Recently in rant Category

Either the IEDR believes its own PR or the PR company it uses are clueless.
I'm not sure which one it is.

In any case they've pushed out yet another one of those "look at how wonderful we are" type press releases. You know the type. A few facts padded by loads of waffle with pretty much no substance.

Read about it over on my domain blog.

And while talking about the IEDR Tom was good enough to share his insights into the IEDR's crazy claims

I also decided to put the domain iedrsuck.eu live - nothing very exciting for the moment, but I'm sure I can find new things to do with it

I don't use Windows that often. Generally speaking I use Windows in the office via Parallels Desktop to access one specific bit of software or when I remote desktop into a server on the LAN to bludgeon more rules into my Exchange profile.

This afternoon I decided that a game of Battlefield 2142 would be a good idea, as killing random players on a multiplayer server is good fun.

Now if I had been thinking clearly I would have fired up the Mac OSX version, but based on what ensued I somehow doubt that my choice of OS would have made much difference.

At least it would be if the EA games updates were:
Needless to say they aren't any of the above, so almost 2 hours later I still haven't managed to download the updates, as the EA games download servers are so damn slow.

(and I probably should add on another 45 minutes for all the other random windows, antivirus and other software updates that have decided to force themselves on me since I booted into XP)

Maybe some people only get a couple of emails a day... I know I don't.

If you don't put a subject to your email I cannot know what it's about without opening it.

This wastes my time and yours.

A meaningful subject line means that I can prioritise the email, find it later or simply pass it onto the correct person.

How hard can it be?

Seriously

While I love my Mac there are some things that drive me mad.

Where the hell is the hash (#) key?

It's ALT+3 on my keyboard, but you'd have to be a genius to work that one out by yourself

At least the tilde (~) is on the keyboard, unlike a standard Italian PC keyboard which seems to have it hidden from view for some inane reason.

I'm really tired of the shenanigans involving the IEDR and the IE namespace, so I wrote this rant.

Feedback welcome (on that site :) )

I enjoy eating. Going out for dinner with friends on a Saturday night be that for a casual dinner or to celebrate an event is meant to be an enjoyable experience.

Last night, however, was far from enjoyable.

The Grill and Grape restaurant in Carlow is one of the latest additions to the town's list of eateries. Several of our staff had eaten there over the last couple of months and had mixed experiences.

On a Saturday night you need to book to get into most good restaurants in Carlow, or any other town for that matter. It's probably one of their busiest nights of the week.

So we booked a table for about 6 of us for 8. I was late arriving, as I'm usually the first to arrive and end up waiting around by myself. I was expecting to find the rest of my party happily drinking an aperitif of some kind, but discovered that although they had been sitting there for about 15 minutes nobody had bothered to take their drinks order.

Another ten minutes or more passed before a waitress appeared and took our order. I tried to order the beef carpaccio, but was told that it was no longer on the menu (odd that considering it was printed on it and nobody bothered to tell us that it was no longer available).

Between us we ordered 4 starters, a couple of beers, water and a bottle of Rioja.
The Rioja was bland. How you can even find a bland Rioja is a bit of a mystery to me, as I'd never actually had a bland Rioja before, but I was planning on trying a different wine for our second bottle. Of course that never happened for one simple reason - the waiting staff never bothered coming back to take any other drink orders!

So what about the food? The starters weren't exactly memorable and they completely forgot to serve one, which meant that Niall was left sitting there while the rest of us munched away at our bruschetta (not exactly the best rendering of that dish).

I had ordered a steak with pepper sauce, but got some other sauce instead. We'd been waiting so long for each course to be served that I just ate it anyway. For a steakhouse the meat wasn't exactly amazing.

The dessert menu is uninspiring and is dominated by ice cream, though they also had a chocolate cake available, which a couple of us opted for topped with a hot chocolate sauce.

I ordered a post dinner Calypso coffee, but of course this never materialised and was completely forgotten by the waiting staff. One of the others ordered a tea but had to change the order as they didn't have that particular tea in stock!

The service in the Grill and Grape was truly dire. Although they seem to have plenty of staff floating around the place they seem incapable of providing a reasonable level of service.

How any restaurant can possibly survive when a party of 6 only runs up a bill of about 40 euro / head but takes up a table for 3 hours is beyond me.

If you're heading to Carlow and want a good meal there are plenty of places you can go - The Grill and Grape isn't one of them.

The launch of Cuil, which was a self-proclaimed "Google killer", got a lot of PR. Of course not all of the PR was as positive as the company's spin doctors would have liked.

I was planning on posting about Cuil around the time of the launch, but between one thing and another it got put on the back burner. That was until I saw a post today over on TechCrunch where several webmasters were complaining about Cuil's spider / bot. In common with most search engines, Cuil uses a bit of software to index pages.

Unfortunately, if the Techcrunch post is anything to go by, Cuil's bot isn't the sharpest tool in the shed and has been misbehaving. What that translates to in real terms is that it seems to be downloading the same content over and over and over again, which can affect website performance and bandwidth costs.

Of course this isn't the first time a search engine's software has had a negative impact on website owners. Microsoft's own search engine bot used to behave in an equally annoying and damaging way when it was in its infancy.

However the key difference for website owners is that Cuil simply fails to deliver.

While they may be able to rectify some of their early mistakes the audacity of Cuil's founders' claims is bound to leave a bad taste in many people's mouths. If you make big promises you need to deliver.

One of the things that I can see Cuil having serious issues with is its use of images.
When you do a search on Cuil you will see images displayed beside search results.
The company's FAQ claims that:


That sounds fine, and if anyone remembers the entire adsense + image placement debacle a couple of years ago, it probably rings true. But, and here's the kicker, which images are they actually displaying?

Doing a few vanity search queries for my own name I can't really complain, as it's showing photos of me for several, but things change quite dramatically when I try to search for keyphrases related to my business.

A search for "irish hosting" is currently displaying a UK ISPA badge beside a link to our company site. We're not members of the UK ISPA, so I don't think they'd really appreciate anyone inferring  a relationship.

It gets worse!

A search for "register irish domains" shows one of our competitor's logos linked to our site!

See below:
I know for a fact that Irish Domains have trademarked both their name and logo, so this kind of usage could lead to issues for all parties concerned.

When I conducted similar search queries a few weeks ago I was seeing our logo displayed as a link to a competitor's site!

And what about the search results that Cuil produces?

To say that they are completely random is to be diplomatic.

A search for "Carlow" turns up a university in the US as the 1st result (I guess you could use Cuil to find random websites that you might never have discovered?)

Darren Rowse should be happy. A search for blogs returns a photo of him, though it doesn't link to his site!

And if you want to check out porn stars Cuil is NOT the place to try. Choosing a few well known adult stars' names at random led to very little (cue jokes about all IT people being obsessed with porn - I know!)

Maybe it will get better over time. Maybe it won't. I don't think anyone is going to notice for quite some time.

Ireland's small business association, the SFA (bad choice of acronym!) are trying to grab headlines at the moment with their latest madcap idea. The SFA's Patricia Callan was on morning radio today advocating that Ireland's minimum wage should be slashed by 1 euro.
Why?
Seemingly doing this would somehow "save the economy".

So who exactly is paying a minimum wage anyway?

Who is on a minimum wage?

Wouldn't doing something about the cost of a loaf of bread or litre of milk be a little bit more useful?

Drawing parallels with other EU states is dumb, as you aren't comparing like with like.

I've been to the cinema twice in the last couple of days.
On Friday night I went to see Hancock in Kilkenny, while last night I went to see Wanted in Carlow.

Both evenings people came into the cinema several minutes after the film had started. I'm not talking about the adverts or trailers, but the actual film itself.

They wander in then spend several minutes standing around trying to find somewhere to sit and talking as well.

End result being that your film viewing is disrupted.

Grr!

According to BreakingNews.ie the exit polls on the Lisbon Treaty vote were "too close to call", so we'll have to wait until the counting is done to know what way it went.

I was reading Donncha's post while sipping my coffee this morning and while I cannot agree with his choice I would have to agree with his comments about the campaigners.

Votes in things like this are one of the few times that my degree comes in useful, since I spent 4 years in UL studying European Studies.

One of the common complaints is that the Treaty is hard to read and understand.

It is.

It's a really long convoluted document. Reading it might be a good cure for insomnia, but it won't help you understand it. You're better off reading around it, but who has time to do so?

The Referendum Commission produced a pretty good pamphlet that explained in quite simple terms what it was all about, but from talking to quite a few people I get the distinct impression that a lot of the don't really understand what the EU is all about.

I listened to a number of the "debates" and "discussions" on the radio over the last few weeks and I cringed more than once. Most of the time the conversation spiralled into a shouting match so quickly that an understandable reaction would have been simply to not vote at all, since neither side seemed capable of putting forward their views in a calm and measured manner.

I'm not calm and measured at the best of times, but I'm not an elected official!

The world is watching today to see what way we voted and at this stage I would be surprised if the vote actually passed. Not because the "no" side was particularly convincing, but simply because people don't understand what the EU is doing or how it does it. The end result of that being that a lot of people either won't have voted or will have been duped by the silly arguments against it put forward by the no camp.

By the way, the image I've shoved in there has nothing to do with this post, which is why I chose it!

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