April 2008 Archives

I'm heading off to Dublin shortly to catch a flight to London where I'll be for the next couple of days.

I haven't been in London, apart from its airports, for about 15 years, so I'm looking forward to the trip.

Tomorrow evening I'm meant to be going to Top Cats, which is a networking event organised by Paul Walsh of Segala. Of course, as I mentioned previously, there are a few other things on in London this week, so I'll be trying to fit as much in as possible.

Unfortunately I won't make it to London in time for the Nominet AGM, but I'm sure that I'll be able to hear all about it later! (On a sidenote my recent post on ccTLDs made it onto CircleID!)

Today was yet another tshirt delivery day.

I simply adore the Despair.com blog tshirt, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, so much so that I ordered another 3.

(This might be a serious character flaw on my part. I tend to obsess. An ex-girlfriend used to find this obsessiveness a little annoying at times ... )

Of course Despair.com do keep coming up with new designs and this one really caught my eye:



Though one of Tshirt Hell's recent additions is definitely on my "want" list. (Wish lists suggest that you may not get them. If I put it on my "want" list I know I will get it, it's simply a matter of when)

I don't get excited about office supplies. I would be very worried if anyone got even vaguely excited about office supplies.
However an office supplies company that goes the extra mile and predicts my possible purchases deserves recognition.

This morning Jones' sent me "Green Book", which is a subset of their product range that is based on either recycled or environmentally friendly products. I've been making an effort to "go green" in the office, even though it's a bit more expensive than using the "normal" products.

I really love the way that they sent me this with a nice personal note suggesting that I give them a call to discuss pricing if anything caught my eye.

Some of the products Jones sell under the "green" banner are surprising. There's an  entire range of pens made from recycled Xboxes!

I was intending on putting off upgrading my desktop's install of Ubuntu until the new version had had a chance to settle a bit, but I decided I'd take the plunge regardless. I expect to run into issues with my graphics card - I have with every other upgrade since I started using it, but apart from that it *should* be ok.

Since we now offer VPS hosting I really need to move a few live sites across to my test account. I've been playing with it for ages, but I haven't moved anything "live" onto the system. There are a few sites sitting on a $random server that I was using for an SEO experiment that don't really need to be there, so moving them would make sense. Like so many of these "housekeeping" tasks I've been putting it on the long finger for ages.

While my desktop is downloading loads of files from the Irish Ubuntu mirror I intend to finally get rid of the last few cardboard boxes that are cluttering up the house. Although I have a recycle bin it's far too small for the quantity of boxes, so a couple of trips over to the office are on the cards. I picked up a couple of handy boxes for sorting recyclables yesterday in Home Base, so once I've got rid of the backlog hopefully I'll be able to bring some order to the chaos.

I'm meant to be heading over to London later this week, so I need to organise flights and hotels etc., I'm hoping to drop into the Internet World exhibition while there, the Ian Fleming exhibition in the Imperial War Museum and Lord of the Rings. Of course that's not why I'm going to London, but I might as well make the most of the trip.

Any recommendations on hotels welcome!

Before turning in for the night I thought I'd do another trawl of the house listings online.
I've been using Daft.ie up until now, but I thought I'd try something different, which was a problem.
The only real competitor for Daft seems to be MyHome.ie
I'm pretty sure there were other property sites floating around, but I couldn't find any with listings last night (I don't count listing of houses costing in excess of half a million euro!)

So how does MyHome.ie compare to Daft.ie?

Basic functionality is quite similar.

On both sites you can choose your upper limit, but it's when you start sorting through the results that you end up getting frustrated with MyHome.ie

MyHome.ie's display / sort options are quite crippled. While you can sort listings by ascending price, you can't do the reverse. For some bizarre reason they do allow you to list the results alphabetically. Huh? Bizarre.

On Daft you can easily switch over to the map view, which is a really handy feature (even if some of the objects on the map don't work as advertised from time to time).

With MyHome.ie that's simply impossible, as  you have to start a completely new search and try to navigate their interface, which is, to put it politely, horrific.

MyHome also has a "nice" feature with new developments. Since they don't seem to think it's appropriate to list even guideline pricing it's useless.

Sure, if I had an unlimited budget and nothing else to do with my time I could probably contact each developer and ask them for pricing. I can't see the point in doing that. I can't see how this could work in the developer's favour either.
Why?
Well if the development was simply outside my price bracket I'd have wasted my time and theirs.

So it's back to Daft.ie for me, since the site is a lot more functional and also seems to have a much bigger choice of listings.

Of course if anyone knows of any other property listings sites please do let me know

I get on reasonably well with some of my ex-girlfriends. I wonder how well this would have worked.... (via XKCD of course..)

Anyone who wants to master the art of euphemism should spend time with an auctioneer, or just perusing listings of houses for sale.

While I might expect someone to "upsell" a house's assets, some of the adverts are either written "tongue in cheek" or by someone with a very weird view of reality.

This one amused me:
Okay you don't expect it to be a palace, but "renovation" and "refurbishment" suggest "overhaul" to me NOT complete reconstruction!

The ICT Excellence awards have been announced.

Unfortunately they have a website. I say unfortunately as it is truly horrendous.

If this is one of Ireland's premier awards I'd hate to see what the bad ones are like....

I was househunting again last night via Daft

I work in Carlow, so I need to find somewhere that is close to Carlow, but not necessarily in the town.

Unfortunately none of the property sites seems to offer a "radius" search function and I also can't filter out "sites for sale", which is really annoying.

There are some nice properties for sale under 200k, but I'm still trying to work out if they are within an acceptable commute distance

With Jason's assistance I finally got the frontpage of DVDs.ie to look a little bit more palatable. I'm still trying to sort out a new backend and am considering upgrading the server hardware as well. The main complaint I've had from people is that the pricing is in Sterling only, which is understandable.

Useless fact of the day - shredders overheat easily. I've been trying to get rid of accumulated junk mail, old bills, receipts etc., this afternoon and managed to upset the shredder. As soon as it cooled down it started working again. Getting rid of all the paper revealed a number of odd items that had been buried on my desk for the last few months.

I'm currently investigating my options in terms of buying a house. I'm happy with the house I rent, but I'm not so happy with the money going out the door every month and not having anything to show for it. So I had a drive around a few "developments" yesterday afternoon.

I still think it's insane that a small to medium-sized house can cost in excess of 250k!

The mortgage lenders seem to have got cold feet over the last week or so with many of them reducing the options considerably. The days of the 100% mortgage seem to be numbered.

I hooked up my Sky+ box to the amp on Friday evening as I'd received the optical audio cable I needed (nobody seems to stock anything longer than 1m in this country!). The difference in sound quality is very noticeable, though the volume levels tend to jump a lot between channels, so you need to keep the remote control close to hand or risk deafening yourself / the neighbours.

On the topic of AV gear...

A lot of people criticise Monster Cables pricing, but I wonder have they seen this lot

Some of the cables listed, such as the Third, cost several thousand pounds for short lengths. I'd love to know who buys this kind of stuff.

A new look and feel was unveiled for Dilbert.com

You'd think that people would be delighted, but the opposite is the case.

Why?

Well whoever is responsible for the screwup that is the new site seems to be living in the past.

The new Flash animations are simple Flash. There's no reason why they wouldn't work in most browsers on most platforms, but if you visit the animation section using Linux you get a lovely message:
So you grab yourself a copy of the UserAgent Switcher extension for Firefox and "spoof" a "supported" browser. And of course the entire thing then works fine.

Doh!

The ups and downs of CD WOW have been interesting to follow.

According to an email that I received in the last few minutes CD WOW hasn't paid some of its bills and the main websites are currently not up.

Their Irish blog is, however.

Odd.

Update: A followup email informs me that their account is back in order

Paul Walsh is giving away a Mac Air via Twitter

More details here

To be in with a chance simply "follow" wubud on Twitter

If you've seen the trailer for Iron Man this should interest you:

Wildly Popular 'Iron Man' Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

One of the things that drives me mad is when a "cheap" item has a high shipping price.
You know the scenario I'm sure. Item "costs" about 2 euro, but by the time you pay for shipping it's suddenly 30 euro.

If you're using eBay.com from Ireland there's an option to show the estimated shipping cost as part of the display columns. If I can't see a price or it's simply too high I won't bother bidding.

Now there is a difference between "too high" and simply "insane"

Check this out (click to enlarge):



It's obviously a glitch in their system, as the items' listings show a much saner shipping price.

Don't you just love computers?

I came across Mac Heist a few months ago, but unfortunately they took a break for a while shortly afterwards.

It looks like they're back in business again and are currently offering a selection of 12 handy shareware Mac OSX applications. The alarm clock one, the aptly named Awaken, which turns your MacBook into an alarm clock proved useful the last time I had to get an early flight!

I mentioned the Actifry back in January, as the idea of deep fat frying without all the grease and oil sounded attractive to me. I didn't buy an Actifry immediately, as I wanted to check pricing etc., before doing so.

Finally yesterday I took the plunge. I'd had an overwhelming desire for chips all day and the old deepfat fryer was binned last week (it wasn't working).

A plate of chips took about 25 minutes to cook and used one small spoon of olive oil (I could have used other oils, but I like olive oil).

The chips tasted as good, if not better, than the "normal" greasy ones.

Even my sister won't be able to give out to me now, as the Actifry uses less oil than a normal salad!

eBay Ireland have unveiled their helpline for their "most valued customers" ie. those of us who spend lots of money.

The guys in eBay had told me about this a few weeks ago, but I had been asked not to mention it in public until it was ready for primetime.

It will be interesting to see what kind of support levels they are going to offer via this new support service.

I'll have to try it out to see!  (I currently have a couple of minor issues that I'd like to get resolved)

I feel sorry for the Wordpress developers, but I feel even more sorry for their users.

Over the past year WP users who have been keeping track of updates etc., have had to update and upgrade their installs so many times that it's not funny.

The way I see it Wordpress users fall, broadly speaking, into two main categories:
Casual users want a CMS to use for their website or blog. They like the way it's easy to install and they've heard good things about it. Lots of webhosts offer easy installers for Wordpress.
Lots of designers like working with the Wordpress templates.

Neither the casual user or the designer is going to be signed up for security alerts from Secunia or Security Focus  or any of the other security sites.

Geek users are probably more likely to play with stuff and are probably going to install lots of plugins.

Now a hardcore geek might check into the source of a plugin to see if the code is "sane", but the average blog jockey probably isn't that concerned with security.
They're not going to worry about the security holes that CMS with php code in its templates could actually cause.

Why would they?

So Wordpress has had security issues in the past.
Surely the latest version resolves all of these?
Surely a major update would bring more than just eye candy?

Seemingly not.
According to Security Focus WP 2.5 is open to SQL injections.
What does that mean in English?
It means, simply, that an evil person could inject data into your blog's database ie. content

There's a longer article discussing some of the implications over here with some back and forth between the author and Mr Wordpress - Matt Mullenweg.

In typical fashion Mullenweg tries to attack the author instead of addressing user concerns.

A simple "we aren't aware of any issues" or something along those lines would have been so much more graceful, but no, that was not the case.

I'm no longer a Wordpress user, so I can't tell first hand, but is there a glaring big flashing light going off on WP installs if the software is out of date and needs to be upgraded to address security issues? Is there?

Open X has had that for ages. It practically forces you to upgrade as soon as you login to an out of date install. They also don't mind telling users about security holes, instead of adding them as an afterthought.

Now whether or not the latest security hole is a real danger or not is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Seriously.

What does matter is that people trusted Wordpress, but are now being embarrassed when their sites are defaced or hijacked

Transparency and honesty nearly always win out and taking a proactive stance on webapp security should be part and parcel of any developer's modus operandi. Shiny interfaces may help the bubble 2.0 crowd, but when the bubble bursts it would be nice to see things with a proper foundation.

(And WP isn't the only webapp with a dire security history - I'm looking at you Joomla and you PhpBB)

For some odd reason I woke up quite early this morning, so I've been working my way down my todo list.

I posted a short review of Across the Universe over on filmreviews.ie - if anyone is interested in writing film reviews let me know - the more the merrier!

I've run into some "interesting" issues with Vbulletin 3's beta release. It doesn't seem to want to play nice with VBSeo, even though it was working fine previously. I might do some more investigation later today.

I mentioned running Adobe Air on Ubuntu recently. Unfortunately it has a nasty habit of hijacking certain file types, however Conor provided a link to the fix on the Adobe forums.

Useless fact of the day. A lot of shops don't stock 3 metre optical audio cables. Since my Sky+ box is more than 1.5 metres away from my AV receiver I've been forced to use the TV's audio instead of proper Dolby. I'm going to head over to another electronics shop to see if they have any in stock, but if not I'll just have to wait for the ones I ordered to arrive (you can never have too many cables!)

I'm going to move a couple of personal sites across to one our VPS servers to see what I can break. I've got a Plesk powered VPS on Centos 5 just sitting there at the moment, so abusing it a bit simply has to be done :)

I've just finished watching Across the Universe in glorious high def.

I'll probably write a proper review of it tomorrow on FilmReviews.ie

In the meantime I have two words for you - watch it!

For the past couple of weeks I hadn't been getting any email notifications about pending comments on this blog, which is why some of them took so long to appear.

Since I tend to login to check for new comments every few hours and had also been hit pretty badly with comment and trackback spam, I didn't think too much about it.

I logged in just now and noticed more comments in the queue again, but no emails in my inbox.

So I decided to look into it a bit further and SSHed in to check logs.

Bizarrely they were completely empty. I restarted postfix and mail began to flow again.

I suspect that I broke the mail server slightly during an upgrade, but as it doesn't actually receive any mail I didn't notice.

So if you weren't getting any comment updates from here for the last while and suddenly got loads of them I apologise!

Niall pointed me at this.
Nice, but insane!

Steve Jobs has Fake Steve Jobs. Shel Israel has a puppet. Paul Walsh has Walsh Watch.

It seems I've now got the next best thing - my own "wikipedia" page courtesy of Mr Eoin Costello. (He was in the news earlier this week when his hosting company was swallowed up)

I must say I am impressed. I didn't realise that Eoin was such a talented wit and not a bad graphic artist either.

It must have taken a couple of hours to put it all together. So maybe we'll see more of these little works of art now that he isn't distracted by his "booming" business.

Of course if he'd spent more time on his business maybe he would still be a "player" and not another footnote ...

Here's a screenshot of the page in case Mr Costello removes it.

In order to preserve what little sanity I have left I've changed the way comments are handled on here slightly.

Since comment and trackback spammers seem to target old posts I've decided to automatically close comments on posts that are 6 months old or older.

The old posts that were attracting the odd comment were mainly to do with older versions of Ubuntu etc., so there's not much point in accepting new comments since the software has changed in the last couple of years.

The other reason why I'm doing this is because I made a boo boo the other day and turned up the spam checking a little too high. This meant that I may have blocked several legitimate comments and had to spend a couple of hours trawling through about 20k+ worth of spam comments to rescue them.

I'll update the comment policy of the site shortly to reflect the new "regime"

We finally launched our VPS hosting plans about 20 minutes ago.

You can now choose between Centos or Windows Server 2003 powered VPS with optional Plesk!

Paul and I had been working on ironing out the last few bugs and annoying issues on the site for most of this evening, which is why I still haven't eaten anything (not that I can't go without food for a few days - I have plenty of surplus!)

There are probably issues, typos and other errors on the site which we haven't spotted, so if you do notice anything odd please let us know: management@blacknight.com OR simply leave a comment here.

We'll probably be making the official announcement / launch in the morning

In my occasional series of "pet hates"...

People, particularly in business, who pretend that they know me annoy the hell out of me.

I may not have the best memory in the world (according to various ex-girlfriends anyway) but I generally remember if I've ever had any dealings with a company.

More often than not they use the supposed "relationship" to try and get past one of our staff.

It's annoying and it doesn't get them the sale. In fact it usually loses it for them.

We're in the final (painful) stages of rolling out new cool stuff chez Blacknight.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed....

In any case this morning we'll be emailing clients to start the migration from one system to another.

The XKCD cartoons bring a smile to my face.

I've had a DSL connection from Magnet Business (formerly Netsource) for the past 5 years.

I was just looking at the connection stats for the last few months and I must say I am pleased.

Apart from the hiccups last week, which were caused by Eircom NOT Magnet, my connection has been rock solid.

Looking at the graph below (click to enlarge) you can see a few gaps, but they all coincide with periods when I was either out of the country or away from Carlow for an extended period (eg. Christmas). Before I go away for a few days I always disconnect just about every single electric device in the house, so the DSL obviously won't work!



Before anyone asks, the line is monitored from our network in Dublin, as we monitor loads of other things as well adding my DSL line seemed logical.

As I work from home from time to time (especially early in the morning) being able to rely on my stable broadband connection is important.

For the technically minded, the monitoring and graphs are all handled by Smoke Ping.

I received an email yesterday from Google's legal team, as I had previously lodged a trademark complaint regarding Adwords.

In order to maintain clarity here is the email in its entirety:

The email is quite confusing. On the one hand they say they are going to uphold the previously lodged complaint, while on the other they say they're changing their policy to come into line with the one they use in the US / Canada. 



In order to make sense of it all I spent a bit of time digging around their "help" documentation to see if I could get a better idea of the implications.



From what I have been able to understand Google are basically giving trademark infringers carte blanche. The only thing you will now be able to complain about is trademark usage in the advert text. The actual triggers ie. keywords, will no longer be protected.



So what?



Well the problem is that people are just as likely to hit a competitor's ad based on a trigger as they are on text in the ad. In fact I'd reckon that the triggers are a lot more powerful than the ad text itself.



So what are a trademark holder's options?



At present I'm not 100% sure. I've contact our trademark attorney in the US to see if he can shed any light on the matter and offer any sane advice, but I imagine his response is going to be unhelpful. He's a great guy, but Google's policy change doesn't leave us with many realistic options.



Of course you wouldn't mind so much if what they were doing wasn't so problematic. Is it a coincidence that Google is constantly being sued by trademark holders exactly because of this kind of thing?

I think not.

This weekend I have to do some serious spring cleaning of the house.

While I am not a "filthy beast" I am definitely not the tidiest of people (understatement!).

I'm going to pop some Lords of Acid into the CD player in a minute and see if I can get started on bringing some order to the chaos

The Royal Mint has unveiled the new designs for the UK coins. They look really nice, though I guess this means they won't be joining the Eurozone anytime soon :)



You can order a variety of mint sets via their site - if you're insanely rich go for the Platinum ones, whereas mere mortals can opt for base metal ones.

The frontpage of the main eBay site is probably worth visiting every few days, as they tend to highlight special auctions.

If you're a Scrubs fan then the one they're highlighting at the moment is probably a dream come through - a day on the set of Scrubs.

Current bidding stands at just over $1000 and is open to anyone who can work in the US (that's me out so!)

All proceeds to charity, naturally.