Techie :: Techno ::: January 2007 Archives

Yesterday afternoon I discovered where I'd left my camera charger. After wasting several hours ripping the house asunder it transpires that I left the damned thing in Cork. After passing through the departures area and into duty free in Dublin Airport I found my solution! The Hahnel Ultima is a really cool little device. It's a lot neater than the original charger that came with my Sony Cybershot T7, which I've always considered to be a clunky piece of plastic compared with the sleek lines of the camera it serves. As you can see it's quite neat. Notice the removable plate. It comes with three different ones, so you can handle different battery sizes with ease. What's really cool, however, is that it comes with US and Irish plugs :) If you're in the USA you can plug it straight in, while in Ireland you simply slip the adaptor over it and off you go. And for those of us who have love affairs with our cars it also boasts a car charger!! (I think I need to get my car cigarette lighter fixed first!) So what could have been a disaster has actually worked out surprisingly well :)

I mentioned previously how blogs and forums (fora) are converging. I've been running the excellent VBSeo mod on a couple of forums for the last few months and the SEO results have been more than satisfactory, however there's no such thing as a free lunch :) The downside is that the forum is being hit with trackbacks from splogs all the time. In the last 24 hours it got really silly, with splogs hitting it every couple of minutes. I've had to disable trackbacks until I can come up with a sane solution for filtering them. Yes they do go into a moderation queue, but the number of them is such that moderating that queue could become a full time job!

Paul sent this around this afternoon Raid for idiots Very funny, but also easy to understand!

Rather than try to reinvent the wheel and in order to keep in tune with the Open Source / Technical flavour of Skycon.... I've decided to give the talk on email filtering using MailScanner... Since that sounds very uninspired I'll see if I can come up with a sexier title. How about: Mine's big enough! - Filtering 50,000 users' mail using open source technology It doesn't have a great ring to it... OR Phishers and phuckers Neither exactly scream "inspired!"

I started writing this yesterday evening, but then I got distracted .... Anybody who knows me will happily agree that I am not a morning person - not unless I've had enough caffeine to kill an ox! However yesterday morning I was up at 7 in order to drive down to Waterford for BarCamp Southeast. Since there were a few of the Blacknight team going down we had arranged wakeup calls, which after the previous night's shenanigans were probably a really good idea :) I picked up Keith shortly after 8am and we hit the road. I must say it was a lovely drive down, as there were hardly any cars on the road! I pity Keith, though, as I have an awful habit of chattering away incessantly ..... The directions we'd been supplied with were spot on, so we'd no issue in finding the venue and actually arrived earlier than we'd planned. (I'd had visions of driving aimlessly around Waterford for hours!) Coffee and pastries devoured the other delegates started to drift. There were plenty of familiar faces, such as Damien, Jon, Donncha, Keith B (not to be confused with Keith G), Berni, Conn, Laura, Grainne, Elly and plenty of others (Do you really want a list of names? :) ) The venue, which is nestled in the Waterford countryside, is beautifully equipped and there was wireless access throughout. The lineup of talks was overwhelming, but I did manage to get into a couple of them, as well as trying to learn to juggle. With my total lack of co-ordination that was no easy task, though I did sort of manage to juggle (more "sort of" than "manage"). The first talk I got to was on podcasting, while the second was on a slightly different topic - death and divorce in a digital world (which deserves a post of its own) After the last talk a bunch of us headed down to the Ramada Viking. Most of us were staying there that night, so it was simply a matter of booking in and dropping bags off in rooms etc., Over the past year or so I've stayed in a lot of hotels. They all seem to merge into one. The Ramada Viking's staff, however, were extremely helpful and the room was fantastic. I've stayed in a few of the supposedly "good" hotels in Dublin and been completely underwhelmed, whereas this time I paid a lot less and got fantastic service in charming surroundings. After a couple of beers in the hotel we all piled into the city for food (which we were sponsoring) and then back out to the hotel for beer and banter. Unlike the first barcamp I actually made it into my bed before dawn :)

Do you know where you live? That may seem like an odd question, but judging by some of the stuff Keith's found in our backend systems it might be a valid question to ask. NB: I have no way of seeing who supplied this information as we just ran queries on a section of the table... Ireland has 32 counties. 26 counties in the Republic and 6 in Northern Ireland.. or at least it used to have... According to some people the land mass has expanded considerably. While I know that some of the confusion may stem from wording on a website I still fail to see how "region/county" could have led to some of these gems (in all cases the country selected was "Ireland") | 9666663696h | << em. Ok... I'm really worried about you | asdasd | << you're not even trying | Éire | << presumably a nationalist / republican | berkshire | << after 800 years the roles are reversed ? | Canada | In Ireland? | CO | << interesting | County | << but which one? | FL | << Disney in Ireland I guess | Florida | | Murcia | << porque no? | n/a | | na | | none | | Pennsylvania | | poland | - that's not that surprising :) | Random | - some people like to keep us all guessing | Region | | Surrey | | sweden | | Tennessee | | test | | uk | | united kingdom | | United States/CA/Goleta | - covering all bases I guess..... | W | I now feel more sympathy toward my postman! :)

Laura has put a gun to my head. I have to decide on a topic for my talk at Skycon and I've got about 24 hours to do it. For once I won't be the only representative from Blacknight presenting!! Paul, in a possible moment of madness, also agreed to give a talk. As he's a hardcore geek he'll probably be right at home, whereas I'm a little more wary. What should I give a talk on?? Bearing in mind that it's quite a technical conference, judging by the timetable, what would people recommend? I was contemplating doing something on email filtering. (The last talk I gave in UL was on SEO) Any thoughts?

I've been interested in the inner workings of podcasting for some time, though I still haven't actually got round to doing anything about it! In any case yesterday's BarCamp featured some really interesting people talking about cool stuff (not all of it was that geeky!). The first session that I made it into was given by two podcasters that I truly respect, Bernie Goldbach and Conn Ó Muíneacháin. Conn has been podcasting as gaeilge (the Irish language) for some time, while Bernie not only podcasts regularly, but has a wealth of experience in teaching other people to do it. The talk was a combination of talk with slides and practical workshop. Bernie kicked off by explaining what he was going to do ie. put together a podcast in about 20 minutes or so and then Conn gave us a load of really useful tips on getting started. What was fantastic about the talk was that they made it all seem so accessible and easy, so even my non-technical companion at the talk was able to follow the entire process with ease (at least I think she did!). Hopefully Conn's slides will be available soon, though I know he's having issues with his broadband On a sidenote I took a couple of photos that you can see here

If any of you are wondering why the theme has changed completely and several of the plugins etc., have vanished... Well I just taught myself a nice little lesson about the dangers of using the following: rm -r -f * I successfully cleaned up my blog by killing it :) Oh well! It was about time I cleaned up, as there were plugins and God only knows what else dating back about 3 years. The main page now has a mere 26 queries, instead of the massive 109 it had previously. I'll be playing around with the layout a bit as I need to put some things back in, but I will make a BIG effort to keep it simple this time. (That probably won't work, but at least I can start out trying!)

I've mentioned webhosting.info's hosting stats several times over the past couple of years. While I still do not find them to be 100% accurate I would consider them to be a relatively good barometer of relative sizes etc., During the course of 2006 Blacknight's growth was steady and healthy (screenshot from domaintools) If you look at our overall position compared to our competitors in the Irish market, however, the picture is much more revealing: Paul spotted our new position at number 2 last week. As he mentioned we've just taken on a new sales manager, so hopefully if he does his job we'll continue to grow and I'll get my dream car one of these days :) I first registered blacknight-solutions.com back in July 2000. I didn't even pay for the first year's domain registration, as I won it in a competition (the hyphenated domain was a really bad idea by the way). Personally I'd never have imagined that six and a half years later we'd be in the top three! So what for the future? We've got lots of interesting plans in the pipeline and they'll be revealed at the right time (I hope!) on the company blog or main site. You might be asking yourself why I'm not blogging about this on the "official" Blacknight blog... Well the answer is very simple - a lot of it started here. Just over 3 years ago I started this blog (November 2003). At the time I was playing about with Movable Type and used the blog as a way of venting my random thoughts and frustrations:

Working for your own company is an odd experience. At times you lack inspiration and would like to throw in the towel. At other times you find yourself driving yourself forward in way no employer could ever imagine

November '03 A lot has changed since then.... First we hired Niall, who has since moved onto Google. Then we moved into our offices.... Then there was the staff expansion.. and more expansion and, well, more expansion... We're now running out of space in the office again! NB: Figures only reflect Com/net/org/info/biz They do not take into consideration ccTLDs, such as .ie, co.uk or regional / specialist extensions such as .eu , .travel

For a variety of reasons I'm currently using windows as my desktop at home (this will probably change as soon as I have the energy to do something about it :) ) In any case I ran into an interesting issue this evening with a domain's DNS. While I could see that the root nameservers had picked up the change and any server on our network could see the new IP, my windows desktop couldn't. I wanted to see what was going on, so I grabbed a copy of dig for windows. It's a handy little package that also includes a command line whois. Seemingly it was ported from debian and can handle most things quite well (it didn't know what to do with a .mobi though!)

Jon posted this link to a mailing list I read. It's absolutely hilarious, but also a really nice way of explaining some of the geekier stuff that we all deal with in terms that most people can understand.

Does anyone know of a tool for working with CSV files and then importing them into MySQL? I've got a flatfile database which has a series of fields that I need to import into MySQL. Most of the fields in the orginal will map to new ones in the MySQL, while some on both sides will be ignored There's about a thousand entries in the database, so I'd rather not do it manually, as it's not simply a matter of copying and inserting - I will also have to manually change one element associated with each entry.... Any suggestions would be welcome if they run on windows or linux (I don't have OSX yet)

If anyone knows of registrars that have reduced the retail price on .eu please post over here The only one I've noticed so far is Joker

In case you are wondering where all the IP addresses have gone to the IPv4 Address Use Report for 2006 has just been posted.