Author Archives: Donncha

Net in China domain spam

Early this morning I received the following email from Chinese domain registrar, “Net in China” regarding the camera club I’m a member of, Mallow Camera Club. It looks suspicious, but harmless. The worst they could do is tempt me to buy those domains through them, or could they have squatted on the domains and extracted a higher price?

Curious, I went searching, and found this post from a few days ago. It seems I’m not the only one receiving these emails. Either they’re trying to scam people, or business is going very well for Net in China!

I don’t have any interest in those domains, but I did finally register mallowcameraclub.org through Namecheap so some good came of this domain scam email!

Dear CEO,

We are the domain name registration organization in Asia, which mainly deal with international company’s in china. We have something important need to confirm with your company.

On the Dec 10, 2007, we received an application formally. One company named “Xingye Company” wanted to register following
Domain names:
mallowcameraclub.biz
mallowcameraclub.info
mallowcameraclub.cn
mallowcameraclub.com.cn
mallowcameraclub.net.cn
mallowcameraclub.org.cn
mallowcameraclub.tw
mallowcameraclub.com.tw
mallowcameraclub.hk
mallowcameraclub.mobi

Internet brand keyword:
Mallowcameraclub

Through our body.

After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of Xingye Company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Zoey Wu
——————————————————-

Sponsoring Registrar: China Net Technology Limited
Tel:00852-30593099
Fax:00852-31771520
Website: www.netinchina.com.hk
Website: www.china-net.hk

Baby's first tooth

On Friday I felt Adam’s first teeth as he bit down on my small finger but they were still under the skin. This morning as he laughed in my arms I saw the tops of two tiny front teeth poking out of his bottom gum! And yes, baby teeth are sharp!

So, from what I can gleam online, we can expect the next teeth to appear in a few weeks time. Teething hurts though. To calm him down, we used the ever useful Calpol as well as two homeopathic products: Nelsons Teetha and Gumeze.

Despite the reservations I might have about homeopathic remedies I can recommend Teetha granules. A screaming crying baby transforms into a happy smiling baby within seconds. The packaging declares that, “each 300mg sachet contains 6c homeopathic potency of Chamomilla”. It also contains Xylitol, lactose and starch. 24 sachets cost €7.25. I’m not sure how that compares to the price of Bonjela and other products.

Gumeze is a liquid gel with a long list of homeopathic ingredients, including Chamomilla. It works, but I feel that Teetha works better.

Further reading for new parents:

  1. Teething Tots
  2. Developmental milestones: Teething

JFK visited Cork in 1963

John F. Kennedy, visited my home town Cork, during his trip to Ireland in 1963. This is a photo that popped up on the “Cork” tag Flickr stream last night and I had to blog it.

Different times, he’s completely exposed to the crowd. Patrick Street is thronged with people. They’re practically hanging out the windows trying to catch a glimpse of him. If anyone wanted to take a pot-shot at him it would have been simple to do so but at the time the country was swept up in a tide of pride and joy. “Kennedy had near-legendary status in Ireland, as the first person of Irish heritage to have a position of world power.”
This was only a few months before his assassination in Dallas later that year in November. The Wikipedia page on him has a paragraph dedicated to the visit, and links to this article from the BBC archives.

Image hosted at Flickr.

This town needs an enema

“This town needs an anema”. That was a line from last week’s “A town called Eureka” and I knew I recognised it. It was a line in the original Batman movie! I couldn’t find a clip of this scene, but here’s the first level of Batman the Movie on the Commodore 64!

How We Met

A short movie shot on the human body. Cool idea and nice story. Here’s the “making of” video.

  • A long list of WordPress MU plugins.
  • I’m sure not everyone knows about the recent activity page on Flickr. Check it out and subscribe to the feed to track comments to your stream.
  • So, you’re comfortable with the web, you can find your way around. Take it for granted? Of course you do. George Barr explains the significance of the web for photographers.
  • The Expressive Moment in Street Photography – this is so hard to accomplish. Many of my street shots lack that expressive moment. Must try harder.
  • Funny photography videos. Love that myspace one!
  • Elly and Tom both ask if Blognation is in meltdown. Seems that wages have not been paid in some time. I see Conor’s last post was yesterday. Hope things get sorted out.
  • Oh great! Another story to reinforce the stereotype of the drunken Irishman!
  • The Sociability plugin for WordPress displays a nice message to Digg and Stumbleupon visitors encouraging them to add a vote for your post. I haven’t looked at it yet. I wonder if it’ll work with Super Cache?

PS. Looking for a Budget 2008 calculator? Try the one at tax123.ie. Via Keith.

The end of Homeopathy

The end of homeopathy? – a very lengthy and critical article looking at the alternative medicine of homeopathy. 456 comments and counting. (via Mink Toast.)
After the birth of our son Adam, my wife was told to take Arnica C30 by nurses and doctors. After reading the post above, I searched for Arnica C30. The first result is a double blind test of homoeopathic arnica C30. The summary results aren’t encouraging,

73 patients completed the study, of whom 35 received placebo and 38 received arnica C30. The placebo group had a greater median age and the arnica group had slightly longer operations; nevertheless, no significant difference between the two groups could be demonstrated. We conclude that arnica in homoeopathic potency had no effect on postoperative recovery in the context of our study.

On to the links …

  • Christmas Spirit – lovely photo and story.
  • In the middle of November, Google changed the clickable area on Adsense adverts. Jonathan noticed a large drop in revenue, but I haven’t. Click through rate is much the same as before, although I did compensate by making the advert URLs more prominent.
  • Sometimes bosses misunderstand tech jargon, in amusing ways. Oh, don’t ask an engineer to talk to your class. He might be a bit blunt!
  • Google Analyticator is a small WordPress plugin that adds the necessary Google Analytics Javascript to your blog. It also has a neat JS function to track outbound links in Analytics. Just make sure you create two conversion goals, “/outgoing” and “/download” to do the tracking.
  • How many famous people?
  • Will the real Googlebot please stand? 208.113.160.20, you sit down. You’re a fake.
  • Jeff’s The Two Types of Programmers essay sparked such a response, he wrote a follow up. I definitely know a few 80% programmers. Many of the people I went to college with fall into that category unfortunately. No, none of them read this blog! 🙂

Ethically uncomplicated stem cells

Science is rescuing us from moral mazes says Andrew Sullivan in last weekend’s Sunday Times. He was referring to the discovery that stem cells could be made from human skin cells. Unfortunately the scientists who made the discovery had to use a cancer gene and a retro virus but this should be a big boost for this branch of research and remove a lot of the ethical questions surrounding the destruction of embryos. (Via Dangerousmeta)

  • Photography Ireland forums.
  • Cork Places on Flickr. Get to know the city and county where I live.
  • Copyright plugin for the GIMP. I’d hate to do it, but I might start watermarking my images.
  • Following on from his post on photography as a career, Paul now points at “What do you wish you’d known when you started out?” in EPUK.
  • Doomsday brings DOOM up to date with modern technology. Retro Gamer magazine features DOOM on it’s front cover. I can’t believe it was released in 1993! I remember playing deathmatch DOOM II in college, and before then trying to deathmatch against my friend Brian using a modem and calling his house. Doomsday available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. It works really well on my Macbook. I spent an enjoyable hour on it last night blasting monsters, soldiers, sergeants and commandos. I love mouse look! Watch out for those glowing fireballs! Unfortunately the pressure of supporting a GPLed product drove one of it’s developers away. The Duke Nukem guys take a much harder line:

    IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS:

    Tough luck. Do NOT contact us with bug reports at this time. Do NOT contact us if you can’t get it to build. Do NOT contact us for copies of the game. In fact, if you aren’t sending us code, don’t contact us at all.

  • Now to look over the Quake engines available.
ouch! pointer in the eye!

via when pointers attack

Really ancient maps of Cork

Google Maps offer a glimpse into the past of Cork, but to really dive into the past try Yahoo Maps.

yahoo map of cork

That building in the marked circle is the old An Post Sorting Office on Eglinton Street. It was demolished at least 2 years ago, and was probably gone long before then. Does anyone remember when? It’s now the building site of the Elysian. Google’s map shows the cleared building site from 2 years ago. Boy, am I glad I took that photo now! 🙂

Google map of Cork

My baby loves Daft Punk

My 7 month old son, Adam watched this video after breakfast and barely moved his eyes from the screen. I think he’s a Daft Punk fan. Cool.

Via Scott

Busted at work

(via AJ)

  • Stunning photo of the Eiffel Tower.
  • How to photograph a rainbow. Some of the images are a bit over saturated but still nice.
  • B&W adjustment layers and blending ideas. Photoshop specific but they’re applicable to the GIMP too. I’d love to see the GIMP support adjustment layers.
  • Scott’s legendary station wagon desert safari. Remote control drive a car into the desert and shoot it up! Slightly disturbing comment though:

    Goddammit, I miss everything cool!! Well, not everything but Goddammit I want to ridearound at breakneck speeds shooting at another car and not go to jail again.

  • Some dogs learn quickly and don’t let size intimidate them! 🙂
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