James Galvin

Here is an idea for a variation on one of those premium phone number scams:

• Register a premium phone number, one of those super expensive ones where you set the price - €99 per minute or however high the phone company allows you to go
• Print the number onto a “How am I driving?” sticker and stick it on the back of your white van/SUV/small truck.
• Drive like a lunatic for a few days - undertaking people in the hard shoulder, driving 30mph in the fast lane, randomly slamming on the breaks, etc.
• Record all phone calls and make a compilation CD in time for Christmas

Dunphy was on form on RTE last night. Accusing the FAI of “flying kites” in the media to soften the impact of the appointment of Terry Venables as Irish football manager, Dunphy comprehensively hammered Venables and urged the public to shoot down this kite before it is too late. The 21 minute segment can be viewed by Irish residents online here. Note Bill O’Herlihy’s crafty contribution towards the end.

I’d love to work for one of the companies that thinks up ads for TV. I imagine them all sitting at a big round table deciding what kind of campaign to go with. They talk about the brand, and brainstorm a bit, trying to think of something clever but direct, debating the merits of each approach. But somewhere at the back of their minds, everyone at that table is thinking “Or… we could just use Shatner!”

And so Blizzard have played the Shatner card as part of their latest advertising campaign for World of Warcraft. [via]

Following in Shatner’s footsteps on the slippery slope of embarrassing self-parody is Mr. “Snickers: Get some Nuts!” T.

Blizzard missed out on the grand slam, because they were unable to land Chuck Norris for this campaign, allegedly because he already beat the game. Either that or he’s too busy endorsing Mike Huckabee and making ads for Mountain Dew:

I’ve mentioned Monster.com a few times since details of the big security breach first came out - when 1.6 million CV’s were swiped by hackers, leading to lots of spam and highly targeted scams. Most people didn’t pick up on the fact that this is nothing new for Monster. Because of the way their website is structured, with all the CVs up for grabs by anyone who can get a hold of an employer login, it is safe to bet that thousands of candidates every day have their private details leaked into some spammer’s database. No SQL injections or XSS required - just get access to one of the many thousands of employer accounts.

So I was surprised that Monster vowed to set things right by pledging a portion of their $80,000,000 upgrade to improving their security. I mentioned at the time that they could throw $80 billion at security upgrades, and it would still not make a difference to its users’ privacy without fundamentally changing the way the site works.

Regardless, throwing money at upgrading the security of the website should prevent any further embarrassments, right? According to The Register, attackers hijacked part of the website yesterday, using it to spread malware to the site’s visitors.

The outage affected the Monster Company Boulevard, said Exploit Prevention Labs’ Roger Thompson, who first noticed the site was inaccessible around 5 pm Monday East Coast time.

Several hours earlier, he discovered the site had been subject to an iFrame attack that was redirecting visitors to servers that hosted exploits from Neosploit, a nasty attack toolkit that competes with better-known packages such as MPack and Icepack.

This is gone beyond a joke. I’ll bet €50 that Monster will make headlines once again (for the wrong reasons) before the year is out.

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 I like. But like Alexia, I would rather see the ScienceWeek guys put their money to slightly better use. Engaging the bloggers is a good idea - it does create a positive buzz, and if 50 Irish bloggers each get ~800 unique visitors per day, then that is good value for advertising. But this is a temporary buzz that lasts a week, and at best, a few people walk away knowing a little bit more about the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with no greater appreciation for science.

To really leverage the power of the network of Irish bloggers, there are much more valuable questions that you can ask. For example, “How can we bring science teaching into the 21st Century?” or “How can we rid ourselves of the growing apathy among Irish people towards science and technology?”

Naturally, it begins in the class room. The most exciting science experiment I ever did in Ireland was dabbing a drop of iodine on a potato and watching it turn black. “WOW that means it has starch in it!”, I exclaimed. But, like the sudden cold, harsh taste of hydrochloric acid in your throat when you accidentally sip for too long on the pipette, my enthusiasm was jarred by cruel nostalgia, as I was reminded of the positive, hands-on approach to science in school in America, and all the things I learned and have never forgotten since.

Consider these experiments that I did in sixth grade in Massachusetts (just a few examples):

Ancient Egypt
“The Pyramid Pull”: studying the pyramids, we spent some time brainstorming how they got these huge 2-ton blocks up to the the sides of the pyramids. Is it really possible that they built ramps and had 20 guys dragging these things up with ropes? To prove the concept, the teacher brought in a huge wooden box, put half the class inside it while the other half, at the end of the rope, pulled the box up a 25 degree ramp. With a bit of maths, we worked out what it must have taken in Egypt.

We also built sundials and obelisks that could tell the time, and loads of other stuff.

Architecture:
“The Skyscraper Challenge”: split into small groups and build the tallest standing structure you can out of newspaper sheets rolled tightly into beams. Some people copped onto the fact that you need some triangles in there for extra strength.

Horticulture:
Dug a garden in the school courtyard, planted vegetables, watched them grow.
Figured out the conditions necessary for germination and growth by carrying out a load of concurrent experiments. e.g., I put a seed in a paper towel and it germinated.
Loads of other stuff too.

Bee-keeping:
Got a bee-hive for the class room (with a tunnel through the wall so the bees could go out into the courtyard). Fed and managed the hive, marked the queen, clipped her wings, harvested the honey.

Fish:
Got a saltwater fish tank. Figured out how to fill it. Went down to the beach for a day and caught (with our hands) ~12 species of fish and a couple of crabs and put them into the tank. Watched them fight it out among themselves for a few months. My pipefish didn’t last long.

In sixth class in Ireland, I don’t think we even did science.

I agree with Alexia, there is so much more that can be done to improve “the cold, heartless trudge through tomes of science”. I would still encourage you to get involved in the Science Week competitions. Even though they are not addressing the root cause of apathy among Irish people towards science and technology, it is a positive and entertaining theme springing up around the place, and any bit of a buzz is better than none at all.

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 glaring omission in Akismet’s functionality. It would be OK if I had 10 spam comments a day, but with hundreds of messages in the queue, I could never have time to check them all.

I used to filter e-mail with SpamAssassin. Any mail with a “spam score” of between 5 and 8 (higher probability of being spam) was held for moderation, and anything above 8 was just automatically deleted. A score of 5.01 means there’s a (relatively) good chance that the email is legit, while a score of 7.9 is almost certainly spam. Sorting by spam score meant I could quickly and easily identify false positives, and 90% of them would have a score of 5.x.

Matt et al are very secretive about the way Akismet operates behind the scenes, but if there is some fundamental reason why future releases won’t have this functionality, then I would see that as a fatal flaw. I might try out Defensio this week. If their spam filtering can get anywhere close to Akismet’s accuracy, then the ability to easily find false positives will make all the difference.

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 something that is usually completely overlooked. They’ve got an intriguing debate scheduled about “Casual vs. Serious Games” (a credible topic). Wish I could be there - anyone who is going should definitely not miss the start-up competition. I’ve used LouderVoice on a few occasions to write structured reviews (via hResume, the mystical, magical microformat), and despite my very half-hearted efforts, I’ve seen a steady stream of traffic to this site as a result. Good luck!

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 companies got wiped off the face of the earth.

It was embarrassing for me, since I just handed over a new web app to the customer for testing, which relied on a web service running on one of my DFW servers.

I signed up with Rackspace a couple of months ago, and was impressed by the confidence with which they spoke of their 100% guaranteed uptime. “Not 99.99999999999?” I asked. 100%, they assured me.

Down for three hours? That puts my uptime to date at roughly at 99.791%. Sorry Rackspace, but my Nintendo Wii has a better uptime than that. If you want to continue touting your “fanatical support”, you will have to do better.

And as for the apology:

We cannot promise that hardware won’t break, that software won’t fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility. If you are a Rackspace customer and don’t think we’ve lived up to this promise at anytime during the outage, please let your Account Manager know.

You forfeit the right to this excuse when you promised 100% uptime. Why do you think everyone else offers a bunch of 9’s? If it hadn’t been a lorry crashing into some transformer, it would have been a giant meteorite. This is God’s way of telling you to listen to your sys admin, and not your marketing guy.

p.s., I will accept a free iPod touch as a gesture of good will.

Update: Got the phone call from Rackspace ~1 hour after writing this. That is fanatical support, since whoever read this post had to find out who I was and get in contact with my account manager in that time. I’ll just clarify that, having been there myself in the past as a sys admin, and also working for a broadband provider, I know full well that these things happen. I am aware that the real test is the response when something like this does happen, and it looks like Rackspace did well to get everything sorted quickly. My issue is with the (now mathematically impossible) 100% uptime claim, which no right-minded service provider should give, and Rackspace now no longer have the right to maintain.

p.p.s., the iPod touch was just a joke

The other day I was driving through Vicarstown (outside Tower in Cork) and I nearly ran over a stoat (in broad daylight). I hadn’t seen one of these in over 15 years - have come across plenty of hedgehogs and badgers in that time, and the occasional mink and otter, but no stoats.

And believe it or not, I saw another one this evening. Bizarre coincidence, or has some tragedy befallen the Irish stoat population - driven by despair beneath the wheels of the nearest Mitsubishi Colt*?