Web Dev Ireland

Behold!!

The Proceratium google

Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences has named this ant after google. Mr. Fisher was so impressed with the help google gave him in setting up a “bio-map” of ants around the world using google earth that he named an ant after them!

We tried to get NASA’s help to develop such a system for years with their mapping expertise and data, but Google Earth answered the call first. I am so impressed with Google that I have named an ant I recently discovered in Madagascar Proceratium google. Its bizarrely-shaped abdomen is an adaptation for hunting down obscure prey: spider eggs.

Google have allowed antweb (run by Mr. Fisher and the California Academy of Science) to create an interface to google earth. So now using google earth and linking it to the antwebs mappings you can see where different species of ants around the world have habitats! It’s pretty cool.

Picked this up on The Register a couple of days ago. Amazing satellite photos of military installations around the world. Become a spy.

The aircraft grave yard is cool here.

tcal.net has had a bit of a facelift. Tcal is a blog that I enjoy reading and commenting on, they have frequent updates and most are very high quality and entertaining.
The bones of tcal is still based on wordpress as is this site (well this site is entirely worpress :p).
I like most of the update but the AJAX comments isn’t something I would be a big fan of. I don’t believe any site should need JavaScript enabled to function correctly (since a lot of office computers in this country have it disabled by the sys admins).
Nice new logo too.

But other then that the site looks well (good job danger!)
If you have never been go now!! tcal.net

I read about this last week on the register what happened is that a group of webmasters got together and decided to link to George W. Bush’s website with the words “failure” and “miserable failure” as the anchor text. If you create enough of these links you start to rank very highly on google. This group have now gotten good ol’ George to number 1 for both searches!

Google call it “Googlebombing” and have a blog post about it
Googlebombing blog.

Now if only we could get Internet Explorer to the top of “dodgy software”.

I posted about this on boards.ie but thought I should put this up here too for all you firefox users.

Simple yet very effective buffer overflow bug vunerability found in FF 1.0.6(probably all 1.0.x) releases and Beta 1.5.

originally posted here

Technical Details:
The problem seems to be when a hostname which has all dashes causes the NormalizeIDN
call in nsStandardURL::BuildNormalizedSpec to return true, but is sets encHost to an
empty string. Meaning, Firefox appends 0 to approxLen and then appends the long
string of dashes to the buffer instead. The following HTML code below will reproduce
this issue:

A HREF=https:———————————————

I’m assuming that this is already being exploited since it would take all of 10 seconds to post a URL somewhere.

Mozilla have a fix/workaround

Yesterday eBay announced that they are going to pay $2.6 Billion for Skype. Thats a lot of cash!
Skype were the pioneers in the VoIP market giving away it’s Client for free to users so they could call each other on the internet with nothing more then a microphone and a set of speakers(mind the feedback loop ).
Google have entered the fray with their own IM and VoIP client called, suprise suprise. Google Talk.
Microsoft have also added VoIP functionality to their Instant Messenger

So now we have three of the biggest companies in the world vying to carry all our VoIP calls (and eventually all our telephone calls too). It should be interesting to see what happens over the next six months or so, expect back biting and masses of marketing.

It’s interesting to own a search engine and be able to place your self in all the target keyword top 10’s. (Try typing “talk”,”VoIP client” and “instant messenger” into Google)

Having seen recently that A List Apart has had a makeover, I came across a reference to the technology that the new version is built on at Zeldmans site. He was saying that the new version of A List Apart(which he is a key creator/contributor to) is now built with the open source web framework Ruby On Rails, having sparked my interest I decided to have a look at their website. I watched This Intro Movie (50mb /qt), it is a demonstration of a blog being built with Ruby on Rails. The guy builds the blog in 15 minutes! I can see this being an excellent way to create web applications very fast.
A list of realworld companies using Ruby on Rails can be found here, the list includes NASA, Motorola, HP, etc…

I was reading an article on the emerging web technology AJAX
AJAX is a muddle of XML and DHTML that could be used to feed new information to ticker-type elements of a webpage. However I can see it being abused instantly with the likes of rotating adverts, bandwidth sucked up without your knowledge! I’m not a big fan of it, not a big fan of JavaScript at all to be honest. Just as I was about to discount the technology and move on, in the comments I came across this very funny, yet true qoute

web technologies are the porn stars of our time. they look pretty and we ogle at their behaviour, but underneath they’re a mess and eventually succumb to viruses and droopy tits.

I have recently started a new job(3 weeks ago) and I have spent two and a half of those weeks sitting around doing nothing! I’m actually starting to get bored of the internet (que noises of shock). The new place has a “restrictive” internet policy with forums, game sites, etc.. all blocked! I’m still waiting to be assigned to a project.
So I have taken to writing in my blog and reading lots of other blogs!

Photoblogs are something I am quite fond of and I’m thinking of starting my own soon. Dublin City is a beautiful place to work and there are a lot of interesting things to photograph.

Here are a couple of photoblogs I like to view everyday
Chromasia : is a photoblog of Blackpool, England.
Daily dose of imagery : a canadian photographer with a great eye