Web – Page 5 – Something Odd!

Who wins Irish Linkbaiter of the Year?

A number of Irish blogs and sites attracted a great many links and attention over the past 12 months but I think I can safely say that the Irish Blog Awards deserves the much coveted “Irish Linkbaiter of the Year Award”. If Damien didn’t delete his own blog from nominations he’d certainly be up for a gong or two!

Not to be left out, I’ve linked to the Awards site too, and I noticed that I’ve been nominated in three categories:

This blog is nominated in the best technology blog category.
I’m nominated in the “Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere” category
Finally, In Photos has been nominated in the best photoblog category.

I voted a few days back and I remember nominating In Photos (hey, why leave things to chance?), but thanks to whoever nominated me in the other categories. Now all that remains is for everyone to vote for me! Go on, you know you want to!

I won’t make it to the awards ceremony this year either but Ryan will be on hand to take a few photos. I look forward to seeing his brilliant black and white shots of the event. My reason for not attending are the same as last year, but thankfully, this year it’s under much happier circumstances!

The voting page doesn’t link to the participating blogs and personalities, but Jason Roe came up with the goods and has linked to them all. Fire up your browser and open them tabs! Ah yes, the Red Cardinal has done the same.

Meanwhile, in typical Rebel Cork style, the Gamma Goblin is holding his own alternative blog awards where, “I’m gonna have my own awards and give ye all nothin! I’m gonna print up flyer’s and stuff, and have cake, and pop… and then maybe a raffle. None of you cretins will get any of the tickets, I’ll keep all the tickets, that way I will definitely win the spot prize’s, which will consist of, a collection of items, and a pile of things.” Go on GG, blow your own bugle, you’ll enjoy it!

We are live from BarCamp South East!

Here I am blogging away at BarCamp South East. It’s been a great day so far. My talk was scheduled for 10:50am which was a relief to get out of the way. Feedback has been positive too and horrors of horrors, I actually enjoyed the talk! Video and podcasts will be online eventually and I’ll update this post when they’re available. Elly left Bernie’s dictaphone on the seat next to me, Joe and Conor had video cameras so I’m sure you’ll get to hear or watch me talk about WordPress one way or another if you’re interested!

Thank you all for the comments on yesterday’s post. I’m hopeful that things will return to normal sooner or later on inphotos.org!

Now, I’m off to look around and mingle with the rest of the attendees!

Just spotted on Lifehacker, is How to manage kids in the home office, a topic brushed upon in my talk.

I’m sitting in the Drupal talk now by Alan Burke and Stephane Corlosquet on the laptop. John Handelaar is showing off his voter site written in Drupal. It’s a great presentation on the power of Drupal and it’s plugins.

Ken McGuire has a review of the day, and apart from everything else, and it was great to talk to Justin Mason finally.

Great day. I think everyone’s looking forward to the next one in May!

Conor O’Neill has posted videos of my talk on his blog. I could embed them here, but he went to all the trouble of uploading them, so go visit his blog and check them out. There are bits there about scaling WPMU by hashing blog_ids and partitioning databases, as well as how to get past the 32,000 file limit of ext2/ext3 in the blogs.dir files directory. Also, if you work from home I discuss my experiences doing the same, and communicating within a virtual company.

Bernie has posted the first podcast of my talk. He’s posting the second half tomorrow about working from home and in a virtual company.

The second part of Bernie’s podcast is online today! In this part I talk about working from home and balancing work and home life. Should be of interest to everyone working from home!

Spurned by Google, ignored by all

Something strange happened on Monday to my photoblog, In Photos.org. It disappeared off Google’s radar and traffic has dropped like a stone since.

Continue reading “Spurned by Google, ignored by all”

Is RSA encryption broken?

First spotted on the ILUG mailing list, it appears that a young 16 year old student has cracked the RSA encryption system and won 1st prize at the BT Young Scientist Competition 2007.

If it’s true then Internet commerce could be in for a rough time, but some previous winners have proven to be less than remarkable when seen against the cold light of day. This comment from the winner, Abdusalam Abubakar, seems to indicate that the method used might not be that effective either. Check out this ILUG thread for further discussion. Can it be true he wrote it in Visual Basic?

“It was great, unbelievable. I didn’t think I was going to win anything. I didn’t want to be optimistic,” he told The Irish Times last night. Abdusalam, whose name translates into “man of peace”, based his initial work on partially successful attacks on the world’s most widely-used encryption system, RSA, mounted by two mathematicians. He decided to take the best aspects of both and generalise a new approach, which he believes has the potential to tackle at least some less complex coding systems.

The strangest invoice ever

Just moments ago I received the following in an email. Searching for the companies mentioned doesn’t return anything useful or suspicious so I thought I’d post it here in case anyone else got it too.

**Electronic Invoice** Date: January 5, 2007

To: From:

Massimo Ferranti AllWebCo

Delfo Italiana Srl 180 Juniper Avenue

Via Varese 9 Satsuma, AL 36572

Muggio, MI 20053 Italy

Item Description Rate Amount
———————————————————————–
Annual Hosting denav.com $599.40/year $599.40
————————————————————————
Tax (0%) 0.00
– Balance Due when rendered – Total $599.40

Total Paid $599.40
Balance Due $ 0.00

********************************************
AllWebCo
To change the credit card we bill for your account:
https://plus40.safe-order.net/allwebco/cc_change.shtml
–=============–
To pay through PayPal:
http://allwebco.com/paypal-payment.htm
–=============–
To pay by electronic check, please use the following secure url:
http://www.allwebco.com/icheckpay.shtml
–=============–
Please make any checks payable to AllWebCo, and mail to:
AllWebCo
180 Juniper Ave.
Satsuma, AL. 36572
–=============–
If you have any questions regarding your billing, please
email Billing@AllWebCo.com

********************************************

Moments later I received a thank you email in response to payment of the invoice. The mind boggles.

Hi,

Thank you!

We have received your new billing information and have renewed the annual
hosting for denav.com.

Total cost $599.40.

Have a wonderful day,

Kendra
AllWebCo

Irish Blog Awards on March 3rd

The second Irish Blog Awards will take place on the 3rd of March in Dublin. Damien wants to know if you’re going so leave a comment on his post if you’re interested. I have yet to make up my mind but there’s already a number of comments left and it will probably be even bigger than last year!

If your company is looking for exposure in the blogging community, there are a number of sponsorship slots still left to fill. More details on the page linked above.

Is my competitive ad filter broken?

I have noticed adverts from a particular domain listed in my Adsense competitive ads filter are still appearing. I understand it might take several hours for changes to the filter to become active, but 4 days?

creativeinterview.com has been on my list since the 22nd of December but I still saw it appear on the Love Messages post on my photoblog.

Google, is something broken?

Update! It appears I’m not the only one with this problem.

It works again!

Bah, it happened again on 2006-12-30. An advert for 1helpon.info/filmxfilm appeared on my site despite 1helpon.info being in my competitive ad filter for ages. Grrr.

Nothing left to read

My aggregator is empty. Things are quiet on the Internet and I’ve finally clicked and scanned through every one of the 230+ blogs in my Bloglines account.

But no, that’s not true. I opened The Dilbert Blog in a new tab for further reading because Scott Adams always seems to have something that will catch my attention and imagination.

That’s the dilemma I face. Many blogs have only one or two posts before I get to read them. Usually I can scan through them quickly. On an (almost?) daily basis Scott writes long lengthy essays on everything from free will, to religion, to the war in Iraq and to hypnotism that I find irresistible so I always skip “The Dilbert Blog” because I know I’ll be sucked in and spend the next several minutes reading and wanting to blog about at least one of his articles. Scott’s posts are gone once I click on another blog, but the rest of them are crying out for attention too! What is one to do?
I put the Online Photographer in that category as well.

A good blog, like a good book, is something you can get lost in and forget yourself in. It tickles your brain cells and gets you thinking. What blogs do you put off reading until you have quality time to really enjoy them? What are the blogs you know you can’t read by skimming over them?

Linkbaiter of the year 2006

Funnily enough, I bought an issue of Time magazine today in which someone is complaining about the white covers of recent issues and expressing the hope that the person of the year cover would have a little more impact.

Little did they know that Time would become linkbaiter of the year by naming everyone on the Internet as person of the year for 2006! More on Techmeme, Copyblogger and lots of others.

Time still has a white cover however!

Moved home last night

This blog moved home that is, I’m still tucked up in Blarney!

I moved to a slightly more beefy linode 200 VPS at linode.com and thanks to Michele at Blacknight the dns changeover took place quietly and unobtrusively last night around 1am. Hopefully you’ll see a slight improvement in page download speed which should improve over the next few days as I tweak settings and give MySQL more memory.