Keith Shirley

I’ve just been reading that Mac users upgrading to Leopard have been getting
a blue screen of screen of death when they reboot. I’d like to take this
opportunity to welcome them to the club – they now know what it’s like to be
a windows user.

Techcentral.ie has redesigned their website. It can’t be easy to do with a site that has such a huge amount of info on there. On the other hand – you’d expect that a website that covers IT issues in such detail would know how to do it right. The question then is, why did my old bookmarks break? It’s not a big deal to setup a proper redirect for your webpages. Having gone to a lot of effort to get your pages as high as possible in Google or Yahoo the last thing you want to do is throw it all away. Moving pages without a proper redirect is like changing the names of all your products and not giving your customers a way to find the new names. If they ask for it you’d just say – sorry – we don’t have that anymore – without explaining that the name has changed. 

You can redirect in multiple ways:

•  Use the REFRESH tag in html. While this will technically allow the old page to be redirected to the new one – it’s not recommended. Many search engines are very wary of this as it can be used to try and trick them. The only good point is you can warn your customers that the page has moved.

• Use the HTTP 301 status code to set a permanent redirection. For every item that is loaded from the web server a status code is
  sent back. In this case the server is politely saying the page has moved to a new place and gives the new address. The search engines will then update their links so that the new link is used. All the page ranking for the old page is saved.

The only issues left are links from outside websites that point to the old page. You can’t just ignore them as they are part of the reason you got the good ranking in the first place. I’m open to suggestions but the only solution I know of is to try and contact the content owners to change the link. This is not an easy process. For that reason I normally suggest that you keep the redirection in place for as long as possible. 

I’m never satisfied for long with a gadget before I start to find things I
don’t like. I’m talking about my new N95. Don’t get me wrong – I still love
it – but there are a few things that are annoying me.

General annoyances
- I hate the fact that I’m going to have to get yet another charger (I like
to have one at home and one at work). Sony Ericsson and a few other
companies recently announced that they would use the mini usb socket for
charging – this would mean you could interchange them. I can’t wait and I
feel it’s just plain stupid and very environmentally unfriendly to force us
to keep buying new ones. They probably didn’t make much money anyway, with
all the cheap Chinese versions available.

- I find the memory problems annoying – I would like to be able to have
multiple apps running but if you push it even a little bit then it says low
memory. I guess maybe I don’t need Skype running all the time.

- I find entering text a pain in the thumb. The old Motorola A1000 had a
stylus and touchscreen. That was a mixed blessing as the letters were very
small so it was difficult to use on a train etc. The T9 predictive ’stuff’
on the Nokia just does not cut it in my opinion. I look forward to the
results of ongoing research into better ways. The iPhone has a touch screen
where the predictive text makes the next expected letters bigger – that’s a
good start. Reading my mind would be better but that will have to wait.

General Likes
- Oh how I love the fact that it seems to just work. The Motorola had a bad
habit of rebooting with VERY loud startup sounds. It was very annoying in
meetings.

- Speaking of sounds – it may seem a stupid thing but I’m happy every time I
download mail to the phone. I’m happy that it just makes one nice bing. The
Motorola made a weird loud squawk for every single mail. Just imagine the
amount of mail I get – I was a lunatic by the time it was finished. Trust me
- I tried to find a way to get rid of it. I even had a look at the
developers toolkit – but chickened out in the end out of fear of killing it.

- People complain about the slow GPS. With the Assisted GPS functionality
however I found it works well and have already been able to make use of it.

- I love the good camera. I bought a Canon years ago but never use it (my
better half does). I just could not be bothered to carry it. I’ll always
have the phone with me however so I look forward to being able to photograph
my life and leave memory space in my head for tech stuff.

There are more but this post is getting too long…

A new .ASIA domain extension is to be released around Feb 2008.  Registration can start now but depends on having a registered trademark and the date of that registration. If the trademark was registered before 2004 then you can preregister the domain now.

More information is available here: http://www.dotasia.org

If the .eu process was anything to go by then it’s going to involve an annoying amount of paperwork with no guarantee of success. At least they are clear this time on one thing – if there are multiple people asking for the same domain – it goes to the highest bidder.

Let me know if you need help sorting out the registration and the associated paperwork.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a weak spot for gadgets. Having been disappointed regularly about what’s actually delivered (boo hoo) I tend to try and no longer expect too much. I received a new phone last week from Vodafone – The Nokia N95. I previously had a Motorola A1000 which was in some ways a pretty fantastic phone. Unfortunately Motorola didn’t seem to have done a very good job on the bluetooth as it kept cutting out. As I was doing increased amounts of driving – losing the connection to the hands free kit was getting very annoying. When I moved to Vista and the sync functions would no longer work I knew that the days of my battered A1000 were coming to an end.

My first impressions of the N95 are good. I knew that the battery life was going to be short – but come on – it’s basically a mini PC. At least the battery recharges quickly. Most likely I’ll just buy a spare battery like I did for the old phone. Now I’ve got to figure out which apps I really want on there – I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve finally done it. Now that we can finally register decent personal names in the .ie domain I’ve decided to get my blog running. Bit by bit I’ll be adding various comments, rants and articles (old and new). Over the years I’ve had hundreds of tips I could share with people about all sorts of techie things. They never really fit into a seperate training course so it’ll be great to be able to share them.