Techie :: Techno ::: July 2007 Archives

Matt Cutts thinks there is a striking similarity between the Harry Potter font and the Yahoo logo It might be a long shot (don't Google engineers have day jobs?) but I can see the similarities if I squint enough (original post)

Over the last few weeks I've mentioned Movable Type 4 several times. Byrne and his team made a release candidate available last night and the change log is simply huge! I'll be wiping my beta install and replacing it with RC1 later today / this evening ... Hopefully they'll have ironed out those bugs that were driving me mad :)

Alexa have finally released an official toolbar for Firefox - Sparky. Up until now there were a number of unofficial "ports" of the toolbar to firefox, but an officially supported toolbar had not been made available. It's a testament to the growth in usage of Firefox that they finally decided to make one available You can see details of the toolbar on the official site

Yesterday morning there were new versions of the kernel for both my desktop and server Ubuntu installs. The servers, needless to say, don't have demented graphics cards, so there were no issues. My desktop, however, was a totally different matter. After the kernel upgrade X refused to start, which was more than a little annoying. When I upgraded this PC a few months ago (ie. replaced the old one with a new one !) I ran into some difficulties with the graphics card, an Nvidia GeForce 7900GS. That time "envy" was the solution, so I went back this time to see what I could find out. Envy has a command line option, so my issues post upgrade were solved by running this a couple of times until I was able to get X to behave. Unfortunately Envy does not configure Xorg to run at the highest resolutions possible, so you can either manually edit the configs OR re-run the Xorg config: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg choosing "nvidia" as the driver. Restarting X (CTRL ALT Backspace) and you should then have a reasonably high resolution again :)

The Movable Type team have released the 7th beta of MT 4 in the last few minutes. Not only does this release include bug fixes it also includes "out of the box" support for podcasting, which should make a lot of people really happy. Byrne Reese has all the details.

Damien is interested in profiling Irish technology companies, particularly startups. It could be an interesting project, as long as he isn't swamped by fluffy rubbish

About a year ago I posted about browser and OS usage on this site and search.ie Damien mentioned a new report on browser market penetration this morning, so I thought I'd have a quick peak at my stats. The results surprised me! The first image is the browser usage for this site. As you can see Internet Explorer is slightly ahead of Firefox: Search.ie remains true to form with the overwhelming majority of users running Internet Explorer

Apologies for the downtime - the RAM upgrade didn't work out as the new modules seem to be dodgy ....

I was just catching up on my blog reading, which is something I've been doing less and less of over the last while. Today seems to be a day filled with spam related news. Head Rambles has a very amusing post about a badly worded phishing mail. As can be expected he's taken a potential annoyance and turned it into a hilarious incident. Darren "ProBlogger" Rowse mentions a new "service" offering spam comments at knockdown prices. Yes - you too can help put people off blogs and blogging !! Techcrunch reports that Google is to buy Postini. Postini has been around for several years and is one of the better known email filtering companies. I wonder if they'll handle the transition better than when they acquired Urchin.. Only time will tell, but I'm not betting on it!

I enjoy business. I enjoy pressure and stress and the lack of sleep.... Well I sort of do, but not all of the time. This afternoon I had to email a large number of our clients directly as a result of a programming glitch: We Made A Mistake - Sorry! I don't like it when we screw things up. It undermines the work we've put in to build up our business to date and I always take that personally to some degree. It's hard not to. On the plus side it did teach us all a valuable lesson - though I'd much rather not learn things this way. At least the expiry dates on our end should now match those on the IEDR's end .....

I'm signed up to several online survey services. In theory I get rewards if I complete the surveys, however more often than not I can't provide correct answers. Why? Because the survey designers don't seem to think things through. This evening's survey from an Irish company gave me three options for my city of residence. As I don't live in any of the three I would have chosen "other" - of course I couldn't and my only option would be to lie. What's the point of badly designed surveys like this?

You'd think Apple would have checked! Full story

Permanent TSB customers are the target of a current phishing campaign. The fraudulent website will ask for ATM pin numbers directly!