I'm closing this blog.

It's been a - well it hasn't been much.

It's been a diary, was a useful tool while I was traveling through America, but after that I haven't really used it, and I'd like to have somewhere that is an actual resource for people, an information point of sorts.

As a result, I've started working on RossDuggan.ie, which will have regular content, whether it's interesting or not will be up to you, but it will be more than idle ramblings.

Thanks.

Blackout Ireland

Your freedom and privacy are in danger.

Your Internet usage will be restricted, or worse, removed entirely.

The irreplaceable service, as necessary in a 21st century modern country as running water is in less well off nations, that which brings education, connects family and friends, allows web businesses and small start-ups to exist and a plethora of remote workers to be in employment, could be torn from you and your family.

Is this because you're unknowingly running a spam server? Or hosting child pornography?

No.

The truth is much worse.

You could be booted off the Internet merely for being accused of the mild transgression of downloading an MP3 file without authorization from the copyright holder.

This isn't happening in a few years, a few months, or even a few weeks. This is happening right now.

You need to act. Now.

Update:

Other articles-

http://andyaz.ie/blackout-ireland
http://blog.blackoutireland.com/post/81674940/a-digital-guantanmo

on Twitter and irssi

This irssi plugin, pointed out to me by phaxx, is probably the best widgety gadgety thing I have gotten in a while. It's like a chat room full of only people I want to hear from!

Everything should have an irssi plugin. Can Facebook status updates come from twitter? Hmm...

On Forum Drama

Prompted by some responses in this thread.

Pro Tip: all boards.ie drama is generated by and as a result of the top few most active posters.

If that person is a moderator, an extra dimension gets attached to it, but it's basically the same principle.

Some people's personality requires they be top dog on the forum, and as egotistical of them as that sounds, it works for (or, I guess, arguably despite of) them for some forums.

If they're not the moderator, they're never top dog, and these people are the ones you see complaining in Feedback or Help Desk or wherever they choose to vent because they have no route up. Socially, it's the Internet equivalent of vandalism.

Daft.ie and Boards.ie at the Golden Spiders

http://flickr.com/photos/nectarous/sets/72157609601064500/

Great night :)

Irish Times article.

Golden Spider award ceremony this evening

The Golden Spider award ceremony takes place this evening, I think this will be the first black-tie event I've attended since my debs.

Boards.ie is nominated for "Best Social Networking & Community Website" and has some interesting competitors for the title, so should be fun.

Apart from myself Vexorg (Gerry Shanahan), DeVore (Tom Murphy) and ecksor (Jerry Connolly) will be in attendence from Boards.ie, as well as some of our respective significant others. We'll be sitting with the lovely people from Daft.ie, of whom there are quite a number. Won't be short of people to talk to :)

MyISAM to InnoDB?

One idea we're exploring at the moment is converting from our current MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB, with the idea that row level locking as opposed to table level locking will eliminate potential collisions which may be causing the increasing number of table crashes we're seeing.

The downside to this, from what I can see, is the lack of FULLTEXT INDEX support in InnoDB meaning we would require an alternative search facility to be brought online. As mentioned in the previous post, I can see Sphinx in this role, and in fact I like the idea of functionally seperating search from the user,post,thread model. Also, I would imagine that the lack of fulltext searching would significantly reduce the load on the primary server. Paired with InnoDB's Hot Backup facility, it should eliminate the need for a secondary MySQL server altogether at this juncture, thus freeing up the other database server for Sphinx, improving the speed of the site and the search while eliminating downtime almost entirely.

...of course this is all just theory right now :) I will need to talk to people who know more than me, and hopefully those people exist within my sphere of contact.