Category Archive for ‘Technology’ at Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Circuit City needs to stop insulting customers

Published

on 27/4/2008

. 22 Comments

I’m in Las Vegas for the EnergyCamp conference.

I had a couple of hours today so I decided to check out the local Electronics stores. When I went into the Circuit City store I was approached by a member of staff who informed me that I “needed to leave my rucksack with customer service near the front of the store”!

I resent being told that. I resent the implication that because I have a rucksack, I am a thief. My rucksack contained my laptop and several other items of value to me. If Circuit City don’t trust me with their valuables, why should I trust them with mine?

I said nothing and simply walked out of the store fuming and into the Best Buy which is conveniently placed next door (as you can almost see in the picture below!).

The staff in Best Buy had absolutely no problem with my having a rucksack. I browsed the store for about 45 minutes, had several interactions with various staff members, all of whom were very helpful, and I left Best Buy having purchased some electronics goodies I have been looking for for sometime. Goodies which I have no doubt Circuit City also stock.

Are Circuit City always so insulting to potential patrons? And if so, how are they still in business?

Friendfeed now on Twhirl

Published

Tom Raftery

on 17/4/2008

in Technology

. 2 Comments

Friendfeed is a very cool site which aggregates all your rss feeds onto one page. This is cool because I contribute to 6 blogs and numerous other sites (Ma.gnolia, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) often automatically without ever visiting the sites in question! Now I have one place to go to see everything I have published.

Better yet, others can see this page and better again, I can see all my friends updates to their sites on a single page (and leave comments on them!).

This is all very useful but suffers from the same problem that the Twitter page suffers from. You need to constantly refresh to see the latest updates.

To get over this there are several Twitter client applications for the desktop (and for mobiles, Blackberry’s, iPhones/iPods, etc.). The one I use is called Twhirl and it is very cool because as well as auto-refreshing, it gives audio and visual notification of replies and direct messages.

So earlier today when I read Mike Arrington’s post about how Friendfeed is now available through Twhirl I immediately downloaded the latest version of Twhirl (0.7.9) and set it up.

Even better, through the Twhirl Friendfeed interface you can also comment on and favourite others posts.

I love it. Now I’ll have to watch who I add to my Friendfeed friends list very carefully as this could overwhelm me very quickly!

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 14): 550 Email blocked by ORDB

Published

Tom Raftery

on 4/4/2008

in Technology

. 3 Comments

My incoming email was unusually quiet yesterday morning. Great, I thought, I’ll get some work done!

However, later in the morning I realised that anyone tryint to send me email was receiving the following error:

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 14): 550 Email blocked by ORDB - to unblock see http://www.example.com/

A quick chat with a few people, including Ross of Rozmic (providers of EmailCLoud - my upstream anti-spam solution) and some Googling told me that my mailserver was mis-configured.

ORDB were one of a number of free blacklists of email spammers. Mailservers could query incoming email against their blacklist and accept or reject email based on the response. However ORDB shut down in 2006.

My mailserver was setup in 2007 but still had a configuration whereby it checked all incoming mail against ORDB (or tried).

Recently, it seems, the blacklist servers were reconfigured to list every ip address as spammers. This was probably to get mailserver admins to once and for-all remove references to ORDB from their config!

When I realised this was where the problem was I went to my mailserver configuration file (Exim.conf), found the following lines:

# deny using ordb
  deny message = Email blocked by ORDB - to unblock see http://www.example.com/
       # only for domains that do want to be tested against RBLs
       domains = +use_rbl_domains
       dnslists = relays.ordb.org

and deleted them.

Sure enough the mail started flowing once more. If you tried to email me in the last couple of days and couldn’t get through, apologies - please do try again.

LCD TV sales surpass CRT for first time in Q4 07

Published

Tom Raftery

on 20/2/2008

in Technology and hardware

. 10 Comments

I read a report this morning which said that in the fourth quarter of ‘07, sales of LCD TV’s passed CRT for the first time:

LCD TVs captured a 47% share of the global TV market, which reached 60.8 million units in the fourth quarter of the year. CRT TVs held a 46% share while RPTVs and plasma display panel (PDP) TVs are estimated at 7%.

The only thing which surprised me about this report was the fact that 46% of people are still buying CRT’s! With the imminent move to HDTV, why would anyone investing in a TV now buy one that will be hopelessly out of date in a few short years (not to mention the far larger footprint of CRTs)?

Blogger’s Dinner in Cork

Published

Tom Raftery

on 18/2/2008

in Technology

. 2 Comments

Damien and Alexia posted about this already but seeing as I have taken over the running of it, I decided to publish a quick post about this dinner too.

We are having a blogger’s dinner in Cork on Sunday March 2nd at 9pm in Rossini’s Restaurant on Prince’s Street.

This is to coincide with the WebCamp/BlogTalk 2008 conference.

If you’d like to join us for dinner that night, sign up on the wiki, send me an email (tom@tomrafteryit.net) or leave a comment here.

Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland

Published

Tom Raftery

on 11/2/2008

in Technology

. 8 Comments

I received an email the other day from xCell Partners, a consultancy firm one of who’s stated aims is “to help bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and Irish tech start-ups”.

They have put together an event that will be on in February, 27th & 29th, in Dublin and Belfast respectively which is all about Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland. Chris Gill, the President of the Silicon Valley Association of Start-up Entrepreneurs (SVASE) will be hosting the various panel discussions, as well as other people from the various companies and associations.

According to Gareth Coen:

This is the first event of it’s kind in Ireland and we hope that it’ll help facilitate the growing number of Irish Web start-ups. The full details of the event as well as tickets can be found at www.xCellerate2008.com

There is a special coupon code which gives a 20% discount for readers of this blog (”TOM”). The discount is available for the forst 10 readers who sign up with the code.

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Archive for the 'Technology' Category