April 2005 Archives
2005 could signal a major turnaround for the Irish Domain Registry (IEDR).
In a press release issued on 26th April the registry reported a profit for 2004 of €880,000, compared with a loss of €1.2 million in 2002. The improved finances are attributed to a combination of cost-cutting measures coupled with a 32% increase in new registrations.
Over the past two years the price of IE domains has been dropped by 20%, which may have contributed in part to the growth in registrations. The increased level of automation combined with more frequent zone rebuilds has also led to faster registrations.
This news follows a number of significant changes to IEDR procedures in recent weeks.
At the beginning of April a list of deleted domains was made public for the first time . The list, which is divided in two sections, lists a selection of both generic and three letter domains. Although it was possible to find available domains using standard whois queries no “drop list” had ever been made publicly available. Some sources speculate that this may trigger a new “after market” in previously owned domains.
Another important change is that in relation to transfer policy. Previously a transfer did not extend the domain automatically by one year and, as the expiry date was not public knowledge, there was a perceived lack of transparency. Under the new policy all transfers will automatically extend the registration by 12 months, thus bringing it into line with the policy used by .com and other registries:
"Renewal payments will advance the .IE domain renewal date by one year. Each time the domain Billing Contact is transferred one extra year is added to the life of the domain"
In order for this to work the expiry date of domains has been made public, although they are still not visible via whois. The dates, in American format, may be viewed by running a query at: http://www.iedr.ie/dns-search.php Hopefully this will be rectified in the not too distant future, although the whois data format may still not be sufficiently verbose to satisfy some, as it unlikely that it will comply with RFC1032, due to restrictions supposedly imposed by Irish data privacy legislation.
Other areas of the IEDR site have also been changed.
The reseller list is now split into two sections with resellers handling more than 500 domains listed separately. There is also a section of the site containing information specific to charity domain registrations.
Does all this signal a new era for the IEDR?
Since David Curtin took the helm the company has changed significantly and has embraced change, although they have been haunted by the legacy of the previous management team headed by Michael Fagan. Mr Fagan finally resigned amid some legal controversy in November 2003 after being suspended on full salary in October 2002.
Firefox is my browser of preference, so I get a little bit annoyed when I can't use it with certain sites ie. sites that I would like to use.
Last weekend I was trying to use Tesco.ie and discovered that it wouldn't work properly.
AIB's personal banking works fine, but other areas of their site does not work, such as the business banking and the online car loan section.
Quite annoying really!
There is no such thing as a tooth fairy and there is definitely no such thing as unlimited bandwidth.
Strangely, or not so strangely, there are still companies promoting hosting plans with unlimited bandwidth to Irish punters.
To oversell is one thing, but unlimited bandwidth is more than just a mere marketing ploy - it's a dangerous myth.
I wish someone would tell Switch Media, or their clients.
Austrian company go-mobile has released a number of extensions for SugarCRM. Details available on their site
Does anybody know of a "sane" way of doing this with Outlook 2003?
I've been scouring the web for the last couple of weeks trying to find a sane solution and have hit a brick wall.
The plugins I have come across including this one simply won't work, as they expect me to generate a key based on an email address, which I don't want or need to do.
Getting it to work with Thunderbird and Enigmail on linux (ubuntu) or windows is easy.
Why does Outlook have to be so awkward?
Sligo based Infacta have released version 5 of Group Mail. Full details are available on their site
Whilst browsing I came across an ad for an Outlook RSS reader plugin, so I grabbed it.
You subscribe is still in beta, but has a couple of useful features, such as integration with Outlook and firefox.
It comes pre-loaded with a reasonable selection of RSS feeds grouped by category, though they are primarily US or UK based.
The number of plugins you can get for Outlook is quite impressive. What isn't impressive is the fact that you actually need the damned things to make it into a useful piece of software.
Entertainment.ie have revamped their design. I'm not sure if there are any new functions but the new design is nice and fresh.
Edit: There are new features, including a customisable view, however there is no verification of the email used for signup!
NBIf you arrived here via Google or another search engine please note that this site has nothing to do with entertainment listings in Ireland.
Outlook is a horrible MUA, but I am yet to find a viable alternative.
I have, however, ended up extending its functionality through the addition of a number of plugins.
The latest one was recommended to me by Tom Doyle is a handy indexing utility called Lookout
It works a lot faster than the Google desktop search and integrates with the UI of Outlook.
I am getting really annoyed with having to deal with silly amounts of spam submissions to search.ie every day.
The site gets approximately 50 new submissions every day, which could be seen as a positive sign if it were not for the quality of the submissions (or more importantly the lack thereof).
What does a site selling pet urns in Texas have to do with Ireland?
The idea that anybody would want to cremate their pet and store its remains in an urn strikes me as quite bizarre anyway, but I fail to see what relevance it has to Ireland.
The hardcore p0rn submissions are not as numerous as they used to be, but are easy to spot in any case.
Last weekend I did a cleanup of the submission queue and got it down from over 700 pending links to a more managable 10-15.
After struggling manually through a few pages of junk I ended up doing most of the pruning directly on the DB and removed all submissions that included URL redirectors, affiliate code or submissions from my "favourite" spammers.
I'm hoping that Gossamer Links SQL will make browse.ie easier to maintain.
The IEDR have released a list of some of their deleted domains to the public.
The list, which can be seen here, is broken into two sections:
- General domains (aka generic)
- 3 letter
Somebody posted a link to a very good article that explains the concept of overselling in a clear and balanced way.
It's definitely worth reading if you are getting tired of reading marketing junk from hosts claiming NOT to oversell. Of course they do, they just don't like admitting to it. Even if they think they aren't they are still part of an oversold chain.
Read the article for yourself:
Overselling Hosting
Whilst "playing" with the latest beta of Infacta's Group Mail last night I discovered that they had added ipv6 support. Very impressive!
There are some very nice new features in the betas that I have seen (and used), including full integration with Outlook and the Group Metrics service.
Bernie reports that he was comment spammed by an Irish company.
I'm not that surprised, which is a sad reflection.
Damien mentioned an email spam issue from a couple of months back as well. Unfortunately this kind of crap will become more prevalent unless Irish law is tightened up and, more importantly, people are educated.
I haven't had any Irish comment spam on this blog yet.. but only time will tell. At the moment I've enough to deal with on the email spam front :(
El Pais have published an excellent multimedia guide to the papal elections, spanning from the pope's death to the end of the conclave.
There is a lot more multimedia content on their site, which is well worth a visit.
Yes, it is in Spanish :)
I had to giggle today when I read one of our "competitors" blurb in the Tribune.
They claim to offer cheap hosting, but they really should do some proper market research before making the kind of claims that they did.
".... €6.49 per month and your .com will cost €1 a month"
So that means the hosting would be close to €80 per year and another €12 per year for the domain.
Unless my maths are bad, that makes €92 ex-VAT.
We do it for less, as do other providers...
Yet they claim "What set-up costs come cheaper than this?"
Do I have to answer that?
They also make a very interesting claim that they will "have your existing site at the top of the google". What's that mean?
It's a totally meaningless statement.
Most people's DSL seems to have been upgraded this weekend, so the speedtest is getting hammered at the moment :)
