May 2005 Archives

I picked up the CD from ebay the other day and have been listening to it since it arrived. It's unfortunate that the Kila site doesn't accept Paypal or laser, as I would have been happier buying directly from them. The odd thing about Kila is that it was my Spanish ex-girlfriend who introduced me to them and their music. We went to see them live in Cork a few years ago and ended up in one of the Metropole's bars until the small hours of the morning with the group. Great guys. Great music.

A site I am involved in to a certain degree is currently receiving a certain degree of media attention due to a comment posted there by someone. The comment, which was not pleasant, was removed by one of the moderators and the user banned. This kind of thing happens on bulletin boards all the time. It might be a cause for irritation if you are the moderator, but it's hardly "newsworthy". Unfortunately in this instance the comment was spotted by someone else who took screenshots of it and posted on his own site (blog) demanding that details of the person who posted the comment be revealed. We cannot simply handover the details to the media or a 3rd party. That would be an abuse of online privacy. If we did it once then we would be setting a precedent. I would have no issue with handing over the information if we were approached by the Gardai. But anybody other than them has no right to ask for that information. Ebay, for example, have contacted us in the past about phishing sites on our IP space. We will respond swiftly to these reports and take the sites offline or get them taken down (usually they aren't hosted on our servers but those of a 3rd party colocating with us). In the standard email from ebay there is a demand for the user's details citing US Federal legislation: "We sincerely appreciate your immediate attention to this important matter. We would also appreciate if you would take steps to confirm the accuracy of any contact information that your user may have provided to you in establishing the account. Should you have any accurate information that could assist eBay and law enforcement in tracking this individual, we greatly appreciate your assistance, as we know that you do not condone the use of your services for such criminal purposes. Finally, please be advised that we have referred this issue to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for their investigation. The F.B.I. has requested that we convey to you in this message their request that you preserve for 90 days all records relating to this web site, including all associated accounts, computer logs, files, IP addresses, telephone numbers, subscriber and user records, communications, and all programs and files on storage media in regard to all Internet connection information, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. Section 2703(f). While we do not act as an agent of the FBI in conveying this request, we do intend to fully cooperate with their investigation, and encourage you to do so as well. " Although we are more than happy to co-operate with agents of the law we cannot handover client details without a warrant from the Irish authorities. Irish and European privacy laws are quite strict about these things, which is a good thing. It does, however, make things quite complicated when the case in question is making news headlines. Privacy laws are an interesting area. They can protect you as an individual against any number of things, including spam. However they do not offer the same level of protection to business, at least not in the Irish context. The difference between the individual and business can be quite unclear, especially when you are dealing with sole traders. It is partially for this reason that I have started using email from this domain for "personal" matters in order to differenciate from "work" matters. Another interesting case was brought to my attention recently where a company operating in the same sector as ourselves gave their client details to a "partner company". The "partner company" then emailed the client database with offers. My interpretation of Irish law governing client details was that we, as a provider of services, could use our clients' details to communicate with them with regard to the services we offer them. The clients have the right to "opt out" of such communication if they choose. Unless we were to specify at the time of gathering their details that we intended to share their details with a 3rd party we would not have any right to do so. This has been confirmed to me by the Data Privacy commissioner's office. Surely this is a clearcut case of spamming?

Over the last year the traffic and submissions to search.ie have grown exponentially. Unfortunately the number of spammers submitting rubbish has increased as well. The site was originally using Links 2 which uses a flatfile database with a perl frontend. Although it was very flexible in terms of templates etc., it did not scale very well, so I moved it to using a MySQL based backend about a year ago. The backend I chose seemed to do what I wanted, but it did not scale very well either. It suffered from a number of issues: - The guy who wrote it obviously didn't know too much about *nix systems - The MySQL queries were terrible - The page build process was slow and resource intensive - Link management was terrible - It did not scale I did look for alternatives, but a lot of the ones I came across were simply not suitable. In the end I got another license for Gossamer Links SQL (glinks) and am now porting the entire DB over to it. Importing all the existing links manually would have been a long and painful process, so I'm using a plugin from Ultranerds.com It still requires a lot of cleaning up after the initial import, but it's well worth it. With a bit of luck I'll be able to accept new submissions to search.ie after the weekend or at least at some stage next week.

This auction is for part of a British MI5 bugging device found hidden in the floorboards of a Sinn Féin office in Belfast in September 2004. Included is a handwritten letter of authentication from Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams. The handwritten letter has been framed and there is a display board for the device. This is a unique opportunity. A historical item such as this has never before been made available and it’s highly unlikely that it will happen again. The auction was pulled by ebay, as it "breached listing guidelines".

The Sunday Business Post is proud of its ABC1 figures and is more than happy to quote them ad nauseum should you ask about advertising with them. Surely a newspaper of this stature is capable of producing factually correct articles? One would have thought so, but one would have been sadly mistaken. According to a recent article, penned by Computers in Business editor, Adrian Weckler, Amazon is trading in Ireland. That may come as news to you, it certainly came as news to me: Large websites such as Komplett.ie, Pixmania.com and Shopireland.ie (which is Amazon's brand name in Ireland) are leading the charge. to quote from the article. I'm sure Donovan Hutchinson, the owner of the domain shopireland.ie would find that amusing. I know I do, as we used to host the site and I registered the domain for him last year. I wonder would Amazon find it as amusing? Considering that the Amazon name is protected by trademark, is this kind of misinformation damaging to their brand name? I'd be interested to find out. Thanks to Hugh for spotting this

According to a recent announcement ebay.ie will soon be open for business. The domain had originally been registered by an Irish company, but was handed over to ebay earlier this year With Ebay.ie to open the days are probably numbered for operations such as ebid.ie which has been stumbling along for the last couple of years

Why the hell do AIB insist on conducting maintenance on Mondays? Their site has been pig slow all morning and the business banking section has been inaccessible. I'm getting really tired of this. I can't access it with anything except for IE on windows, which severely limits me. They've been promising to update the entire business banking thing to use a sane version of Java, but so far it hasn't happened. Gah! Not happy!

I've been working away on Browse.ie in my free time for the last few weeks and have added a couple of new features including a forum. The other thing I am working on is getting people to edit some of the categories. If anybody is interested in looking after a category they can request it in the forum. So far the only category that has an editor is "Dublin" :)

According to a report in Friday's Irish Times it is now illegal to refer to Dingle as anything other than "An Daingean": The Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Eamon O Cuiv, has ruled out allowing the name Dingle to appear on maps, road signs, statutory instruments and official correspondence. Although promoting the use of the Irish language is laudable, surely some level of pragmatism should be applied? Kerry relies heavily on tourism, so you can easily imagine the number of foreign tourists wondering why they can't find this "Dingle" place they've read about or can see on their maps. Seemingly local business is in favour of maintaining some reference to the anglicised version but O Cuiv is being intransigent. He has even gone so far as to suggest that maintaining usage of the anglicised name would involve removing the area from the Gaeltacht. Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the Minister meant to help communities in the Gaeltacht, not hinder them, especially in terms of economic development? Appletree Guide to Irish Place Names (Appletree Guides)

Exit0 have a modified version of Raymond's spam assassin ruleset that will catch the bounces: German spam

A very handy little plugin: here It displays some essential stats from your adsense account in the status bar of firefox.

There's a new wave of political spam hitting mailservers across Europe and presumably the globe. Most of it seems to be in German, though some subject lines in English have been reported. It looks like they are being sent by zombie PCs. This is very similar to the nazi spam which was spotted about 14 months ago. Update: Raymond has released an SA ruleset to block most of this junk which has been identified as being sober related You can grab the ruleset from : http://mailscanner.prolocation.net/german.cf I've added that to some of our servers and it's working nicely

Superquinn have an interesting selection of Spanish desserts including natillas and arroz con leche from Goshua. They are delicious!

Very cool: http://www.boadle.com/red5/ And yes - it is Star Wars NOT Star Trek

I finished reading Digital Fortress last night. On the positive side it is a "good read", as long as you are not expecting to enrich your intellect by reading it. You could probably describe it as a good thriller, with a number of interesting twists to the plot. The story unfolds in two locations, the NSA in the US and Seville, Spain. As is to be expected in this genre of writing we do get some insight into the characters' background in order to make their actions that bit more plausible, but you won't find any deep analysis, nor would you want it. Having lived in Spain and dated a beautiful girl from Seville it was quite nice to read a novel based partly in a city that I knew. What I was quite annoyed about was Brown's condescending attitude towards Spain and the Spanish. He seems to have a very twisted view of Spanish society and thinks of it as almost a third world country. The book is riddled with references to Spain's "backward" society and services. Getting sick in Spain is considered to be a recipe for death. Maybe this might have been true thirty years ago, but the same could be said for quite a number of "first world" countries. Spain's health service, in my experience, was as good as Ireland's and probably a lot cheaper. This jingoistic attitude tainted my reading experience. Even though I enjoyed the novel I could not but help being rather annoyed at the author's attitude to Spain. Maybe he had a bad experience there as a student, but does this give him the right to refer to the country in such a derogatory tone? I think not. The author's attitude towards the country bears little relation on the actual plot, but it does leave the more educated reader wondering how a man capable of such a twisted view could write an acclaimed bestseller like The Da Vinci Code

If you are upgrading from an older install be very careful with the spam.assassin.prefs.conf, as the latest version that ships with MS has a number of changes in it that can cause issues with your Bayes' settings ie. location of the files With older installs you may have place the files in: /var/spool/spamassassin you would have set the path to bayes to be: /var/spool/spamassassin/bayes The new default settings in the file work on a slightly different basis, so you should check carefully before implementing them.

A few months ago I mentioned email disclaimers, more specifically the rather silly and amusing ones. Over the last few weeks some people's usage of disclaimers AND signatures has been getting on my nerves. Do I really want to read 10 lines of links and spurious junk AND a long corporate disclaimer? An email signature should contain the necessary contact information ie. company name, website, telephone and fax. There's no point in putting in line upon line of text, "bouncy" signatures, graphics or other things. They may impress people who don't use email much, but if you get any serious levels of email this kind of crap is simply annoying.

I found it rather amusing that Weckler's editorial in this week's SBPost was about corporate blogs. Talk about "jumping on the bandwagon". You'd think that: - nobody had ever written about it - there was something really revolutionary Excuse my sarcasm, but I find the editorials rather bland and lacking in originality. I almost prefer his random rants.

I've spent quite a bit of the weekend tidying up things on browse.ie, such as page titles, the link submission page and a few other things. It still needs work, but it's pretty much open for business.

Chip and PIN is a revolutionary new payment system that introduces a more secure way for over 1.1 million Laser cardholders in Ireland. Why are we so far behind other countries? France had a "chip and pin" system at least 13 years ago, possibly longer, and yet both laser and the CC processors are hailing the introduction of the system as "revolutionary". I wouldn't care what they called the damned thing if I could actually use it where I wanted to. Shops don't seem to have any problem with it, but just try buying something online! So far this week I've had one government department's site reject my laser saying the number was invalid, while the WorldPay gateway for CDwow rejected it without any reason. I am not impressed!