2005 June Archive at Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Monthly Archive for June, 2005

Robert Scoble coming to Cork

Published

Tom Raftery

on 23/6/2005

in Blogging and Business blogging

. 11 Comments

Robert Scoble is coming to address the IT@Cork Annual Conference on November 30th this year.

More details of the event will be released closer to the time.

In the meantime, when I asked Robert if he’d be willing to attend a bloggers dinner after the Annual Conference he said:

Of course! I’m always up for a bloggers dinner!

So, as the IT@Cork Annual conference will be in the Rochestown Park Hotel, I propose that the bloggers dinner be there as well, on the evening of the 30th of November at 8pm say.

How does that sound to people?

Out of Office reply policies

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/6/2005

in Podcast, Security and Technology

. 1 Comment

I saw a post on David Smalley’s blog about Microsoft Exchange Server Out of Office Replies. In his post David mentions that in Exchange server 2000, Out of Office Replies (OOR’s) are not sent outside of the Exchange organisation, and he goes on to explain how you can configure Exchange to allow OOR’s to go outside of the your organisation.

While this behaviour by Exchange would appear to be a bug - there is a good reason behind it - it is for protecting the privacy of your Exchange users. It is entirely possible to spam a company (or more likely companies), do automated searches for Out of Office Replies, cross reference them with phone book entries, and then burglarise houses secure in the knowledge that “Sally is on holidays in Bali until the 15th!”.

Out of Office Replies like these will also tell any cracker that this person’s logon will be unattended for the next x days so they can merrily ring the helpdesk saying “I have lost my password, can you re-set it for me?”

Also, OOR’s will reply to ‘normal’ spam mails, confirming the email address as a live one.

From an IT/security point of view, it is preferable to maintain the current situation of OOR’s not going beyond you Exchange organisation but I can see that from a client service point of view this might not be acceptable.

If you do need to allow OOR’s in your company, then you really need an OOR policy document and as we are rapidly coming into holiday season, you need to make all your staff aware of it asap for their own protection.

Staff shouldn’t say how long they are out for nor why they are out. They shouldn’t include their sig file as this gives away too much information (Job Title for instance - the more senior the position, the more likely (extended) travel is involved), and they should include the name of an alternate contact along with the main company number (but they shouldn’t include the job title of the alternate contact).

The following is an example of a reasonably safe and yet informative Out of Office Reply:
“Thank you for contacting me - unfortunately I am away from my email right now but I will reply to you on my return. In the meantime, if you need some assistance, please call John Doe at 555 1234.”

The podcast of this post is available here thanks to Pete Prodoehl whose comment on my last post explained how I could use Ourmedia.org to upload podcasts to the Internet Archive without the 24 hour wait!

Podcast using WordPress

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/6/2005

in Blogging, Podcast and WordPress

. 12 Comments

Chris J Davis has posted a very simple 3 step tutorial on how to Podcast using WordPress.

Chris’ first step brought Audacity to my attention for the first time - Audacity is an Open Source Cross-Platform application for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems and with a freely available add-in, it can export mp3 files. So step one of Chris’ tutorial is the creation of your mp3 sound files using a tool like Audacity.

Step two of the tutorial deals with where to put the sound file once you have created it. In my ignorance, as a Podcasting newbie, I would simply have uploaded it to my own server but Chris points out that it is possible to upload your sound files to the Internet Archive. Using the Internet Archive’s storage facility saves your own server both storage space and bandwidth - this consideration becomes increasingly important as more and more people listen to your podcasts. You can upload to the Internet Archive using the Creative Commons Publisher (Mac OS X version available too).

The final step of the tutorial is to create a WordPress post containing the URI of the sound file and WordPress will do the rest!

One further tip Chris gives is to create a separate WordPress Category for your Podcasts so subscribers can subscribe to that feed alone and not have their subscriptions filled with your text-based WordPress posts.

I have taken Chris’ advice and created a Podcast category on this blog - the feed for which is available here. As an experiment I have created a podcast of this post and will podcast future posts (not all!) and monitor the interest levels. If I’m not world-famous by next week, I may give up!

This post will be available from the Internet Archive in 24 hours (submissions to the archive are moderated I discovered and take up to 24 hours to be approved) and will be downloadable from here - in the meantime, you can download it from my own server here.

Thanks to James for pointing out this tutorial.

UPDATE: The podcast is now available for download from the Internet Archive here. Also, in comments Liam burke mentioned that you can upload podcasts to podblaze.com free and they are available immediately - I will try this out and report back.

UPDATE2: I created an account on Podblaze.com and uploaded my podcast - it seems to be a straightforward enough process, the only rub is the 40mb free account limit! Also, there doesn’t appear to be a way to see how many times your file has been accessed.

The podcast is available on podblaze here.

Virtudes Marquez Villergas 1931-2005 RIP

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/6/2005

in Personal

. 0 Comments

Virtudes Marquez Villergas was my mother-in-law. She died last week (on Sunday 12th June) in her home in Seville, Spain unexpectedly.

Her loss is felt profoundly by all who knew her - she was, without doubt, one of the warmest, most generous and fun-loving people I have had the privilege of knowing.

The world was a better place with Virtudes Marquez Villergas in it.