May 2008 Archives

As most people have probably gathered at this stage I'm ever so slightly passionate about films and home cinema.

Over the last while I've been enjoying the glorious high definition of blu ray and HD DVD, however since the cinema studios like the idea of maintaining their monopolies a lot of blu ray releases are region encoded. Since my current blu ray player is a US import that limits me a bit.

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel.

Since HD DVD is now more or less defunct (you can still pick up plenty of titles at bargain prices) the hardware manufacturers have started focusing on blu ray. While the players are still a lot more expensive than DVD players, you can now find a couple of options below 250 euro. What this means is that a standalone blu ray player is now cheaper than a PS3, which is a good thing (I really don't want a gaming console!)

Sigmatek's SBR 1000 weighs in at just over 230 euro, while Samsung's BD P1400 cost just over 240 euro. Neither model is particularly high end, but I am seriously considering picking up one of them, as I'd like to be able to take advantage of some of the EU vendors' disc offers.

On a sidenote I also spotted today that Amazon is listing Iron Man is being available for pre-order. What struck me as a bit odd was that they neglected to provide a release date!

EDIT: Home Cinema Choice has a review of the Samsung BD P1400

As readers may have gathered I've been looking into the entire buying a house experience over the last while.

My experiences to date have been mixed, but I am learning quite a bit in the process.

The guys behind Daft.ie have been extremely helpful and gave me access to a really nice feature before unleashing it on the public earlier today. You can now subscribe to property alerts via RSS!

It's a really nice feature, as I check bloglines a couple of times every day anyway. I can also easily mark items (in this case houses / properties) to check again later. Of course I could try to do that with the email alerts as well, but if you saw my inboxes you'd understand how impractical that might be!

Now if only finding an ideal house, mortgage and everything else were that easy!

I always applaud inventive and innovative marketing techniques. I think they're great.

But when the marketing department of a multinational starts inventing domain names you have to wonder what they're at!

Chris from Sensorpro spotted a Dell advert publicising dell.co.ie I suspect someone got Ireland and the UK confused, as we don't have a co.ie extension!

In fact, if you try to get either you will see:

And here's the banner image (click to enlarge) :

Hosting365 have announced that they've sold Register365, which is their shared hosting and domains business to Namesco a UK provider.

So now Ireland's largest provider is no longer Irish. According to the press release Hosting365 are going to focus on their managed services.

What does that mean for the Irish hosting market?

It could be interesting times ahead, as Novara was already swallowed up by Irish Telco Digiweb earlier this year.

Are there more acquistions and sales in the pipeline?

I have little or no patience for spammers, as most people know.

Since I run several sites that deal with domains and the internet industry in general I seem to have been targetted by TodayNic's comment and forum spammers. Over the past year or so I've had to remove multiple spam comment attacks from several sites.

It's annoying. Very annoying.

However it's even more annoying when they have the gall to demand that I remove a post I made last year about their spam.

Considering they're still spamming from what I've seen in the last few weeks I can think of no good reason to remove any posts where I've referred to Todaynic's spam.

Someone claiming to be "Chris" from Todaynic left  a comment on another one of my blogs at around 3am this morning.

I'm always amazed at the silly / insane / nonsensical junk that comes out of some companies and organisations.

Enterprise Ireland seem to be funding a Template Monster clone, which is linked into Digiweb. Why should tax payers be paying for another Eoin Costello project? If it's commercially viable shouldn't it be able to stand on its own two feet? And does the world really need another template monster?
Why would anyone in their right mind pay that kind of money for a such a horrific "design" when so many free site building tools would do as good a job if not better?

Ammado are a very odd business. Judging by what people have been saying this morning it looks like they spammed quite a few bloggers this morning (Justin Mason, Donncha O Caoimh and Damien Mulley that I know of). I have an account with them, so while I thought the email looked dodgy I wasn't going to complain to them formally.

Twitter has been down more than up over the last few days. If anyone wants an invite to jaiku I have a few.. If you want to see what people are blathering about check out Twit.ie (love the name!) which pulls in the latest posts from both jaiku and twitter from an ever growing list of Irish based users.

UPDATE: Justin has blogged about Ammado and also points out that they're signed up to Habeas!

UPDATE 2: Someone from Ammado has posted an "apology" in the comments on Justin's blog. I'm beginning to see a pattern emerging here..

UPDATE 3 - Looks like quite a few people weren't that impressed with being "targetted" by Ammado: Alexia, Maman Poulet, Damien,

Xkcd's latest cartoon pretty much sums up how I feel about a lot of this social media rubbish that you keep reading about.

Although the prize for most offensively described event has to go to IT@Cork with their idiotic description of an event to "increase an organisation's IQ"!

Talk about marketing speak gone insane!

There's no reason why ordinary household objects can't be a bit of fun.

I've got several boring door wedges that I use when I need to give the house a bit of an airing (like today!), but I'd be tempted to get a couple of these for a laugh:



More info here

I've mentioned the rather stupid way in which Enterprise Ireland mismanage their ebusiness mailing list.

My previous comments were primarily aimed at the "anonymity", which I felt was problematic on a number of levels.

But what about the actual editing and twisting of people's words?

When I write an email, an article or a blog post I do so consciously. I may, from time to time, use words or phrases that may not be the most appropriate, but I am more than happy to accept any and all consequences for my actions.

Do I really need someone from Enterprise Ireland to tell me how to word my emails?

I honestly don't think so.

In reply to a thread on hosting I sent a reply where I clearly stated that I considered the previous reply to be "inane". I know what the word means and I don't hide my identity. If I'd wanted to say "misinformed" I'd have said as much. I didn't.

Do EI's list moderators live in fear of offending the poor ickle business people?

Thank God there are still mailing lists like OPEN where you can say what you want without having your words twisted around (or having to wait hours for someone to "approve" your reply)

Is it any surprise that people like Damien end up organising their own trips to the US instead of relying on EI?

UPDATE: It now seems that people are offended by "my" reply where I said someone was "misinformed". Considering I didn't even use the word in my email I find it amusing that the "moderator" has decided that the discussion should continue elsewhere. Idiots!

This site, and several others, will be offline for up to an hour tomorrow. The server already got a RAM upgrade recently, but it's now getting a CPU upgrade.

While the performance of this site and most of the others on here hasn't been an issue there are one or two sites that might perform a bit better with slightly beefier hardware.

In any case I thought it was about time that I did some upgrades, as the servers could probably do with it.

While I'm still getting emails alerting me to new properties for sale in Carlow every few hours I decided to check out prices in other parts of Ireland.

Why oh why did we base our business in Carlow? If we'd based ourselves closer to the Shannon (ie. Limerick, Clare, Tipperary) the cost of houses would be significantly lower.

Of course the infrastructure and distance to data centres etc ., would pose a problem, but the price differential is huge.

Ah well.

Anyone want to help me rob a bank? Balaclavas optional.

I enjoy playing around with new "toys", so I was delighted to get an email earlier this evening from one of the Zemanta team earlier this evening to let me know that they'd added support for Movable Type.

The concept behind Zemanta is intriguing. It's a browser plugin that integrates with serveral of the more popular blogging platforms via your browser. Once you've composed a blog post of 300 characters or more it will make suggestions for images, links and other content.

As they describe it themselves:
The images are pulled from a variety of sources, but they assure users that they are all copyright cleared ie. you won't be getting any nastygrams from people's legal teams asking you to remove them!

Although the people at Zemanta only officially support Firefox I'm working away quite happily using the plugin on Swiftweasel, which is a derivative.

Since I can never find the information when I need it.. here are the current Paypal merchant fees (as of May 20th 2008)

Hittail have launched their premium service.

While it may be a bit expensive for a hobby site the pricing is very reasonable if you intend using it for an ecommerce site.

Why?

For one very simple feature - the option to transfer keywords that hittail has "found" into your Adwords account.

The only thing that is a little annoying is that there are limits on the number of keywords and pricing is per domain.

The guys at XKCD have done it again!

I took delivery of some of their tshirts this morning, as well as my Top Gun tshirt

I've spent the last couple of days in Co Clare with most of my family (which is why I haven't been answering emails as quickly as normal).

We seem to come together most often these days for weddings and funerals.

My grandfather, Joseph (Joe) Neylon, passed away last Tuesday so we were there to say our farewells.

My grandfather lived a very full life and passed away at the age of 94. He'd even written his memoirs!

I could probably write a lot more about the important role he played in my life, but I can't at the moment and I may never be able to.

He'll be missed

Grainne from InterTradeIreland got in touch with me yesterday regarding the All Island Seedcorn Competition 2008.

The competition is aimed at startups and has a prize fund of 280 thousand euro. The first prize is  100 thousand euro (I wish we'd had that kind of money to play with a couple of years ago!)

Full details including entry criteria are on the site

Anyone who randomly sends forwards me .doc press releases without even making an effort to personalise the email stands zero chance of getting a favourable mention from me ever.

It's not terribly hard to use some mailing software to send out press releases.

Why do people presume that everyone uses Word?

How hard would it be to actually address an email to me personally? Is that too much of a challenge?

It's not terribly hard to send email - thousands of spammers manage it, don't they?

So why on earth can't someone send a press release properly?

And since Donncha has already "named and shamed", I will too.

Ifoods.tv - you really need to get a clue.

It's not a matter of web2.0 vs web 1.0 or anything like that. It's simply a matter of using, as we say in Cork, a bit of "cop on".

You may have been nominated for an award, but it obviously wasn't in marketing or email usage based on the rubbish you sent me today and the way you sent it.

Don't you just love dumb spammers?

itext.ie seem to fit neatly into that group.

Their bulk unsolicited email this afternoon checks all the boxes for spam of the worst kind.

Yes, itext.ie are real geniuses

The email looks like a viagra spam or similar to be honest, so I wonder how successful it will be

Damn - two Blacknight related posts in the one morning ....

Anyhow .. .As of about half an hour ago we've dropped the price on IE domains to 21 euro.

Go to our main site to check for available domains or to transfer your existing domains.

We've just revamped the VPS hosting site to make the order process a bit simpler.

We know it doesn't display properly in Safari, but this will be fixed.

I'm still trawling property listings sites on a semi-daily basis and I've now got alerts setup with Daft.ie

Of course buying a house involves some basic economics. You have a buyer (me) and a seller (either a previous owner or a developer). For the seller to be able to make their money they need to be able to find a buyer who either has the money required or the ability to get their hands on it.

So why on earth would anyone list a house with the mysterious "price on application"?

If I have a budget of say 300k there is no point in me looking at a house listed at 400k.

What can possibly be gained by listing houses without guideline pricing?

Maybe I'm missing something essential and basic from the "big picture"

I meant to mention this before the weekend,  but didn't get a chance.

The Irish Media Contacts Directory 2008 edition has just been released.

The directory is split into four main sections:
It also includes an "experts" section which is useful if you are looking for an informed comment on something.

It would be really nice if they gave subscribers access to the data in CSV format, as that would be very useful for mailing lists etc.,

The directory retails at EUR90 and is available via the site

This year is turning out to be a bumper year for James Bond fans.

The Ian Fleming centenary has acted as a wonderful catalyst for the likes of Penguin, who are releasing a series of new covers, which are simply gorgeous.

Here's the one from Casino Royale:
It maybe new, but it's got that wonderful 60s retro feel.

The full set of books will be available at the end of May, though they haven't announced if they will be making a box set available yet.

Of course there's also the new Bond film which is set to be released on October 31st.

Earlier this year Royal Mail released a set of stamps to commemorate the centenary, while the Imperial War Museum is holding a really nice exhibition.

Of course the main thing behind Bond was the books, so you could do worse than spend some time acquiring some of the first editions. While you can get some of the first editions for as little as 30 or 40 euro there are some going under the auction hammer next Friday for prices ranging from 500 euro to ten thousand euro. More information is available on the Bloomsbury Auctions' site (you can bid via eBay)

While I've always found the official Google blogs to be good sources of information they lacked interaction as comments were disabled.

They've now changed their policy and are accepting relevant comments

From what I've been able to work out they haven't enabled comments on all their blogs as yet and Google staff don't seem to be engaging with the public. So it seems like it's a bit of a one way street. (If someone can find me evidence to the contrary I would appreciate it)

Of course not all blogs accept comments and for some people there is a very good reason why they don't. Seth Godin, for example, provides a clear explanation on his policy and it makes sense. But if you do allow comments, shouldn't you at least reply to them?

Top Gun is not a "chef d'oeuvre', but it's great fun.
It has dated a bit since its initial release over 20 years ago, but it's still enjoyable (Yes I do have the special edition DVD and the HD DVD release.)

So how about Top Gun tshirts?

Either there's an upsurge in Amazon phishing emails or the phishers only got my email address recently.

I've had about half a dozen phishing emails today purporting to be from Amazon regarding my "seller" account.

To start with I don't have a seller account.

The other giveaway sign is that although the links are similar to Amazon domains, they aren't Amazon domains.

They all seem to be subdomains of by.ru, which appears to be some sort of free hosting solution based in Russia (I don't speak Russian, so I'm only making an educated guess)

Unfortunately, while Amazon do have a facility for reporting phishing emails it is clearly not aimed at the "casual" end user or anyone who is short of time. It consists of a rather convoluted series of web forms instead of a simple email address.

While the likes of Paypal, Ebay and most of the major financial institutions make it relatively easy for even a novice to report phishing emails Amazon dare to be different.

While they may be getting the reports in from honeypots etc., surely it would make more sense to facilitate end user reports?
Am I missing something?

UPDATE: Over 24 hours later I got a reply from Amazon with the email address to use for reporting phishing emails.
In case anyone else needs it the email address is: stop-spoofing@amazon.com
If you forward phishing emails to that address as an attachment they get sent to their security team.

The Irish media must have been really bored this morning or just looking for a big headline. I guess its all an anticlimax now that Bertie Ahern is gone and thew new cabinet are in place.

According to RTE there was a "security breach", while Morning Ireland used the term "hacker".

What were they talking about?

Was a major ecommerce site hacked?

Did private and confidential information leak into the public domain?

No. All that happened is that Damien Mulley worked out where a file was on the Data Privacy Commissioner's site before they announced it to the public.

Hardly newsworthy and hardly a "security breach".

The report itself is a totally different matter, however.

 

While I have my reservations about the film I Robot the latest special edition boxset is truly impressive.



Of course you'd have problems fitting it in with your "normal" DVDs.....

Play are currently offering it for about 77 euro including shipping. I presume they'll ship it to Ireland, as it would be classed as a DVD, but if anyone knows otherwise please let me know