I received an email yesterday from Shel Israel regarding his forthcoming road trip to Europe with Rick Segal.
Shel asked me who he should meet in Ireland. I said, “why don’t I post it on my blog?”
“Great!” he said.
So, Shel and Rick are
looking for people with great ideas who can help us see how tech entrepreneurialism will evolve in Ireland over the next few years.
Given that Rick is a VC and Shel is a business consultant, anyone with a new business or new business idea should be keen to meet them.
If you would like to meet up with them, either leave a comment on this post, or drop me an email at tom@tomrafteryit.net and I’ll pass on your interest.
UPDATE - Unfortunately I will be away when Rick and Shel are visiting Ireland but Pat Phelan of Roam4Free has kindly stepped up to the plate and is holding a blogger/VC dinner in the Taste of Thai restaurant on September 9th at 6:30pm. Rick and Shel will be there and are hoping to meet lots of interesting Irish people there too. If you are interested in meeting them, I’d advise you to go along.
Skype have released Skype for Mac with Video Preview. You can download it here.
It is beta software so be aware that when you install it, you may have issues. Having said that, I installed it on my iMac G5 and so far so good!
This is a photo of my first video call on Skype. Don’t forget that you have to click the camera button on the screen for the other party to be able to see you. I was scratching my head for the first couple of seconds of our call wondering why I could see Scott and he couldn’t see me! D’oh!
Also, Skype have disabled the ability to take screenshots (are they worried about porn calls?). Fortunately I had my cameraphone to hand and was able to take the shot above of our call.
The audio and video quality is very good. The video is less choppy than I would have expected. The only issue I had was that my processor was maxxed out but this is a known issue.
The other big change with this version is the Mac Skype interface has been drastically cleaned up and it is way better.
Kudos to the Skype team for this preview.
[Edited to add a link to Scott's site]
[UPDATE] - I see Ars Technica have caught up with this story now.
Previously I wrote about how easy uploading photos to Flickr is using Flock.
Since then Thomas Hawk turned me on to Steve Cohen’s cross-platform, open source photo uploader JUploadr.
Why do I like it?
- Well, it is GPL’d for a start.
- Cross-platform
- It allows me to upload photos to my accounts on Flickr and Zooomr
-
It allows batch editing and uploading
- I can tag my pictures and
- I can upload directly into my Flickr Sets
Why JUploadr isn’t on Flickr’s Tools page is beyond me. It beats the tools there and it is free (unlike the iPhoto plugin linked to there).
Enrique was baptised yesterday - so how come my head hurts?
A great day was had by all.
When you see something new being lauded by Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress fame), Kevin Burton (of TailRank) and Chris Pirillo (of GnomeDex fame) you sit up and take notice.
In this case they are talking up a new service called OpenDNS. OpenDNS is a very simple idea - it is a centralised series of DNS servers which protect you against phishing sites and speed up your browsing.
How do you use the service? Simply change the DNS settings in your computer (or router) to point at OpenDNSs DNS servers (208.67.220.220 and 208.67.220.222) and off you go!
They claim to be much faster by enabling huge DNS caches (does this mean changes to a sites DNS settings will propagate more slowly?) and by having their caches “at the major intersections of the Internet” - so far U.S. only.
They also claim to protect you against phishing by comparing sites you want to visit against their database of known phishing attacks. This strikes me as a dubious claim as these sites change daily and keeping up with phishing sites is a fast paced game of leapfrog. Marshal Kirkpatrick is equally skeptical (if not more so!).
The speed difference of using the OpenDNS servers isn’t especially obvious for anyone based in Ireland. Browsing to any of my regular sites is in fact, initially, a little slower then normal (most are not in their cache yet I suspect) but speeds up on second load.
However, one place I did notice a definite speed bump was in my RSS reader. Chris Pirillo mentioned it in passing when he said:
If you use a news aggregator, either one (or both) of these solutions is mandatory
He was correct. Browsing websites might not seem much faster but my NetNewsWire RSS reader refreshed my >200 feeds in a fraction of the time it normally takes. Maybe this is how they should be promoting their service. Anyone else notice this?
How to block comment spam
Like all bloggers, I find comment spam to be a constant annoyance. There are many ways to mitigate the problems it causes however and using the following techniques means that this site is subject to almost no comment spam.
Use WordPress’ built in comment spam tools -
I also have a custom .htaccess file which stops a lot of spamers cold before they reach the site at all. Excercise extreme caution with .htaccess files as they can take your entire site down. If you are not sure what you are doing, I have written a few explanatory articles on .htaccess files previously. If you are still not sure what you are doing, put the .htaccess file down and walk away very slowly!!!
Finally, I use plugins called Referrer Karma and Bad Behaviour which help significantly by stopping bots from accessing your site to leave comment spam.
Having implemented these techniques ensures that my site stays free of comment spam without having to moderate all comments and without having to implement CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are those horrible badly drawn images of combinations of letters and numbers which some people put on their sites to stop spam. CAPTCHA’s are evil*. Stop using them. Now.
* The American Foundation for the blind has written many times about how difficult Captchas make browsing for blind or partially sighted people and the W3C in a report on Captcha’s said: