Tag Archives: irishblogs

How to accidentally erase your ad filter

When you’re adding sites to the Google Adsense “Competitive Ad Filter” please do not do what I just did.

As my filter has the maximum 200 urls I have to delete entries before adding new one, but I had deleted a couple of urls so I thought I’d have space for just one more slightly-dodgy low paying ad site. Unfortunately I didn’t and the familiar “Too many lines” error showed.

Normally I would search out another url to delete but I wanted to be done with it and not bother with my last change so I hit return on the url, this url, https://www.google.com/adsense/filter-save.do – thinking that it would reload the old list. It certainly did. It brought me back to day 1 when I had no entries in the filter! You know that sinking feeling? That moment when something has gone really wrong? That was me a few minutes ago.

Thankfully hitting BACK on my browser and confirming the POST operation restored the list and I quickly removed the offending LCPC site. Phew.

Someone should tell Google, this would be a rather quick and easy way for a malicious someone to mess with a person’s filter. They should check for the existance of some POST variables before overwriting the filter. It’s a bug!

Simply because a blog post isn’t a blog post without a link, here’s where I talk about my competitive ad filter. MFA and LCPC sites galore. The MFA sites listed in this post finally made it into the ad filter this morning.

Classic Irish Rock from Horslips

St. Patrick’s Day has arrived and it’s beautiful outside. It’s perfect weather for landscape photography – plenty of light and an interesting sky with fluffy clouds floating on-high. I’ll be on the streets of Cork photographing the crowds and the parade so look out for me if you’re around!

Just because of the day that’s in it, and because I was dancing around the kitchen with Oscar this morning to this song, here’s Horslips playing “An Dearg Doom”.
Video of the aforementioned dancing will not be making it’s way onto the Internet any time soon…

Just back from town now. We met Linda and went to Luigi Malones for lunch, hoping to catch the last bit of the parade afterwards, but as we reached Patrick’s Street at 2pm the crowd started to disperse! The parade lasted barely an hour! Conor saw the whole thing and he said we didn’t miss much. I got some great shots of the crowd and as everyone was in good mood many people posed and acted a little crazy for the camera.

A few minutes later we met Conor and Sylvia, headed to the farmers market where Linda and I took long exposure shots of the carosel and we eventually ended up in a nearby cafe for further refreshment.

Looks like some photos of the parade are showing up on Flickr already. I saw an insane number of people with digital SLRs. Folks, why aren’t you all blogging?

I think Linda might have found a new passion in street photography too. Can’t wait to see her shots!

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More photos: Red Mum took some excellent shots of the parade in Dublin. Monasette did the same in Galway. Gallery to follow! Flickr has lots to offer today! Anyone else I can link to? Leave a comment!

Everyone’s very quiet! No more photos? I have a few photos on my photoblog, and I’ll be posting some more over the next week.

St. Patrick's Day 2007

Tomorrow is the feast day of the patron saint of Ireland, St. Patrick. Unfortunately it seems that St. Patrick was never canonised officially by a Pope, but that’s ok because according to Wikipedia, “for most of Christianity’s first thousand years, canonisations were done on the diocesan or regional level.” We’ll not give up our Saint without a fight! (via)

In honour of the day parades will be held in all the cities and many of the towns of Ireland. I’ll be in Cork tomorrow to capture a flavour of the day and photos will appear soon after on In Photos.

Some links to whet your appetite for tomorrow:

  • I can’t believe the last time I posted St Patrick’s Day photos was 2004! I did shoot the St. Patrick’s Festival which was on during and after the parade last year. That was great fun with street entertainers and food stalls. Yum!
  • Details about the Cork Parade can be found on the Cork Festival website. The parade starts at 1pm from the end of the South Mall and heads up towards Mc Curtain Street. The usual route of the parade if memory serves.
  • The Dublin festival lives at stpatricksfestival.ie and if the radio adverts I’ve heard are anything to go it’ll be a great day!
  • Does your town or city have a parade website? Leave a comment and I’ll link it here!

Blogorrah lists five reasons it’s great to be Irish which will either bring a smile to your face or confusion. Frawley’s? Never heard of it! I love reason two however!

You don’t have to resign from office for being corrupt – just pretend you’re really sorry for about half an hour. Or better still – ignore it and it’ll go away!

That mouse presses all the right buttons

Having just installed Ubuntu Edgy on a squeaky clean partition I’m still migrating some of my settings and programmes from my last Ubuntu install. Why did I reinstall when an upgrade from Dapper already went well? Unfortunately in the course of configuring my Wacom graphics tablet I broke my sound and for the life of me I could not remember how to fix it. That and I was running out of space and there was a nice 28GB NTFS partition doing nothing but taking up space..

Your mouse is probably luckier than some but if some of the buttons on it don’t work then look for the following line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
and change it to this:
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"

I hate middle mouse button clicking on a scroll wheel and this Microsoft mouse is worse than others. The side button works much better for me! Finally, I can press the right button again! 🙂

Oh and good luck if you have a widescreen monitor. My Dell 2405 LCD barfed every time I tried the graphical install. I had to look for the “alternate” cd and do a text install, and then install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and add a suitable modeline to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I haven’t done that since I don’t know how long ago. Definitely in the last century.

Bite size entertainment

It’s rather sad that I prefer to click on the Dilbert cartoon feed rather than the one for the author’s site in my news aggregator.

After being offline for most of last week due to a dodgy internet connection I’m still playing catch up and trying to fill in the rest of my life too. I think we need cranial networking now so we can scan and read blogs in a timely manner. Or a world wide moritorium on blogging for a few days perhaps.

Blogging by Twitter anyone? If all the posts in my Bloglines account were a max of 140 characters I’d have them read in no time at all! Oops, I’ve gone over my allo

My home from space

If I were in the house buying market it just got a little easier to spy on the neighbours of your possible new home. My home.ie added a satellite mapping service to their site which allows one to zoom in closer than other online maps, although I don’t think you’ll be watching anyone skinny-dipping..

It’s not quite as smooth as Google or Yahoo’s offering. You have to click the direction arrows instead of dragging the map but it’s not bad for scouting around.

Finally, my map on Useamap links to a spot in Blarney a few hundred meters down the road from where I now sit. They offer driving directions and distances just by clicking on your destination on the map. It’s not perfect. It likes the main road to Cork a little too much, but I guess if you didn’t know an area it’s probably better to stay off the side roads eh?

myhome-ie-map.jpg

MyHome.ie

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Google Maps

Craic agus ceol ar an gCeadaoin

My brother Donal who I mentioned a few days ago is going to Lesotho in mid-April to help build a school and raise funds for the ISPCC here in Ireland.

As part of his fund raising effort there will be a charity trad gig on Wednesday night, that’s tomorrow night! Sounds like a great line up and I’m going to try get in for an hour or so. Watch out for the guy in the WordPress tshirt with the camera. That’ll be me!

Charity gig

Performers on the night include The Fuchsia Band, back from their travels and who always put on an energetic and entertaining show; Cork singer Ger Wolfe singing some of his distinctively Cork ballads; Dan O’Callaghan, a piper from Cork who has travelled around the world playing music; Tommie Cunniffe on accordion, who is currently recording his debut album; and, last but not least, John Mitchell on flute accompanying Donal O Caoimh on the uilleann pipes.

Update! The gig was great. A huge crowd gathered to watch and listen and we even had a few dancers! I hope to post some photos tomorrow if I find time to work on them tonight.

Who wins the iPod?

When I originally mentioned Paul Walsh’s viral competition to win an iPod I thought he would pick out the winner, but no. He makes me do the dirty deed.

I haven’t announced a winner yet, mainly because my phone line is all crackly and my DSL dies within 10 minutes of going online and then doesn’t come back for hours, but also because it’s difficult to pick one winner:

  • Do I pick someone out at random? That’s the fairest way for all involved.
  • If I pick a winner at random that doesn’t reward people who frequently comment on my blog. Out of all the comments received only three “regulars” participated.
  • My brother commented, and Frank, a friend from school commented. Do I stand accused of favouritism by rewarding one of them?

In the end it was today’s Dilbert cartoon that swung it. My brother Donal gets the iPod. He’s a music nut as you can guess from all the concert photos on his blog, but also a keen musician too. He was best man at my wedding and there was no job too big or small that he couldn’t do to make preparations for that day easier. Thanks Donal and thank you all for participating!

I’m just glad the rest of my family didn’t leave comments or I’d be in a whole heap of trouble picking the winner…

Yet another twit signs up

Yes, I’m on Twitter now. No. I’m not a pregnant goldfish but the first thing I like about Twitter is their support for RSS. Conor’s twitter popped up in my meta search a few minutes after he twittered.

twitter+flickr+webcam+stockpix=flussgeist via Topgold on Twitter. Pretty cool. Listen to that Trocaire Ad banned on Today FM and other non-RTE radio stations.

At the mercy of Eircom

Connectivity has been very flaky for the last few hours as my phoneline has degenerated into crackle hell. Making it worse is the fact that I dared move from the incumbant telco, Eircom, and became a customer of UTV Talk some time back.

UTV took my complaint after I waited for a customer representative for only a few moments. They checked my line and it flagged red so they passed on the complaint to Eircom to fix the line. That nagging feeling that I would be offline for a long time only got worse..

About an hour later someone did ring the house phone, and through the crackles and interference I think I was told an engineer would be out to check the line. Rejoice!

I’m still waiting, hours later. A call to 1901 proved fruitless – the automated voice said my line wasn’t an Eircom one so he couldn’t do anything else and shouting “agent” at the phone put me on hold waiting. I put my mobile on speaker and waited about 10 minutes before hanging up. Aren’t monopolies great?

I hope an engineer calls tomorrow.

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Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.