You know that feeling? The one where you’ve been sitting in an airplane for the past 8 hours and you’re feeling like crap and you can’t wait to get out of a narrow uncomfortable seat in the dark enclosing shell. Yeah, that one. Then you see place names you recognise on the map in front of you and you realise you’re almost home. Ah bliss.
Music
Dune vs Queen: Who Wants to Live Forever
The first time I heard this Dune cover of Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever” I thought, “Oh Wow! That’s good!” Then, 30 seconds into the song I thought, “Wait a second. This is actually fairly boring. The voice that sounded nice at the start really sounds weak, there’s no feeling, it goes nowhere and the video is rubbish.” Here’s the original song by Queen. Turn the volume up. It’ll send a shiver down your spine and you’ll realise how good Freddie’s voice was. Amazing stuff.
WordPress
How to successfully spam blogs (and how to fight back)
What you’re about to learn isn’t anything new. It’s not particularly earth shattering either, but a lot of people don’t know it. NOFOLLOW DOES NOT WORK (properly) You may have noticed legitimate looking comments on your blog from people with suspect names. Usually the name will be a brand name, service or literally anything that sells. The commenter’s website is obviously related to that business. Why do they bother using special keywords when Google is supposed to not follow those links? Do they know something you don’t? Yup. They know that keywords, even on nofollowed links, matter. I’d provide reference […]
In the news , Ireland , Music , When-in-Ireland
Irelande Douze Pointe
Oh dear. Dustin will be singing for Ireland at the Eurovision this year. I think we could win. Maybe.
Ireland , When-in-Ireland
A right tool
Scanning Gmail’s spam folder (815 emails after 2 days) is much more entertaining when I remember that all those messages about a longer tool refer to a completely different thing in Cork. Sort of. 9 pages of spam. I need to scan them because Gmail catches an alarming number of legitimate email, despite all my training. Sheesh.
Ireland , Web , When-in-Ireland
Sell your soul for a luxury weekend in the country
What would you do for a luxury self catering weekend in the West of Ireland? Would you sell your soul and help launch a Google bomb? Well, the good people at Glengarrriff Lodge would like you to link to their website with the keywords “Luxury Self Catering” in the link. Do that, and link to someone else who may be interested in the weekend and you’ll be entered in a draw for a weekend at the Lodge worth up to 1175 Euro! Nice eh? Anyway, now that my blog is squeaky clean, I couldn’t possibly consider subverting Google’s search engine. […]
Web
Hellloooo to my new StumbleUpon friends!
After asking people to add me to their StumbleUpon network last November I finally logged in again and added about 20 new friends including Ellybabes as you can see from the graphic below. StumbleUpon makes it really easy to add friends and I’m glad to see there are a few more Irish people in my network. I’m looking forward to stumbling on more Irish content and I hope you all enjoyed the sites I discovered in my trawling of the web. Thanks everyone for adding me, and sorry for taking so long to do the same!
Web
How to use ssh as a proxy server
Using ssh as a proxy or encrypted tunnel to browse the web can sometimes be necessary: When you’re at a conference but need to login securely to your blog. When local access restrictions make life really difficult. If you have a server in another country and want to see what Google Adsense adverts people see in that country. I use ssh for the third reason. I want to see what adverts people in the USA see when they look at my blog so I can filter out the low paying and MFA ads (see notspam.org for more). Unfortunately I have […]
Linux
How to umount when the device is busy
It happens all the time doesn’t it? You need to unmount a CD or you want to pack away the external drive but when you try to umount it you get the dreaded “device is busy” message. Wouldn’t it be great if Linux actually told you what was keeping the drive busy? Here we are in 2008, I’m using Ubuntu Gutsy, and that message hasn’t changed in all the years I’ve used Linux. # umount /media/disk/ umount: /media/disk: device is busy umount: /media/disk: device is busy First thing you’ll do will probably be to close down all your terminals and […]
Linux
Ubuntu WiFi problems on the Dell D630 laptop
Wireless networking was always a bit patchy for me on my Dell Latitude D630 while running Ubuntu Gutsy version of Linux. It would work fine for ages and then freeze up suddenly, requiring a hard reboot to get things working (Apache would become unkillable, I guess because it was attached to the broken Wireless networking driver.) Problems always showed up when I transferred large amounts of data between Linux and my Macbook. Files copied fine for a few minutes and then the whole house of cards would collapse. Crash! Boom! The first time I looked for a solution nothing turned […]