February 2008 Archives

I've never been in Days Hotel in Kilkenny.

None of my staff have ever stayed there on business.

We have no existing business relationship with them whatsoever, yet they have the gall to spam us this morning.

Not only is their email unwanted, but the 3 unwanted attachments bloat the email by a further megabyte.

Why oh why do Irish business not get the idea of permission?

I probably missed the announcement that Twenty Major's book was out, but fortunately Will mentioned it on Jaiku...

I'm seriously tempted to grab a copy this week, but I'm also feeling guilty for not finishing the book I'm reading at the moment

I already mentioned the really cool tshirts from Despair.com this week, but they've now topped that with a DIY tool to create your own Demotivational Posters

Cool you may say, but they're also offering a discount code and a chance to win $1000 (though that hasn't been launched yet)

I've been looking forward to this tshirt being available for a long time. I ordered mine last night!

Last night's Oscars led to the usual mixed bunch of wins.

Ratatouille won. (The acceptance speech is amusing.)

Atonement won, but didn't sweep the boards.

Marion Cotillard won - yet another reason for me to actually watch that film!

Of course the biggest award for anyone here in Ireland was that picked up by Once

I posted a couple of the acceptance speeches over on FilmReviews.ie

I've mentioned the horrific salesonline.ie site a couple of times in the past.

They've now taken the site offline and are instead displaying a holder page with their contact details.

At least they're not making us all suffer through that video anymore!

So anyone want to take bets on whether their new site will actually comply with any web standards?

Adrian Weckler's column this week doesn't mention facebook, but he does cover EULAs and the demise of HD DVDs. (I can't seem to find either article on the SBPost site)

Argos has opened in Carlow, so I'm going to see how bad the traffic is shortly. Hopefully the bypass will help take some of the traffic away from the town, as the commercial centres must be suffering. I'm currently in the market for DVD storage solutions and a new TV stand, so I'll be heading to a few of the shops around the town this afternoon to see what's available and at what price.

AJ has an interesting post about security. His focus is on what the search engines are indexing and highlights some common mistakes.

Tonight is the Oscars. I'd love to stay up and watch them live, but I've got to be awake for work in the morning! The Academy is offering some really cool posters again this year including one celebrating 80 years of best picture. It won't be shipping until after the ceremony (obviously)

While working on one of my quieter blogs I realised that Google Analytics wasn't installed BUT the Google Analytics web interface happily told me that it was. Moral of the story - don't trust them!

I'd love to be able to report some of the odd sales and support queries we get, but this week we've had one that I can mention:
- caller number 1 who wins the prize for odd sales query of the month wanted to know if we ran an escort service
- caller number 2 wanted to apply for a technical role and asked what a PDF was. And no - their native language was English!

It seems that even Hollywood's biggest events are trying to embrace environmentally friendly practices.
This year's Oscar ceremony will have a green "flavor" (sic):

More information on the official site

I don't hide the fact that I am impressed by some marketing techniques. I also don't hide the fact that other marketers are really clueless.

Today's marketing email gone wrong comes courtesy of Corgi. I bought some really nice scale cars from Corgi around Christmas and get their email newsletter regularly every Friday.

Today's newsletter has plenty of calls to action, which is what you would expect from a marketing newsletter.

What you don't expect is to find that the website is offline. Not only is it offline, but it's been replaced by a generic "coming soon" page from their registrar.
Since I was feeling charitable I thought I'd ring them to let them know. Of course it's hard to ring someone when you don't have their phone number, but I eventually managed to find one only to be told that "everyone goes home at lunchtime". How decidedly odd. When I send out marketing emails I try to hang around to see how effective they are. Maybe I'm odd?

So Corgi's mailer this week was a total waste of time.

Maybe it all started being "cool" or "hip" or something to use silly names for companies or products, but when a product has a reasonably sane name, why on earth would you change it?

OpenAds have decided that using a logical name simply isn't good enough.
OpenAds was descriptive and quite clear. Sure it may have taken a while to get used to the change from PhpAdsNew, but the first change of name had a certain degree of logic:
Open - open source
Ads - adverts, ads, advertising

For a banner management suite that made perfect sense to mere mortals like me.

Now they've decided to "rebrand" themselves as "OpenX"

Their explanation is odd to say the least.

Of course their names aren't nearly as bad as some of the ones mentioned in one of Mike Butcher's recent articles

(This coming from a guy who decided to build a brand called Blacknight :)  ) *cough* - though in my defence I've never had any thoughts of changing the name ....

This week has been one of those weeks that I'd like to forget in many regards.

Our offices were without power due to electricians (again!). Of course this time not only did we lose power, we also lost office equipment (you can see a nice pile of it here). We'll be able to get replacements, but it's a real pain in the neck and if we didn't have friendly suppliers it would have been an absolute nightmare. And people ask why I'm going bald!

I'm still playing Travian in the evenings, but that's not going to well on the speed server. One of my neighbours keeps attacking me in the middle of the night, so I wake up to discover that the day's resources are wiped out.

I / we also seem to have become embroiled in several legal issues that are outside my control, so I've been spending "quality time" on the phone to solicitors. Of course each phone call, fax or email is billable, so it gets more and more expensive.

What else?

On a positive note we have finally hired one new sales person and may have a lead on a couple of others.

I've also more or less finished my latest silly web project which I've had on the backburner for about two years. Hopefully I'll be able to sort out some of the niggly details and make it public in a few days ...

XKCD comes up with some cartoons that are just too funny.

Today's is a case in point:

I'm currently working on a new project in the evenings and weekends that involves playing with merchant datafeeds.

The big lesson I've learnt in the last 48 hours is that XML is a pig to work with.

The data from merchant X weighs in at 84 megs as a CSV. If you grab the same data as XML you end up with a massive 261 megs. Sure, hard drives are cheap, but the server load goes through the roof when it has to process the larger XML file...

Moral of the story - stick to CSV

I like checking FeedBurner statistics from time to time. Some might call this navel gazing, but I am interested in seeing what is going on in terms of RSS subscriber figures etc., This is especially important for the company blog.

So I was quite upset this evening to discover that the "all time" statistics option is no longer available in my Feedburner control panel.

I checked their official forums and was able to confirm that it's gone, though nobody from FeedBurner seems to be willing to offer an explanation as yet.

There is, however, still a way of getting the data out from Feedburner.

When you login to your account select the feed you are interested in.

You should see an Export option on the menu bar to the left and you can choose to download as either Excel format or CSV.

Once you've exported the data from FeedBurner you can then use it with any software you like to generate pretty (or not so pretty) graphs etc.,

It will be interesting to see how this change pans out.

Is this yet another case of a Google acquisition turning sour?

So are there any alternatives out there to FeedBurner?

I signed up for a StumbleUpon account nearly 3 years ago. Of course I lost the login details and ended up creating another account last year, which I then forgot about. Bernie was inviting people to connect with him earlier this evening, so I dugout the original emails...

While I can appreciate that StumbleUpon is free and useful it's got some really annoying UI / "user experience" glitches.

Why does the main page invite me to "join" when I'm already logged in?

Why does the "invite friends" screen insist on sending emails to people instead of actually searching for them? There is an option to find people via their email address, but it's well and truly buried.

The invite friends email isn't particularly well crafted either. Instead of sending you to a page to join OR login it forces you to signup, so Bernie's emails earlier this evening will probably have frustrated a load of other people (unintentionally on his part).

Jaiku has been offline for most of today, which is a pity. It looks like they're having hardware or database issues again. Pity, as its interface is so much nicer to use than Twitter.

Travian UK have restarted server 1, so hopefully I'll fare a bit better. I'm currently being slaughtered on the speed server :(

when this tshirt sums it all up in a couple of lines?

Brilliant! Though a bit more verbose than the TShirt Hell one (which seems to be no longer on offer)

While I still haven't settled on a multi-region Blu Ray player I did pickup a HD DVD player in the last couple of weeks.

Some people may say I'm insane, but they probably do that already anyway!

To be perfectly honest the only reason I got the HD DVD player was because the price was right. At just over 100 euro it would have been silly to pass it up!

The player I got was a Toshiba  HD-E1, which seems to have had reasonably good reviews.


I'm still exploring the possibility of getting an "unlocked" Blu Ray player, but I'm not quite ready to hand over that much cash just yet. Of course I may wake up tomorrow morning and do it anyway, but that's part of the fun! Spontaneous and totally unplanned purchases may make me feel bad when I get my credit card bill, but they're great fun until then!

The other thing I need to sort out is a TV stand.

The one that currently graces my sitting room is simply too small. I won't be able to fit the HD DVD player in it when I take it home (it's currently sitting beside my desk in the office, as I still haven't received any HD DVDs from Amazon)

So I'm currently looking for a TV stand that can hold:
A wander around a few furniture shops in Carlow revealed that most TV stands on offer were either:
Are there any particular vendors that I should be looking at?

Of course there is a simply huge selection on offer over on eBay.. I just don't know how to narrow it down!

One of the things that has always bothered me is collections in supermarkets.
I have no issue with someone rattling a tin (or bucket) outside a shop, but I really don't like the way they get people collecting at the cash registers. They insist on packing your bags even if you aren't using any, or don't want them to and then you feel embarrassed and have to give them your loose change.

Apple's latest bit of hardware, The Time Capsule, sounds like an interesting concept.

It's a combination of wireless backup unit for Mac clients and also acts as a wireless base station.

Two versions are available:
It would be complete overkill for someone like me, as any important data is kept on the office network which in turn is backed up to one of our SAN units in Dublin.

It might prove attractive for some people, though I'll probably discover that there are cheaper alternatives out there without the Apple logo :)

I knew that upgrading Ubuntu had been far too easy.

There had to be a "gotcha" and of course there was.

EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System) is no longer supported as part of the core Ubuntu distribution, but as a couple of my servers were running very old versions of Ubuntu apt did its job all too well and upgraded it for me.

End result - Siracusa, where several of my busier sites live, was very very unhappy and fell over a couple of times. Niall had a look at it for me and thought it was a hardware related issue, which was understandable. Udevd was eating CPU and the load post-reboot was over 10, which, for a relatively quiet machine, is a littled nuts!

A bit of searching this morning led to this post, where someone else had had a similar issue with a laptop. That led me to this page on the Ubuntu wiki. The package has been removed and that page outlines in detail the kind of issues that the software causes. And it fits more or less exactly with the errors in siracusa's logs!

Running a simple:
apt-get remove evms

seems to have resolved the issue - I hope!

I also cleaned up the configurations following Niall's tip:
dpkg --purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | cut -f1`

It looks like one of my personal servers isn't very happy, so my personal email and several sites are currently unavailable.

Oh the joy!

One of the annoying things about Apple is that they insist on doing silly currency conversions. As a result it's a lot more attractive to buy Apple hardware AND software in the US and import it into Europe..

But what about customer service and after sales support?

Will Apple's Irish team help you if your Los Angeles bought hardware is causing you problems?

It's an interesting question ... I don't have the answer, since the only hardware I bought in the US was either low cost (mighty mouse USB) or for someone else (iPhone and iPod nano)

However Adrian Weckler is having issues with his new Apple MacBook and seemingly Apple Ireland aren't going to help him. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.. Of course it would also be interesting to know if he said who he was when he rang in... Not that his name would have meant anything to a call centre staff member, but you never know....  

Today's Dilbert amused me, but their copyright means I can only link to it...

It seems that Google doesn't want to play by anyone's rules but its own.

This will probably come back to bite them.

In their latest "innovative" move they're now taking control of the humble 404 error page.

If you have their "helper" toolbar installed you may not get to see the web as it truly is.

Charming, isn't it?

And of course Matt Cutts is defending them like a good little Google employee.

Call me a cynic, but doesn't that remind anyone of Network Solutions' defensive stance of front running?

Today is February 14th.

In some cultures that makes it Valentine's day. Or, if you own a flower shop, the day you pay off your mortgage.

Of course Valentine's Day is memorable for a lot of reasons. Here's a few:

Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" opened in 1895

The St Valentine's Day Massacre took place in Chicago.

You can find more random and useless facts here

If you're stuck for something todo ie. surrounded by annoying people who seem to take the entire "special day" rubbish seriously check out my suggested list from last year.
As is usual some of the more amusing suggestions are in the comments ....

And when I say "serious" this glass really is for you....



It holds an entire bottle of wine!

It's aptly named "The Full Bottle Wine Glass" (via)

Today was upgrade Ubuntu day!

For some inane reason I hadn't kept ANY of my Ubuntu servers up to date in terms of releases (they were up to date in terms of security patches).

Part of the reason why I hadn't upgraded was laziness - they were all working properly, so I didn't see any reason to fix something that wasn't broken...

Of course that meant that when I finally decided to upgrade the first server (this one) I faced an interesting dilemma.

Ubuntu has an upgrade path, however it is not direct.

If you are running Dapper and want to upgrade to Gutsy you are going to spend quite a bit of time looking at an ssh session!

The upgrade path is:
Dapper Drake > Edgy Eft > Feisty Fawn > Gutsy Gibbon

And you have to do it in that order. There doesn't seem to be anyway around that...

I'm not a *nix developer, so I can't comment on the logic, but it would be nice if someone were to come up with a method of making the upgrades from $oldish version to most recent a little bit easier and less time-consuming.

On the plus side the upgrades seem to have worked without causing any major headaches. I may regret saying that!

The first step is to verify exactly which version of Ubuntu you are currently running.
You could check your sources.list (/etc/apt/sources.list), but the "sane" way to check is by running the following command as root:
lsb_release -a

Running the upgrade itself involved simply changing the version referenced in sources.list each time and running
apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade
And then following any on screen instructions regarding changes to configurations etc.,

This server and its "relatives" are now all up to date with the latest version of Ubuntu and all the other software that goes with that

Now back to playing Travian ....

A few people have commented on my obvious dislike for recruitment agencies.

Most people haven't asked why... some have...

When I left college in the late 90s I ended up going to Italy for a few months teaching English. When I came back in early 2000 the Irish economy was supposedly booming, but I ended up on the dole.

My intense dislike for recruitment agencies stems from my experiences with a very large number of them in Cork, Dublin and Limerick during the period between when I got back to Ireland and when I left again.

Now don't get me wrong. There are some recruitment agencies that are really good and professional. I can't speak highly enough of the guys in Careerwise Recruitment.

They actually read my CV.

That was the basic problem that I had with recruitment agencies. They seemed to be incapable of reading CVs. Now, I know from my own experience with recruiting staff that some CVs are deplorable and impossible to decipher. In a lot of cases the layout is so bad that practically hurts to read them.

However my CV at the time was quite simple and easy to read. Skills were clearly categorised. Bullet points were used etc.,

But time after time the followup call from the supposed expert involved them asking me really inane questions. Or worse still, sending me to do job interviews with companies that asked me to fill out application forms where I had to tell them my Inter Cert results (Irish equivalent of GCSE / O Level)!

I don't believe the world owes anyone a living, but if someone has a college degree it's fairly safe to assume that they actually made it through secondary level education!

I could go on....

In any case, based on my poor experiences with recruitment agencies as a job seeker I can see absolutely no reason why I'd inflict their "choice" candidates on myself when I'm footing the bill. Maybe some of the recruiters have learnt to read and are now capable of matching job seekers with prospective employers, but I somehow doubt it.

Now if I was going to use a recruitment agency I know who I would use...

PS: If you are looking for a job check the company blog

Mark Carey is one of the more active MovableType plugin developers. Some of his plugin have to be simply categorised as "cool". There's no other word that sums them up aptly, though I'm sure you could find plenty if you tried.

His latest plugin release is a stroke of genius - Wordpress Interface for Movable Type

It does pretty much what it says "on the tin" and replaces the MovableType "classic" interface with one that not only looks and feels like Wordpress, but also emulates a lot of the behaviour (from a UI perspective).

You can give it a whirl here  - username: demo pass: demo

Screenshots and more details on his original post

He may have done it almost as a joke, but it also shows how incredibly flexible Movable Type can be.

Evil thought - you could replace someone's WP install with this and they probably wouldn't even notice!

My windows XP Pro based machine has been powered off for the last hour or so, as I've more or less moved entirely across to my new iMac.

One of the advantages of being in my line of business is that most of what you need is web based and is OS agnostic :)

It will probably take me a few days to get used to the finer points of working with OSX in an office setup ie. connected to MS Exchange 2007 (64 bit) and part of a Windows "domain" with active directory etc., etc.,

I think I've got most of what I want / need setup on here, but I'll know soon enough!

While not everyone syncs their desktop PC with an NTP server, you'd expect people to at least have their PC clock set to the correct month!

Checking my imap folders this evening I came across a gem - maybe a rough gem, but perfect to illustrate my point.

Some bright spark requested a service, however, as their PC's date is set to two months into the future it's quite hard to see when the email was actually sent!

The only way I could see when the email was actually received was by checking the raw headers!!

This probably isn't as big a problem for users of Outlook, since it seems to sort mail by date / time received, but it's really annoying if you're using Thunderbird (or a lot of other email clients)

Somebody on Facebook sent me a message with how to say "I love you" in a fairly impressive selection of languages. I've no idea who it was, but here's what the message was in case you're feeling inventive come Valentine's Day:

Afrikaans - Ek het jou lief

Albanian - Te dua

Arabic - Ana behibak (to male)

Arabic - Ana behibek (to female)

Armenian - Yes kez sirumen

Bambara - M'bi fe

Bangla - Aamee tuma ke bhalo baashi

Belarusian - Ya tabe kahayu

Bisaya - Nahigugma ako kanimo

Bulgarian - Obicham te

Cambodian - Bung Srorlagn Oun (to female)

Oun Srorlagn Bung (to male)

Cantonese/Chinese Ngo oiy ney a

Catalan - T'estimo

Cheyenne - Ne mohotatse

Chichewa - Ndimakukonda

Corsican - Ti tengu caru (to male)

Creol - Mi aime jou

Croatian - Volim te

Czech - Miluji te

Danish - Jeg Elsker Dig

Dutch - Ik hou van jou

English - I love you

Esperanto - Mi amas vin

Estonian - Ma armastan sind

Ethiopian - Ewedishalehu : male/female to female

Ewedihalehu: male/female to male.

Faroese - Eg elski teg

Farsi - Doset daram

Filipino - Mahal kita

Finnish - Mina rakastan sinua

French - Je t'aime, Je t'adore

Gaelic - Ta gra agam ort

Georgian - Mikvarhar

German - Ich liebe dich

Greek - S'agapo

Gujarati - Hu tumney prem karu chu

Hiligaynon - Palangga ko ikaw

Hawaiian - Aloha wau ia oi

Hebrew - Ani ohev otah (to female)

Hebrew - Ani ohev et otha (to male)

Hiligaynon - Guina higugma ko ikaw

Hindi - Hum Tumhe Pyar Karte hai

Hmong - Kuv hlub koj

Hopi - Nu' umi unangwa'ta

Hungarian - Szeretlek

Icelandic - Eg elska tig

Ilonggo - Palangga ko ikaw

Indonesian - Saya cinta padamu

Inuit - Negligevapse

Irish - Taim i' ngra leat

Italian - Ti amo

Japanese - Aishiteru

Kannada - Naa ninna preetisuve

Kapampangan - Kaluguran daka

Kiswahili - Nakupenda

Konkani - Tu magel moga cho

Korean - Sarang Heyo

Latin - Te amo

Latvian - Es tevi miilu

Lebanese - Bahibak

Lithuanian - Tave myliu

Macedonian Te Sakam

Malay - Saya cintakan mu / Aku cinta padamu

Malayalam - Njan Ninne Premikunnu

Maltese - Inhobbok

Mandarin Chinese - Wo ai ni

Marathi - Me tula prem karto

Mohawk - Kanbhik

Moroccan - Ana moajaba bik

Nahuatl - Ni mits neki

Navaho - Ayor anosh'ni

Nepali - Ma Timilai Maya Garchhu

Norwegian - Jeg Elsker Deg

Pandacan - Syota na kita!!

Pangasinan - Inaru Taka

Papiamento - Mi ta stimabo

Persian - Doo-set daaram

Pig Latin - Iay ovlay ouyay

Polish - Kocham Cie

Portuguese - Eu te amo

Romanian - Te ubesc

Russian - Ya tebya liubliu

Rwanda - Ndagukunda

Scot Gaelic - Tha gra\dh agam ort

Serbian - Volim te

Setswana - Ke a go rata

Sindhi - Maa tokhe pyar kendo ahyan

Sioux - Techihhila

Slovak - Lu`bim ta

Slovenian - Ljubim te

Spanish - Te quiero / Te amo

Surinam- Mi lobi joe

Swahili - Ninapenda wewe

Swedish - Jag alskar dig

Swiss-German - Ich lieb Di

Tajik Man turo Dust Doram

Tagalog - Mahal kita

Taiwanese - Wa ga ei li

Tahitian - Ua Here Vau Ia Oe

Tamil - Naan unnai kathalikiraen

Telugu - Nenu ninnu premistunnanu

Thai - Chan rak khun (to male)

Thai - Phom rak khun (to female)

Turkish - Seni Seviyorum

Ukrainian - Ya tebe kahayu

Urdu - mai aap say pyaar karta hoo

Vietnamese - Anh ye^u em (to female)

Vietnamese - Em ye^u anh (to male)

Welsh - 'Rwy'n dy garu

Yiddish - Ikh hob dikh

Yoruba - Mo ni fe

Zimbabwe - Ndinokuda

Disclaimer - As I don't speak all the languages I've no way of knowing how accurate the phrases are

I am not happy.

Over the last two months I have spent a disproportionate amount of money on Ebay. I should be ashamed, but since that isn't likely to happen I shall condemn eBay.

Ebay - you are evil!

Why do you tempt me with cool and fun ways to spend money?

Why do you let me buy high quality goods at a fraction of their high street value?

According to my eBay control panel I've spent about EUR3000 in the last 60 days!!

What have I been buying?

1 x iMac desktop computer.
Lens for my digital SLR
Bluetooth headset for my mobile phone
Carrier bag holder (thing you hang on your kitchen door for holding plastic bags - couldn't find one in the shops...)
Batmobile - Corgi diecast models
Firewalls - well I do run a hosting company!

I was down in Cork over the weekend, as my family hadn't seen me since Christmas.

As it was my birthday the previous weekend they'd a couple of little things for me - never a bad thing!

My sister, who is about ten years younger than me, seems to have an uncanny knack at finding me really cool presents. She got me a gorgeous Lord of the Rings mug from the souvenir shop at the London stage show. She knows I'm a bit of  Tolkien fan (still jealous that my mother's seen the show about 3 times!) and that I like to collect mugs (even if it's not intentional)

Very cool!

Having a proper framework for software makes things a lot easier!

We're going to be using a sane solution to rollout preinstalled scripts on our new hosting platform, so feedback would be nice

Check the company blog here

You'll have to excuse the horrible photo, but I haven't had a chance to even plugin my new "toy". It arrived by courier late this morning, but I got caught up in client meetings for most of the afternoon...

For the last couple of years I've been forced to maintain a Windows PC in the office so that I could access AIB's online banking service. While it was possible to "bludgeon" it into working with Ubuntu it was a lot "saner" to use Windows. Fortunately AIB finally upgraded to using a proper JVM recently and made their business banking completely cross-platform and cross-browser (it probably doesn't work with lynx, but that's hardly a good example, is it? :) )

So I've no more need for my Windows desktop.

I would have considered simply rebuilding my existing PC with either pure Ubuntu or a dualboot, but since I've become quite fond of OS X I decided that I'd move to it completely. Of course moving to Apple entirely while an attractive proposition isn't exactly economical, as a decent spec iMac can set you back more than several "normal" PCs.

Thank God for eBay!

I hope to start the migration tomorrow... Or maybe Monday (time permitting!)

Byrne Reese is a really cool guy who seems to come up with cool stuff on a regular basis.

He's just released a small plugin for Movable Type that will bring "pingback" to Movable Type and make the transition from Wordpress that bit easier for users.

Very cool!

(It's implemented here as of 5 minutes ago, but may explode!)

I run a hosting company so I know all about outages and unexpected issues.

They can and will happen.

No matter what happens you will never please all of your clients. You can try, but you won't succeed. It's not that your best efforts won't be good enough, but simply that there will always be an "expectation gap". The best you can hope for is pleasing most of them most of the time.

One thing I have learnt (the hard way) is that being honest and upfront can be both painful and rewarding.

You need to swallow your pride and "eat humble pie" when you screw up.

No matter what you as the provider may think, as far as the client is concerned their little site is the centre of the universe.

You can say what you like behind closed doors, but you need to be respectful in public.

I'm not saying that we all manage to do this all of the time or that it is easy, but it's the sanest way of dealing with things.

Some providers simply don't "get" that.

And if you're feeling particularly evil check Keith's blog