March 2007 Archives

As part of the Irish Internet Association's annual congress, we at Blacknight are sponsoring one of the afternoon sessions. The title of the session is "Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts", so it's pretty broad. If you make money via your site ie. through monetisation with Adsense, Amazon or any of the other affilliate / partner solutions let me know. It would be interesting to see what people are doing.

Niall has posted some details on setting up IPV6 on Redhat based distros. Why do I mention it? Well it's kind of nice to be able to get IPV6 going across all servers and services on our network. If other people's networks are capable of communication over v6 then we should be able to reciprocate (like was the case when I was in Lisbon).

Pictures speak louder than words:

I'm currently in Madrid, where I'm waiting for my connecting flight back to Dublin. It's been a week. An incredibly hectic week. A week of meetings (both public and private), drinks, food, drinks, talk and all those other wonderful things that big industry events bring with them. The only problem is that I am broken. I'm physically destroyed! It is my intention to get myself back to a nice warm bed as soon as possible, as I have some serious catching up on sleep to do. I think my poor liver could also do with a break!

I've had a page on the ICANN Wiki for well over a year, but, as I'd never been to an ICANN meeting it was lacking the infamous caricature, so that's now been sorted out! Here's a small version of it: Whether it's a good likeness of me or not I'll you decide :)

This afternoon's sessions includes a 4 hour session with EUrid staff which I am currently attending. They seem to be going over some of the statistics and facts related to the EU namespace, though whether or not they stand up to closer (and possibly more cynical) scrutiny is another matter. It should be very interesting to see if they will be this upbeat after the first round of renewals ie. after April 7th. The Belgian registry, for example, saw a massive reduction in registered domains 12 months after their free domain promotion.

Vodka.com was recently bought for several million dollars. It currently redirects to russianstandard.com Unfortunately the site does not work properly in Firefox, so I cannot navigate it!

There are two tutorials /sessions this afternoon covering domain aftermarket. The first session was given by Rob Hall from Momentous.ca. The salient point from Rob's talk being that the secondary market has become the primary market - much as is the case in real estate. Some people may not agree or approve with that sentiment, but the reality and figures speak for themselves. Further details of his talk are here, while you can download the slides from the ICANN site The second session is being chaired by my good friend Jothan Frakes of DomainSponsor and features Mason Cole (SnapNames), Tim Schumacher (Sedo), Tom Murphy (Name Media - owners of Afternic) and Emiliano Pasqualetti (DomainsBot). You can download the slides of their presentations on the ICANN site.

I've spent the last few hours in ICANN meetings where the topic of discussion has been the future of WHOIS. It's a very hot topic, though I do get the distinct feeling that: What ICANN are trying to decide is how to deal with WHOIS data. They want to remove a lot of the detail from the whois, but they seem to have placed far too much emphasis on US legislation. They seem to have ignored the EU data privacy concerns. You can read the document being discussed here

Although the welcome ceremony for ICANN Lisboa isn't until tomorrow morning the venue in Lisbon's financial district, has been buzzing since yesterday. Delegates from every corner of the globe were arriving in dribs and drabs throughout the day. A lot of the Americans had arrived early in the morning, so were quite jetlagged. Good strong coffee helps :)

Crazy one week domain offer - register or transfer a .ie with Blacknight for a mere 25 euro. Full details here Go to the Blacknight site to order!

I'm sitting in Dublin airport waiting to board a flight to Madrid before heading on to Lisbon. I seem to be cursed! Since I really did not relish the idea of getting caught on the M50 (aka the longest carpark in Ireland) I drove up last night and stayed near the airport. I don't enjoy rushing, so I left the hotel with plenty of time to get to the airport to checkin etc. Of course I could have taken my time as the flight is, of course, delayed! If I had been running late, of course, it would have been leaving on time Ah well - at least I can't miss it!

Ireland's crudest, funniest and consistently best blogger, Twenty Major, has signed a book deal. I just wonder will the "c" word be used to punctuate each and every paragraph! I can see it getting an "R" rating or similar (if such a rating existed for books....) Congratulations! More coverage on ENN

I've been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for the last couple of years both at home and in the office. The time has come for me to replace the keyboard at home, as it's beginning to have issues with certain keys etc., So what kind of keyboard should I get? I've looked at some of the really cool projector style ones, but they're totally impractical. I've got quite large hands and hate small keyboards I don't mind noisy keys, but the quieter the better

I've been in contact with several people who are going to Lisbon for the ICANN meeting, but several others won't be able to make it this time which is a pity. If anyone is going that I haven't been in touch with let me know :) I was looking forward to it, but since a few people have confirmed that they will be there I feel a lot better. The only thing I'm trying to work out now is whether I'll be able to make it into the centre of Madrid and out again on the way over (without missing my flight).

It didn't take too much to find the flipside to the latest adsense addition. Pay per action (beta) is where it's at. Until people gain access to the beta program we can only guess what will be inside, but the concept of only paying for specific user actions is definitely attractive. More on the official blog

Darren mentions that Google have launched the beta of a new addition to Adsense - AdSense referrals (beta) Unlike "normal" adsense, you don't get paid per impression or per click. You only get paid based on actions defined by the advertiser (where's the adwords end of this to see what the setup is?) Hopefully this won't become one of those endless betas like the Adsense for RSS / Feeds that seems to have vanished, as it could be a very interesting addition to people's arsenal. EDIT: There's also a post on the official Adsense blog

Over the last few months we've all been hearing about the PlayStation 3. First there was expectation, but then that turned to disappointment as the European launch was postponed until March. So with the launch only a few days away what do you think? Have you booked yours? Do you even care? Personally I won't be buying one, as I don't like consoles, though I know a lot of people who are going to jump at the chance, but the price is more than a little offputting. At over 600 euro a pop it would have to be truly impressive!

Krystian, who is back in Ireland again, wants to see what the Irish think of the Poles and what the Poles think of the Irish. Hopefully people will take the time to engage with him.

This site gets quite a lot of traffic from certain keyphrases. As a result of this I am constantly having to cull marketing junk from the comments. And no these aren't the usual spam ones. The last one I culled was from a sales rep based in a small Irish town. So if you to abuse my comments I will let you. In return for a fee. How big is the fee? That depends on me. It's a lot cheaper to simply contact me in advance and ask me politely to help you / promote your services or whatever. I may still ask you to pay, but I can assure you it will be a LOT cheaper and less embarassing

Firestats 1.17 has been released. It's a bug fix, so no need to get worried :)

I only spotted this today, but it's still open for another few days, so get on there! Dell Linux Survey It would be great if Dell offered people the option of choosing a linux distro preinstalled on desktops and laptops. I'm getting rather tired of having to reformat them and others are wasting a lot of time trying to get refunds for an OS they have no intention of using.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was having some "interesting" issues getting Ubuntu to play nice with my new graphics card (GeForce 7900GS). You can get a full spec of the card on the Nvidia site. It's a pretty powerful card: Graphics Bus Technology PCI Express Memory 256MB Memory Interface 256-bit Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 42.2 Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec) 9 Vertices/Second 822.5 Million Pixels per clock (peak) 20 RAMDACs (MHz) 400 While it will work without the extra power cable plugged in the nVidia control centre will give you a warning as soon as you boot into Windows. Under Ubuntu the opposite is the case. If you try to install Ubuntu with the card's power cable plugged in you will end up bashing your head against your keyboard (at least I did!), as the installer doesn't have the correct drivers to handle it. Solution - unplug the power lead. Install Ubuntu as normal. Once you've done that you can pop over to Alberto Milone's site and grab the .deb that you need. Run the following command as root (use sudo if you're that way inclined): dpkg -i envy_0.9.1-0ubuntu3_all.deb It will probably whine about a load of dependencies being missing - ignore that for the moment. You can then run: apt-get install -f Which basically tells it to download any required packages and install the .deb Once installed you'll find that you've now got a new icon under Application > System Tools Run "envy" and you will be prompted for your admin password. You can then choose how you want to install it. I went with the autoinstall. Once the autoinstall is run it may prompt you to reboot your PC. Don't. Shutdown your PC completely. Once it is safely shutdown plug the graphics card power cable back into the PC and restart. If X still crashes on boot, then unplug the power again. Boot into recovery mode, login as root (if you have it enabled) and then run: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg If you don't have root enabled simply run the command as: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg The driver you need is "nvidia". Follow the reconfiguration wizard all the way through and remember to set the screen resolutions you want to use. Use the spacebar to select them. Shut down the PC again and plug the power cable back into the graphics card. It should boot properly and X should work This worked for me and I'm currently running at 1280*1024 (I may up that - just need to check what the monitor will support). Your mileage may vary and I may have left out a stage - I wasn't documenting this as I was doing it.

I have a nice legal copy of Windows XP Pro. Unfortunately it predates any of the service packs, so when I went to install my new PC I ran into an interesting issue. The intel motherboard I'm using is from Intel® 946 Express Chipset Family. Of course it comes with all the drivers required on CD. Unfortunately Intel work on the basis that whoever is installing XP will be using a new disk. I'm not. I keep moving the install from PC to PC. I think it's installed on the 3rd or 4th set of hardware since I first got it. I'm probably not alone. Normally I'd download any extra drivers that I need, but the one driver that you need is required for the LAN card to work ie. no driver == no net connection. (Of course this isn't an issue under Ubuntu where it all just works out of the box (apart from the graphics card, but that's a different story)) Solution? Grab the required file from someone else's pc and drop it onto the desktop (as it's required for USB to work properly a USB key won't work - I tried) The file, which is tiny by the way, is called usbehci.sys and you can read all about the MS patches / updates in their knowledgebase And for those of you who don't feel like wasting aeons looking for the damn thing you can download it here

When I read about this I thought it was a joke and had to check the date to be sure: Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts So basically she has a public website but does not want spiders to crawl it even though she hasn't denied them access using robots.txt ?

I've just installed this PC and have run into some interesting issues with the graphics drivers. Which nvidia drivers should I be using? If I try "nvidia" and change the resolution settings X crashs completely, so I'm stuck with a really low resolution which is making me miserable :( Any suggestions?

The make sure you're detecting if the browser supports it. I just installed Ubuntu on this pc, so I don't have any extra plugins yet. It being a Saturday and St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to check which shops are open and until when. Browsing the Dunnes Stores website is nigh on impossible without Flash and the developers, who were probably paid a small fortune, haven't even bothered checking to see if users have Flash. Well done guys! You're brilliant.

What OSS software do you recommend for windows, apart from the obvious ones like Firefox and Thunderbird. Are there any other essential tools that you use on a regular basis? I've started a thread on this over here

Years ago when I got my first server I remember installing some scripts to check its integrity and warn me about attacks. I was amazed and quite frightened by the number of SSH attempts. I soon learnt, however, that this was quite normal. It maybe worrying, but it's normal. Put a server on a public IP and people will try to crack it. There's no avoiding that. Well, there is, but it's a bit impractical to disconnect a web server from the internet :) So what can you do? One of the solutions is to use iptables to block the IPs of failed login attempts. If someone (or something) makes more than X connection attempts from a particular IP then you block it. Of course that's easy if you can program. I can't! Luckily I don't have to, as there are solutions like the rather excellent Fail2Ban available: So not only can you block SSH attacks, you can also use it to defend yourself from other bruteforce attempts. There are debian / Ubuntu versions available, so all you need to do (as root) is run: apt-get install fail2ban This will install the daemon and its basic config, which is to silently block SSH attacks. You can easily customise the configuration by editing /etc/fail2ban.conf The developers have left nice clear comments in the file, so even I was able to make the necessary changes, including whitelisting my own IPs ie. you don't want to lock yourself out just because you've forgotten your login details. There's also a nice writeup here which goes into some depth about the various options available.

I have normal vision. I do wear glasses, but I could get away without wearing them most of the time. Admittedly I only started wearing my glasses on a regular basis when I walked straight past my girlfriend without spotting her (this was about ten years ago), but I wouldn't be considered blind. I'm not a designer, nor would I ever claim to be one, but, in common with a lot of people, I can probably recognise nice design when I see it. Unfortunately some blogs are simply painful to look at directly. When I say "painful" I mean that it literally hurts your eyes to look at the horrendous clashes of colours and annoying highlighting. Just because the XHTML validates does not mean that your eyes won't hurt! Maybe some blog designers think they are being clever while they torture the rest of us - I honestly don't know. Blogs (and websites in general) are all about content. Tasteful presentation of the aforementioned content goes a long way, but the content itself is the key differentiator. Thank God for RSS! Without it we'd all miss out on good content that is buried beneath horrific designs.

The pricing of IE domains is always a topic that seems to excite people. The funny thing is when people take their own marketing too seriously. A couple of years ago I mentioned a rather silly set of statements made by a certain Irish hosting company. Why did I mention it? Well, as I said then and I say now, they don't exactly have a good track record in terms of pricing. While the rest of us were doing our best to attract business with pricing etc., they were charging a high rate. In a free market they're entitled to do so BUT when they started making crazy hypocritical claims about pricing I wasn't going to stand idly by. So what the hell is this all about? So they're matching someone else's prices? Why? What is the point? It's not as if they even have good pricing... €69 for a .ie is about €40 more expensive than the lowest price in the market at present, so it's hardly innovative pricing ... Surely they'd be better off trying to grow their own business?

RedHat have released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. From what I've heard and seen this could be a really exciting release, as they have placed a lot of emphasis on virtualisation Of course Centos has already started work on a 5.* release, with a beta currently available. I'll be interested to see what kind of things people can do with this new shiny toy :)

Since there is a slight difference in release dates of the latest James Bond on DVD my US order actually arrived two days ago. It won't be released in Ireland for another couple of days. In any case, if you do get the two disc edition the documentaries are well worth watching. Daniel Craig comes across as a really nice unassuming guy. I'm never too sure how seriously I should take any of the comments on DVDs. You know damn well that the studio is behind the production, so it's not as if they're going to say anything negative about each other. Even if the director hated working with Daniel Craig he couldn't very well say so... Pity there isn't more focus on Eva Green, though she might get more in the Bond girls section that I haven't watched yet. It's also fascinating to see how they put the entire production together, but as Damien already pointed out, I'm fascinated by some of the odder things, such as special edition soundtracks...

Every time I install Ubuntu I end up struggling with changing the default editor to use vi or vim. If only I'd found this page before! So simple! All you have to do is run (as root): update-alternatives --config editor

If you are using Firestats it is recommended that you upgrade ASAP

I'm really sick of all these web 2.0 fanboys.

It's like the dotcom boom with slightly older people, or something.
Don't get me wrong. Some of the web applications and services are really cool AND useful.
They may even have a business plan behind them so that they'll actually be around in 6 months time ....
Twitter (it doesn't even deserve a link!) simply isn't.
It's probably the biggest waste of time I've come across in years.
Does anyone really give a damn what other people are doing all the time.

"I just got up"
"I made coffee"
 "My girlfriend is having morning sickness"

- stop the lights!! Headline news!
Most people's daily lives are boring.
While we may all do interesting things a lot of what we do is incredibly boring.
This is why I own a DVD player, a TV, books etc.,
Someone telling the world that they are sitting on a bus isn't going to improve my life. If I wanted to know where someone was I could ring them, email them, IM them .. you get the idea..
If I want to know what you are planning to do I can check your calendar / diary (if you have a public one)
Do we really need twitter?
I don't think so.
Others tend to agree
Though all the little fanboys think it's so "cool" Guys - reality check please.
Just because it's got a "web 2.0" stamp on it does not make it "cool" "useful" or anything else.
If it was "hip" to jump of cliffs would you all do it?

Which site(s) would people recommend when looking for a hotel? I've used a couple but I may be missing out on good deals!

Last weekend I must have been bored or simply crazy, as I bought several domains and complete websites. The main acquisition was this discussion forum which took my fancy partially because it had a reasonably good domain name, a nice enough custom skin and vbseo preinstalled (saving me on license costs). Moving it from the previous host to one of my servers didn't take that much work, though I have come to hate cpanel backups with a passion! While they do a good job of maintaining the important files they also include a lot of junk that isn't much use on a vanilla server (ie. one without any form of control panel). I'm a lot happier using scp, rsync and vim :) I also finished getting the last of the important content off palermo. Niall was heading up to the data centres this afternoon, so he was good enough to move my "baby" into its new home in Interxion. It's been reinstalled with the latest release of Ubuntu (I owe that man pints!) and is currently sitting there doing very little.. that will change!

While I was at DomainFest in LA I got to meet a lot of interesting people in the domain / hosting / internet / online business, so going to ICANN Lisbon was a natural followup. Unfortunately I've been rather busy over the last few weeks, though that's probably a good complaint to have as well :) In any case I only got round to booking my flights this evening. Trying to find reasonably priced flights to Lisbon isn't as easy as it should be - thank God for sites like Expedia.it (the English version kept on giving me pricing in dollars, so I opted for the Italian version) and Sky Scanner! So my flights are booked and now all I have to do is find a hotel. I've ended up taking quite a circuitous route, flying Dublin - Madrid - Lisbon (it could have been worse if I'd ended up with Lufthansa!), so depending on how the times work out I may even get to pop into Madrid for a couple of hours. I haven't been to Lisbon for about 10 years. I was there twice in the 90's with my girlfriend at the time. We were poverty-stricken students. We were in love. It was romantic. Though the hotels were far from it! I swore the last time I was there that if I ever went back I would stay in a semi-decent hotel, though I never imagined it would take me practically ten years to get back there!

I get cold calls from sales people on a regular basis. Some of the callers are very nice and charming etc., and we have pleasant conversations. Others should really choose another field of work Really - they are not suited to direct selling. If you ring me up and try to sell me advertising you need to tell me why I should do it. This afternoon a very nervous sales person rang trying to sell me advertising in a new magazine. Or maybe it wasn't a new magazine.. He couldn't really make up his mind. Questioning him about this upset him When he told me that we should advertise in it because we "made websites" I naturally corrected him and asked him what he thought we did.. and why hadn't he even looked at our website. He had hung up. How mature So if you get a call from a rather nervous guy selling advertising in a publication that might be new or might not be (he may have decided by the time he calls you) then watch out!

I mentioned a post about prolific bloggers a while back. It seems I'm in that top 100 for the moment :) I wouldn't expect to be there for long - there are a lot of very prolific bloggers out there!

Realex have won a very tasty contract - the online payments for one of the largest online shops in Europe - CDWow! While I've known about this for several months I had promised their CEO, Colm Lyon, not to blog about it until they'd officially announced it, which I see they've now done. I'm delighted for Colm. He deserves every success.

While I may not like some of the websites that get submitted to the various directories I manage I can appreciate that not everyone can design (I can't!). However one of my pet hates are the image only sites. You know the ones I mean. Instead of pages of text they are one big ugly image. No text. No links. Nothing clickable or spiderable. You'd need to use OCR technology to get any content or meaning from them. Why do people do that? And what's more worrying .... Are they actually paying for it? There are so many issues with image only sites that it's hard to choose one to start with:

Although I missed HeadRambles' (aka Grandad) 5 minutes of fame on RTE the other evening it is available to view online. If you are going to watch it you will need patience. Not with the bloggers or the interviewer, but with the RTE stream. Bandwidth is no longer an issue (they're on INEX), but whatever way they have the stream setup it makes for a really painful experience (which also forced Firefox to restart!)

As I work for a hosting company that monitors a LOT of network traffic data it's only natural that my own DSL line is being "watched" (it makes talking to our ISP a lot more interesting!) If you look at the screenshot below you will see a very big difference in the connection from around lunchtime today: So what changed? The only thing that changed was the firmware on the Linksys WRT54G. Nothing else has changed in my setup. I'm not complaining, but the difference is startling. If only I had known :)

Over the past few days a Coleraine based company, Lotus Chinese Medical Services, have been systematically spamming a LOT of Irish companies. While spam may be annoying and I'm no stranger to it, what makes this spam a little different and more annoying is the payload. The idiots are sending out a rather large PDF attachment with each and every email! The file is about 2 megabytes in size, so with encoding etc., it can put quite a "nice" strain on your DSL line. Imagine a sales@ or info@ address that sends the same email to multiple people in an office. You end up with the same stupid mail being downloaded by ten or twenty people at once. End result being that your office network gets really really slow as a result. So what can you do? Report them to their ISP AOL and spamcop and anyone else who cares to listen. I've already reported them to AOL and spamcop a couple of times this week, as they keep hitting my personal domains one by one, which suggests that they've built themselves a "nice" little database of Irish domains. Unfortunately they don't have a website, so you can't get that taken down or blacklisted in a URI blacklist, which is a pity, but you can ring them and yell at them :) Another option would be to report them to the data privacy commissioner. While this may not offer much protection for businesses they've also been hitting personal email addresses (including the one tied to this site). Of course as they are not actually based within the republic that may not help. Anyone with suggestions let me know