Teknovis

Last weekend I read an article by web developer Jason Roe in which he described his discovery that under certain circumstances the Ryanair web site would revert the cost of flights to 0.00€. The full article is Ryanair no credit card fee + 0.00 flight bug.

I did not think that the discovery was in any way special, because it is relatively easy to replicate situations like this on many web sites. I would not even call it a bug, because it only occurs when the web site is being used in an abnormal way. I do not think that Jason Roe was trying to imply this either.

However, the tone of the responses that were posted by some of Ryanair’s staff are astonishing! For example, the first Ryanair response is:

jason!
you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

I cannot understand what motivated this! Why did Ryanair not respond with the same explanation but in a pleasant manner? To make the responses even less understandable, I do not think that Ryanair develops this software itself!

I should also add that I have had many experiences with Ryanair before, and this is the first time I have ever seen such negative behaviour. So I am not a Ryanair basher :o

Surprisingly, this story has gained enough momentum that it was covered by The Irish Times today in Ryanair turns on blogger who found website glitch. Indeed, it is currently the most read story on the web site! I particularly like the quote by the Ryanair spokesman Stephen McNamara:

Lunatic bloggers can have the blogosphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

It seems to me that if the Ryanair employees had abided by this in the beginning then there never would have been a problem!

Update

RTE covered this story, and included an interview with Jason Roe, on the main national television news!

Tags: Jason Roe, RTE, Ryanair, The Irish Times

The Irish Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) published a report earlier this week covering the attitudes of Irish residential customers to ICT. The report is very easy to read, and it contains many interesting findings. My favourite findings are:

• 79% have Eircom as their fixed line supplier
• The average monthly fixed line spend is 48.04€
• The average monthly mobile spend has decreased from 45.64€ to 41.64€
• Vodafone‘s share continues to decline, O2‘s share has seen a marginal increase, Meteor’s share continues to grow, and Three‘s share remains relatively unchanged.
• 56% own either a PC or laptop, and 11% own both
• There has been a continued increase in Internet usage, and penetration now stands at 64%
• 43% think that speed is the most important factor when using the Internet
• 50% of home broadband users do not know their contracted downloaded speed
• 44% have heard of VoIP, 35% of these have used it, and72% of these people use Skype
• 82% believe that technology has improved their lives
• Technology is used for entertainment purposes by 36% for more than 20 hours per week

The full report can be downloaded from ComReg Residential ICT Services Survey Q4 2008.

Tags: ComReg, Eircom, Ireland, Meteor, Mobile Phone, O2, Skype, Three, Vodafone

In an effort to reach out to the masses, the Vatican has launched its own official channel on YouTube. You can see it at www.youtube.com/vatican. Apparently, it is not getting much attention :o

On a slightly related note, I never realised that the Vatican’s ccTLD was .va, although not many domain names appear to use it!

Tags: YouTube

The Irish Blog Awards are now accepting nominations for 2009 on 2009 Nominations. The available categories are:

• Best Popculture blog
• Best Blog from a Journalist
• Best Food/Drink Blog
• Best Fashion Blog
• Best Arts and Culture Blog
• Best Political Blog
• Best Group Blog
• Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog
• Best Technology Blog/Blogger
• Best Sport & Recreation Blog
• Best News/Current Affairs Blog
• Best Specialist Blog
• Best Newcomer
• Best Blog of a Business
• Best Music Blog
• Best Personal Blog
• Best Humour Blog
• Best Photo Blog
• Best Blog Post

Further details of each category are described in 2009 Nominations. Well done to Damien Mulley for organising these awards!

I certainly will be voting. My problem is that I have definite ideas about which blogs to nominate in certain categories, and I am not aware of even a single blog in other categories!

I think that the launch timing of my blog was too late to enable it to mature sufficiently to be considered for the best newcomer category :(

Tags: Damien Mulley, Irish Blog Awards

I am a big supporter of standards for technology, and I was reading some specifications from one of the many standards organisations today. I suspect, perhaps incorrectly, that there are many Irish companies involved in international standards organisations. I know that standards participation by Irish companies is something that Enterprise Ireland encourages.

Therefore, I decided to write a series of articles listing the Irish companies that are involved in international standards organisations that relate to information communication technologies. I will also include non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland. (It would be nice if I could replicate this for the entire EU, but I do not have the time for that at the moment.)

I am going to start this series by looking at the W3C, because it is probably the prominent standards organisation in relation to the Internet. I am basing these lists on the online membership list.

The Irish companies that are currently members are:

• Afilias
• ChangingWorlds (but see Amdocs to Acquire ChangingWorlds)
• Cibenix
• DERI (this is a Science Foundation Ireland funded research group that I should have included in Science Foundation Ireland Funded Research Groups)
• IONA
• MobileAware
• mTLD Top Level Domain (also known as dotMobi. I think that it might just use Ireland as an address for tax purposes)
• TSSG (This is a research group. It appears to be responsible for start-up companies that are also involved in the W3C such as Nubiq)
• Voxpilot

The non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland that are currently members are:

• Adobe
• Alcatel-Lucent
• AOL
• Apple
• Avaya
• Betfair
• Cisco
• EDS
• EMC Corporation
• Ericsson
• Google
• HP
• Hutchison 3G (also known as Three)
• IBM
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Motorola
• Nortel
• Oracle
• SAP
• Siemens
• Sun
• Vodafone

The Irish companies that appear to be members based on their own web pages even though they are not listed by the W3C:

• Segala

That took me longer than I expected!

Tags: Adobe, Afilias, Alcatel-Lucent, AOL, Apple, Avaya, Betfair, ChangingWorlds, Cibenix, Cisco, DERI, dotMobi, EDS, EMC Corporation, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, IONA, Ireland, Microsoft, MobileAware, Motorola, Nortel, Nubiq, Oracle, SAP, Science Foundation Ireland, Segala, Siemens, Sun, Three, TSSG, Vodafone, Voxpilot, W3C

The EU has launched its new digital library Europeana – again! I previously wrote about this in Too Much Interest in new EU Digital Library, because the demand was so great the first time that the website was launched that it had to be taken offline.

Hopefully this time the website will be able to cope with the traffic!

More details about this relaunch can be read in EU’s new online library reopens.

Tags: Digital Library, Europeana

I read a very interesting article earlier this week about a company called Hulu. (I read the article in a magazine, and I cannot find an online version of it.) I had never heard of Hulu before!

In summary, Hulu offers Internet viewers video content from some of the largest studios in the US. Its novelty is that it obtains revenues by including advertising.

The unfortunate thing about Hulu from my point-of-view is that its video content can only be accessed from US based IP addresses :( So I will just have to wait until I am there to try it :(

Hulu are also trying to get more mainstream coverage by streaming New Year’s Eve celebrations from Times Square. Details about this are in Hulu will live-stream New Year’s Eve in Times Square so you don’t have to freeze.

I am going to embed the live stream here, just to see if it works.

Either way, I hope that everybody enjoys their celebrations tonight!

Tags: Hulu

Google published the Zeitgeist 2008 earlier this week. This shows the most popular searches on Google during 2008.

The results are broken down into separate results for each country, which is probably more useful than the overall results. One of the interesting things that I noticed is that the term Google is in the top 10 in many countries! I do not know why people search for this using Google, but my guess is that these people are not searching directly on the Google webpage. For example, I have Firefox configured so that I can type my Google search terms directly into the address bar.

It is also very interesting to see that certain terms that are directly related to well known websites, such as YouTube, appear in all of the EU results. Yet nearly all of the EU results have terms that are specific to the country or language. I do not recognise a lot of these ones!

The most popular search terms in Ireland were:

1. Bebo
2. Youtube
3. Hotmail
4. Yahoo
5. Google
6. Games
7. You tube
8. News
9. Map
10. gmail

Unfortunately, none of these search terms relate to Irish websites :(

The fastest rising search terms in Ireland were:

1. Facebook
2. utube
3. google maps
4. Youtube
5. Nasza klasa
6. Wiki
7. RTE
8. Maps
9. Irish Times
10. Yahoo! mail

Perhaps the most interesting search term on this list is for the Polish social networking website Nasza-Klasa. (This is the most popular search term in Poland.)

There is also an interesting observation about the list of most popular politicians in Ireland in Politician Declan Ganley more popular than Bertie says Google.

More details about the popular search terms in Ireland can be read in “Sarah Palin” the most searched query on Google. Unfortunately, Ireland is not included in the Google Zeitgeist page, and I am unable to find the official source!

The results presented by Google have been filtered to remove terms related to adult searches. I recall hearing that pornography related searches are by far the most popular. However, it seems that Google did not get the filtering totally right this time for the UK results. The original list (see Palin beats Obama in Google’s ‘zeitgeist’ rankings or 2008 Year-End Zeitgeist Around the World until the mistake is noticed) contained the term cam4 under the Fastest Rising category. Let me say that cam4 is certainly not suitable for viewing in work :o For more about this see Ooops, Google Zeitgeist lists a porn site.

Tags: Austria, Belgium, cam4, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Firefox, France, Germany, Google, Ireland, Italy, Nasza-Klasa, Netherlands, Poland, Pornography, Spain, Sweden, UK, YouTube

I spent some time playing with Google Trends today. This is a really intriguing website that lets you see how popular specific search terms are with Google. Additionally, it can be queried to show multiple search terms, and it can be restricted by specific geographic region. However, I am not convinced that the subregions within Ireland are accurate! I really like the way that Google matches the peaks to the related news articles from the same period. It certainly helps to explain the results!

I was playing with this because I read a very interesting article today that claims that the number of searches by Irish users for porn mirrors the number of searches by Irish users for property. Furthermore, one of these terms is increasing in search popularity, and the other is decreasing. Can you guess which?

The full article is Property pron an interesting trend, and the live graph is much easier to read. I really doubt that Kildare is the subregion that searches for the most porn! Also, it is fascinating that the number of searches for porn spikes every year at Christmas. I am not sure how to interpret how Christmas is spent in Kildare!

Last week there was a meat scare in Ireland due to high levels of dioxins (see Recall notice for Irish pork products for more details). It is already possible to see the increased number of searches for “dioxin” in Ireland!

Tags: Google, Ireland, Pornography

Over the past few years I have attended many international conferences (and even a few in Ireland). These conferences can usually be classified into two different types.

The first type of conference events are the academic type. This are usually of a non-commercial nature, and therefore they have limited budgets. However, the attendees are normally from a younger age group. So the social events at these conferences tend to be cheaper, but also more energetic.

The second type of conference events are the industry type. I have been to many of these where there are a small number of people, but big deals are done during them. It is not unusual (at least during previous better economic times) for the companies selling to spend several thousand euro per head on the social events. These social events are usually very unique opportunities that an individual would not be able to experience. They also tend to be more serious, and they are aimed at an older age group.

Earlier today I read about DomainFest 2009 in Playboy Mansion Party Announced For DomainFest. As the title suggests, the social event is going to be held in the Playboy Mansion!

I think that this is one of the most unusual social events that I have ever seen as part of a conference! It certainly would be an unforgettable experience!

Unfortunately, this conference is outside of my field :(

Tags: DomainFest, Playboy