Oh dear. Dustin will be singing for Ireland at the Eurovision this year. I think we could win. Maybe.
Tag Archives: irishblogs
A right tool
Scanning Gmail’s spam folder (815 emails after 2 days) is much more entertaining when I remember that all those messages about a longer tool refer to a completely different thing in Cork.
Sort of. 9 pages of spam.
I need to scan them because Gmail catches an alarming number of legitimate email, despite all my training. Sheesh.
Sell your soul for a luxury weekend in the country
What would you do for a luxury self catering weekend in the West of Ireland? Would you sell your soul and help launch a Google bomb?
Well, the good people at Glengarrriff Lodge would like you to link to their website with the keywords “Luxury Self Catering” in the link. Do that, and link to someone else who may be interested in the weekend and you’ll be entered in a draw for a weekend at the Lodge worth up to 1175 Euro! Nice eh?
Anyway, now that my blog is squeaky clean, I couldn’t possibly consider subverting Google’s search engine. No sirree, but it looks like a gorgeous location so I decided to give it a plug anyway.
Oh, I’ll be in that part of the country in the next few weeks so I might call in and say hi!
Hellloooo to my new StumbleUpon friends!
After asking people to add me to their StumbleUpon network last November I finally logged in again and added about 20 new friends including Ellybabes as you can see from the graphic below.
StumbleUpon makes it really easy to add friends and I’m glad to see there are a few more Irish people in my network. I’m looking forward to stumbling on more Irish content and I hope you all enjoyed the sites I discovered in my trawling of the web. Thanks everyone for adding me, and sorry for taking so long to do the same!
How to use ssh as a proxy server
Using ssh as a proxy or encrypted tunnel to browse the web can sometimes be necessary:
- When you’re at a conference but need to login securely to your blog.
- When local access restrictions make life really difficult.
- If you have a server in another country and want to see what Google Adsense adverts people see in that country.
I use ssh for the third reason. I want to see what adverts people in the USA see when they look at my blog so I can filter out the low paying and MFA ads (see notspam.org for more). Unfortunately I have a head like a sieve so unless it’s in the bash history I need to go look this up every few months:
ssh -D 8080 -Nf example.com
Replace example.com with your own hostname. That short command will create a socks5 proxy at 127.0.0.1:8080. Just configure your browser to talk to that and you’re surfing again!
Here’s a few external links you might find useful.
- Matt had trouble with his socks5 dns while travelling.
- Proxy Firefox through a SSH tunnel
- I need to install Foxy Proxy to make this easier to manage.
– if only I had searched for the right terms I would have found this excellent page sooner.
(I bet that when I most need to look up this post I’ll be behind a tight firewall that won’t let me at my blog ..)
Ubuntu WiFi problems on the Dell D630 laptop
Wireless networking was always a bit patchy for me on my Dell Latitude D630 while running Ubuntu Gutsy version of Linux. It would work fine for ages and then freeze up suddenly, requiring a hard reboot to get things working (Apache would become unkillable, I guess because it was attached to the broken Wireless networking driver.) Problems always showed up when I transferred large amounts of data between Linux and my Macbook. Files copied fine for a few minutes and then the whole house of cards would collapse. Crash! Boom!
The first time I looked for a solution nothing turned up, but eventually I went searching again, and after digging into all sorts of forums and websites I found the simpe solution on the Dell Linux Wiki:
Create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ipw3945 and add:
blacklist ipw3945Add to /etc/modules:
iwl3945
Reboot after doing that and all will be fine in the world again! I haven’t had any networking issues since replacing the ipw3945 driver with the iwl3945 one!
How China Digital Times moved from MT to WordPress
Can you improve performance when moving from a statically generated site to a dynamic environment? You can if the conditions are right. In the case of CDT, publishing times were a nightmare with Movable Type. Search performance was horrible, and the comment spam problem caused such a drag on the server that we’d had to disable commenting altogether. Now, with the site fully tag-enabled, searchable and comment-able, loads are down dramatically and publishing times have dropped from 15 minutes to a few seconds.
Notes on a massive WordPress migration. Scot moved the China Digital Times site with 16,000 posts and 6,000 tags from Movable Type to WordPress and saw a huge performance increase. Nice.
Anatomy of an AIB Phishing Email
I’m well used to getting phishing emails for American or internationally known banks but this morning an email supposedly from AIB made it past Gmail’s spam filters.
AIB posted an alert a few days ago to watch out for fraudulent emails, but this one appears to be different. I’m forwarding it on to alert@aib.ie
The content of the email is a Jpeg image, and it links to a php file on http://internetbanking.aib.ie.2.3h8ax3.com/
As the rest of this post has a number of large screenshots click the link below to read the rest. You can probably ignore this if you’re not living in Ireland. 🙂
Tea and Sandwiches with Donncha
Anyone for tea? Here’s what I usually put into a sandwich:
- Cucumber
- Ham
- Coleslaw
And all contained within lightly buttered brown sliced loaf bread. Yum.
Here’s the delicious chocolate cake we had in O’Briens in Blackpool Shopping Center a few days ago. Beautiful rich chocolate cake, with a layer of chunky chocolate cream through it. You don’t think I’d stop to take a photo of it before eating, do you?
Yes, there is a reason to this post. What do you eat for lunch? If it’s all sensible and boring, pig out once in a while, it’s good for you!
PS. I got nominated in a few sections of the Irish Blog Awards. Thank you to whoever nominated me. (No, it wasn’t me!)
Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?
I bumped into Tom Raftery in Cork Airport on my way to Arizona. As luck would have it, we were both on the same flight to London, although he was going to Munich for a conference.
Unfortunately we weren’t sitting near each other on the plane but in the airport he said he spends more time in Twitter than reading blogs. That came as a surprise to me, but I’m sure it’s happening to many other busy people too.
That’s one reason I’m excited about Prologue, the new Twitter-like theme for WordPress. Automattic is already using it internally as a private discussion tool and for a group of disparate people spread all over the globe it’s a really useful tool to find out at a glance what each of us is up to.
Tom lives and breathes social media all day long. I’ll have to ping him on Twitter to read this and get some feedback from him!
I’m already thinking it might be an easy way to introduce blogging, social media and networking and Twitter to some of my non-blogging friends who slave away in offices all day long. Set up a private blog on WordPress.com, activate the Prologue Theme and invite them all on as contributors. They probably use RSS aware browsers too so keeping up to date on what’s happening should be a simple task.
Prologue is a perfect fit for WordPress MU too. You’ve already got many users who probably chat on your support forums. Let’s get our thinking caps on and create some sort of group blogs so people can converse right within the blogging environment!
Interested? Download the theme and play with it. It’s GPLed. Also, keep an eye on Joseph and Matt who will be updating the theme.
Finally, Matt describes Prologue really well:
Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.