September 2007 Archives

Krystian has just launched a new forum in English aimed at getting Irish and Polish people to interact.

I was just chatting to Niall about RIPE assignments and members and he gave me a nice little command to check data.

You need to run this in a shell:
whois -i origin AS39122 -h whois.ripe.net

If the RIPE member in question has been keeping their data current you should get back information on all their IP assignments (or is that allocations? I always mix them up!)

Both Apple and Microsoft are working on releases of their operating systems.

Apple's release is scheduled for the end of October, while Microsoft's server 2008 has been delayed several times.

I hope to be playing with a release candidate of Server 2008 over the next couple of weeks. I'll probably put it on a virtual machine of some kind... or maybe even on a spare server in the office ...

I've just been looking over the list of nominees for this year's Net Visionary Awards and I've been trying to work out who I should vote for...

Best Blogger - It would have to be a toss up between Keith and Grandad. I know a couple of the others on the list, but I don't read them regularly so I can't really vote for them.
While it's hard choosing between Keith and Grandad I'd probably err towards Grandad as he's made me laugh so much over the last year. It's also great to see someone of a slightly older generation not only starting their own blog but also getting other people blogging.

Best Online Banking Service - I've no idea. I don't use any of the banks listed. I really don't understand why they even have this category. If it was broader ie. "financial services" you could get a lot more interesting stuff in there, but how many banks are there?

Best Podcaster - Conn O Muineachain. He deserves it

Education Contribution - Bernie Goldbach. (congrats on the new arrival by the way!)
Paul Whelan from Biology.ie would be another choice

E-Government - No idea. Sorry!

Innovation - This is a really tough one, as I know quite a few of the nominees personally. David Curtin and his team successfully launched Enum in Ireland and that is true innovation. Newaddress.ie is a really cool service, so Kevin deserves credit (they were nominated previously, but I don't think they won). Martin Langedijk's work with Teamwork has made life a lot easier for a lot of businesses including my own! Alan's someone I respect and who has been doing quite a few interesting things over the last year or so - keep an eye on him!

Internet Entrepreneur - Obviously I'd have to vote for myself - though I never actually win!. If you don't want to you could do worse than looking at the likes of Derek Quinn, who was also involved with NewAddress and is probably plotting something new already ... Pigsback is a cool idea, CentralR is useful and all the other ones listed are either already cool and useful or have lots of potential. There's just so many of them to choose from! (Maybe you can just pick me and keep it simple! :) )

Internet Marketer - Dave Davis.  I've no experience of the others. RaboDirect has been very successful with their online marketing, though they were nominated for this last year as well when someone else was involved (I think!) . Mark Tarbatt's Generator is an interesting business and unlike some of his competitors he actually does provide quotes when you ask for them!

Mobile Internet Damien Farren from DotMobi
I've mentioned them several times on here and over on both my domain blog and the company one. They're doing cool stuff with the mobile web!

Online Trader - Even though I / we are nominated the list is impressive and I really don't think I should be there. Someone like Geoff Boyle from 123 is much more deserving

Social Contribution - This is always a tough category. Trying to narrow it down is not easy! A lot of the time the nominees are the unsung heroes. The guys and girls that have helped the rest of us in some way (and by "us" I mean people in general)
Damien Mulley has given generously of his time over the last few years in so many ways that it would be hard to know where to start.
Andy Osborn has been slaving away on taking BodyWhys to the next level and it seems to have been paying off.
Paul Clerkin's work with Irish architecture site Archiseek is amazing. You don't have to be into architecture to appreciate that it is a labour of love.
Politics.ie is a fantastic resource, so David Cochrane deserves to be on that list.

Technology Journalist - I'd go with Mulley on this one again, though Eamon McGrane makes that decision difficult.

Web Designer - Oh how I hate this category! Take your pick! Alan, Peter and Darren have all done work for me in either a personal capacity or for the company over the last year, so how I'm going to vote in that category.... God only knows!

Web Developer - I know several people on that list (quelle surprise!) but I am at a loss as to who I'd vote for. I know who I won't vote for, but that doesn't reduce the list enough!

If anyone has any suggestions on how best to vote please let me know!

NB: Anyone can vote. You DO NOT need to be a member of the IIA

Peter from Edenweb has made available a set of nominee logos for the IIA Net Visionary Awards

Nice work Peter!

The Internet Helpdesk is a classic. If you've worked in IT or had to help out a family member with their computer problems you've probably come across it already.

There's nothing wrong with a golden oldie like this one!

The latest release of Wordpress was made public earlier today. Since I've stopped using Wordpress I wasn't aware of it until I caught up with my RSS feeds a short time ago.

Whether the new release brings enhancements or new features won't really matter to anyone, as the new release brings with it a new "phone home feature":
How?
Well it seems that it sends a lot more data back to Wordpress than is actually necessary and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, doesn't seem to have a reasonable explanation for this.

There's a couple of posts about the issues this raises and a very long discussion of it on the a mailing list (worth reading!)
The key point being raised time and again is that people aren't given an option to opt-out of sending the data. It might also be seen as breaching EU privacy legislation according to one contributor.

UPDATE: You can disable the call home function via a 3rd party plugin. If you read the mailing list thread there's one or two options mentioned.

I went along to Mobile Monday yesterday evening. I don't know what I was expecting. I was more or less prepared to politely smile at boring presentations and demos. I probably wasn't expecting to be as impressed as I was!

There were three companies presenting their products and services last night and they were all fascinating.

First up was Mobile Aware's Rotan Hanrahan who showed some demos of what some of their clients are doing.

The second presentation reminded me of the Firefly phone, but was a hell of a lot cooler.
Sentry Wireless have come up with a firewall type solution that allows users to restrict who can phone or be phoned from a particular device. The advantage it has over Firefly is that you don't need any proprietary hardware as the solution works at the SIM level. The first application of the technology is a product they call KidSafe.
Of course there's no reason why the technology could not be employed in other realms...

The last of the three presentations was from Mobile Complete. It really blew me away!
I've mentioned Litmus / SiteVista in the past when talking about browser testing.
Imagine taking this kind of testing to the next level and beyond.
That's what the guys in Mobile Complete have done.
Their system allows you to gain complete access to a huge array of mobile devices remotely using an ASP model.
During the demo last night one of my friends was actually able to send an SMS to the test phone in the docklands!
You can find out more about the testing suite of Device Anywhere on their site (and test it for 3 hours for free!)

After the demos we adjourned to the bar ...

I'm not into spreadsheet software that much. I use Excel and the Open Office equivalent to do simple things that make my life that bit easier (like most people!)

It seems that Excel 2007 has issues with maths. While it can probably deal with most simple calculations without issue it is kind of worrying that it thinks that 850 multiplied by 77.1 is 10000!!

More info here (via Niall)

I never use expletives when I write.

I can't see the point.

If you can't make your idea / opinion known / clear without having to resort to the use of expletives, then I would have to question your abilities as a writer.

Twenty Major's use of the expletive is interesting, as he does it in a particular manner. The first couple of times I read him I was offended on certain levels, but now I'm not.

However other bloggers make use of expletives when they don't need to.

Mulley, for example, has quite a good rant today about online advertising. Whether I agree with his opinion or not (I don't) I would have considered his piece to be well written except for the use of expletives. It's not as if he can't express himself without using them, so why does he?

Personally it makes no sense to me.

Don't people care about language any more?

I'm planning on attending Mobile Monday in The Hairy Lemon, Dublin, this evening.

Over the past few months we've sponsored several events across the country (and further afield), but I've been unable to attend most of the events, which is kind of annoying!

Can anyone recommend a good hotel in that part of Dublin?
I'm thinking of leaving the car behind and getting the train up so I can have a couple of drinks afterwards and not have to worry.

Over the past couple of years I've deal with Vito from DemoDemo quite a bit. He's a cool guy and their demos have saved us a fortune!

Earlier this evening he sent a lot of his clients an email which really caught my attention.

They're celebrating 5 years in business this month so he's offering a "set your own price" deal! Basically you hop over to their hosting tutorials page. Choose what you want to order and then send them an offer.

Interesting marketing tactic to say the least! I hope it doesn't backfire on him :)

Damien linked to a site that talks about the high costs of locall numbers for many users.
David posted about this some time ago and there were several interesting comments on that article.

We are based outside Dublin, so for a lot of people there still is the mental block with ringing an 059 number instead of an 01 or a region free 1850 / 1890



The problem as I see it is a catch 22.





Of course we do publish our "normal" 059 number on the site, so anyone who wants to can use that ...

But if we were to start marketing based on the 059 number would we lose business?
If you use an 1850 / 1890 some people seem to end up paying more for the calls. If you use a 1800 number it's hard to limit who uses it ie. restricting it to sales calls only. We've thought about the 1800 number long and hard, but we can't really justify it.

A number of people had raised concerns about CD Wow's service being less than stellar of late.

It now transpires that the company was bought by Australian company Stomp International.

I haven't had any reason to purchase anything from them in quite some time, so I've no idea how good or bad service was during their "bad patch", but they used to be excellent.

I just visited the Carlow website. It's horrific. It's embarassingly bad.

Why can't they do something like Clare or Donegal?

Does a county have to rely heavily on tourism to have a decent looking website?

I'd have thought not.

Earlier this week Carlow decided to have a carfree day before the rest of Europe.

Whether this was a good idea or not isn't important, but if you were a resident it would have been nice to actually have access to some information on it.
I'd have thought the local authority site would have been the place to find the information. Of course there was absolutely no mention of it at all!

Anyone who tells me that egovernment is improving obviously hasn't tried to actually use the local authority sites for Carlow!

We're stuck!

I never thought I'd say it, but we're stuck in a little rut.

We need to come up with new names for our products and I am not inspired. Some of our staff are semi-inspired.

Suggestions welcome - read the post over on the company blog which explains it all

Pretty much everyone will be accepting pre-orders for personal IE domains in advance of the October 31st "go live"

I just hope that people realise what a "landrush" type situation really involves. I'd suspect that quite a few of them don't.

In a landrush like this not everyone can be made happy. It's simply not possible.

If, like me, you have an uncommon firstname or surname (I have both!) then you should be fine, but if you have a more common combination you may run into issues.

All you have to do is pickup your local telephone directory to get an idea.

I've posted a bit about how the queues can be expected to work on our company blog.

I'd also have to remind people that if you are going to try to get yourname.ie that you choose an Irish provider with servers in Ireland.
This server is only a couple of milliseconds from INEX. Can the same be said for some of the other "irish" providers? (that small "i" is intentional!)
Anyone who recalls the "fun" of the .eu landrush and sunrises will recall that every millisecond made a difference.
It doesn't matter a damn if you market your business on bargain basement domains using bargain basement servers on the other side of the globe - when it comes down to the crunch people will want to get their IE domains from someone who has a fast, low latency connection into the registry.

I've mentioned Amas' reports previously and the latest one is as fluffy as its predecessors...

The main thrust in this edition is broadband "takeup". It doesn't mention whether it's actually available or not, which seems more than a little counter-intuitive, though admittedly they do mention availability in their own office:
You'd think that they might have factored that into the headlines...

The other part of their report relates to the mobile web:
Wow! Great headline, but who are you actually talking about?
That's incredibly vague and the followup statement doesn't actually collate with anything:
Let's look at that statement more closely. Which companies are they talking about? Companies in general or the 100 that they looked at, but haven't actually named?
If it's Irish companies in general I'd love to know where they're getting their stats.

While it's nice to see them talking about mobile sites this kind of vague reporting is not helpful. If you are going to focus on 100 sites and 100 only then why can't you actually mention which sites you are talking about?
They claim that none of the sites they checked scored 5 on the ready.mobi test (they didn't even tell people where the test was located!), so at least I know they weren't looking at ours!

I'm a little bit annoyed with the way Apple are rolling out the iPhone in Europe.

Earlier today they announced that they had chosen O2 as their exclusive carrier in the UK.

Although they haven't announced their plans for Ireland yet it wouldn't surprise me if they were to do the same here.

While I know you can hack it to some degree that's hardly the point.

If I want to get an iPhone will I be forced to change carrier? I'm not going to change about a dozen or so handsets over from Vodafone to O2 just so I can get an iPhone!

Paul took some photos over the weekend of our new firewalls

I got a nice little case for my iPod Nano some time ago. It protects it from being bashed around or scratched. However it's not a very exciting or interesting cover - it's simple and functional.

Imagine being able to use any image you wanted on an iPod Nano case.

Red Snapper allow you to do just that

You choose which images you want to put on your ipod nano case and they look after everything else.

If you drive around the country you will always see a bit of road kill. It's inevitable.
Yesterday, however, it was a bit over the top. Either the level of road kill has increased significantly or the route I took was more susceptible to it than other routes.
I think I must have seen every imaginable form of road kill during my drive from Carlow to Midleton yesterday morning.

This is very amusing. It reminds me of a French guy who used to share a flat with me years ago

Though I better not say anymore!

If you're a bit of a geek you might appreciate the photos I posted on the company blog:

Loads of boxes from Dell

More stuff from Dell

Amazon has joined INEX, the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange.

I haven't had a chance to talk to any of their technical staff about what they will be peering, but anything will be welcome :)

Now if they were to start offering access to S3 etc., over their INEX link it would be really cool!

I was delighted to hear that the IIA board now counts Keith Bohanna as one of its members.

Organisations need to have representation from people based outside Dublin. The IIA is the "Irish" Internet Association NOT the "Dublin" Internet Association, so getting people onto the board who aren't based in Dublin can only help. (yes I know Fergal lives outside Dublin!)

Thanks to Ken for highlighting it

Irish social networking site Nimble has just relaunched with a fresh new design. It's also loading a LOT faster!

I'm still not 100% sure if I like or hate these social networking sites. I'm also not convinced that there's enough space in the market for ALL of the new ones that keep cropping up, but it is nice to see a "home grown" alternative to Bebo and MySpace

(Disclosure: We host the site)

The IE domain registry will finally be allowing individuals to register their own names come end of October

Full details here.

Other mentions:

One of the things about popular films is that they are guaranteed to create a sort of pricing war in the online shops.

The latest Harry Potter film is no different. The more popular online shops are listing the pre-release pricing and the deals are quite interesting, though Play.com seems to be slightly ahead of the crowd.

Now what on earth would I do with a Harry Potter doll?

Via Digg the top fifty most influential bloggers is a fascinating read. Unlike so many of those lists you see this one has been laid out clearly and explains exactly who each person is and why they may be considered important.

You'll probably recognise some of the names, but a lot of the others are probably better known by the sites they run or started.

Actress Eva Green, who starred in Casino Royale and Kingdom of Heaven, stars in the latest Dior perfume advert:

I'll be heading over to Los Angeles towards the end of next month for the ICANN meeting which is being held close to LAX.

I'm still finalising my travel details, but I expect to be over there for about a week or so.

Since Aer Lingus planes are like sardine cans I'll probably be flying with British Airways this time round. Virgin Atlantic would have been nice, but I don't think there's an easy way to book all the way through from Ireland and getting stranded somewhere if a connecting flight is late or whatever would really upset me.

If anyone is planning on going to ICANN in LA and wants to meetup for beers etc., let me know

Just a quick note to let you know that Blacknight are running a sale on .mobi domains starting today.

All new registrations will cost 10 euro per year.

Damien has been posting about Cybercom's report on popular Irish sites.

In his first post he reported on the site's that people spent the most time on.

Some of the sites listed aren't very surprising, but why would so many Irish people be interested in the US site http://www.nih.gov/ ?

In his second post he looked at the sites attracting the most visitors.

Maybe people's browsing habits in July were completely out of whack with the rest of the year, but there are some sites on that list that I've never even heard of (and I don't meant the Polish ones).

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd say it, but Alexa's stats for Ireland look a lot more plausible.

Alistair's also questioned the methodology and demographics.

I'm currently experimenting with MovableType's templating "language" to be able to automatically add certain content into the "head" section of pages and entries depending on a variety of factors.

So far it seems to be working, but I'm still testing to be 100% sure!

This post is, therefore, a quick test to make sure that it is working as expected

If your FeedBurner feeds are currently reporting zero subscribers you are not alone.

It's probably a minor service hiccup, but it did get me to check their forums at least!

One of the things that drives me mad is typing long commands or sequences that I need to type over and over again.

Luckily there is a way to search your previous commands in bash.

Simply type CTRL R and you will get a new command prompt. Then start typing part of the command.
To keep looking back through other instances of the command just keep hitting CTRL R.
Once you've found the line you want a simple "arrow up" or similar will get you back to your normal command prompt.

Thanks to Paul / Niall for the tip.

domainrenewal-online.com have been spamming and scamming domain registrants on both sides of the Atlantic over the last couple of months.

They also started targetting other languages as reported by DomainesInfo

I mentioned this scam a while ago on the company blog

If you receive one of these emails ignore it.

If you want to take action you can contact the domain registrar with whom the domain is registered OR submit it to anyone of the blacklists.

This kind of scam really disgusts me!

I joined Facebook a few weeks ago to see what all the fuss was about.

I can see why people might like it, but there are a lot of things about it that I find incredibly annoying.

One of the things that drives me around the bend is all the stupid emails it sends me, but that's my own fault for joining!

The other thing that drives me mad is the profiles. They're not very helpful. When you get an invite from someone you need to know who they are, but all facebook gives you is a name. Today, finally, someone sent me an invite with a note, so I actually know who the hell it is. Their invite will be accepted. There's another ten or so that won't be, as I don't actually know who they are.

In the past few weeks I was contacted a few times by journalists regarding the Irish ISP Test
In response to several queries that we received we've rolled out a couple of new features, while earlier in the week I mentioned we were looking for