Damien Mulley

Looking at the Technorati Top 100, Donncha comes in at No. 46. Well done Donncha. Hopefully we’ll see more Irish Bloggers gain a foothold in the top 50 soon.

WaveHunt

Citywide Wireless Cat and Mouse Game to be held in Dublin

WaveHunt is a high-tech treasure hunt using a moving wireless computer network, with a first prize of two hundred euro!

Claiming a first for Ireland, this new wireless network tracking competition will be witnessed in Dublin City on Saturday, March 5th. Inspired by a similar event in Las Vegas, WaveHunt is a fun event for Ireland’s technical community that will test their network and direction finding skills.

A cross between orienteering and a manhunt, entrants will be armed only with a laptop, which will serve as a compass enabling them to follow the person carrying a wireless access point. Once entrants are close enough, they will receive a series of clues leading to the identity of the carrier. The entrant with the fastest time in registering the identity of the carrier wins the first prize.

RedBrick committee member Charlie Von Metzradt, organiser of this game commented, “We’re hoping to get as many people as possible to come out and play this game. It tests an individuals with and fitness while incorporating modern technology in the shape of a PDA/laptop and wireless card.”

Kindly sponsored by Esat BT, WaveHunt is being run by RedBrick (DCU’s Networking Society) as part of Tech Week in DCU which has various groups and societies running events and talks that are IT related. WaveHunt is adding a physical dimension to these events. Individuals and teams, including companies are all encouraged to the partake in this, its inaugural year.

Brief Description : Unsolicited Emails – requesting further information
Comments :

Mr Mulley

I am writing to acknowledge receipt of your letter dated 15/02/05 on the
1/03/05.

Before I can proceed with the matter any further I require the following
details:

– A declaration that you have not consented to receiving such
communications.
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(if any)
– A statement that you wish to make a formal complaint.
– A statement that you will be willing to give evidence in Court relating
to the complaint.
– A statement that you will be willing to give a sworn statement, if
requested.

Awaiting your response.

This place sucks. Mixing Justice League with Office Space.

Cool DJ

Thrift Deluxe – Make your own clothes and household ornaments.

GQ on Google – Journey to the (Revoltionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google.

The 48 Laws of Power

Banksy takes on Brighton – Two coppers snogging.

Overlinked English Rugby Joke

United Nations definition of ‘family’:
“The family is technically defined as ‘any combination of two or more persons who are bound together by ties of mutual consent, birth and/or adoption or placement and who, together, assume responsibility for, inter alia, the care and maintenance of group members, the addition of new members through procreation or adoption, the socialization of children and the social control of members.’ “

BlogTorrent – BitTorrent and Blogs Ideal for fan sites who want to host content but don’t want to get hammered by downloaders.

Spellchecker for FireFox

The Game
To know The Game is to play the game. One can never stop playing.

Feb 15th 2005 – Delivering a keynote address at the RSA Conference in San Francisco today, Bill Gates announced the next version of Internet Explorer. Version 7’s main feature appears to be improved security adding to an already ongoing drive to improve the overall security of all MS products. Not much else was disclosed by Gates about this except that a beta will be out this summer.

Speaking on the Internet Explorer blog Dean Hachamovitch stated “This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software.” One of the main negating factors about IE of late has been the plague of phishing attacks and browser hijackings due to malicious software. MS seems to be finally addressing this issue but in the time it’s taken the monolithical organisation to take action, other browsers like FireFox have been converting a good deal of Internet Explorer users.

While some FireFox supporters may be worried over this announcement, it should be taken as an endorsement to the power of FireFox and it’s merry band of developers. Redmond must be worried about the massive uptake of firefox and industry recognition of it’s security features.

Gates also spoke at the RSA event about Microsoft’s Antispyware tool and it’s latest acquisition of Sybari Software Inc., which provides solutions to help protect messaging and collaboration servers from malicious software. Gates stated that MS intends to integrate the Sybari products with the GeCAD technology acquired in 2003 and create a “Microsoft Engine” for virus and malware scanning.

According to Bruce Schneier MS has also been working on a security scanning application that can detect root kits, trojans, key loggers and other malicious software. The application known as Ghostbuster is lauded by Schneier, one of the world’s best security experts, though he laments that it might remain a research only project. MS is spending 1/3 ($2bn) of it’s research budget on security at the moment and these latest announcements are the fruits of it’s endevaours but it still has a long way to go before it can sell itself as being a vendor of secure products.

Notes:
Gates’ Keynote
Internet Explorer Blog
Schneier on Ghostbuster

Strider GhostBuster webpage

A site that daily has something posted on it that makes you go “Jesus yeah, that makes so much sense”. Hugh says “Know diddly-squat about tailoring? Then you’re more likely to pay that extra $300 for that Armani, less likely to save $600 from going with the old man in Chinatown. “ Very true and now the net is changing that and at a rapid pace as Hugh reminds us with great examples almost daily. With book reviews and the likes on Amazon and comparison shopping sites powered by individuals and not marketing companies, old style marketing is dead on arrival.

Best thing about the net is you can’t get away with the shite you’d get away with in the non-digital world. Fucked over by a company ? stick it in your blog and Google has a record of it for life, chances are you link up with others who have experienced the same. Now you are some mini-activist group, all without expending many resources. Certainly makes the playing pitch a bit more equal. The Corporate voice and an individual voice are a lot more equal online.

Like every voice had the ability to be heard online, so does every taste. With the long tail idea it means even the most obscure books and cds can be made available and still be worth selling.

Cory Doctorow talking about copyright. Not watched it yet but will when I have time. So, yeah I might never see it.

Bright Eyes. You instantly humming the Watership Down theme ? I heard lots of hype about this boy and got the latest two albums from this guy. I liked ” I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” which was very folky and had a great intro with him telling an unusual story. The other album “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn” is very electronica; I wasn’t too gone on it. I’m certainly not going to dismiss this youngfella though so might get some previous albums. I heard he excels live. The cool thing is he co-founded his record company – Saddle Creek and he’s keeping his own in the American charts against billion dollar behemoths.

McNipple – fucked up art from Casey Weldon. yes, of course I liked it.

Imeem – complex social networking tool. Hmmm, this looks really interesting but until everyone had broadband I don’t know whether it will work efficiently. From what I gather it’s like taking your MSN list and giving them access to secure places for discussion and for sharing and working on files. It’s a good idea and one we’ll see more of I would think.

Yahoo has brought out YQ Contextual Search. I still need to try this out to see what the fuss is about. I’m not too clear how it’ll work. Fair play to them though as they have a firefox plugin for it. Someone else has implemented it on their website so that if you do a web search it’ll search using the themes on your site. Er, I think.

The new Volkswagen Singing in the Rain ad. The dancer in it is a guy called David Bernal and he’s quite the talented performer. You can see his evolution from when he popped up at a show, and melted in front of the crowd blowing his competitors away. A few years later he returned with more skills and now we see him in the VW Ad. First I thought the video was edited as if he was filmed backwards, but after seeing his abilities I’m not so certain now.

The Art of pills.

Using BitTorrent in case your blog is very high-traffic. Wasn’t this one of the ideas for podcasting too ?

Getting things done with an IT twist.

Kitten inside the screen lickin at it. Very cute.

Preshrunk -T-Shirt Blog

Ralph Wiggum Valentine’s card

Talking about Google and speculating about their future plans is like gossiping about a famous celebrity, especially as Google is still one of the top brands around, No. 2 for 2004 and No. 1 for the preceeding two years. If our rife speculation proves to be even slightly right we’ll gain street cred from our peers for being able to predict what this billion dollar baby was going to do. If we’re wrong people will just think “Google is such an enygma”.

The other thing about Google speculation is the fact that whatever wild ideas we come up with, Google has the ability to implement them. Google is dream-come-true-land, they have the brain power, they have the technical infrastructure and they have the cash mountain.

So, when we all heard about Google becoming a domain registrar we were all going “Oooh ooooh, maybe they can do this, and this and this “. However, maybe it’s something simple. Last year, almost a full year to the day it became a registrar , Google was stopped by Network Solutions from taking Whois information from the NetSol servers and displaying them on Google search results. NetSol said it was worried about their customers being spammed. I’m sure the additional server load from Google didn’t help matters either. It was probably more to do with revenue though.

Displaying whois information on Google allows it to sell targeted ads from other competing domain registrars and thus bypassing NetSol who generate a lot of new customers from whois lookups. Google is all about keeping you on their property longer, the more online time you spend with them the more ad income they can generate. I wonder will Google start selling the domains themselves now, or just use their registrar license for lookups and remain selling ads ?

So maybe this is all they’re doing for now anyway, but who knows what the next level will be once they integrate whois information ?

Notes:
ZDNet News Article on Netsol stopping Google

UPDATE:
Read on another blog(which I can’t remember) an additional reason for being a registrar: knowing when domains expire so they can set the PageRank to zero. Since a lot of people are buying up expired domains with good page ranks and then polluting search results with them, wiping their rankings after expiration would improve the search quality.