Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
On the back of a suggestion from James Governor I am going to set up a blog dedicated to Green issues. I have a strong interest in this area and have presented internationally on the topic but I don’t post much about it (and when I do post here, I feel I am polluting the stream with unrelated posts).
So, any suggestions for a great (available) domain name?
I have a Fire Eagle invite code as a prize! I will decide on a winner tomorrow (Friday 7th at 6pm GMT).
I gave a talk at the it@cork Green IT event yesterday entitled “Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint”.
The talk goes into some detail on how Cork Internet eXchange, the cork-based data centre I am a director of, achieves hyper energy efficiency.
It is also worth noting that tomorrow’s OpenCoffee session is in CIX. Hope to see you there.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Beta yesterday and, surprisingly, it seems to be quite a good browser! I say surprisingly because Microsoft don’t have a track record in the good browser market 
I wrote a post a few weeks back comparing the speeds of various browsers and Microsoft’s current browser, Internet Explorer 7, was the slowest browser by a long margin.
Opera’s CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie was quoted recently making some very valid criticisms of Internet Explorer 7.
However, Microsoft seem to have addressed many of those issues in Internet Explorer 8.
I downloaded and installed it on my Mac last night (in the Parallels partition with XP as the OS).
It seemed to work well enough so I loaded up the Acid2 test and was surprised to find that it rendered correctly! This was a good sign!
So then I tried running the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark tests on it and it completed the test in an extremely respectable 9.9 secs. For comparison, Firefox 3.0b3 took 16.9 seconds to complete the same test.
There is still a lot of work to be done on IE8. It crashed several times on me when I was using it and it fails the Acid3 test miserably (17/100 compared to Firefox 3.0b3’s 61/100 and Webkit’s thoroughly respectable 87/100!).
Still, this looks like Microsoft are finally taking a step in the right direction with IE8. I am looking forward to seeing the final release.
UPDATE - I installed Internet Explorer 8 on my Vista laptop this evening (the same one where Webkit runs the test in 9,094.2ms) and IE8 completed the test in 19,906.4ms. This is roughly the same as Firefox 3.0b3 and is a vast improvement on the 66,870.6ms which IE7 took.
I am speaking at the it@cork Green IT breakfast event tomorrow morning (5th March ‘08). My presentation is “Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint - A Case Study” and I will be using CIX as a case study on how innovative thinking can lower your carbon footprint and your costs.
The event kicks off at 07:45 in the Cork International Hotel, at Cork Airport and the other speakers are James Governor of RedMonk, whose talk is titled “The Sustainability Imperative: Towards Greener Software” and Mike Hughes of Microsoft Ireland who is going to talk about Windows Vista energy conservation features.
Should be a good event (and you get breakfast!).
I uploaded the presentation I gave at the IWTC conference last week to SlideShare.net.
The talk is entitled “Why Blog?” - and is aimed at helping educate companies on the potential advantages of blogging to their business.
I have embedded a copy below -
The 2008 Irish Blog Awards are on this evening thanks to a monumental amount of work by the awards founder and organiser Damien Mulley.
Unfortunately, for the first time, I can’t make it along to the awards this year. It is really disappointing as it really is a great event 
I hope everyone who goes along this evening has a total blast.
Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!
Recent Comments