum that has the mod installed. Pretty cool :)

Seems like AIB is offline this morning. Kind of annoying as I needed to check some transactions on my personal account ....

Just reading the CRO's latest newsletter when the first item struck me: So basically people are presuming that the CRO have a freepost license and just sending documents of varying importance in based on this presumption?

BifSniff's latest cartoon is brilliant: You can easily add their cartoons to your blog or website

Following on the Irish government's introduction of new legislation that outlaws holding a mobile while driving I expect there'll be a boom in the sale of hands free kits ... I've never been comfortable talking on the phone while driving and have always invested in some form of headset to make it a bit less painful. On Friday afternoon I took it to the next level and got myself a really nice solution. The only issue I've had so far is when my Nokia's battery isn't fully charged or it simply needs a reboot.

According to El Pais three hackers have been arrested. The group targetted several well known Spanish sites.

According to a number of reports a man's body was found to have extra organs in it: Earlier, it was reported that an additional heart and pair of lungs were found in the remains of the 55-year-old British man who died while holidaying in Ireland. (full story) Of course there will be investigations etc., but how on earth could you possibly put an extra heart and lungs into a body by accident?

The 2006 IIA Net Visionary awards nominations are now open. You may nominate anyone you wish and you do not have to be a member of the IIA to nominate someone. There are a wide range of award categories that include blogging and podcasting for the first time this year. The nomination form is here