February 2007 Archives

Alex King has released another handy plugin to harvest links from your blog entries. You can see it in action here I'm not sure it's terribly useful, though I do like it all the same. I seem to have an odd affinity for semi-useful plugins....

Julian Field, developer of MailScanner, is seriously ill at present. Here's hoping he gets well soon!

In another one of the sidenote style posts ..... We've currently got about 4 positions open!! That's mad! It wasn't that long ago that we had 4 staff! Anyway, we're looking for the following: If you feel that you are suitable pop your CV over to management@blacknight.ie in PDF or RTF format.

A few weeks back, after my trip to LA, I mentioned that I was looking into getting a new camera. Not so much as a replacement for my Sony Cybershot T7, but as an "addon" :) The problem with the Sony Cybershot is that it's a compact. While it may be capable of taking lovely "snaps" it simply cannot do more advanced things. The feedback I got in the comments on that post was fantastic, so I finally took the plunge today and ordered a Canon EOS 400D with a EF-S 18-55 mm Lens. Hopefully I'll have it by the end of the week. On a sidenote, AIB's credit card services were on the phone to me within 5 minutes! Hardly surprising really, as I rarely make large purchases on my personal credit card - and I really do appreciate their vigilance. Of course I couldn't remember what the hell I bought the other weekend at around 7pm on Saturday ... but I was more than happy to discuss all the other transactions on my account, including my trip to Hooters in Hollywood.

Client-side Javascript is really useful sometimes, but this one is rather silly: It *thinks* the Oscars start in just over an hour, whereas they don't actually start for another 8 hours, due to the time difference! Oh well :)

As part of my ongoing efforts to make sites on this server run faster and cause me fewer headaches I've implemented Apache log rotation using Cronolog. Apache2 does support log rotation, but Cronolog gives you more options, which is why I chose it. On Ubuntu all you need to do is: apt-get install cronolog To see which version you have type: cronolog -V The version I have is 1.6.2, which was released 5 years ago! I guess that means "it just works". Unfortunately the documentation on the site isn't as extensive as I would have liked, but adding a daily log rotation in Apache2 can be done by editing the log entry in the vhost config to read as follows: CustomLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /pathtologs/logs/%Y/%m/%d/access.log" combined This will create a subdirectory for each year, month and day. As the site I was concerned about, IrishBlogs.info, produces rather large log files I was more concerned about getting them down to a managable size. I am not worried about processing them at this juncture. Hopefully this will help :)

I picked up the "Special Anniversary Edition" of the Gladiator soundtrack on Amazon earlier this week. It's a lovely two disc set with disc two featuring some of the scenes from the film. Weren't they meant to be making a sequel or prequel?

I've mentioned the rather braindead way in which the Enterprise Ireland mailing lists are maintained in the past. The subject has reared its head again and the moderators have done a "wonderful" job. The fact that there are "moderators" annoys me enough already. It's damn annoying. Their response is maddening: (my emphasis) This editing and censoring of posting bugs the hell out of me.

I've just moved IrishBlogs.info to a new server (this one). If anyone notices anything odd please let me know

I've been with Sky for close to two years now. In all that time I don't think I've ever received a single invoice or receipt for my payments to them. The only mail I get from them are silly letters about Sky broadband and the monthly magazine. Shouldn't they be making available invoices or receipts? I've already spoken to their accounts department, but they were hopeless. I was informed that I would get a receipt if I paid by cash, but that option is not available to anyone in Ireland as far as I know. Chorus, on the other hand, used to send me receipts every month. Am I missing something?

For the past 3 weeks or so we've been having issues with electricity in our offices. Fuses are tripping randomly even when nothing is on (ie. in the middle of the night). In the past 2 years or so we've had no less than 4 sets of electricians in the office and each of them seems to find problems left by their predecessor. At this stage I'm sick of them all. "It's fixed" "Are you sure?" "Yeah" Don't you just love promises? Every time I hear that kind of promise from an electrician I cringe, as their idea of "fixed" and mine are totally at odds. Maybe there's an electrician out there who is a true professional and actually manages to do things like wiring sockets without leaving exposed wires or puts in fuses that are actually rated adequately ... Does such a beast exist or has the Celtic Tiger pushed them all away?

Don't forget to register if you plan on attending the Irish Blog Awards

Seemingly the people behind the new Lily O' Brien's site were paying attention to my post and the thread over on the webmaster forum. It's a pity that their staff can't be as mature and graceful as Ross, but there's very little we can do about that .... In any case the site now "works" in lynx and the w3c validator is no longer blocked. I have to say "works" as the use of ALT tags etc., is woeful and totally lacking in any semantic basis which would probably cause confusion for a visually impaired user and gives zero benefit in terms of SEO. (Try browsing the site using lynx to see what I mean). Why anyone in their right mind would want to block the w3c validator from accessing their site is beyond me. It makes me wonder what they had to hide. I suspect it was the bad coding, since none of the pages on the site were validating before the posts here and on the forum. With regard to SEO it will be interesting to see what happens. The original site ranked well and was obviously well indexed, as the image below illustrates: As all the inbound links to specific pages etc., are all dead you can expect to see Lily's SERPS being impacted negatively. Whether or not the site will eventually recover remains to be seen, but in its current state it distinctly lacks semantic textual content. Only time will tell.

I've just moved this site over to a different server for a number of reasons - one of them being that I want see how well APC works and it wouldn't work on the previous machine for some silly reason. In any case if anyone spots any weird errors please please please let me know.

The shortlist for the blog awards is now online. While I'm happy to be shortlisted I was hoping it would be under a different category, as I really think that Bernie will wipe the floor with me :) I was also a bit disappointed to see that HeadRambles hadn't made it onto the list.

I got back from ULlast night and went straight to bed! Skycon was great fun, but I was absolutely exhausted - Skynet really know how to organise a party! (A more sober post is on the company blog - if you'll excuse the intentional pun!)

If anyone wants the slides from my talk yesterday afternoon here they are: Open Office format PDF format

I'm scheduled to give a talk in the University of Limerick this afternoon as part of Skynet's conference - Skycon. Even though I've given plenty of talks in the past I am always incredibly tense beforehand. This afternoon I'll be talking about email filtering on a large scale :) As there are quite a few hardcore geeks onsite today I'm hoping they'll all have gone to the other talk!!

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft server technology, but I was really impressed with the demo site that Rob threw up earlier today. So now we offer Asp.net AJAX extensions. Are you impressed? :)

It looks like trademark holders are biting back, as EUBrowser lose yet another WIPO complaint (UDRP)

Suse Linux is "on the road" with a date in Dublin organised for 27th March: Full information on the Dublin date and registration via their site.

Although Google has made a lot of improvements to the Adsense publisher centre over the last couple of years (I've been a member for the bones of 4 years!) it still lacks some basic features - graphs. Trends are a wonderful thing, but plotting them can be a real pain in the neck. Of course there are a number of solutions currently available to publishers (see this thread for discussion), but I always like having options. Last night Robin asked me to test out a new "toy" he'd thrown together, which he refers to as a "mashup". Personally I dislike that term. It sounds far too negative and messy. Referring to it as a "hack" would be more positive in my eyes, but that's just me. The system Robin's put together is very simple. Login to your adsense account and run an advanced report for the period you are interested in. So, for example, you could have a look at the 12 month period spanning January 1st 2006 to January 1st 2007. Once the report has displayed you can download the CSV version of it (for some dumb reason it exports as report.csv, so you have to manually rename it if you want to run several reports to compare periods!). You can then upload the CSV to the site and it will generate a nice graph for you. Not only will it show you your earnings over time, but it will also predict your future trend, which is pretty cool. The graphs at the moment aren't the prettiest, but it's incredibly functional and easy to you. Well done!

I've mentioned issues with websites on more than occasion in the past. In some instances the issues have been mildly irritating, whereas in others they have been horrendous. When an ecommerce website basically tells me / my browser to "get lost" because I'm not using Javascript I get rather annoyed. However, for every website that tells users (and their browsers) to go elsewhere there's another that is sitting there welcoming them all in as potential sales. In the case of Irish handmade chocolates this is really obvious. A quick search on Google for "irish handmade chocolates" shows the top three or four companies in the sector: So the 3 main competitors are: I happen to like chocolate, so the results don't really surprise me :) Anyway, you could expect the search results to oscillate for certain key phrases. In this particular sampling, however, there is one wildcard - Lily O'Brien's. They're the wildcard for two reasons: I should be able to access an ecommerce website using ANY browser I choose. I don't expect it to work perfectly in ANY browser, though I would expect it to be functional in the most commonly used ones. I don't think that asking that is too much :) Since I like web standards and the like let's try a little test on all three sites and see what happens: Butler's W3C Validator Test: The HTML on this site is anything but valid, however once you force the w3c validator to deal with it you get a massive 92 errors! The silly thing is that most of the errors could be fixed very easily. They're silly things like missing mimetype declarations for Javascript etc., Lynx Test: The site is usable. Better use of ALT tags would make it a hell of a lot easier to get around, but it does display. Lily O Brien's W3C Validator Test: Failed. Now this is the bit that really got me. Not only did the site fail the test, but it's actually using server-side UserAgent detection AND is basically telling a large number of browsers to "get lost". What's laughable is that even the "get lost we don't like your browser page" doesn't even validate!! How on earth could they put together an error page that doesn't even work properly? No DocType declaration and incorrect HTML markup. Talk about adding insult to injury! Funnily enough the site currently has a good Google PageRank - I'd expect that won't last, as the new site is going to be really hard to traverse with a spider. Lynx: It won't let me view the site! Lir W3C test: Gives 67 errors. As usual most of them are very simple to fix Lynx: Navigable. Not as much content as on the Butler's site, but it's still usable The problem that sites such as Lily's face is that they are basically trying to force people into using what the developers / designers think people should be using. What if I wanted to access those sites using a PDA or my mobile phone? What if I want to use a new funky browser with a UserAgent string that their code doesn't recognise? What if I was using a screen reader? While JAWS may support Javascript I've already seen issues with UIs on several sites, so a site that doesn't have any text (or very little of it) is going to put people off. What about older people with weak eyesite? My grandfather, for example, is over 90 years old. His eyes aren't good. He has to use onscreen magnification to view a lot of sites. If they're using more images than anything else there isn't much for him to see. What if I have money in my pocket and I need to buy chocolates for my girlfriend? Are you going to tell me to go elsewhere simply because you didn't code the site properly? It will be interesting to see how the three sites compare in a few months time when Google has done another dance. Unless Lilly's make some significant changes to their current website layout I would predict that they will be severely penalised by Google et al and that their online sales will suffer as a result

I recently bought a license for PaintShop Pro, as I really don't have the patience to fight with the Gimp (sorry Donncha!) I'm not a graphic artist, but being able to do some simple editing of images is handy for customising blog templates etc., This evening I wanted to change the header images on monetise.it, as I was still using the default ones. PaintShop Pro wouldn't let me! As I had chosen to use images of bank notes it simply refused to edit them and directed me to RulesForUse. I wouldn't have been bothered if it had simply warned me about potential issues, but blocking me completely is a bit nuts. (It also begs the question - what other types of images don't they want you to edit? If I try editing a hardcore porn photo will I be sent to the Vatican's official website?) I ended up using the Gimp to do the resizing, but that's hardly the point. I'm amazed and a little annoyed. I wasn't trying to commit fraud and you'd have to be really dumb to possibly confuse the images in the blog header with real bank notes.

Since it's slightly different to the "normal" sizes: The slight difference in size is to cover the space used by Google themselves

Once you have a reasonably sized network you will get abuse complaints. It doesn't matter what's causing the complaints (well it does... ) but you need to be able to react quickly and deal with the issues. I've mentioned my own experiences dealing with abuse desks in the past..... Now for the flipside. Would someone please please please tell people to send clear abuse reports? Please? How hard can it be? I was reviewing a few abuse tickets this morning and had to ask someone else to explain what the hell they were talking about! For example this one is a classic case of bad English: Technically it's correct, but why couldn't they just say: That would have been a hell of a lot easier to understand (I've omitted the really clumsy introductory paragraph of their email). They've also included a load of rubbish about network abuse in general - we have our own AS number - thanks! Gah!

What other companies are there in the Irish market that offer electricity solutions to business? The only one I've come across is Airtricity who promise a 10% saving. Are there any others worth dealing with?

I rented Children of Men this weekend, as well as a couple of other films that I'd missed at the cinema. While I could bore you to tears by providing a detailed review of the film and Clive Owen's performance - I won't. Clive Owen's performance was fine, but the script wasn't. Michael Caine's performance was interesting, although his character wasn't fully developed. I'd wait until this film is shown on TV ie. DO NOT pay to watch it

So if you're single or simply can't be with your loved one Valentine's night can be a real pain. A few years ago, when I was living in Milan, we had a singles night out which was good fun... This year? I'll probably be choosing from this list: Any other suggestions?

[ http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=mneyloncom-20 I placed two orders with Amazon US yesterday evening. I just got two emails from them confirming that both orders had shipped. Great! But wait... the predicted delivery dates are a wee bit odd: Order 1 - estimated arrival date: 28-February-2007 Order 2 - estimated arrival date: 14-March-2007 That's bizarre to say the least! Both shipments are DVDs and the first one has two boxsets (Firefly and Mission Impossible Ultimate Edition) It doesn't bother me that much, as it will give me something to look forward to, but I do find it odd :)

Richard has come up with a really cool offer for ALL Blog Awards nominees. (I'll have to come up with something as well now, won't I? ) Anyhow, as I always like freebies and I know Richard is a nice guy I'd be delighted to take him up on his offer. So, following the instructions on his site: Totally unhelpful, aren't I? :)

BarCamp Dublin is set to take place in the Digital Hub on Saturday 21st April 2007. I was at the last two Irish barcamps in Cork and Waterford, so I'll be attending this one as well. As it's in Dublin I expect there should be a good turnout (not that there wasn't at the previous events...) At this point the schedule is stilll a bit "up in the air", but I expect it will develop closer to the date.

The 2007 Irish Blog Awards Voting is now open. I've been nominated under a few categories - business, technology and best contribution (for IrishBlogs.info ) . I *think* I was nominated under two categories last year. I never seem to win awards, so you could feel pity and give me your vote OR you could help maintain that trend and vote for someone else :) Let the games begin! EDIT: Full list of nominees courtesy of Jason

I was out of the country when the Quinn Group announced that they were taking over BUPA. Personally I'm delighted. I just hope that the government take action with respect to VHI's position, as it is untenable. As a sidenote, I had tried to contact Vivas to sort out the company's health insurance plans, but they proved themselves to be completely inept.

The guys over at Tshirt Hell have revamped their design. If you don't like Flash, then you'll probably hate it :) The main change, from what I can see, is that the product pages are more integrated with the rest of the site, so they'll probably be able to increase their sales.. Great stuff though! Unfortunately most of the tshirts are simply too crude to blog about, which is probably why I like them. This one is pretty good: Jimmy, who works for us, seems to be making a good effort at collecting their entire catalogue!

I got an email from Pat Phelan a short time ago to let me know that their service is now available in Ireland. Pop over to his site to get all the details.

For the last few days a lot of Irish bloggers seem to have been competing to see who has the most subscribers to their feeds. *yawn* :) I find it kind of amusing to watch, though I have got to hand it to Eoghan. He's come up with a really nice incentive!

I don't post about the company as much here as I used to, but this is worth mentioning :) We've just slashed the pricing on domains for our current special offer: More info on the official company blog. And you can order directly via the website

While I was in LA last week John sent me details of the Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2007. While there are some potentially positive aspects in the Bill some of the Bill's contents are, for lack of better word, simply crazy. That is simply wrong. How can they possibly expect that to hold up in court? How can they expect anyone to take the .ie ccTLD seriously if they can retroactively apply the bill to the 70k+ IE domains already registered? They also seem to think that issues surrounding registration disputes are a matter for government: So that puts it in the realm of civil courts... lovely.. The Bill's provisions for the management of the IE namespace do offer some hope of industry involvement, but the bulk of the text does not strike me as particularly positive. If the government is concerned about the present and future of the IE namespace they may have been better advised to look at emulating other ccTLDs. By making explicit provisions for fines and other elements within the context of the Bill it sounds like they have no intention of allowing any freedom of governance. This is worrying.

Over the last few days I've been getting more and more emails offering me products for Valentine's day. While I'm sure that there are plenty of people who love all the hype around the "event" I've always disliked it. When I was a teenager I remember all the excitement for both girls and boys to see who would get "Valentines" and how big and expensive they'd be. It hasn't changed much. Why should people be forced into spending silly amounts of money on cards etc., for one day of the year? Surely if you love someone you don't need a "special day" Ban it I say !

While I was in LA I took some photos with my Sony Cybershot T7. The Sony Cybershot is a nice little camera that fits easily into a pocket ie. it's subtle. Unfortunately its lens doesn't exactly lend itself to more complex lighting scenarios and the zoom isn't the best. While this is fine when you want to take simple snaps it's really frustrating when you want to take shots of things like the bat mobile! So can anyone recommend a digital SLR?

ICANN's next meeting is being held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 25th to 30th March 2007. The main ICANN site has some details, but I expect there'll be more content and detail in the coming weeks. There is also a site run by the local host (with really annoying background music), which contains information on the venue etc., but does not have a schedule as yet. On a sidenote ICANN recently launched a blog, so subscribing to the feed might be beneficial if you are interested in following domain news.

I arrived back in Dublin this morning at around 11am Irish time, which was 3am LA time. I'm not 100% sure if I'm jetlagged or simply tired.... In any case it was a fantastic trip!! I've uploaded the rest of the photos from my camera and have downloaded my mail (that took a lot longer). It was great to meet some of the people I'd been in touch with over the last couple of years in person and, of course, it was a wonderful opportunity to make new contacts. Prior to heading over I'd made a very short list of people I wanted to meet and I am delighted to say that I got to meet them all. Both Frank and Peter have posted about their experiences in LA, though I haven't found anybody else's photos yet.

I haven't had much time to blog over the last couple of days, so I'll be uploading more photos etc., once I get back to Ireland. The last few nights have been a bit mental (in a good way!) so last night we took it a bit easier and finished up in Red Rock on Sunset around 1. I'll be meeting a couple of the other stragglers in about half an hour for breakfast before coming back to my hotel room to finish packing before heading to the airport. The DomainFest organisers have announced DomainFest 2008 for Las Vegas, so I will definitely be going. They really know how to party!! The only thing I'm dreading is the flight back, as I know I'll be uncomfortable :( Ah well - it's been a great few days.

A panel of experts drawn from several quarters led a very compact and intense panel session on IDN, ccTLDs and new TLDs. Most panel discussions I've attended have either run on too long or dragged a bit. In the case of yesterday's session the opposite was the truth. The panel was comprised of Tina Dam (ICANN), who gave a brief update on IDN. She was followed by Hiro Hotta (JPRS) who gave us a lot of information and statistics on the Japanese experience with IDN to date. Pinky Brand (.mobi) covered the progress and future prospects of .mobi. Leona Chen (.asia) went through the prelaunch information for .asia, which looks like it's going to be very exciting, while Matt Serlin (MarkMonitor) covered some of the general aspects of ccTLDs. After their presentations there was a Q & A session, which allowed people like me to throw as many queries as we wanted at a panel of experts - a great opportunity !

Michael Arrington gave a very entertaining talk at lunchtime today. Arrington, who is best known as editor of Techcrunch, formerly worked in the domain industry, so he was able to cover some areas of interest to domainers. A lot of what he talked about was about web 2.0, but with a slant for the domain industry. Topics covered included RSS, content and AJAX.. It was entertaining and informative :)