Techie :: Techno ::: October 2005 Archives
Several months ago I mentioned an experiment that I was attempting to conduct using Typo3.
Continue reading Typo3 Enterprise Content Management.
Over the last couple of days there has been an increase in the number of submissions to Irish web directories that I edit.
As each site has to be approved prior to listing I get to read about and view quite a few sites.
Continue reading Search Engine Optimisation and Submission - Back to basics.
Over a year ago I posted some reflections on email filtering based on our experience as an ISP
Justin Mason's latest post reflects on some of the issues that I had hinted at:
False Positive ‘Reports’ != FP Measurement
As he underlines in one of the comments:
The problem is, if you don’t receive the message text, it can be damn hard to figure out if the message you just blocked was spam or not — therefore they seem to just assume it was spam!
I spent a couple of hours this evening fixing some of the issues people had communicated to me after launching the new help / faq site for IrishBlogs.info
- Site descriptions on all blogs are now visible
- Random site of the moment is enabled
- Multiple blogs re-enabled
When I originally launched IrishBlogs over the summer I wasn't expecting so much interest. To date it has just under 100 bloggers and hopefully will surpass the 100 mark very soon.
As a result of this I've setup a separate FAQ / Help Site to replace the current FAQ
If anybody has questions or answers then the new FAQ is the place to address them
The Irish Internet Association has announced the appointment of their new CEO, Fergal O'Byrne:
The Irish Internet Association is pleased to announce the appointment of Fergal O'Byrne as its new CEO. Fergal will be starting in the role with immediate effect. Commenting on the appointment Colm Lyon, Chairman of the IIA said, “We are delighted to have Fergal on board. The Internet Industry in Ireland is currently in a very positive cycle - the momentum of the last two years has continued and it has transformed now into sustainable growth. Against this background the IIA has become more relevant than ever and during the last year this has translated into more events and more members. The IIA expects this growth to continue and it looks forward to working with Fergal in devising the plans and strategies to make the IIA the catalyst by which its members meet, learn and trade. Fergal is well familiar with the Internet Industry in Ireland and he has demonstrated a clear ambition to make the IIA an integral part of this industry." Fergal O'Byrne has been involved in the internet industry since 1995. He sits on a number of boards and was awarded the IIA/MSN Internet Marketer of the Year Award in 2004.
Since we launched our blog hosting package I've been asked by a number of people about ways of getting the most out of their Wordpress blog.
Continue reading Essential Wordpress Plugins.
Flock is the latest "toy" in the geek world it seems. I'm not sure whether it will take off or not, but I grabbed a copy of the "developer preview" to try it anyway.
Continue reading Flock on Ubuntu.
The Open Office development team released the stable version of Open Office 2 earlier this week.
If you need a functional office package, with word processing, spreadsheets, presentations etc., then it makes an attractive alternative to MS Office.
The Irish mirror is hosted by heanet and is probably a safer bet than the main download servers at the moment
I've mentioned the Golden Spiders and the distinct lack of a website more than once over the last couple of months.
Continue reading Spiders Find their Web - in the USA.
Wayne gave me a really useful link this evening to a script that not only calculates your site's Google PR, but also examines all the subpages and outbound links:
Super PR Tool
The same company also offers a bunch of other scripts for google advertisers, publishers and seo people. Well worth a visit
The shortlist for the IIA Netvisonary Awards 2005 has been announced. Much to my surprise I'm on the list!! Wow!
Thanks to all who voted
The full shortlist is as follows:
Continue reading Netvisionary Awards Shortlist Announced.
WARNING: This is a commercial post. If you do not want to read it please do not click. You have been warned.
Continue reading Blacknight Goes Blog Mad.
I got postgrey (greylisting for postfix) working without too much difficulty a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I managed to screw up smtp-auth in the process.
Continue reading Postgrey + smtp auth.
Ubuntu's installer for desktops is simplicity itself. Not only is it easy to use it also comes with a wide range of powerful features.
The development team have now announced the release of a server specific version ie. one without all the "junk" that you need on a desktop machine
Continue reading Ubuntu Releases Server Version.
Phishing fraud is not going away. As the fraudsters expand so do their list of targets. The latest one that was reported by Alex French, CEO of Bitbuzz, targets AIB:
Continue reading AIB Targetted by Phishing Attack.
Hugh is currently working on a new site, so he obviously wants to get it right from the beginning.
Like so many other "net savvy" entrepeneurs Hugh knows that the search engines are crucial to his venture's marketing strategy. If the spiders don't like his site it may not be as succesful as he would like.
Continue reading What makes a search engine friendly site?.
You too could be the proud owner of a dodgy domain
Yes, that's right. These domains are guaranteed to be high quality barely used domains.
Their previous owners were caught in the act of committing credit card fraud and possible email fraud so, of nothing else, they may have a coloured past
Any takers??
Jokes aside I do wonder what the hell hosting providers and domain name vendors do with the fraud domains ie. domains paid for using stolen credit cards which are subsequently voided
We're amassing a collection of them (it's not that big, but it does grow over time) and I presume other operators have comparable collections. Anybody interested in swapping theirs for some of ours ? :)
According to a report on this morning's Morning Ireland, mobile phones have been in Ireland for 20 years today. Of course 20 years ago the word "mobile" was not as correct as it is now.
I got my first mobile in 1996 when I was living in Spain. It actually belonged to one of my girlfriend's friends.. but that's not really important.
So when did you get your first mobile?
Privacy advocates like to "get vocal" whenever they are aware of possible infringements on their perceived privacy.
But what is privacy in the 21st century?
Continue reading Privacy - Is it just a myth?.
Before anyone contacts me to break the news I am aware that there are some issues with the Irish Blogs site.
The "site details" link is not working and is giving a very unhelpful error.
I've contacted the software developers and will implement a fix as soon as I get a response from them
The software powering the site was upgraded earlier this afternoon, so if you see any other issues apart from the one I mentioned please let me know.
EDIT: The site details link is now working. There are still a number of other minor problems to be resolved, but they guys in Evo are being really helpful, so hopefully it will ALL be working better than before :)
Edit2: The site should be working (more or less).
Software patents have been a hot topic in tech circles for the last couple of years.
Continue reading Software Patents - more madness?.
I upgraded this server to breezy this morning. It seems to have gone quite smoothly, but I'll probably find I've broken something in the process :)
The latest version of Ubuntu has officially been released.
The release comes shortly after the news that ie.archive.ubuntu.com is now mirrored in Dublin by Heanet
Continue reading Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Released.
I've always been more than a little sceptical about industry statistics and the methodology employed to gauge companies. I'm also very aware that the current methods are about the only ones available to us, so I have to take the information as being at least indicative of trends and patterns.
Continue reading More Hosting Stats + A gauntlet is thrown down.
Well, only if you really want to:
IIA NetVisionary Awards 2005
It should be interesting to see who is shortlisted as some categories had some very interesting names
I'll be at the ceremony in either case :)
Am I the only person who finds reciprocal link requests generated by automated mailers and nasty little spam robots annoying?
Continue reading More spammy link requests.
Bash autocompletion is very handy especially if you are using ssh to login to the same hosts over and over again.
Unfortunately breezy includes a minor change to the ssh client configuration that will cause this to break.
If you look in a standard known_hosts file in your ssh directory you should see a human readable part including the hostname and IP followed by the usual mumbo jumbo.
In the breezy standard setup the contents are all hashed, so you can't make out any of the contents.
The breezy ssh client config located in:
/etc/ssh/ssh_config
Includes the following line at the bottom of the file:
HashKnownHosts yes
which means that by default autocompletion will fail miserably as the hostname / IP will not be readable, as it is stored in a hash.
Simple solution. Change the line to read:
HashKnownHosts no
Remove the existing ssh history:
cd .ssh
rm known_hosts
Make sure that autocomplete is on in your profile by checking that the following section in your .bashrc file is uncommented:
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /etc/bash_completion
fi
And your autocompletion should start working again.
There's probably a very good reason why the package maintainers changed the default, but it took me some time to work out why my autocompletion wasn't working
*sigh*
I first browsed the web in '94
Back then browsers were very different. The web was a much smaller place. Google didn't exist.
Eleven years later the web is an important part of people's lives. You bank online, buy your books online, read the news online and maybe even find love online.
The technologies behind it all have moved on. Content has become more complex and our interactions with it have reached new levels.
AJAX is one of the more recent web buzzwords. You see it a lot in the tech world. It's easy to think of it as yet another fad.
But what if it isn't?
And what exactly is it anyway?
Jordan Frank's article on xml.com tries to address both questions and makes the whole thing a lot clearer ( a picture can speak so much stronger than mere words)
A lot of mail server admins have been forced to implement some form of spam checks at the SMTP level.
Some of the implementations are quite demented and probably do more harm than good, whereas others are extremely sane.
Continue reading Postgrey - Greylisting In Postfix on Ubuntu (Debian).
Colm MacCárthaigh's blog has a very interesting entry this evening on running software mirrors.
He's involved with HEANET, so he knows what he's talking about
Electronic voting has been mentioned a few times in the media over the last few weeks.
The Irish government has awarded a tender, with an estimated value of EUR119k, to UK company QinetiQ Limited
Adam Beecher is in the news this weekend.
I was flicking through the main part of the Sunday Business Post when a headline caught my eye
It transpires that BT's legal department are taking action against Adam due to his domain btireland-sucks.com
The funny thing is most of us knew about the domain since shortly after it was registered. I refer to it as a domain, as there was very little content. One sentence:
Fix your f*cking billing system you muppets!Now that he's being threatened legally he's added quite a bit more content. Whether Beecher has any rights to the domain or not is now irrelevant. By threatening him with legal action over the domain name they are drawing attention to themselves and it is not the kind of attention any company involved in the ISP / Telco business, particularly in Ireland, could do with. An overreaction on BT's part? I would think so and I would also imagine that it will turn out to be a very expensive mistake on their behalf.
Why can't Google produce tools for more than one OS?
There's probably a very good reason and I'm sure the development costs of supporting applications on several OS would be a lot higher than that of producing widgets for Windows only.
Just a comment from a frustrated linux user :)
The debacle surrounding IE domains vs .com's has now been picked up by the Sunday Business Post.
Continue reading IE Domain Debacle Continues.
