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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Science Week's Carrot-Dangling does not Address "Root" Problems (I swear that was unintentional)

Alexia has declared her disappointment in Science Week‘s carrot-dangling approach to spread awareness of science by encouraging Irish bloggers to write about inventions. Let me just preface this by saying: I like carrots. I would like to win a free Nintendo Wii, I am just a bit too lazy to think of an invention that [...]

Akismet or Defensio?

Apologies to anyone who’s comment hasn’t made it onto this site in recent months. I’ve spotted a few false positives in my Akismet spam list lately, which makes me wonder how many I’ve missed in the past (because I usually just ‘delete all’). The inability to sort by “spamminess”, as Techcrunch puts it, is a [...]

LouderVoice at LeWeb3

Congrats to Conor and LouderVoice on making the final list of 30 competitors for the 2007 LeWeb3 Start-up Competition. Looks like it could be a great conference too, some really interesting sessions. It is nice to see the organisers taking heed of the importance of gaming in the future of the internet – this is [...]

Rackspace Outage

I was pretty surprised when I saw the lights go off on my Rackspace servers in the DFW data center, in Dallas. The outage was covered by Laughing Squid, and made it onto a lot of big tech news sites such as TechCrunch, GigaOm, Valleywag, and O’Reilly Radar. 37 Signals and other well known web [...]

Back from Berlin Web 2.0 Expo

No matter how hard I try to describe Berlin, only one word comes to mind – it is very very “German”. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what I love about the place. Just like Weisswurst and pretzels, the city is numbingly bland on first impressions, until you discover the sachet of honey mustard. The wide [...]

More on Shelfari's Spamming

I’m seeing some referrals from this LiveJournal post by a member of the team behind Librarything regarding Shelfari’s unethical spamming strategy. When I wrote about Shelfari’s “confusing and deceptive” sign-up process last week, I did consider at the time that I was over-reacting, but now I see what a widespread problem Shelfari has caused. The [...]

Mass Invitation Spam Becoming the Default

Who decided that it was OK to send a spammy mass-invitation to everyone in your addressbook by default? Allowing some web app to access my private email account is an act of trust, and it is being abused by every site that tries to dupe me into spamming my contacts. Anyone who is thinking “it’s [...]

Mashup Camp in Dublin & Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin

I’ve signed up for Mashup Camp, 11-12 November in Dublin. At first I couldn’t believe that this was a tech conference, because the website was so bad. I have no problem with the minimalist style of websites preferred by university professors and the like, but you’d never expect to see anything like this anywhere near [...]

Kanagawa Theme

I changed the theme a few times over the past couple of weeks. Never realised that the last one I had actually didn’t work in Internet Explorer, which probably explains why my site traffic has plummeted. I was alerted to the fact that something was wrong when I stopped getting my usual €0.05 per day [...]

Back from London & Future of Web Apps

Was over in London for the FOWA. I’ve been to London a few times in the past couple of years, but still can’t get over what an insanely expensive city that is. Breakfast in the hotel, for a basic fry: £21! That’s €30 or $43. Future of Web Apps conference was on in the Docklands, [...]