Techie :: Techno ::: April 2007 Archives

You've got to love reciprocal link spammers! Their emails are great! I got this one earlier today:

Dear owner of http://www.xxxxx.xxxx, I'm the webmaster of http://www.xxxx.xxxx. We came across your site on the Internet and feel that it would fit perfectly into our collection of quality software-related links at http://www.xxxx.xxxx. The Google PR of this site is currently 0. We've already placed a link to your web site along with a description at our site on the http://www.xxxx.xxxx/links38.html page, which we encourage you to check for accuracy. We'd appreciate it if you place a link back to our site using the following HTML code (just copy and paste it into your links page): xxxxxxxxx.com - xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx If you'd like the description of your site modified, the category changed, or if you have any other cross-promotion ideas, feel free to email us. Please note that if you don't place a reciprocal link to us somewhere on your site within a week, the link to your site will automatically be removed from our directory. Please link to us using the code above, and let us know where we can find the link. Best regards, xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx This is NOT SPAM -- this is a one-time reciprocal link request. We have NO INTENTION to email you again. You can also reply to this email with REMOVE in the subject line to make sure we'll NEVER send you any more e-mails in the future. ----------------------------------- Powered with LinkAssistant SEO Tool http://www.link-assistant.com/ -----------------------------------

I've edited it heavily to remove reference to the spammed site and the spammer. What made me laugh was the footer. If it's not spam why are you sending it to "the owner of xxx.com"? If you know who I am then you know what my name is. I also love the way the person using the software didn't edit the boilerplate email that well and left in the "software related links" line. Considering the mail was aimed at a site to do with the tourism industry I can see that getting a few raised eyebrows...

There will be a general election in Ireland in the next few weeks and we'll all have to listen to the various politicians going on about how much they'll do for the Irish economy. But do the politicians actually use Irish companies to provide them with services such as hosting and domain registration? There's a thread over on boards.ie which is quite revealing. It seems that Sinn Fein are the biggest offenders of the lot! They seem to be 100% hosted in the US (courtesy of Pair). So much for republicans? This lack of support for Irish business was also mentioned here as well, and ties in with the GAA's total lack of support for Irish jobs.

According to an article in Silicon Republic, Carlow town is supposed to be going wireless as of today. Niall did a bit of investigating into the article's claims earlier during the day, but couldn't find out a lot. Not surprising really when you consider that one of the providers mentioned doesn't even have a functioning website! Later this evening he did a bit of "war driving" and found a number of active nodes. It would be nice if we'd a bit more info. I live about 5 minutes walk from the council offices and the local Fianna Fail candidate managed to send me useless junk mail, so getting something I might find useful would make a pleasant change ...

Over the last few weeks I've been getting an increasing amount of email from various departments in Microsoft. Most of the email is rubbish. It's not just that the content isn't very good, but some of it is emails to tell me about emails that I should get in the future. Oh come on! It's email for God's sake! I don't need an email from Microsoft to tell me about another email I should be getting. The volume of these mails, which also includes a silly number of surveys (without any incentive to complete them), has reached a point where I now just delete the messages without reading them. Setting the correct frequency and volume in your marketing message makes all the difference. It's a pity Microsoft can't get it right

Cormac has posted a bit about blogs that do follow. Both this blog and the company one "follow" links - as they should.

Dell will ship XP preinstalled on new PCs again. It seems that people were none too impressed with Vista being forced on them and the hardware vendor had no choice but to do an about face. full story

I mentioned the beta of Amazon's context ads a few weeks ago. Before I could give it any form of review I wanted to let it run on a couple of sites to see how well it worked, so for the last couple of weeks it has been active both here and on IWF. What I've found is that the code causes the pages to display a little oddly - it adds an extra couple of lines to the footer for some strange reason. That isn't much of an issue, but it did surprise me at first. What I was more interested in finding out was how well the system handled the ads ie. if they are truly contextual or not. IWF has a lot of textual content, though it would not be as dense as this site, as you can easily have threads that are only one or two short messages long. In general the ads served lacked context, as they seemed to be generated on one or two keywords in the text and not based on the whole corpus. I kept on seeing links to guide books about Ireland, for example, which would not fit with the site's theme at all. On this site, however, the ads seem to be more contextual, though again I get the feeling that it is only using one or two keywords to generate the advert. A recent post on Eragon, for example, is currently displaying two ads related to the film and the original book, while the third is based on something totally unrelated. In conclusion I can see that the system might work well with review sites or similar, where the textual content in the articles is keyword rich and densely focussed around particular themes, as the ads on review-like posts seem to be a lot better. In terms of click through rates I can't really draw any meaningful conclusions.

A lot of people would agree that the only portion of the online industry that has consistently made money was the adult entertainment portion. While a lot of geeks may get excited by IPV6 it's going to be an uphill struggle to convince the rest of the world to start using it. So what would happen if you were to combine IPV6 with Porn? It's an intriguing question and judging by the IPV6 Experiment's site, some people are interested in finding out. Basically they're going to offer a load of premium adult content for free to users who can connect to it over ipv6. Full details on the site NB: The project / experiment is not live yet NOTE:If this turns out to be an elaborate April Fool's it's a damn fine one!

Some charmer decided to tag me, so I feel semi-obliged to rise to the challenge. So why do I blog? I started blogging for a couple of reasons. On the one hand I wanted to play with the blogging software. I'd seen people using Movable Type and it looked pretty nifty and I also thought it would be handy to know what our clients were likely to ask for in the future (at the time the company was a hell of a lot smaller!) The other side of it was that I actually enjoy writing. That's not to say that I write particularly well (or particularly badly), but I've always enjoyed doing it. When I was in college I managed to fund a part of my studies by writing for a newspaper from time to time. I've always been into language, which is probably what drew me to studying more than one language in college and spending so much time overseas. Since I started blogging about 4 years ago I've found it very relaxing. In some cases it provides a space for a little rant (a common enough use of blogs!), whereas in others it's a handy way of seeking advice / help from others. Of course you can still do this on forums and mailing lists, but the structure of blogs and blogging lends itself to certain uses with greater ease.... I also use my blog as an "aide memoire". If I find a solution to a problem or a handy link I may shove it on this blog (or one of my other ones) so that I can find it later. Of course if I only had one blog it wouldn't be too bad, but I seem to have developed a mild addiction, so instead of one or two I seem to have spawned more than half a dozen. Not all of them are actively maintained, but some of them are more active than others. For example I Squatted Your .eu is quite active at the moment as so much is going on with .eu (or isn't going on with it, depending on your point of view) For a long time this blog was seen by some people as the unofficial Blacknight blog, which wasn't really my intention. Of course it's a bit hard to separate me (a human being) from Blacknight - the company that I started, so that connection was kind of logical, although it wasn't my intention. In the end of course I setup an official blog for the company.... Enough of this ! So let's see who I should tag: John (his blog name was simply asking for it!) Bernie Frank Jothan Anthony

I mentioned a couple of days ago about how the Sky Movies site was broken. I didn't realise that they hadn't restricted their "inventiveness" to that channel's site alone. They've also done a very "good" job on the sports channels as well!

If you're into statistics and domains this might be of interest: Takeup of .mobi in Ireland

The Irish Internet Association's website has been offline for most of today. Why? Well put simply the domain has vanished from DNS, so it's impossible for anyone to reach it. The domain is held by Esat's nameservers, but at some point in the last 24 hours someone removed it completely from their nameservers and as the IEDR's offices are closed today there is no way to move the domain to another set of nameservers even as an interim measure (ie. there are no reloads or changes to the .ie zonefile today) I spoke to the IIA's CEO Fergal O'Byrne a short time ago and he explained what had happened. It transpires that the IIA have a free account with Esat, but that their billing department seems to have raised an invoice 4 years ago for services. Although the invoice was flagged as free and to be removed it obviously wasn't ... End result being the site is offline due to a billing error. I'm sure Fergal is very impressed!

IDN (internationalised domain names) was one of the hot topics at the last ICANN meeting in Lisbon. In Lisbon the discussions were quite complex, as they were discussing the scope of IDN withing gTLDs ie. domains that are completely international in their nature. When it comes to a ccTLD ie. one for a particular country a lot of the more "off the wall" topics can be safely ignored. Ireland has two languages - English and Irish (Gaelic) While the English language only has one or two accents, that are applied to "borrowed" words, the Irish language had several, though this has been reduced to one - the fada. The humble fada can change the entire sound of a word (like most accents!), yet it is currently not possible to register a .ie domain using a fada. My name in Irish is Mícheál O'Nialláin (or so I've been told), yet there is currently no way for me, or anyone else, to register the domain name while preserving the correct accents. What of all the other Irish placenames? Organisations? People? Wouldn't it be nice if you could make use of accents in your .ie domain? Would people want it?