Web Dev Ireland

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.

Finally they have me doing some real work. Thats why I have not being posting so much recently. I will make a dedicated effort to post more I promise :p .

So anyway this is what I’m doing:

Unit testing and Regression testing a very large website. It’s interesting to see how much effort goes into a large enterprise web portal with a huge backend!

I’m doing all this using HTTPUnit and JUnit. Which are based on Java, which I don’t know too well. I’m having to learn very quickly.

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

Ok so this is a little thing I have been meaning to do for a while. I will post a picture of something I see on the way to work everyday. Since I live in Sallins I will have a lot of photo’s I can take(This could be a looooong series).

The Odlum Flour and Oatmeal Silos

When I walk out the door of my house and walk up towards the train station I see these every morning. They look so different each day depending on the sky behind them. The day I took this photo the sky was very overcast. So I decided to convert it to greyscale to emphasise the “greyness” of the image. Somedays the sky is blue the silos look totally different. I like the photo and I might post the full sized image in the gallery this evening.

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)

Well it’s 8 months since I seen this teaser page full of beautiful images “actual screenshots” apparently of the game. So I drooled and waited and drooled and waited until now! Finally I get to sink my teeth into this demo. A word of warning the demo comes with no instructions. The Demo can be seen downloaded from the official Age of Empires website.

Minimum specs are:

Windows XP
1.4Ghz Processor
256MB of RAM
64MB Graphics card
370MB of Hard disk space (actually 575Mb fully installed)
DirectX 9c

Here is a screenshot to get you hooked!

There goes my weekend.

I have heard rumours about this phone for about two months now. The phone is made by Motorola. I was hoping for something really cool that looked like an iPod, but instead we get …

It’s not that pretty and admittedly it’s not an actual apple product (you know it would look really god if it was). Some of the other problems that I see with the phone is that it is restricted to 100 tunes max, no matter what size memory card you put in it (que the Motorola ROKR 100+ songs crack ). It also only comes with a 512mb memory card. I’m a big fan of higher bitrates on my MP3’s so that just would not do.

I much prefer the functionality of the Samsung i300 with a 3gb hard drive for your mp3’s. The portable music player will soon be a thing of the past as all our devices intigrate into one.

One really cool music player launched yesterday by apple is the iPod nano it costs €209 for the 2Gb version and €259 for the 4Gb version from the apple store.

Well it’s the big day! Ireland Vs France at Lansdowne Rd.
I have recently started to work up the road from Lansdowne Road and I am really excited about the game tonight. I was curious about what happens the day of the game so I went out at lunch and took some photos. The anwser is quite simply … Nothing, at least nothing you can see from outside the grounds. There are a lot of vans going in and out of the grounds but nothing really outside except some barriers and a few extra Garda.
So anyway tonight for those of you not in the know is a huge game in terms of Irelands chances of qualifying for the World Cup in Germany 2006 If we win tonight we will have a very good chance of qualifying from group 4. I can’t wait to see how this game goes . Here is another picture of the East stand I took today. Everyone cross your fingers!