Archive for May, 2005

Seatbelts on school buses?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/5/2005
in Community Interest
. 5 Comments

We have had a terrible tragedy here - a school bus swerved while apparantly trying to avoid a previous crash, went out of control, overturned and five schoolgirl passengers were killed (and 46 passengers were injured).

Since the crash, there has been a lot of debate around the fact that there were no seat belts fitted on the bus which crashed. There is little doubt that if seat belts were fitted on the bus and if they were used by the pupils on the bus then the death and injury toll would have lower.

However, there has been almost no mention of the lack of Anti-Lock Brake System (ABS) on the bus. If the bus had been fitted with ABS then the bus would not have skidded out of control, the bus would have been brought to a stop safely and the lack of seat belts would not have been an issue.

Definitely all school buses should have seat belts but more importantly, all school buses should have ABS fitted.

WordPress Categories, Technorati Tags and Search Engine Optimisation

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/5/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and Search Engine Optimisation
. 65 Comments

Technorati is a search engine which automatically receives a notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated.

Technorati Tags are a way of classifying blog posts - you can add tags to your blog posts by adding a rel=”tag” to tag links in your posts - however this method is cumbersome and prone to mistakes. Fortunately, if you are a WordPress user, Technorati automatically recognises your categories and uses them as Tags to classify your posts.

Why are Tags important? Well, if I want to see what has been written by bloggers recently on any topic, I simply browse to the Technorati Tag page for that topic and see all the latest posts. For instance the Technorati Tag page for Security at time of writing contains 4,620 posts from 850 blogs, all on security related topics.

But wait, there’s more! I can do a search in Technorati for a term of interest - and if I want to keep an eye on what people are writing about that term moving forward, I can create what is called a Watchlist for that term (the term can be anything - your company name, for instance - or your competitor’s name!). A Watchlist is a saved, constantly updating search so you can go back to the search and at any time see the latest posts on your term of interest. It gets even better, your Watchlists are also available as RSS feeds so you can keep an eye on them using your RSS reader!

Given that Tags are important and that WordPress categories translate into Technorati Tags, it follows that you should chose your WordPress category names very carefully. For instance, if you want to create a Category for posts about about your blog - you could call it, Blog, Blogging or Weblog. If you look at the equivalent Technorati Tags for these terms, you will see that the TagBlog has a Google Page Rank (PR) of 5 and has 42,678 posts from 7,422 blogs; Blogging has a PR of 4 and has 15,131 posts from 2,295 blogs; while Weblog has a PR of 2 and has 55,823 posts from 3,552 blogs.

So from a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, the best category name (of the three) to chose in WordPress would be Blog because it has the highest Google Page Rank (and has the highest number of associated blogs). A page with a high Page Rank linking to your site increases your own Page Rank and therefore your SEO.

Something to consider when creating WordPress categories.

D-Link DSL 300 is Mac address specific!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/5/2005
in Technology and Web
. 0 Comments

I lost Internet connectivity over the weekend at home. My home Internet setup is quite basic - see the following diagram (courtesy of D-Link):
Home Internet setup diagram
I use my laptop almost exclusively and I have it connected to the Internet via wireless network served by my D-Link DI-624 wireless router.

On Sunday morning, my laptop didn’t register any wireless network. I thought my son had accidentally turned off the router so I went upstairs to check but no, the router was dead. Completely dead - no LED lights lighting, nothing.

No problem, I thought. I’ll bypass the router and plug my laptop directly in to the DSL modem (a D-Link DSL 300). When I did, though, I still couldn’t access the Internet!

I logged into the web interface of the modem and discovered that my ISP username and password settings appeared to be lost. Strange coincidence I thought, both devices having problems simultaneously, possible power surge of some kind? Anyway, I reconfigured the modem with the settings, downloaded my email and then connected the modem to my sons iMac so he could play.

Again though, there was no Internet access. I logged into the modem again and yet again the ISP settings were lost. Uh oh! I wondered if the modem had been damaged as well.

Then it hit me - the modem must be MAC address specific - and it was set for the MAC address of the wireless router - hence its apparent failure when the router failed. Knowing that, I left the one device connected to the modem until this morning when I had a chance to replace the wireless router.

Now that I have replaced the wireless router, all is back to normal once more (except my wallet which is a little lighter :-( )

How to pick any lock in seconds

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/5/2005
in Community Interest and Security
. 7 Comments

Lockpicking is the art of opening a lock without damaging it or using a key - and recently lockpicking has become a sport with clubs and championships. Who knew?

One such club is TOOOL (The Open Organisation of Lockpickers). One of the founding members of this organisation is Barry Wels whose video on how to open a Kensington laptop lock with a toilet roll and a pen have gained him a lot of notoriety lately.

In a similar vein, Barry gave a talk at the Physical Security Workshop at 21st Chaos Communication Congress (21C3) in Berlin where he demonstrates a new technique for opening just about any physical lock in seconds. The technique is called the bump key method and a pdf explaining the bump key method is available here.

The talk is now available online and makes for scary viewing - be warned though, it is over 600mb so if you want to view it you will need a decent Internet connection.

Hat tip to Eric Marvets on whose blog I first saw a reference to this video.

WordPress 1.5.1.1 released

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/5/2005
in Blogging and WordPress
. 0 Comments

WordPress 1.5.1.1 was released earlier today to fix bugs in the 1.5.1 release of a couple of weeks ago.

The latest version is now available for download from the WordPress site and is recommended for all WordPress users.

The Semantic web and life sciences

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/5/2005
in Technology and Web
. 3 Comments

I see where Tim Berners-Lee expects the next explosion in use of the Semantic web to be in the field of life sciences.

The Semantic Web “will give scientists and other users unexpected help and serendipitous added value from others’ data,” Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), said at the Fourth Annual Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston

He went on to say

Life scientists in particular could find the Semantic Web a useful tool, and in so doing, “provide leadership to lots of other fields” in implementing this next-generation Web technology, Berners-Lee said. “At the moment, I see a huge amount of energy from people in life sciences, getting excited by the Semantic Web and what it can do to solve the big-idea problems.”

Dr. John Breslin, of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway has written and spoken extensively about the semantic web so I look forward to finding out from him first-hand just exactly what the semantic web is when he comes to the Blogging for Business event on the 9th of June.

If you find the concept of the semantic web hard to understand (I know I do), you are not alone - even Tim Berners-Lee admits that the concept is “quite difficult to explain.”

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