Planet ILUG

Michele Neylon: Clint Eastwood Chrysler Ad Super Bowl 2012

2012-02-06T18:21:08+00:00

Chrysler’s ad from the 2012 Super Bowl stars Clint Eastwood and is pretty amazing:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Clint Eastwood Chrysler Ad Super Bowl 2012 is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Want To Win An Xbox 360 + Xbox Live Gold Membership?

2012-02-06T16:06:37+00:00

We haven’t given away any “shiny objects” in a while, so we thought it was about time that we did.

So what’s the deal?

Whether you’re an existing “fan” of ours on Facebook or not you can enter a draw to win an Xbox 360 which also comes with 1 year’s Xbox Live Gold membership.

So whether you’re a casual gamer or just want to watch Netflix via your Xbox, then this competition is the one for you.

How do you enter?

Simply head on over to our Facebook page and follow the instructions.

We’ll announce the winner in 2 weeks time.

Any questions? Let us know via the comments.

Want To Win An Xbox 360 + Xbox Live Gold Membership? is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: blow my mind

2012-02-03T15:30:43+00:00

It makes me happy that images like this can blow my mind and give me pause for thought.

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Donncha O Caoimh: Batman Forever

2012-02-03T12:45:41+00:00

Batman Forever is an amazing looking Amstrad CPC demo made last year and won first place in the CPC Demo compo at Forever 2011.

Stunning artwork, great effects but perhaps a little bit of the old school yard “my computer is better than your one” in there too. Not too fond of the Commodore 64 are they?

Also check out pushnpop.net, an Amstrad demoscene website! It even has an article on cross-platform development using Linux and Vim!

Thanks Keith for leaving a comment in my last post about this demo. Well worth watching!

In related news, the 1541-II I ordered last week arrived this morning. I’m waiting on the zoomfloppy USB interface to connect it to my laptop now. Fingers crossed it’ll work and it’s not too late for my 20 year old Commodore 64 5 1/4 discs. I tend to agree that if it wasn’t for piracy ancient games would be lost to history now ..

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Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Security Issues

2012-02-02T14:25:22+00:00

Normally we blog about pretty much all news we have – both good news and bad news.

This morning, however, we felt it prudent to take a slightly different route and emailed our clients directly before publishing anything anywhere else.

As has been covered in the media today we had a security issue which led to some customer data being breached.

The below is the official release that we have issued

Blacknight Hit By Security Breach, Reports Minimal Damage

February 1, 2012 – Carlow, Ireland – Irish registrar and hosting company Blacknight experienced a security breach on January 31, 2012.

No financial data has been compromised and the damages are minimal. The breach may however, include client contact details such as email addresses and telephone numbers. Up to 40,000 customers may have been affected.

The breach occurred on January 31, 2012 and was caused by an external compromise. Blacknight is investigating the issue further and taking appropriate steps to prevent a re-occurrence of the issue. Blacknight have already been in touch with Dataprotection.ie and Iriss.ie in regard to this matter. Blacknight will also be in contact with Gardai for a further investigation.

Michele Neylon of Blacknight explains: “We take our responsibilities to our customers very seriously and have already been in touch with the Data Protection Commissioner and have informed them of the breach. Blacknight is a secure company, however data breaches are a reality that almost every online company must face. We are taking this opportunity to increase our security even further and apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Blacknight is highly active in the online security community and work with enforcement groups to address and eradicate cyber crime. The company is passionate about educating its customers on ways to identify and prevent cybercrime and is taking measures to increase security even further.

Blacknight are recommending that users update passwords used for Blacknight.com and be mindful of any unusual online account activity.

If you have questions about the breach or require additional information, please contact support@blacknight.com

Security Issues is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: Amazing C64 and Speccy Pixel Art

2012-02-02T13:15:57+00:00

Computers have always been home to amazing artwork. The C64 has so many graphics modes that artists were spoiled for choice near the end of the machine’s life. Luckily, artists are still working on the machine and releasing stuff even now!

You can find some amazing Commodore 64 artwork on c64pixels.com and it’s even sorted by graphics format like hires, FLI and others.

There’s also a comprehensive and detailed collection at CSDB of course but it does have a gallery. You’ll have to click through to each image to view it.

Here’s a wonderful ZX Spectrum gallery. The Speccy was known for attribute clash but despite this you can create really amazing work if you know what you’re doing. Check out this Binary Zone tribute to Speccy artist David Thorpe. You will recognise the loading screens!

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Donncha O Caoimh: Chrome bug: it forgets browsing sessions!

2012-02-01T10:50:13+00:00

I just reported my first Chrome bug but it looks like it’s been known for quite some time, unfortunately.

When Chrome is configured to open the home page on startup it forgets any recently opened tabs if you don’t open those pages before you close the browser again. I’m fairly certain it used to do the right thing before and remember those pages but I’m not sure when that behaviour changed.

Unfortunately Firefox does the same thing. Go to History->Restore Previous Session and it will restore the home page in the same circumstances. I’m almost certain that browser did the right thing in a previous release.

If one were pedantic, the previous session was the single homepage tab and not the dozen tabs I had open before my browser was closed but it’s not what I expect. I’ll close my browser down when I’m doing something intensive but then click on a link in Tweetdeck, laugh at a rage comic and close the browser again before I realise my mistake.

The other thing Chrome has changed is when you have multiple windows open. It only shows the recently closed tabs for one of those windows. Open the home page again and you’ll see the “recently closed” link again where you can open tabs from other windows. You can also press ctrl-shift-t to restore closed windows.

If you hadn’t closed many pages before you shut your browser down you can also use the History page to open previously closed pages selectively. Unfortunately that won’t help if you had pages open for days that you just meant to read when you had time but never found the time. I find myself shoving pages into Read It Later just so I can get back to them at my leisure.

I’ve tried a few Chrome extensions that promised to save my browsing sessions but none worked in the way I’ve described. Does such an extension exist?

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Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Calm Reasoned Dialogue Helps

2012-02-01T02:12:36+00:00

The last week or so has been “interesting” to say the least. (Last time round it was only a couple of days. …. now it’s stretched to a week)

It’s also been incredibly busy, which is why I’m only getting round to posting this now and even now I doubt that anything I post will be that coherent, but I’ll give it a go..

Over the past week or so myself, TJ McIntyre, Simon McGarr, Ian Bergin (and many others) have probably spoken to just about every single media outlet in the country. The discussion and debate surrounding copyright, digital rights has gone from being a minor interest to something that mainstream media are paying attention to.

It’s been wonderful to see over 70 thousand people sign the petition over on StopSOPAIreland.com.

It’s been depressing to see some of the stupid and profane insults being directed at an elected representative on Twitter and elsewhere. You may not agree with Minister Sherlock, but there’s no excuse for some of the offensive insults that have been aimed at him over the last week.

So let’s look at the positives, the negatives and possible future actions. (You’ll have to excuse me if I meander!)

For a long time I’ve felt that our industry as a whole was not taking the right approach when engaging with government.

In many respects we speak a completely different language.

The IP (intellectual property) lobby, however, can be very well organised and knows how to speak the language that politicians and government understand.

They also have another major advantage – unity. Rights holders tend to speak as one voice, while those of us in the digital economy either don’t speak, or when we do we don’t know how to do so in a way that government will understand. Unity is, usually, but a distant dream.

The exception to that of course was the SOPA Blackout, or as Frugal Dad termed it in their rather excellent infographic, “The Day the Internet Stood Still”. And while the huge level of interest in a single day is laudable I’d hope that people don’t forget that SOPA was just one battle. The war is far from over. But maybe using terminology like “battle” and “war” isn’t particularly helpful. It might be a clear metaphor, but it’s confrontational. And confrontation is a big part of the problem.

The debate and discussion around copyright online is not a new one. It’s been going on for years, but it’s only in the last few months that it’s become visible enough for people outside our industry to pay attention.

SOPA and PIPA in the US might be “dead”, but you’re incredibly naive if you believe that they won’t be replaced with something else. The important thing is that whatever comes along as a replacement should be balanced enough to make both rights holders and the rest of us (even though we are a rights holder) happy, or equally unhappy.. depending on your viewpoint.

The key for those of us involved in the digital industry is to actively engage in constructive dialogue with both the rights holders and our public representatives. But it needs to be both dialogue and constructive. Shouting at each other won’t work.

Last Wednesday evening I, along with several others from the Irish Internet Association, met with Minister Sherlock in his offices. We spent about an hour discussing both our concerns and fears, as well as getting a very good feel for the Minister and his government’s views on the issues. We had a very good discussion, which I think all parties found to be educational and productive. Among the concerns we raised was that we hadn’t seen the draft text of the proposed legislation and we also didn’t feel that the safeguards that may exist had been clearly communicated. The text was produced the next day.

However organisations such as ISPAI (Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland – we’re a member) were very concerned by the wording. You can read their letter here (PDF). Around the same time Ireland’s largest online community Boards.ie joined the fray and published an open letter on their site that all visitors had to see before accessing it (kind of like an interstitial advert). And all through this time the number of signatories of the petition on the Stop SOPA Ireland site kept growing..

Yesterday evening an incredible thing happened. The Irish parliament (Dail Eireann) actually debated the proposed Statutory Instrument on copyright. Minister Sherlock and other members of the Dail had a lively discussion about an SI that was originally going to be signed into law without any public debate! It was also made very clear by the Minister that they intend to proceed with signing it next week, which didn’t come as a surprise to me. On a positive note, however, the Minister and his colleagues had considered an alternative wording to the SI that was drafted by TJ McIntyre and Simon McGarr. That alternative wording would have removed a lot of the issues for companies such as ourselves who dread spurious legal threats. No matter how spurious a legal threat might be it still costs us money and time to defend ourselves and our clients against them.

What are the next steps?

In the short term I’m not 100% sure, but things change very quickly in the world of politics.

While it might be nice to think that the government might actually adopt amended wording for the SI, which would go a long way to appeasing companies like ourselves, it’s more likely that the SI will be signed into law in its current form.

However even if that does happen there is still a chance to make a change. Irish politicians are now very aware of the level of interest the Irish public have in this topic. They cannot simply ignore 70 thousand people. Both the IIA and the ISPAI should be able to facilitate dialogue with both industry, government and rights holders. Unfortunately to date IRMA have not shown any willingness to “play ball”.

Maybe the sane way forward is for there to be a comprehensive debate and revision of copyright law in Ireland leading to either modifications to the existing legislation or the introduction of completely new legislation.

What do you think?

Let us know via the comments.

Calm Reasoned Dialogue Helps is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: Humble Bundle on Android

2012-01-31T19:57:37+00:00

The latest Humble Bundle is out and features Android as well as Windows/Linux and Mac versions of the following games: World of Goo, EDGE, Osmos and Anomaly Warzone Earth.

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Michele Neylon: Is Bebo Gone?

2012-01-31T08:30:34+00:00

Image via CrunchBase

I haven’t logged into my Bebo account much over the last couple of years. I did login earlier this year almost by accident. I logged back out again within a couple of minutes.

Last night, however, the site seemed to go offline completely. Looking into it further it’s pretty clear that either something is wrong or they’ve pulled the plug:

dig +trace bebo.com

; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> +trace bebo.com
;; global options: +cmd
.           2953   IN   NS   j.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   d.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   m.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   i.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   g.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   c.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   a.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   b.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   k.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   e.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   l.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   f.root-servers.net.
.           2953   IN   NS   h.root-servers.net.
;; Received 436 bytes from 81.17.240.194#53(81.17.240.194) in 3 ms

com.           172800   IN   NS   a.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   c.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   i.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   d.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   b.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   j.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   m.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   f.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   h.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   g.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   l.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   k.gtld-servers.net.
com.           172800   IN   NS   e.gtld-servers.net.
;; Received 486 bytes from 192.112.36.4#53(g.root-servers.net) in 56 ms

bebo.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.beboinc.com.
bebo.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.beboinc.com.
;; Received 102 bytes from 192.26.92.30#53(c.gtld-servers.net) in 82 ms

;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

The above output is from the “dig” command, which is a simple utility to check DNS.

Running it against this domain (michele.me) gives a different and more useful result:

dig +trace michele.me

; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> +trace michele.me
;; global options: +cmd
.           2819   IN   NS   l.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   m.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   i.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   b.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   a.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   g.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   k.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   h.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   d.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   c.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   f.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   j.root-servers.net.
.           2819   IN   NS   e.root-servers.net.
;; Received 436 bytes from 81.17.240.194#53(81.17.240.194) in 3 ms

me.           172800   IN   NS   d0.cctld.afilias-nst.org.
me.           172800   IN   NS   a2.me.afilias-nst.info.
me.           172800   IN   NS   ns.nic.me.
me.           172800   IN   NS   c0.cctld.afilias-nst.info.
me.           172800   IN   NS   a0.cctld.afilias-nst.info.
me.           172800   IN   NS   b2.me.afilias-nst.org.
me.           172800   IN   NS   b0.cctld.afilias-nst.org.
me.           172800   IN   NS   ns2.nic.me.
;; Received 486 bytes from 192.112.36.4#53(g.root-servers.net) in 55 ms

michele.me. 86400 IN NS ns.blacknightsolutions.com.
michele.me. 86400 IN NS ns2.blacknightsolutions.com.
;; Received 86 bytes from 2001:500:27::1#53(c0.cctld.afilias-nst.info) in 102 ms

michele.me.       900   IN   A   78.153.202.220
michele.me.       900   IN   NS   ns2.blacknightsolutions.com.
michele.me.       900   IN   NS   ns.blacknightsolutions.com.
;; Received 190 bytes from 2a01:a8:fe00::2#53(ns.blacknightsolutions.com) in 307 ms

So basically Bebo.com is not returning any A records which means it could not display no matter how hard it tried. Of course there could be all sorts of crazy going on with other DNS records, but it doesn’t look likely.

Checking the whois records for the domain the only thing that sticks out is that the nameservers changed back in December. They were using Akamai’s DNS, then switched to using their own nameservers. Akamai’s services are used by a lot of big content providers and aren’t cheap, so this switch would suggest a scaling back of Bebo in terms of their traffic levels etc.,

Is Bebo gone for good?

No idea. I’m not aware of any official statements from them as yet though I haven’t been following that closely either because I honestly don’t care

Does it matter?

Probably not, though the complete lack of any notification to any of the social network’s users is worrying and proves yet again why you shouldn’t rely on a social network to store anything important.

Is Bebo Gone? is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

Michele Neylon: Good Reads For Long Flights?

2012-01-31T00:55:48+00:00

Cover via Amazon

I’ll be doing several longhaul flights over the next few months, which was one of the reasons why I got a Kindle. I like reading on planes (when I’m not sleeping), but there isn’t much space in the seat pockets for anything more than a Penguin paperback. Lugging the Steve Jobs biography back and forth across the Atlantic in December was “fun”.

Next month I’m heading to Orlando via a rather circuitous route, so I’d love to have a couple of good books to read on my way.

So what would people suggest or recommend?

Good Reads For Long Flights? is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

Donncha O Caoimh: Please hack me I need it!

2012-01-30T19:33:34+00:00

Just one of the many kids on ps3 who message me asking for Modern Warfare 2 hacks.

10th prestige hack anyone? There’s a ready market of players who want to cheat their way to the top!

BTW – the new WordPress app for Android kicks ass!

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Donncha O Caoimh: Mastering Machine Code on your Commodore 64

2012-01-30T15:30:31+00:00

Before the internet became popular and the web was still in diapers I had a Commodore 64 at home. “Mastering Machine Code on your Commodore 64″ by Mark Greenshields was the first programming book I owned that wasn’t full of BASIC listings and opened my eyes to the wonders of low level assembly development. It was a daunting task learning machine code on my own but I devoured the book and learned so much by looking at the code in demos and games of the time.

The book was originally published in 1984, and I discovered it in a small bookshop next to Paul Street Shopping Centre in Cork sometime in 1990 or 1991. I still remember the excitement I felt at finding any book on the subject. The city library had books on computers, even one or two on building robots and things you could connect to a computer but nothing that explored the C64 in depth.

Based on what I learned in that book and from hacking demos with the aid of an Action Replay I was able to do quite a bit. Nothing amazing but I’m proud of what I did along with others in my demo group way back 20 years ago. I was 16 at the time. I wonder what I’d be hacking on now if I was that age?

You can find a zip file with all our demos in this post. Commodore 64 emulator required!

While flicking through the book I stumbled upon a favourite section, the one on interrupts which I’ve scanned and posted the first two pages of in this post. Here’s another doc on this subject, with the same example code flashing the border 60 times a second. Happy memories.

What was your first programming book?

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Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Think Of The Hungry Dragons And Get Mobile

2012-01-30T14:55:26+00:00

Mobile is big and getting bigger. If you ignore it as part of your business then you do so at your peril.

Bert, our pet Dragon, wanted to get a takeaway and all he could find was a PDF menu! And while you may not believe in dragons you’ve probably come across restaurant websites that insist on giving you the menu as a PDF only. The Oatmeal sums it up nicely – and if you’re a designer and you haven’t seen that comic, where have you been?

But I digress..

Some projections suggest that there will be over 1 billion users of mobile by 2013. Can you or your business afford to ignore them?

Is your website functional and usable on all mobile devices?

If yes, then well done, if not then read on!

We’ve partnered with GoMobi from Dublin based dotMobi to offer our clients the best mobile solution that money can buy.

What does the system do?

You’ve got two choices. You can either build a mobile site from scratch or give it a “kick start” by letting GoMobi “suck in” your existing site’s content (basically save some time on typing).

Want to know more? Check out the demonstration video here

So how much will this cost?

€3.99 a month or €44.99 a year

How do I order it?

You can order it here.

Do I need a .mobi domain name to use GoMobi?

No. GoMobi will work with any domain name. You just need to let the system know where the new mobile site will be located ie. m.domain.tld or iphone.domain.tld – you decide

Who provides the hosting for the mobile site?

GoMobi does

What about search engines? Will my GoMobi site be search engine friendly?

The solution has been designed to make your mobile site as search engine friendly as possible and follow best practices.

If you have any other questions please let us know! Bert and the team are here to help!

Think Of The Hungry Dragons And Get Mobile is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Michele Neylon: Captain Obvious Says Blogging Regularly Gets Traffic

2012-01-29T15:18:29+00:00

I posted a few weeks ago about how I was going to go on a diet and change my lifestyle.

Yesterday marked 3 weeks on the diet, so I posted a “status report” / “progress report” (I work in IT – you’ll have to excuse the IT-esque terminology!).

What I didn’t go into were some of metrics related to my weight loss / diet blogging.

On the technology.ie podcast Conn and I are going to be talking more and more about sharing tips and tricks with people to help improve their websites. So one of the things we thought we’d talk about was “breathing life into an old blog”. My dieting and weight loss blog isn’t the case study, but it’s still quite interesting to see how traffic etc., on there has developed over the last few weeks.

So a bit of background first.

The site had been left idle for quite some time – there hadn’t been a single update since November 2009. It was also running MovableType. Much as I love MT I’ve been moving all my blogs over to WordPress due to the phasing out of MT development and also it’s a lot easier to get a WP based site tweaked quickly and easily.

So I migrated the existing content over to a fresh WP install and gave it a “new coat of paint” with a relatively simple theme from Woothemes. James had done a logo for the old site a couple of years ago, but it had never been used, so he updated it slightly and that gave the site a slightly more “professional” look.

I’ve had Google Analytics tracking set up since the beginning, so it was simply a matter of adding the correct code into the theme’s options (it supports it “out of the box”).

I hadn’t had Feedburner configured for the RSS feed for some odd reason, so that was rectified.

In terms of RSS traffic the numbers aren’t exactly stellar, but they’re growing:

NB: feedburner wasn't setup before January 2012

What about web traffic?

fat.ie Google analytics stats January 2012

You can click to enlarge the graphic, but the basic metric to note is that since I started posting on there more regularly ie. practically every day, since the beginning of the month the traffic has been going up. I’m cross-posting and sharing the posts on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, which is driving some of the visitors, but there’s also a few that are following it via RSS, or simply following it without subscribing.

I’m tracking the site’s “progress” using multiple tools, but the obvious “take away” is that the more fresh content you produce the more traffic you’ll get.

Another one of my sites, for example, has been left on “auto pilot” for the last couple of months and the traffic has dropped quite a bit as a result. There is “fresh” content on there practically every single day, but it’s not original, so the search engines aren’t giving it much “weight”, which makes sense.

Captain Obvious Says Blogging Regularly Gets Traffic is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

Donncha O Caoimh: Ghosts ‘n Goblins is much easier..

2012-01-28T14:26:47+00:00

Games are a hell of a lot easier when they’re trained! Ghosts ‘n Goblins was one of the first games I dived into to see how it worked back in the day. Earlier I played a remix of it’s soundtrack and fired up the game afterwards. I remembered it was hard but compared to games today it’s a demon!

Luckily it was trained and my son and I had an enjoyable half hour shooting the baddies and jumping from platform to platform. I wish the compatible joysticks from back then had more than one button, left/right and up to diagonal jump is a PITA!

In case you’re wondering, a trained game is where the game has been hacked and various cheats added. Usually a fancy intro with swirling graphics and music is added at the start and the group that has hacked the game give you the option of adding infinite lives, time, invulnerability or whatever suits the games. Practically every C64 game you’ll find online has these features now.

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Donncha O Caoimh: Can’t login to Games for Windows Live?

2012-01-27T23:33:33+00:00

I changed my Xbox Live password recently and found I couldn’t login to GFWL this evening. “No problem”, I thought. Just change the password to my new one.

No, I can’t change the password. I can select the password field. It’s active, I can move the cursor back and forward but I can’t type or delete the * characters.

Luckily it was a simple, if non obvious, fix to get around this. Uncheck the “Save my e-mail address and password” and “Sign me in automatically” checkboxes. Now you can select the password field and change it. Don’t forget to “remember” the password again..

Yes, Games for Windows Live is a POS.

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Mark Dennehy: Sherlock’s Folly – the problem is the system itself

2012-01-27T16:54:39+00:00

Sherlock's Folly (the Irish version of SOPA) is not the main problem we have to deal with...

Donncha O Caoimh in photos: An entertaining statue

2012-01-26T22:21:17+00:00

A street performer in Galway City last September. Put money in his box and he’d shake a bit and make some noise. Only kids stopped to watch him.

Adults hurried by.

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Donncha O Caoimh: 1:51 of utter cuteness

2012-01-26T10:29:55+00:00

If you’ve had enough of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, bailouts, the Euro defaulting, rising oil prices and the rest of the bad news you’ll enjoy this video.

By chance we have a Shitzu at home and a black and white cat (daughter of this cute little fella). They’re friendly but not like these two!

I expect this video will be pulled from Youtube just as soon as the copyright holder matches the song.. Oh well.

(via)

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Donncha O Caoimh: Sherlock and Smith and copyright images

2012-01-25T21:21:01+00:00

Remember how Lamar Smith, sponsor of SOPA, used a copyrighted image for his website’s background image without permission? Sean Sherlock, the junior minister preparing Ireland’s SOPA did something similar on his website (which is currently down).

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Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Anonymous Targets Irish Government Sites In Response To “Irish SOPA”

2012-01-25T15:20:10+00:00

The last couple of days have been very “interesting”.

As I mentioned previously, the Irish government intends to enact legislation that could have a “chilling effect”. I went into this a bit in my previous post and far more eloquent people have written extensively about the entire subject.

My key issues with the legislation can be summed up as:

lack of transparency – if the legislation isn’t so abhorrent then why not let us see the text?
illogical “logic” being applied to it – Minister Sherlock claims that the legislation already exists. If that is the case why does he feel obligated to introduce more legislation? I’m not a lawyer, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Lack of debate (see transparency) – I went into this last time
Lack of consultation – industry groups such as the IIA (which we are members of) were NOT consulted

Meanwhile, back at the “ranch”, the people have spoken loud and clear.

Over 30 thousand people have signed the petition over on Stop Sopa Ireland. There are at least two other petitions doing the rounds at present, so the number of voices crying an emphatic “NO” (or “hands off” if you want to be more melodramatic) is higher.

Unfortunately, while the Minister has “engaged” at some level his opinion does not appear to have changed. He has been talking to various people over the last couple of days and there’s been emails and phone calls involving some very big companies, politicians and more. Where this will end is anyone’s guess at the moment. Hopefully at some point soon industry will be able to play a role in the drafting of legislation that impacts us and our clients.

I’d love to be optimistic and think that the government might reverse their position, but the reality is that Judge Charleton’s decision in EMI vs UPC is putting the government under pressure. However that pressure is not balanced. Why should the IP lobby have greater rights than you or me? (And for the record, Blacknight holds IP rights that we will protect energetically)

But this morning’s headlines weren’t about any of this.

Ireland has angered the hive, we will be reporting all attacks through this account | #OpIreland #OpMegaUpload

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 24, 2012

That single message of less than 140 characters was posted last night at around 9pm Irish time. Shortly afterwards several Irish government sites were effectively taken offline in an attack by “Anonymous“. The sites weren’t “hacked”. Any personal data stored on servers was not tampered with. The sites were simply unreachable due to a DDOS attack.

While Anonymous may have launched / orchestrated these attacks in “support” of our campaign against “Irish SOPA” I wouldn’t endorse their actions. Not for a minute.

Why not?

Because it distracts people and causes more confusion. Politicians and journalists have enough difficulty dealing with technology as it is without adding to the confusion.

“Cyber-activism” might be understood by a netizen, but far too often government sees cyber-activism as cyber-terrorism. We’re an internet company, so “obviously” we’re somehow linked to the negatives as well as the positives ..

TJ McIntyre is more eloquent on the subject

So let’s see what the next chapter in this saga will be ..

Stop Ireland’s SOPA (ocaoimh.ie)
EMI is suing the Irish government for not tackling music piracy (thenextweb.com)

Anonymous Targets Irish Government Sites In Response To “Irish SOPA” is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: Stop Ireland’s SOPA

2012-01-24T16:21:49+00:00

Before the end of this month the Irish Government will introduce a very vague copyright protection law. It won’t be debated in the Dáil as it will be enacted by a ministerial order. Protection of copyright is a laudable endeavour but when so little is known about the amendment or how it’s implemented it’s impossible to figure out how it will affect us. Once IRMA get a whiff of any more power or influence you just know they’re going to abuse it! Remember the infamous “3 strikes” rule?

Before I go any further, here’s how you can help. Sign this petition or use this contact form or this list to contact your local TD to express your misgivings and anger at this law being pushed through so quickly.

From the stopsopireland.com website:

SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, recently proposed in the US. It caused an Internet-wide outcry due to its far-reaching implications; way beyond simply closing access to outlaw file sharing websites, it would have enabled law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains due to infringing material posted on a single blog or webpage.

A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.

Instead, the law is being enacted by ministerial order. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material.

As I mentioned in my Wikipedia post, this law might already be illegal:

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered a landmark case for protecting free speech in the fight against online piracy. In a decision issued today on the Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM case, the Court stated that web filtering systems used to prevent illegal downloading on peer-to-peer networks was incompatible with fundamental human rights.

Minister Sean Sherlock will be on drivetime (RTE Radio 1) after 6pm this evening to talk about this law. I hope he comes to his senses.

Oh, it is very easy to bypass any spying the music and movie industries force on Irish ISPs. All you need is an encrypted tunnel to a remote host outside the country. If Irish ISPs ban users from using tools like that then you can say goodbye to a huge number of IT jobs. I rely on these tools every single day of the week to do my work.

Laura Czajkowski: FOSDEM 2012

2012-01-24T14:41:28+00:00

With less than two weeks to FOSDEM taking place a weekend of talks, catching up with old friends and making new ones nearly here. Jan Claeys has created a wiki page if anyone is going, taking part, wants to meet up or help with the stall. As always it’s voluntary but having lots of people helping does spread the time so folks can go to talks or take part in the corridor discussions that tend to happen.

If you’re giving a talk why not let people know so they can attend, just add your details to the wiki, there is also a dinner on the night organised so keep an eye on the page for details. See you there, I’m taking part in a panel session on working with community contributors where I’ll be discussing locoteams.

Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Say No To An Irish SOPA Style Law Say Yes To Democracy

2012-01-23T23:31:28+00:00

Remember SOPA?

We didn’t like it and it was pretty clear that a lot of internet users weren’t too happy about it either.

However SOPA was being debated openly in Congress. There was discussion. There were public hearings. There was also a massive backlash of public opinion, but that is one of the beauties of democracy.

Democracy.

We are an internet company not a political lobbying group, but this is not the first time that I’ve written a post for our blog where I’ve used that word.

It’s a word that many of us take for granted.

It’s a concept that many of us cherish, even without realising it. I guess the definition kind of explains that:

Democracy in its purest or most ideal form would be a society in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives

In Ireland, however, it appears that we will not be given the opportunity to engage in a public debate about the introduction of very similar legislation to the now defunct SOPA.

The Minister, in this case Sean Sherlock, appears to be trying to introduce the legislation via ministerial order. What that means is that our public representatives won’t even be given the opportunity to vote on it, never mind actually debating it.

What is the legislation going to say exactly?

This is part of the problem. We know that the Minister intends to sign it into law, but the exact wording of the legislation hasn’t been shared. TJ McIntyre has provided an FAQ for those of us who have difficulty translating legal English into something we can actually understand and relate to.

It is probably going to be based on text similar to this:

3. The Act of 2000 is hereby amended by the insertion of the following subsection after subsection (5) of section 40:

(5A)(a) without prejudice to subsections (3) and (4), the owner of the copyright in the work concerned may apply to the High Court for an injunction against a person who provides facilities referred to in subsection (3) where those facilities are being used by one or more third parties to infringe the copyright in that work.

(b) In considering an application for an injunction under this subsection, the court shall have due regard to the rights of any third party likely to be affected and the court shall make such directions (including, where appropriate, a direction requiring a third party to be put on notice of the application) as the court may deem necessary or appropriate in all the circumstances.

What that translates into in plain English is that we, a hosting provider, could be held liable for a copyright infringement that we knew nothing about. Of course it goes further than that, as it could be (ab)used and force us, and others in industry, to either block access (filter) your internet connection or disable access to entire websites and domains. Or taking it further, if a rights holder found an infringing photo on Facebook they could demand that the site be blocked!

Ireland has a healthy digital economy, an economy that we at Blacknight are proud to be part of. International companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ebay, Paypal and many many more have chosen Ireland as their European home. The introduction of this sort of legislation without proper debate and discussion and without the full ramifications of the legislation being considered could only have negative impact on the digital industry and the Irish economy as a whole. Innovation in a digital age should be allowed to flourish. Intellectual property rights holders are, of course, entitled to protections, but those protections should not be granted at the behest of freedom of speech and unreasonable impact on others.

With that in mind several of us have got together to organise a petition to the Minister to ask him NOT to enact any legislation at this time.

If you want to find out more please head over to Stop SOPA Ireland.

Any questions or feedback? Let us know via the comments

(Dáil image via Wikipedia)

Say No To An Irish SOPA Style Law Say Yes To Democracy is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Happy new year again

2012-01-23T15:39:19+00:00

One of the great things about being an international company is you get to celebrate lots more holidays. Of course it doesn’t generally mean you get to take time off for them.

We’ve got customers in over 100 countries around the world

So today (the 23rd of January 2012) it’s the Chinese new year and far be it from us to miss out on a chance to celebrate a new year we’re continuing our year of the Dragon erm I mean Cloud discount. When a country has nearly 20% of the worlds population and the holiday involves a dragon .. you just know we’re going to have to mention it …. and yes Bert has returned to help us celebrate it.

So if you want to avail of some great savings on a cloud hosting plan look no further than our cloud store use code “cloudyear” and get 20% off. You can read more about the Year of the Cloud here

While you’re at it maybe you’d like to get a .cn.com maybe now is the time to break into the huge market that is China.

Happy new year again is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: SSH Socks Proxy for Android Phones

2012-01-23T10:37:15+00:00

Android has had VPN support for donkey’s years but I could never get it working. I tried pptpd and xl2tpd but pptpd didn’t work (and has security holes) or the configuration is daunting and lengthy when all I want is a simple proxy.

There’s also HTTP proxy support built into Android. It’s exposed in Samsung and other ROMs at Settings->Wireless and Network->Wi-Fi Settings, Advanced. Apparently this app sets things up correctly too. I’m not sure if it’ll do authentication however unless you add the username:password in the hostname. I also don’t want to install Squid on my public internet server!

So, the holy grail of proxying would be doing so through ssh. Nothing else to install on my server and I get an encrypted tunnel through the internet and out of Ireland which might be a good thing to protect my privacy from the prying eyes of the Irish Government. A far more mundane reason is the security of my data from others on a public wifi network. (Aside, on what will the record companies blame the falling numbers of CDs sold when the Irish version of SOPA is passed?)

The good news is that you can now create an ssh tunnel from your Android device. The bad news is that it has to be rooted to make the most of it. Go grab the SSH Tunnel app and you’ll be sending data through your remote host in no time. There’s also a beta version that uses an OpenSSH native binary rather than a Java implementation. I haven’t tried that yet, the stable version worked fine for me.

You can stream Netflix through it, and browse the net, post to your blog or whatever else takes your fancy. All through a secure tunnel to a remote server.

In case you’re interested, it’s simplicity itself to do the same thing on Linux or Mac computers using the installed ssh client. On Windows just use Putty!

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Donncha O Caoimh: Skyrim’s Whiterun built in Minecraft

2012-01-22T19:14:23+00:00

Are there Skyrim fans in the house? Sure there are! You’ll recognise the town of Whiterun in the video above, all built in Minecraft. It looks pretty good too! Download link for the map in the description of the video!

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Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Use Zemanta To Improve Your Blogging

2012-01-22T17:37:50+00:00

Image via CrunchBase

Personally I love blogging. I write for the company blog on a regular basis, but I also write on several other blogs.

However I’d be the first to admit that I am not afraid of taking advantage of whatever tools I can find to help speed up the process and improve it.

Zemanta, in my opinion, is probably the most powerful and useful tool in my personal blogging “toolbox”.

You might have noticed the Zemanta icon on some of our blog posts in the past. It’s also the tool we use to help suggest “related” articles from sources we trust that end up in the footer of our posts here.

So what exactly is Zemanta?

Zemanta is a service which works by scanning your content as you write it and then makes “intelligent” suggestions for images, related links and tags.

That’s a very simplistic overview. In reality there’s quite a bit more “under the hood”.

Before getting under the hood, let’s cover a couple of the more basic things.

How do you get it?

You can just go here and install one of the browser plugins, or the plugin for your content management or blogging software.

How much does it cost?

Nothing. It’s 100% free.

Do I need to signup for an account to use it?

No, but if you do create an account you’ll be able to access the more powerful tools. See screenshot below (click to enlarge)

Zemanta preferences screen

You can also tell the system more about you, including things like your Flickr ID, Twitter handle and which sites you author.

Zemanta personalisation

Zemanta Flickr

And since the system works by suggesting content for you, including tags, photos and links, the more information you give it the more relevant the suggestions will be and the more time you’ll save, while also improving your blog writing.

Zemanta Monetisation via Amazon US

It also allows you to make money, in theory at least, as it hooks into the Amazon (US) affiliate program.

We spoke to Andraz from Zemanta a while back on the Technology.ie podcast. You can catch that interview here.

We’ve also been talking to Zemanta more recently about some of their upcoming services and all I can say is “wow!”. They’ve got some really cool things in the pipeline.

If you’re already using Zemanta, how do you find it?

If you’re a new user, what do you think?

Let us know via the comments!

Use Zemanta To Improve Your Blogging is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Michele Neylon: Dilbert Tech Support

2012-01-22T15:17:45+00:00

Today’s Dilbert struck a chord:

(original here)

Dilbert Tech Support is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

Michele Neylon: Irish Politics Needs To Be Less About The Party And More About The Country

2012-01-21T21:59:18+00:00

Image via Wikipedia

The title kind of sums it up.

Listening to two Irish politicians squabbling on the radio the other day it really struck me. Instead of trying to move forward and actually solve issues most of the politicians seem to be more interested in taking potshots at each other’s parties.

It makes me sick.

Instead of trying to work together in the country’s best interests, they’re more interested in comparing each other’s track records.

How does that help anyone?

Sure, having different parties and a strong opposition etc., etc., are good for democracy, but the petty squabbling and constant harping on about past mistakes is a waste of energy.

Were mistakes made? Yes.

Do we need to be constantly reminded of them? No.

And I’m intentionally not mentioning any political parties or individuals as I feel that they’re pretty much all doing the same thing.

Irish Politics Needs To Be Less About The Party And More About The Country is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

Michele Neylon: Rubbish Online Literally

2012-01-21T12:00:35+00:00

I love seeing businesses embracing the web. When an offline service goes online it can make things much easier for its users.

This morning I was playing catch up on the various utility statements that had arrived over the last couple of weeks and happily dumping the useless junk that had been packed into the envelopes. I’m glad I did, as I found a rather nice letter from the company that collects my rubbish, AES. They’ve finally gone online!

Registration took a couple of minutes and now I have access to a lot of useful information that will save me time and headaches.

Once you’ve signed up for an online account you can access the online portal:

AES Online Account Summary

What it’s particularly handy is that you can easily download copies of invoices and also see when your bins were last collected.

Bin Collection Summary

This may not be as “exciting” as some online services, but prior to this getting copies of invoices etc., for the accountant was painful.

Of course since January 2012 the tax relief on bin charges has been cut by the government, but if you’re keeping an eye on your household running costs then the online portal is still useful.

Maybe now they’ll stop sending me so much dead tree!

Why is getting rid of rubbish such a chore? (blogs.confused.com)

Rubbish Online Literally is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

The Internet Audio Network: ITFreely s04e07: Blackout To The Future

2012-01-20T17:12:07+00:00

Following that, Patrick and Shane discuss the implications of Apples push into the textbook market with the release of iBooks 2, news that was hot off the presses as we went to air.

Finally, we delve into the recent launch of Netflix in Ireland, and what it may mean to other content providers over here.

References:
TJ McIntyre
iBooks 2
Netflix Ireland
Roku Box to launch in Ireland

This week, the Internet has been all a flutter over the SOPA blackout. In this show, we talk to TJ McIntyre of UCD about a lawsuit taken against the Irish government which may result in SOPA like measures in Ireland. Following that, Patrick and Shane discuss the implications of Apples push into the textbook market with the release of iBooks 2, news that was hot off the presses as we went to air. Finally, we delve into the recent launch of Netflix in Ireland, and what it may mean to other content providers over here. References: TJ McIntyre iBooks 2 Netflix Ireland Roku Box to launch in Ireland

Donncha O Caoimh: Achoo

2012-01-20T13:08:08+00:00

(via)

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Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Measurement Tickets Up For Grabs!

2012-01-20T10:03:46+00:00

Measurement is being held next month in Dublin and we’re really excited about it and Bert got all dressed up!

What is it?

It’s a one day conference on social media measurement ie. tracking sales etc., from social media (and other outlets)

Where is it?

National College of Ireland, Dublin 1

When is it?

February 15th 2012. So the day after Valentine’s Day.

How much does it cost?

Early Bird €59

Full price tickets €89

Who is speaking?

The full speaker list hasn’t been finalised yet, but at the moment there’s a nice range of speakers (both Irish and international)

Who is organising it?

Mulley Communications – the people that run events like the Irish Web Awards

Why does Blacknight care?

We love these kind of events, so we’re one of the sponsors of the event and are also helping promote it.

So how do you get your hands on a ticket?

Pretty easy. We’ll be announcing details of how to get your hands on a ticket via Facebook and Twitter later today. To make it a little bit of fun we’ll probably ask you to answer a simple question.

We’ve got a couple of tickets to give away and once they’re gone they’re gone – so best of luck

UPDATE – thanks to everyone who entered.

The two lucky winners were:

David Newell
Mairead Lyons

“Yippee Doo Dah” – podcast 14 (technology.ie)
Technology.ie Podcast #4: Damien Mulley (technology.ie)
Fluffy Links – Wednesday 11th 2012 (mulley.net)

Measurement Tickets Up For Grabs! is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: WAT

2012-01-19T22:05:15+00:00

One for the programmers.. WAT (via, RT by SimoRoth)

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Donncha O Caoimh: Open large files in Vim with care

2012-01-19T12:21:34+00:00

If you want to load a large file in Vim you should disable the swap file to speed things up. It’s simple to do as well:

Vim -n file.txt

If a file is over 4096K or so and I have enough system RAM (not usually a problem) I’ll do it this way as it avoids Vim creating a potentially huge .swp file.

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Donncha O Caoimh: Wikipedia is down is it?

2012-01-18T15:28:34+00:00

Today is the day kids have to read books to do their homework. But seriously, SOPA and PIPA, bills being considered by the U.S. Congress could have far reaching implications for anyone who puts content online. It’s really going to hurt the U.S. economy and by extension any country that exports into that country. If you live outside the U.S. many of the websites you use every day will be affected by this law, and if a non U.S. website is blocked then they could lose significant website traffic and suffer financially.

Broadsheet.ie (who have gone black along with other well known websites) quoted this Boing Boing post which you can’t see either because it’s gone black today:

Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we’d have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren’t in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

In related news, EMI Ireland threatened to sue the Irish Government for not doing enough to stop copyright violations. Legislation is due this month but I haven’t heard anything in the news since. One wonders how they’ll deal with this ruling by the Court of Justice (thanks ILUG):

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered a landmark case for protecting free speech in the fight against online piracy. In a decision issued today on the Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM case, the Court stated that web filtering systems used to prevent illegal downloading on peer-to-peer networks was incompatible with fundamental human rights.

For more on this read Will Ireland block the internet to save CDs? The likely answer is “Yes”. (Thanks Talideon!)

Here’s a great examination of SOPA and PIPA by Reddit sysadmin Jason Harvey. It’s lengthy but here are a few snippets:

Facilitation of criminal violations

The potential for abuse in this language is painfully obvious. “Facilitation” can often be argued as simply teaching or demonstrating how to do something. Under this definition, a site could be targeted for something as simple as describing how to rip a Blu-Ray. This language also makes it clear that the legislation is not solely targeting sites “dedicated to theft”.

…

If the Attorney General served reddit with an order to remove links to a domain, we would be required to scrub every post and comment on the site containing the domain and censor the links out, even if the specific link contained no infringing content. We would also need to implement a system to automatically censor the domain from any future posts or comments. This places a measurable burden upon the site’s technical infrastructure. It also damages one of the most important tenets of reddit, and the internet as a whole – free and open discussion about whatever the fuck you want.

Why this doesn’t actually stop piracy

This legislation is aimed at requiring private U.S. entities to enforce restrictions against foreign sites but does nothing against the infringement itself. All of the enforcement actions can and will be worked around by sites focused on copyright infringement. U.S. citizens will still be able to use foreign DNS servers, new advertising and payment networks will pop up overseas, and “infringing sites” will still be linked to by other foreign sites and search engines. In fact, tools used to circumvent these forms of internet restrictions are being funded by the U.S. State department to offer citizens under “repressive regimes” uncensored access to the internet. When the dust settles, piracy will still exist, and the internet in the U.S. will have entered the realm of federal regulation and censorship.

See also sopastrike.com, Google’s Take Action page, Reddit.com and the Reddit SOPA FAQ.

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Donncha O Caoimh: A cache directory is a temporary directory

2012-01-18T11:07:12+00:00

WOAH! Do not put symlinks to your uploaded files in a temporary cache directory. Nginx users running WordPress should beware if they followed these instructions and put a symlink to uploaded files in the wp-content/cache/ directory. I’m going to rewrite that page right now suggesting they use a different directory, possibly wp-content/uploads/ or maybe wp-content/files/.

WP Super Cache (and I presume other caching plugins) will delete everything in the cache directory. It’s like putting important files in /tmp/ where files are routinely cleaned out on reboot.

My replies on the thread above might paint me as a cold heartless bastard but I am sorry those websites suffered data loss. However I’m shocked that they put links to uploaded images in a folder containing temporary files!

Edit

(20 minutes later): the codex page has been updated, thanks Westi for your help. It now recommends using wp-content/ms-filemap/ rather than wp-content/cache/

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Barry O'Donovan: Today’s Links – 2012-01-18

2012-01-18T10:31:16+00:00

famfamfam.com: Silk Icons - “Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format.
Read the Docs - Read the Docs hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar. We support webhooks so your docs get built when you commit code. There’s also support for versioning so you can build docs from tags and branches of your code in your repository.
Glue - Automatic Sprite (PNG+CSS) creation. Support for multi-sprite projects. Automatic crop of unnecessary transparent borders around source images. Configurable paddings per image, sprite or project. Optional .less output format. Automatic sprite images post-processing using OptiPNG. Sprite- and Project-level configuration via static config files. Configurable cache busting for sprite images.
scrollorama - The jQuery plugin for doing cool scrolly stuff.
FreshBooks - The fastest way to track time, organise expenses and invoice clients.

Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Wikipedia And Other High Profile Sites Protest SOPA / PIPA

2012-01-18T10:01:30+00:00

I posted about our thoughts on SOPA and why we were opposed to it over Christmas.

In the last week or so the US government has backpedalled to a certain degree in respect of the tabled SOPA legislation, but they still want something.

Whether it’s “a” SOPA, PIPA or something else is you can be pretty confident that this sort of legislation is going to be tabled again and again and again.

Today many high profile sites are protesting either by “going dark” or adding a message of some kind to their main page.

Wikipedia (English desktop version) has gone dark, though you can still access the mobile site.

Google in the US has swapped out its logo, though you can’t see it if you’re outside the US:

Google blacks out its logo for US visitors

You can find a list of some of the sites participating over on the SOPA Strike site.

Here in Ireland we’re aware of a few sites that have gone dark:

Broadsheet.ie

Bock The Robber

Internetnews (run by me), as is my personal blog

Know of any other sites “going dark”? Let us know via the comments

Wikipedia And Other High Profile Sites Protest SOPA / PIPA is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: Syndicate on Thursday

2012-01-17T16:09:36+00:00

One of my favourite Amiga games of the 90′s was Syndicate. The PC version will be available on GOG.com from next Thursday. Great little shooter, go buy it! (via)

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Donncha O Caoimh: oh hi 184.171.245.160

2012-01-17T15:23:04+00:00

I’m pretty sure bingbot doesn’t live at 184.171.245.160 and wouldn’t hit /wp-login.php 509 times in a row.

deny from 184.171.245.160

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Donncha O Caoimh: Ancient DOS Games – Star Wars: X-Wing

2012-01-17T11:53:32+00:00

I think this game is the reason I bought a joystick for my PC. I still have that joystick (or maybe it’s the second one I bought) up in the attic but I haven’t used it this century yet and I don’t have a PC with a joystick port/parallel port any more! Remember the joys of calibrating your device so your game was simply playable? You young ‘uns with your Xbox 360 controllers have it easy these days! I never understood why joysticks had to be so fiddly on PC when they just worked on the 8 and 16 bit machines.

This game ran in 320×200 pixels and 256 colours. I do remember when that was and impressive screen resolution. (via)

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Michele Neylon: So Now We Have A Dragon

2012-01-17T01:33:28+00:00

Bert – Year of the Dragon cloud hosting, a photo by blacknight on Flickr.

James and I toss ideas back and forth about images and designs to use with blog posts, promotions, newsletters etc.,

Today‘s little invention is one of my favourites this year (ok the year is young, but hey !)

There’s probably a reason he’s called “Bert”, but even if there wasn’t a good reason it’s still a cute name for such a cute dragon..

Trying to market hosting and domains is always a bit of a challenge, though I guess that’s part of the reason I like doing it. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of just shoving photos or images of servers and rather mundane stock images on a site. Of course we still end up having to do it from time to time, but having a bit of fun with things and abusing cats, horses and sheep is much more fun. (Please check our blog before passing judgement on the last sentence!)

So whether “Bert” will make more appearances or not remains to be seen, but I’d like to think that he will..

So Now We Have A Dragon is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

Michele Neylon: Blacknight: Year Of The Cloud Discount

2012-01-16T14:37:34+00:00

2012 is the Year of the Dragon. We decided we’d make it the “year of the cloud” by offering you all a special discount on our cloud server hosting plans

What’s the offer?

20% off any annual cloud server hosting plan

What is Blacknight’s cloud hosting?

We offer a comprehensive range of cloud hosting plans on both Windows and Linux. You can read more about it here.

What is covered?

The base plan ie. the cloud hosting bit.

What is NOT covered?

Any software licenses or extras

Is this available for monthly plans?

No. It only applies to annual orders

Does this apply to renewals?

It only applies to annual plans. We weren’t offering cloud servers hosting 12 months ago, so it could not apply.

Can current customers get this discount?

Yes.

How do I get the discount?

Use the coupon code: cloudyear (no spaces – all lowercase) when placing your cloud hosting order online

Usual rules apply – no coupon code => no discount. No exceptions.

Cloud Hosting Without The Fluff (michele.me)
January Blues Getting You Down? Save Big In Our Mega Hosting and Domain Name Sale! (blacknight.com)

Year Of The Cloud Discount is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: Well Loved Lego

2012-01-16T12:44:00+00:00

Well used and loved Lego may break and get squashed but the non-broken bits can be washed and dried and used again by a new generation.

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Donncha O Caoimh in photos: The Penguin and the Man

2012-01-16T11:27:59+00:00

Graffiti on the Crawford Art Gallery about a year ago.

There’s something weird going on with my feed here. I messed up the Feedburner redirect for a few days but fixed it and now posts from Holy Shmoly are appearing here too! I’ve disabled the redirect entirely now. Maybe that’ll fix it and my next post on HS won’t appear here.

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Donncha O Caoimh: I think I may be done with Battlefield 3

2012-01-15T22:51:19+00:00

It’s the game that many people upgraded their PCs for but Battlefield 3 isn’t the darling that Bad Company 2 was, at least for me and the guys I play with.

Expectations were high for this game. The trailers promised massively destructible environments and so much more but the final game did not live up to the hype. I guess it couldn’t really, could it? We were expecting a game that would be the second coming of Christ in gaming terms, weren’t we? If Jesus played any game, he’d choose Battlefield 3. Now I think he’d probably pick up Skyrim and go adventuring by himself wielding swords and magic fireballs to defeat his foes!

I played Bad Company 2 since early 2010. It wasn’t always a rosy relationship (remember C4 on the MCOM stations?) but it took over a year for me to become as apathetic towards it as I am about Battlefield 3 now. The latter game only came out in September! Veterans of PC gaming gush about Battlefield 2. Do you feel the same about Battlefield 3?

I’ve let my Xbox Live subscription lapse, and I’ll probably trade in the Xbox version of BF3 for store credit. I’ll still jump into a game (on PS3) if anyone wants but the heady excitement of the early days has already worn off.

There is a ray of light, for me at least. I’ve rediscovered single player gaming. Skyrim kept me distracted for a few hours over the Christmas holidays but it’s Saints Row the Third that is my favourite game of 2011. There is so much silly and creative fun and idiocy in that game that it’s a pleasure to play. It’s even better coop!

Closely following that game, I have to admit the many hours I put into Darwinia were a pleasure too. Such a simple game but the story gripped me – help a developer rid his computer generated world of viruses! Loved that.

Catch you all in Killing Floor, L4D2, or most likely anything but Battlefield 3…

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Donncha O Caoimh: Misfits (Of Science)

2012-01-14T13:19:31+00:00

Before I started watching the British science fiction tv series Misfits I thought it might be a remake of Misfits of Science, a tv show that aired in the mid 80′s. I couldn’t be more wrong. The new show is so much darker and edgier. None of the fluffy woolly brightness of superheroes who always do the right thing. Definitely worth watching!

You can watch the Misfits trailer too but E4 won’t allow me to embed it so you’ll have to go to Youtube. Silly.

I never realised Courteney Cox starred in the Misfits of SCience. ‘Course as a 10 year old I had no idea who she was back then and this was long before Friends.

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Donncha O Caoimh: Xbox 360 vulnerability? No, just weak passwords!

2012-01-13T13:25:26+00:00

If your Xbox Live account has been hacked chances are it’s because you used a weak password. According to this post xbox.com reveals if a hacker has found a legitimate email address by printing the following error:

The email address is or password is incorrect. Please try again.

After 8 attempts with a wrong password a CAPTCHA is shown but that can be easily circumvented.

Now, showing that error message makes the job of hacking accounts easier but if it wasn’t there you can be sure that login page would be (and is being) hit by dumb bots that stuff the login page with random emails and passwords. My blog gets hit by so many bots exploiting vulnerabilities for software that doesn’t even run on here that nothing surprises me any more about the intelligence of script kiddies.

It would be super if Microsoft used something like Steam Guard or at the very least put time limits on successive password checks but in the meantime what can you do?

Use Lass Pass or another password service and pick a strong password. Use a pass phrase, “talking heads is a great band”, “i wish i had super powers”, “use your own imagination”. They’re all a lot better than “abcdefg1″ and a lot easier to remember! Connect a keyboard to your Xbox to type a long phrase in or you’ll be discouraged.
Limit the damage. Don’t add your credit card to Xbox Live. Sometimes you can buy an Xbox Live Gold subscription at half the price Micrsoft charges. Buy points cards if you want to buy stuff. Until recently it was hard to stop XBL auto renewing if you used a credit card.
Go live in a hole in the hills and play marbles with the mice.

My XBL Gold subscription ran out a few days ago so I’m back to being a silver member. Not too fussed as almost everyone I play online with has a PS3 or PC too. I’m left wondering why I need an Xbox 360 any more! I will make doubly sure that I have a strong password on the account.

Thanks Gavin for linking to that article, even if we do disagree about what a security hole is.

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Noirin Plunkett: Meme seen everywhere

2012-01-13T07:48:18+00:00

Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

“Instead, after organizing the transport of water, food and ammunition up the hill, he took a nap.”
–General Warren and the Battle of Spion Kop, in Military Blunders, by Saul David

I LOL’d.

Donncha O Caoimh: Oh Corel, you’re still around? Hello Bibble!

2012-01-12T16:47:20+00:00

I’m a big fan of Bibble Pro by Bibble Labs so when I saw an email from them a few days ago announcing their sale to Corel I was a little worried. The last time I had anything to do with Corel software was when they had a Linux distro. That didn’t end so well.

Here’s some blurb from the press release:

Corel bought us for a couple of reasons. First, they were looking for a top-of-the-line technology to complement PaintShop Pro, their flagship photo editing solution. They were blown away by the speed of Bibble’s technology and saw the opportunity to invest even more in development and in bringing our technology to even more users- something that Bibble Labs simply couldn’t afford to do on our own. We’ve been working with the Corel team for the past few months and it’s clear they’re committed. They are excited about our technology and processing power, and the opportunities we see to take the product forward. They recently released PaintShop Pro to very strong user and industry reviews, and are now keen to offer photographers a powerful workflow and management solution. Corel knew there was no better match for them than Bibble.

All of us at Bibble have joined the Corel team. We’re keeping Mac and Linux support and we’re staying in Austin. I’m now running product development for Corel’s new photo workflow solution that is based on the core Bibble technology. What’s even better is that I now have access to dedicated user interface and graphic designers who are helping to improve usability and make the product even better looking. I also now have a full QA team dedicated to product testing, along with documentation and localization teams, marketing and sales teams, and a huge, international distribution system to help get our technology the notice it deserves. We also have access to a customer support team to help provide the personal attention I had always wanted to provide, but couldn’t do on my own. Not only does this mean that many more folks are working on this product than ever have before, but it als o means that all of us at the Labs can focus 100% on the core technology and the product.

Bibble Pro has been transformed into Aftershot Pro. You can download a trial version here. It looks very like Bibble Pro but it’s a lot snappier. It loads very quickly, previews show quickly, applies filters quickly. It also feels lighter on my system.

The upgrade for existing Bibble users is $19.99 (EUR/GBP 14.99 incl. VAT) up to the end of January so I decided to go for it. Hopefully the speed increase isn’t because there isn’t a huge catalogue of imported photos! It would be nice to have some way of importing the Bibble photo catalogue.

Reaction elsewhere has been mixed. Check out these threads: one and two.

Oh yeah, Bibblelabs and Corel. Thanks for supporting Linux!

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Barry O'Donovan: Asterisk with SS7 via Wanpipe, Dahdi and libss7 – with ISUP SAM support

2012-01-12T08:05:08+00:00

After much head banging in bringing up an SS7 link with SAM support, I am documented what worked here.

Firstly, what is SAM support? One end of an SS7 link initialises a new call by sending an Initial Address Message (IAM). All SS7 software stacks support this and usually it’s enough. One case where it’s not enough is when one wants to address a phone number with more than the E.164 standard max length of 16 (usually to pass additional information tacked on the start, end of or even replacing an A or B number). In this scenario, SS7 uses a Subsequent Address Message (SAM) to send the additional digits. Most / all mainstream Asterisk SS7 software stacks do not support this.

The platform and software used is as follows:

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS standard CLI install;
dahdi-linux-complete-2.4.0 from the archives (direct link);
a patched version of libss7 supporting SAM via SVN (see below);
a patched version of chan-dahdi via SVN (see below);
Asterisk 1.6.0.28 from the archives (direct link);
Asterisk Addons 1.6.0.6 from the archives (direct link);
Sangoma Wanpipe 3.5.24 (direct link).

Yes, I know some of the above are obsolete. Unfortunately it’s what’s required for everything to play nicely together. And, guess what, it works!

Before You Start

Ensure you have all the necessary packages for building the packages:

apt-get install build-essential libnewt-dev subversion    \
   libsqlite3-dev libsnmp-dev bison libtool flex          \
   autoconf2.13 libmysqlclient-dev

You can assume the working directory is /usr/local/src in the following.

Installing dahdi-linux-complete

Download and extract dahdi-linux-complete into /usr/local/src. Then, in the same directory, create some symbolic links:

ln -s dahdi-linux-complete-2.4.0+2.4.0/linux dahdi-linux
ln -s dahdi-linux-complete-2.4.0+2.4.0/tools dahdi-tools

Now build dahdi-linux:

cd dahdi-linux
make
make install

Now move onto dahdi-tools:

cd dahdi-tools
./configure
make menuconfig # (and select tools or accept defaults)
make
make install
make config

Installing libss7

There is a patched version of Digium’s libss7 referred to as Attila’s libss7 available via SVN. Download and install it:

svn co https://observer.router.hu/repos_pub/libss7/trunk alibss7
cd alibss7
make
make install

Installing Asterisk

Download and extract the Asterisk 1.6.0.28 package reference above.

cd asterisk-1.6.0.28

Now this next bit is very important and easy to miss - you also need a patched version of chan_dahdi.c that is compatible with the patched version of libss7. This is also available from SVN:

svn co https://observer.router.hu/repos_pub/chan_dahdi/trunk achan_dahdi

Then copy it to your Asterisk source:

cp achan_dahdi/chan_dahdi.c asterisk-1.6.0.28/channels/chan_dahdi.c

Now continue with the Asterisk installation:

./configure
make menuconfig
make
make install
make samples
make config

Install Asterisk Addons (optional)

Download and unpack the above referenced add ons package and build and install:

cd asterisk-addons-1.6.0.6
./configure
make menuconfig
make
make install
make samples

Sangoma Wanpipe

I’m using one of Sangoma’s E1 / T1 interface cards and so I need Wanpipe also. I’m using version 3.5.24 and preceed as follows after unpacking:

cd wanpipe-3.5.24./Setup install

During the install, follow these prompts:

select option 2 => Asterisk/Dahdi Support;
enter path /usr/local/src/dahdi-linux (for Zaptel path prompt);
select defaults for everything else;
you DO want to install start-up scripts;
you DO to configure wanpipe devices for DAHDI;
you DO want to generate /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf and:
- select E1 / T1 as appropriate;
- select line framing and encoding;
- choose clock source;
- select Zaptel/Dahdi – PRI CPE as signalling;
- select National ISDN 2 as switch type;
- do not enable hardware DTMF detection;
- use all channels;
- select dial plan context as appropriate;
and continue for other ports as necessary;
finally, choose Save cfg: Stop Asterisk & Wanpipe now
you would like wanrouter to start on system boot;
and you would like to execute ‘dahdi_cfg’ each time wanrouter starts.

Configuration Steps

We now need to set various options in Wanpipe, Dahdi and Asterisk for SS7 as it’s PRI/ISDN by default.

Edit all /etc/wanpipe/wanpipeX.conf files as necessary and change:

 TDMV_DCHAN              = 16

TDMV_DCHAN              = 0

Now edit /etc/dahdi/system.conf and change (for example):

span=1,1,0,ccs,hdb3,crc4
bchan=1-15,17-31
echocanceller=mg2,1-15,17-31
hardhdlc=16

span=1,1,0,ccs,hdb3,crc4
bchan=2-31
echocanceller=mg2,2-31
mtp2=1

which of course assumes signalling is on channel 1. If you have voice only links, you might need something like:

span=1,0,0,ccs,hdb3,crc4bchan=1-31
echocanceller=mg2,2-31

Lastly, we need to configure Asterisk. Replace lines such as:

;Sangoma A102 port 1 [slot:4 bus:5 span:1]
switchtype=national
context=from-pstn
group=0
echocancel=yes
signalling=pri_cpe
channel =>1-15,17-31

with an appropriate configuration. Mine follows below with some edits and some important notes at the end:

;Sangoma A102 port 1 [slot:4 bus:5 span:1]
switchtype=national
context=from-pstn
group=0
echocancel=yes

signaling=ss7
ss7type=itu
ss7_called_nai=dynamic
ss7_calling_nai=dynamic
ss7_internationalprefix=00
ss7_nationalprefix=0
ss7_subscriberprefix=
ss7_unknownprefix=
linkset=1
pointcode=1
adjpointcode=2
defaultdpc=3
networkindicator=national_spare
cicbeginswith=2
channel=2-31
sigchan=1

Set pointcode, adjpointcode and defaultdpc as appropriate;
set networkindicator as appropriate and ensure it matches the other end (you can see what you’re being sent and what you’re sending via ss7 debug;
cicsbeginwith is normally 1 but the telco on my end are starting at 2 – this was groping in the dark diagnostics and issues such as no audio, CICs not in service when both sides claim they are, etc may point to misaligned CICs;
make sure you have configured from-pstn or the appropriate context in yourextensions.conf.

Confirming Your Link Is Up

Now start wanrouter (/etc/init.d/wanrouter start); dahdi (/etc/init.d/dahdi start); and Asterisk (/etc/init.d/asterisk start). You should see your link come up via logs available with the dmesg command. Launch the Asterisk console and check the status of your links:

ast-deg1-1*CLI> ss7 show cics 1
  CIC   DPC  DAHDI        STATE   BLOCKING
    2    3      2         Idle
    3    3      3         Idle
    4    3      4         Idle
    5    3      5         Idle
    6    3      6         Idle
    7    3      7         Idle
    8    3      8         Idle
    9    3      9         Idle
   10    3     10         Idle
   11    3     11         Idle
   12    3     12         Idle
   13    3     13         Idle
   14    3     14         Idle
   15    3     15         Idle
   16    3     16         Idle
   17    3     17         Idle
   18    3     18         Idle
   19    3     19         Idle
   20    3     20         Idle
   21    3     21         Idle
   22    3     22         Idle
   23    3     23         Idle
   24    3     24         Idle
   25    3     25         Idle
   26    3     26         Idle
   27    3     27         Idle
   28    3     28         Idle
   29    3     29         Idle
   30    3     30         Idle
   31    3     31         Idle

You should now be okay to make test calls.

Do You Need Professional Support / Consultancy?

While I will try to respond to comments and questions on this blog, I don’t have the time to provide one on one assistance pro-bono. Professional consultancy on Asterisk and SS7 is available worldwide through my company, Open Solutions with contact details here.

References

For posterity, I have added Domjan Attila patched libss7 and chan_dahdi to GitHub:

Donncha O Caoimh: Hey The Cork News! Give to charity?

2012-01-11T21:06:31+00:00

The other night my wife showed me a local paper pointing at a picture of Ray D’Arcy and Jenny Kelly that sat next to a report about their recent engagement. Great! We’re fans of the show, they’re nice people, lovely!

Only thing is, that photo looked familiar. I searched and found it in my US Book Launch Party post from way back in 2005. I’m used to websites ~~borrowing~~ stealing my photos but it saddens me when commercial newspapers like The Cork News do it too. I found their Twitter account too and guess what? I’m not the only photographer who’s had a problem with them.

So… @TheCorkNews- can you address this? MT @ElishaClarke Don’t appreciate my photo being used without my permission. http://t.co/tCqnTTKk

@TheCorkNews did reply positively which is good.

@DeclanMadsen Sure, we’ll be in touch with the photographer.

But the fact remains that they used another photo without permission, my photo. Leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

The Cork News, I don’t want payment for the photo, or reimbursement for the 100 Euro train fare to Dublin, or the 40 Euro it cost to stay in a local hotel that night. If you want to make this good, please make a donation to Matt’s charity water campaign for his birthday. Thank you.

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Michele Neylon: Blacknight: New TLD Application Window Opens Tomorrow What Does It Mean?

2012-01-11T15:51:00+00:00

Tomorrow, January 12th 2012 ICANN will open the application window for new TLDs.

What on earth does that mean?

Companies, organisations, groups and even cities will be applying to run their own domain name extension.

What is a domain name extension?

It’s the bit on the right of the dot (“.”). For example, blacknight.com is our main domain. In our case we are using a .com, which is run by a US company called Verisign.

What new domain name extensions are we going to see?

At the moment nobody knows for sure. A number of organisations have been very open about their plans to apply for particular strings, so we know there are applicants for:

.shop (multiple applicants)
.web (multiple applicants)
.nyc (multiple applicants?)
.paris
.scot
.irish
.london
.music (multiple applicants)
.wine
.canon

And many more besides, but nobody knows at the moment who will actually get to launch a new domain extension.

Why not?

ICANN’s launch program includes an application process that vets applications very carefully, so some applications will probably fail. Others might get past the initial stages of the application process but fail for another reason.

Can I apply to run my own domain extension?

Short answer: Yes, but it’s going to cost you around $1 million US and you’ll need to be a limited company or equivalent.

Longer answer: Getting your own domain extension is not the same as simply registering a domain via a registrar. With your own domain name extension you would have a lot of freedom, but you also have a lot of responsibility as well. While it might be suited to an organisation, group, city or big company, it probably isn’t something that most individuals would consider doing, unless they were multi-millionaires

Does my brand need to apply for our own TLD? We’re worried that someone will “squat” it.

No. The newGTLD program has a lot of trademark and IP protection mechanisms builtin, so you can object to an application before it is fully processed

When will we know which extensions have been applied for?

Early in May 2012 ICANN will be publishing the full list of applications

What happens if more than one entity applies for the same string?

They could end up in an auction.

Can there be shorter domain extensions with this expansion?

The minimum is 3 characters. All the two characters are reserved for country codes. The same rule applies to internationalised domain names.

So could I have email@extension?

No. You still need a domain / string before the extension eg. michele@neylon.nyc would be valid, but michele@nyc wouldn’t be. The extension (TLD) is the bit on the right of the dot – you still need to specify something on the left.

When will I be able to register a .irish or .shop domain?

When the registry operator has been chosen and registrars (such as ourselves) begin offering the new extension(s) for sale. This is unlikely to happen until 2013 at the earliest.

We will post more on the subject as the facts become known.

Can I pre-register a .irish or a .shop domain now?

No and we would strongly discourage anyone from even trying to pre-register domains now.

Will I need to register my company name or trademark in all these new domain extensions?

No. There are going to be a much larger number of domain extensions that will probably cater for specific industries, professions, languages and locations. There wouldn’t be much point in registering your brand or company name in all of them.

So which domains should we register?

If you sell wine and there is a .wine, then that would be an obvious choice. Got an office in New York City? Then .nyc would make a lot of sense.

In short you should see these new extensions as being a marketing opportunity.

How much will it cost to register my own domain with these new extensions? ie. mycompany.shop or mybusiness.paris

Pricing will be determined by each registry operator, so some extensions might be available (retail) for not much more than a .com domain name now, while other domains will probably be sold as “premium” extensions.

Will these new domain extensions replace existing .com or .co.uk domain names?

No. This is an expansion. It is not a replacement.

If you have any other questions / queries, or if something is unclear please let us know via the comments below.

New TLD Application Window Opens Tomorrow What Does It Mean? is an article from Blacknight Blog - News, tips & offers from Ireland's leading hosting & domain registration companies

Donncha O Caoimh: Get your SGS Cyanogenmod 7 Here!

2012-01-11T10:50:07+00:00

The Cyanogenmod 7 nightly builds for the Samsung Galaxy S stopped quite a while ago but the the builds linked from this thread work just fine and get you the latest CM7 nightly. Not touching CM9 until there’s at least a stable release as it’s my wife’s phone now!

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Donncha O Caoimh: 30 minutes of exercise a day? Can I?

2012-01-11T09:52:51+00:00

I should walk my son to school more often. It’s only 1.2km away, 12 minutes to get back home and I feel refreshed after that walk. It’s been such a mild winter I have no excuse!

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Paul Jakma: Comparing cycling in the Netherlands to Scotland

2012-01-10T22:34:33+00:00

The following thoughts on comparing cycling between Scotland and the Netherlands are intended to be anecdotal, from my impressions of having been a cyclist in the Netherlands as a child and adult visitor; and as a commuter & recreational cyclist in Glasgow, Scotland for a year & ½. For more evidence based perspectives, please see blogs such as “A view from the cycle path” and “At War With The Motorist“.

The cyclist

In Scotland the cyclist will often look as if they are about to take part in a very dangerous sport. Many cyclists wear helmets, and often hi-visibility clothing. It’s largely culturally accepted that cycling is an activity that requires special cyclist safety equipment, and state cycling information reinforces this. Clothing worn is often cycle-specific, and tailored for energetic, sporty cycling. Cyclists often are male, and in their 20s to 40s.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, cyclists typically dress no differently from anyone else. They will be quite representative of the population as a whole in terms of age, from the young through to the old – dutch children cycle independently to school from age 8 or 9 or so (though, worryingly, this has increased from when I was young, when age 6 or 7 was common). It’s not unusual to see parents carrying children, e.g. with seats on the rear rack, on the bar, and/or attached to the handlebar (for very young & light children), and sometimes all 3 at the same time. The “bakfiets” (barrow-bicycle) has also become popular as a flexible utility bicycle for young families.

Perhaps this is due to cycling in Scotland being undertaken often as a fitness activity, and not just as a way to get around. Perhaps the fact that Scottish cyclists tend to have to regularly practice “vehicular cycling“, and having to cycle faster to safely mix with nominally 52km/h (30mph) motor traffic, means they need sportier clothing. While in the Netherlands, cycling is something you do to get around – to get to school, to work, to do “boodschappen” (shopping), or nearby friends.

The sports/fitness cyclist of course also exists in the Netherlands. They are a tiny minority of the population in the Netherlands, just as in Scotland, though perhaps a little less so. However, unlike in Scotland, they are also a tiny minority of cyclists. Cycling is simply a normal part of life for most people in the Netherlands.

The bicycle

Bicycles in Scotland tend to be sports-bike derived. They’ll either be road-sports or mountain bikes, or hybrid of these mildly adapted for about-town. They’re nearly always equipped with derailleur gears, which are quite fragile and need constant maintenance. Derailleur gears means chain-guards are impractical, so oily chains are always exposed. Lights are bolt-on after-thoughts, usually battery-driven. Many bikes do not have full mud-guards, e.g. because they are sports-road bikes that have no fittings for them, or because they are mountain bikes on which they are not fashionable. Some mountain bikes may have seatpost mounted half-guards. Many bikes do not have luggage racks, but where they do, it’s usually made from a thin-gauge aluminium which can not carry more than 25kg or so. Brakes are often rim-caliper brakes – which require regular adjusting. Mountain bikes often have suspension, for downhill cycling over rough terrain, which saps pedalling energy.

Bicycles in the Netherlands are usually hub-geared, often 3-speed. This means no derailleurs, which means its more robust and needs much less maintenance, and also that the chain or belt can be fully enclosed. Brakes tend to be low-maintenance drum brakes (the rear often actuated by pedalling backwards). Lights are often dynamo-driven, and even integrated into the bike on some modern designs. Low-drag hub dynamos are common these days, supplanting the rim-driven bottle dynamos still common on older bikes. Rear racks tend to be far more sturdy, as it is common in the Netherlands to use them to give a friend a lift – particularly among teenagers & young adults. For an idea, have a look at the Batavus 2012 city bike line-up (UK site, but the models & specs differ a little, to cater for UK preferences).

The environment

The road environment in the Netherlands is nearly always built to cater as much for the safety and convenience of pedestrians and cyclists, as it is for motorists. Cycling infrastructure is integrated with road design, and has been evolved and improved over decades, with safety for all users engineered in.

Older dutch road & path design

In dense urban areas, speed limits are 30km/h (18.6mph), sometimes even less. Where ever possible, road users are separated and each given their own, clearly delineated space. So pedestrians will have their foot-path, cyclists their cycle-path, and motorists their road. Where space is constrained, cyclists may have to use the road – in which case the speed limit will practically always be reduced to 30km/h or less. Care is taken to reduce, if not avoid, the impact of conflicts between different road users at junctions and pinch points. On streets where motor traffic may encounter cycle traffic, the junction with side streets may be given raised kerbs, with tight angles, to slow down cars coming in or out of those side-streets. Cycle paths are generally very smooth, clean and well-mantained. You can cycle on them with normal bikes, with no problem.

The Scottish sports cyclist might, however, not be entirely happy with the dutch cycling environment, as cycle-paths often are mandatory. Dutch sports road cyclists often complain about being restricted to narrower cycle-paths in places, while ordinary dutch complain about having pelotons of fast roadies flying past at speeds similar to mopeds – which were banned from many cycle-paths in the 90s for the same reason. Various groups, representing both ordinary and sports cyclists, have been campaigning to allow/force such pelotons to use the road instead.

Brand "new" segregated path in Glasgow

In Scotland, cycling infrastructure is more rare. Cycling infrastructure often seems to be designed & built separately from the general road, and does not get a lot of funding. Infrastructure is usually done extremely cheaply, e.g. by designating existing footpaths as “shared use” and putting up a few signs, or by painting an advisory lane on the road. The shared-use paths sometimes have rough surfaces, such as gravel on tow-paths or even very rough cobbles (the Clyde-side section of NCN75 in Glasgow, from Broomielaw to the SECC), making them unpleasant or even completely unsuited for use by normal town bicycles. Which may explain the popularity of very heavy, suspension mountain bikes here in Scotland. On-road cycle lanes often are very narrow and go through the highly dangerous “door zone”, where cyclists can be knocked off their bike into the path of the 52km/h (30mph) traffic.

Even when segregated paths are built, because there is so little investment, very little of it can be built, or , as in the case in the photo here, it’s simply sectioned off from an old & broken road without being properly resurfaced first. Where paths cross side-roads, or where the segregated paths run out (which is often, as so little of it can be built), very little thought is given to reducing the impact of conflicts between cyclists and motor traffic. If thought is given, it will be the cyclist who is required to give way with a “Cyclists Dismount” sign, not the other way around. The local authority may even deliberately require the cyclist to negotiate kerbs, again making life hard for anyone on a normal bicycle.

The lack of separate infrastructure means Scottish cyclists have to choose between cycling on road, amongst fast motor traffic, or often inconvenient shared-use paths where these exist and perhaps illegally cycling on pedestrian footpaths where they do not. Roads in urban areas are often designed to maximise traffic flow. Single lane streets with parking widen out to 2-lanes at junctions. Railings often are installed to segregate the fast, 52km/h traffic from pedestrians – potentially leaving on-road cyclists nowhere to go in any incident with a motor vehicle.

As cyclists are so few, and because they tend to dress distinctly, there seems to be tribalisation between motorists and cyclists. Some motorists view cyclists as obstructive “lycra louts”, getting in their way and slowing them down, even though in urban areas in Glasgow, average journey speeds are often limited to 20 to 30km/h by traffic lights – which is potentially slower than the cyclist. Congestion, caused by cars, not bicycles, can make journey average speeds much slower again. Despite, or perhaps because of, waits at traffic lights equalising average speeds for motorists and cyclists, motorists still will rush impatiently at, and not infrequently above, the 52km/h (30mph) speed limit. Some motorists can be ignorant, a rare few even aggressive. The cyclists in turn feel embattled, and often subjectively quite unsafe, due to this fast and sometimes close passing motor traffic – motor traffic they will often catch anyway at the next lights.

Weather

While the Netherlands might not get quite as much rain as Scotland, it still gets plenty of it outside the summer. That said, it doesn’t rain as often people think, and most cycle journeys in either country will be rain free. Also, the winters can be much much colder in the Netherlands. The dutch simply wear a rain jacket, carry an umbrella and put on more clothes.

Flat land

Much of the Netherlands is quite flat, Holland especially so. However, the south of the Netherlands, near the border with Belgium, can be more hilly and cycling is just as normal there, as anywhere else. The flatter parts can allow strong, continuous winds to blow across, which can be as much of a drag on cycling as any hill!

Overall

Despite the less appealing environment in Scotland, compared to what the Netherlands shows is possible at least, you can still enjoy some dutch style cycling, at least within Glasgow city. So many of the roads are wide and 2-lane, that with a little confidence to take your lane, by moving out away from the gutter and more towards the middle of it, or by riding 2-abreast if with company, you can get the motorist to, perhaps grudgingly, give you the space needed to enjoy nice, relaxed cycling in whatever clothes you’d normally walk out of the door with. Unfortunately though, I suspect many people in Scotland are put off cycling by idea they’d need to develop that kind of confidence.

Mass cycling in Scotland may first require that the roads see more equal investment for cycling. This in turn may require some leadership, and/or a significant change in economic pressures (e.g. fuel costs; public health costs of sedentary lives).

Filed under: Cycling

Donncha O Caoimh: Fotoshop by Adobé

2012-01-10T18:32:33+00:00

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The cyclist

The bicycle

The environment

Weather

Flat land

Overall