June 2008 Archives

I've been at the ICANN meeting in Paris for the last week and haven't had a chance to post here.

I'll be posting a few followup posts over on my domain blog over the next few days.

Suffice to say that some of the media coverage of the event has been more than a bit sensationalist!

I'm in Paris until Sunday afternoon, so I fully intend to take advantage of my remaining time here to do zero work!

I've mentioned previously how "organised" I can be when travelling.

With each trip I seem to improve some things to the detriment of others.

This time round I have:

• booked the hotel (4 months in advance!!)
• booked flights
• booked hotel in Dublin for night before
• organised loads of meetings
• brought business cards home (ie. so they are close to my suitcase and won't get forgotten)

I haven't decided if I should lug my digital SLR with me or not, as my phone's camera is more than adequate. However I will have to dig out the data cable that came with it or I'll be "snookered" again. My little Sony camera is AWOL, since I "conveniently" forgot it in Cork. (Cue Homer Simpson style "doh!")

Of course the downside to being semi-organised in advance is that you tend to misplace things like your hotel booking confirmation. I'm staying in the Meridien Montparnasse, which is part of the Starwood group. I only found this out when I spent 10 minutes frantically searching my email for the hotel booking details!

Oddly enough I was in Paris at the same time last year for my aunt's wedding. Of course last year I also managed to get pick pocketed and end up with no cards or even the carpark ticket to retrieve my car! I've since learnt my lesson and now tend to leave a couple of my credit cards in the hotel safe. I also invested in an American Express card specifically to avail of their emergency replacement card service (they guarantee 24 hours!).

While I seem to have scheduled loads of meetings starting the afternoon I arrive, I still intend to get to the cinema at least once, so I've been perusing Allo Cine to see what's on. As tends to happen some films are released in France months before Ireland, while others lag months and sometimes even years behind. I had been hoping to see Asterix, but at this stage it's probably easier just to wait for the DVD release.

I suspect I'll arrive in Paris to discover I've forgotten something really dumb yet essential, like my phone charger, as there's no way that I can possibly be that organised!

Although I only upgraded my Mac's browser to Firefox 3 this morning I will be downgrading it shortly

Why?

Practicalities.

Several web applications I use on a regular basis break badly in Firefox 3, which renders them unusable (typo3) or not as usable as I would like (Movable Type).

I know the guys in Movable Type will fix the issues, though they were waiting on a stable Firefox release before they made any crazy changes.

I've no idea how long it will be before the Typo3 team fix the UI issues on their end.

Unfortunately in both cases the issues arise from Javascript rendering issues ie. the browser engine has changed how it handles it

Ah well!

Today sees the official release of Firefox 3

Ubuntu users seem to have been granted the privilege of downloading the new release since this morning for some odd reason!

The guys behind Firefox are also trying for a Guinness record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period.

Inevitably their web servers have crashed under the load and are now displaying an error message:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

I guess that was to be expected, however their FTP servers are still working fine!

If you want to grab the new version of Firefox via FTP you can get it here

I'll be leaving for Ennis shortly, as I have to go and collect a load of books that I'd left in my grandfather's house.

Of course I'm running an hour or two behind schedule, but it's a Saturday, so I should be forgiven!

I left a lot of Spanish and French books with my grandfather a few years ago, so I've really no idea what is actually there. I suspect there's plenty of Garcia Marquez and a few dictionaries, though I'm not 100% sure.

My task for next week will be getting my hands on more bookcases, as I've more or less filled all the ones I have and am currently living surrounded by boxes!

I mentioned SharedReviews last year when they were in beta.

It's run by a couple of guys I know, so I'm really delighted to see how well they've been doing.

A lot of companies send out emails telling clients and users about new features and cool stuff they're offering.

It's rare to get a plain and honest email which goes into detail about the company's development.

It's so rare, that it's like a breath of fresh air.

The guys have been doing stellar work building up the number of users AND building up their revenue streams. I'm absolutely delighted for them both (Frank and Peter):

Growth of the site has been stellar the last couple of months, resulting in increases in unique visitors and pageviews by 50% month over month. In fact we've gone from 8,000 unique visitors in February to a projected 50,000 unique visitors and 1.6 million pageviews this month. Congratulations on helping us grow this fast! What we need is to ensure the SharedReviews word is spread in as many places as possible, form your blogs to your MySpace and Facebook accounts, make sure your reviews and SR in general are being marketed everywhere you go. This will result in more traffic and revenue for the community, and more votes for your reviews!

Of course now I'm feeling guilty, as I haven't been that active on there !

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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Eamon Ryan is Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources.

Now the last time I checked Communications included such things as ISPs, broadband, internet - you know, that sort of thing.

I was also under the rather naive impression that Dail ministers couldn't opt out of parts of their own portfolio. You know, ignore those bits of their portfolio that might make them actually have to deal with real and substantive issues.

As MD of Blacknight I am our representative to the Irish ISP Association (ISPAI). I'm also on the  organisation's working group for data retention.

We've been working with our members and the various government departments and Gardai on the transposition of the directive into Irish law. I won't bore you with the details of this at the moment - it would also put me in a bad mood to even think about it!

A couple of weeks ago the ISPAI sent letters to various Irish government ministers including Mr Eamon Ryan, Minister for Communications (etc)

The letters attached (pdf) are the letter from the ISPAI to Mr Ryan and his signed response.

Considering the directive itself refers specifically to communications (Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC) his reply has left me more than a little confused:

I have no function in this matter

Sorry? You're the minister for Communications. How on earth can you hope to get away by saying you have no function in this matter? The directive affects just about everything your department is in charge of.

So I have to ask dear reader, what purpose does Eamon Ryan serve?

EamonRyanispailetter.pdf

eamonryan-reply.pdf

Damien has posted quite a nice rant about how people should and shouldn't pitch to him.

While he might have been writing from his perspective as blogger, he raises a number of points that extend well beyond blogs and are more about sales in general.

I don't like cold calls. Some people probably enjoy them, but I can't think of anyone offhand. When you first start a business you feel almost honoured that someone is trying to pitch their goods to you, but over time that (quickly) wears off. You soon realise that your time is better spent looking after your own business and if the product or service is as cool and useful as the salesperson is making out you'll probably come across it anyway. (That argument is a bit flawed, but please don't interrupt!)

The problem with some people is that they have blind faith in their own products. Now don't confuse "blind faith" with "confidence" or "pride".
I'm proud of our business, but I also know that what we sell is not suitable for everyone.

I wouldn't try to sell my mother a dedicated server, but I know she needs and uses her email. How it works isn't her problem - though her tendency to seek technical support via my mobile number when I'm in the wrong timezone can be a challenge at times! (Admittedly she hasn't resorted to that since I got my first server)

About a year ago (possibly longer?) we were contacted by someone who was selling a software product.
I can't remember the product name, but I know it was some kind of CMS solution.
And it wasn't cheap. They asked us if we would be interested in selling it to our clients. We weren't for a number of reasons.

End of story? You'd have thought so.
But no.
They then rang again demanding to speak to someone "further up" because the person they'd dealt with obviously "didn't have any vision".

Of course they'd been dealing with me, so they never got that sale.

Whether I have vision or not is irrelevant.

If you're trying to sell anyone anything you can't expect to make a sale with that kind of attitude.

If you love your product, that's great.

But you've got to realise that:

• nobody else is going to share that much passion
• forcing people to get passionate about it isn't a good tactic. You might be able to win people over, but forcing them to do anything isn't a good idea
  
• telling a sales prospect that they lack vision is tantamount to suicide
• if someone isn't interested insulting them or simply pushing them won't make that sale. It might make you an enemy instead

You've got to have perspective!

One of the hot topics that will be under discussion at the upcoming ICANN meeeting in Paris will be the introduction of new TLDs.

I've mentioned a few of the campaigns previously on my domain blog (expect more activity on there while I'm at ICANN!)

So how many new TLDs will there be?
How many applicants can we expect to see?

I had been thinking about the entire thing a small bit over the last year, but Anthony Van Couvering decided to go one step further and conducted an informal poll

He emailed a group of people from within the domain industry, including myself, and asked us what we thought. The numbers and comments are quite diverse, but based on the conversations I've been privy to, they're hardly surprising.

I'm heading off to Paris next week to attend the ICANN meeting. The meeting is being held in Montparnasse, which is a great location, as there are so many bars, restaurants and cinemas nearby.

If anyone who is planning on attending wants to meet up do let me know. I've a few meetings organised, but there'll be plenty of opportunities to meet up.

Amazon.com had issues last week, but today it's Amazon UK's turn.

How long it was down for is unclear, but several people, including myself, got an unhelpful "service unavailable" message when trying to access the site earlier this evening.

It just goes to show - 100% uptime is a myth :)

As I mentioned recently, this server is now available over both ipv4 and ipv6.

The next logical step was to get ipv6 of some kind working at home.

Unfortunately my isp isn't offering ipv6 (yet!), so I had two options:

1. Setup complicated networking stuff to get some of our ipv6 allocation to appear at home
2. Get an ipv6 tunnel from Sixxs

Option 1 might have been possible, but it would have involved bribing one of our network engineers to do it in his spare time, as I don't have the technical knowledge to pull it off

Option 2, therefore, was the one I chose.

I've been running OpenWRT on my linksys wrt54g for some time, so the howto on their site was one of my first ports of call.

Once I got my ipv6 tunnel from Sixxs I was able to use ping6 to verify my connection was working over ipv6 from the linksys.

Unfortunately I cannot get any form of ipv6 from my desktop! All I get are unhelpful messages about there being no routes :(

UPDATE: Jeroen from Sixxs and a couple of other people were extremely helpful and I finally got it working.

Running the following on the openwrt seems to have fixed the issue:
ip -6 ro add 2000::/3 dev <tunnel>

where <tunnel> is the interface for your tunnel

I also had to rejig a small bit of my config, as I'd put in /48 instead of /64

It's all working nicely now, so my next minor challenge is to get my Mac to use the ipv6 assignment on the network here.

For some reason I don't get as much junk mail as other people. I presume it's because I don't live in a housing estate.

Over the past few weeks, however, my letter box has been assaulted by just about every political party and pressure group in the country trying to swing my vote in the upcoming referendum.

I wish they wouldn't. Most of the literature from both sides is badly written and not very persuasive. People who are going to vote will probably inform themselves on the issues using the media anyway, so I can't see how stuffing loads of badly designed leaflets into my letter box is going to help.

In any case I've made up my mind on how I'm going to vote.

Initially I was confused by the really unclear messages coming from both camps.

I just hope people actually take the time to vote. I know the turnout is going to be low - it nearly always is, but it would be nice to see whatever decision is made being made by a reasonable number of people.

Over the past couple of years this site has been IPv6 enabled from time to time, but it ended up losing its IPv6 some time ago.

It's now back and working again!

Thanks to Niall, who did some rejigging of DNS and network stuff yesterday to get it all working properly again!

The more content that is available over IPv6 the better.

Anyone who has a dedicated or colo server with us can get native IPv6 if they want. Simply ask!

Amazon's main site, Amazon.com, has been down for the last hour or more. Currently some sections of the website are available sporadically.

The really scary thing is that based on their reported revenues every minute of downtime equates to about $31000 of lost revenue!

Now that is really mission critical!

In the meantime you might amuse yourself looking at some of the craziness in the current whois output:

whois amazon.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

   Server Name: AMAZON.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
   IP Address: 69.41.185.219
   Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
   Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
   Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

   Server Name: AMAZON.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
   IP Address: 203.36.226.2
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: AMAZON.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
   IP Address: 80.190.192.24
   Registrar: EPAG DOMAINSERVICES GMBH
   Whois Server: whois.enterprice.net
   Referral URL: http://www.enterprice.net

   Domain Name: AMAZON.COM
   Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
   Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
   Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
   Name Server: UDNS1.ULTRADNS.NET
   Name Server: UDNS2.ULTRADNS.NET
   Status: clientDeleteProhibited
   Status: clientTransferProhibited
   Status: clientUpdateProhibited
   Updated Date: 28-mar-2008
   Creation Date: 01-nov-1994
   Expiration Date: 31-oct-2017

I'm heading over to Paris in a couple of weeks to attend the ICANN meeting.

While I may have booked my hotel room ages ago I still haven't organised my flights. Flying from Dublin to Paris shouldn't be hard to organise as so many of the airlines serve the route.

So earlier today I decided to look into my options.

Air France's rates seem ok, but I thought I'd check both Aer Lingus and British Airways as well. I'm not interested in Ryanair, as I don't really fancy a trek from Beauvais, while I know that getting from Charles de Gaulle is quite easy.

That an airline would add fuel surcharges and possibly baggage handling charges is one thing, but that the "national" carrier would have the gall to charge a 6 euro credit card handling fee is nuts!

For all bookings except those originating in the USA, there is a handling fee charged. Charges as follows:
€6 per person Credit Card handling fee.
€2 per person Debit Card handling fee

With the volume of transactions that a company like Aer Lingus is processing I would suspect that their cost per transaction at the merchant level is negligible. I don't know who they use to manage their payment gateway, but whether it's inhouse or outsourced there is no way that it could possibly cost 6 euro. And a 2 euro debit card fee is just as insane, as they actually cost less to process.

I already mentioned their inane issues with browser language detection issues (everyone is in the US according to them!)

I'd love to know how people would react if we started chucking on CC handling fees.. Actually, I wouldn't want to know. The very idea of it makes me feel queasy

I'm not ashamed to say that I am a James Bond fan (why would I?), so I was very interested in seeing how the new Bond novel would turn out. A new novel? The concept of a new James Bond novel is probably a bit bizarre considering that Ian Fleming has been dead for quite some time, but this year, to mark the centenary of his birth, Penguin commissioned Sebastian Faulks to write a new novel.

Devil May Care is classic Bond. It may only have been published last week, but it feels like it was written over 30 years ago at the height of the cold War.

The story picks up after the last "original" Bond book with our hero recovering his strength. Next thing you know we're plunged headlong into yet another exciting adventure that takes us to the four corners of the globe.

There's plenty of action, but there's also plenty of proof that while Bond maybe tough he's still only human.

Is it as good as an Ian Fleming? Possibly.
Is it worth reading? Definitely

Grab a copy!

It's 2008.

At least I think it's 2008 in most of the country.

Unfortunately it looks like some parts of Mayo are stuck in some kind of time warp.

I'm usually proud to be Irish, but when I see the kind of junk being pumped out by the Mayo Echo I cringe. If this were supported by any part of government I'd probably switch my citizenship without any further ado.  I don't want to be Irish if that's how Irish people behave.

Seriously

What am I ranting about?


The Mayo Echo carried a story on its front cover recently with the title: Castlebar Lake Attracts Hundreds of Perverts

Charming.

Castlebar.ie's main page tells most of the woeful and embarrassing story of how the site has been shut down due to legal threats from the idiots in The Mayo Echo. Idiots.

While the comments on the Castlebar.ie site are not visible this explanation is:

The comments that Mr Geraghty complained about arose from a highly controversial article written and published by Mr Geraghty in his newspaper covering what were termed "gay perverts" in Castlebar. Moderators judged the comments that resulted from this to be fair comment - many expressing strong disapproval of the article and including some of the opinion that it was likely to incite hatred against the gay community. The article included, for example, a clearly identifiable number plate of a car belonging to those that were allegedly some of the "hundreds" of "gay perverts" or even "drooling perverts" (to use the actual phrases in Mr Geraghty's article) that allegedly frequent a car park in Castlebar every week

The paper is also promising to publish photos of men involved in homosexual acts - charming! (Though that might get them shut down completely, so it may not be such a bad thing .... )

So while it seems "just" for the newspaper to publish articles that are basically inciting hatred against the homosexual community, it's a major "no no" to criticise them?

Sorry guys, but freedom of speech is a two way street.

If the Mayo Echo want to be Neanderthals in their choice of editorial that is their prerogative, but they have no right to demand that other people's sites be taken off line since they disagree with the "journalism".