I like Microsoft Windows, and in particular, I love Windows 2000 and Windows XP. They are the perfect desktop operating systems for my needs. I think that the other main operating systems are great (and maybe even better than Windows in many respects), but I just do not like them so much.
Like all good users of multi-user operating systems, I use a normal account for my daily activities. I occasionally use the administrator account when I require elevated privileges. If the task is small, then I normally use the runas command from a Command Prompt.
Today I came across a description of launching applications with elevated privileges from within Windows Explorer. The process consists of pressing the SHIFT button before right clicking on an application! An extra “Run as…” option then appears in the context menu. I think that this is a small, but brilliant, time saver!
My blog has been online for one week now, and I am still making small changes to its design. Today I added my links page. Although it is rather sparse at the moment, I want to ensure that all of the links within it are links that I really read!
The process of adding this links page turned out to be far more complicated than I was expecting! I also learned a lot about how WordPress works along the way!
I initially decided that I wanted to keep all my links in a single dedicated page, rather than having them on every page. The simple solution would have been to hardcode this page, and maintain it manually.
However, WordPress has a built-in feature for managing links, so I thought that it would make more sense to use that.
I started by looking at Powerblogroll, because I thought that this would enable me to paste a line of code into my page, and everything else would work smoothly. It does not :(
So I discovered that I needed to create a links template, and then use this to create my links page. I think that the online WordPress documentation is very good, and I discovered that the wp_list_bookmarks() function was the one that I needed. The documentation describes its usage. Lastly, I updated my theme to style the new code.
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of meeting recruiters from several of the leading IT companies in Ireland. The informal message that I got from them all was that:
There are currently as many graduate opportunities as there were last year, and in some cases there are significantly more.
Starting salaries are roughly between 27,000€ and 33,000€ per annum. (Naturally there are other benefits associated with each job!)
The applicants are making more of an effort in their applications compared to previous years. I am speculating that this is due to applicants being aware of the current economy downturn.
The average calibre of applicants is decreasing. I am speculating that this is a symptom of the general reluctance of Irish students to pursue technical subjects.
So overall, it appears that there are plenty of opportunities in the IT sector for high-calibre graduates. This is consistent with both my experiences, and my colleagues experiences, of employment opportunities for experienced IT professionals.
I have just included a YouTube video in my previous post. I really thought that this would have been a simple task in WordPress, but I was quite disappointed!
The first hurdle was actually figuring out how to paste the HTML code that YouTube supply. This was not too difficult – I just had to switch to the HTML view in WordPress.
The second hurdle appeared when I tried to validate my post. I had not realised it, but the <embed> tag is not supported in XHTML! So I modified the YouTube code as described here.
I really do not understand why YouTube are using this deprecated tag!
I came across this very interesting 3D desktop demonstration today by a company called BumpTop. You can also watch one of BumpTop’s creators demonstrate BumpTop at TED 2007. (Indeed, the TED website contains many interesting videos!)
Although I really like the look of BumpTop, and I imagine that it is even more impressive in reality, I am not sure how useful it is for organising files. I am saying this from the perspective of somebody who is ultra organised! My computer desktop only ever contains three application shortcuts, and I am really good at using file structures! Even my real desk must be clear before I leave it!
I was thinking about applications for BumpTop on tablet PCs and PDAs, but again I cannot see any benefit to me.
I think the application of BumpTop that would most appeal to me is inside the application! For example, I enjoy digital photography, and many times I will have lots of images from a single shoot simultaneously. These photos will all be stored in the same directory because I use a directory per shoot. However, when I am editing them I often create temporary shoot-specific groupings.
Researchers in the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) in the Swiss University Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed four side channel attacks that are capable of detecting keystrokes remotely. Their attacks are based on measuring electromagnetic radiation, and they successfully attacked 11 different wired keyboards over distances up to 20 meters. The initial details of their research are available online (including two video demonstrations), and further details are contained in a paper that is currently under peer review. I am sure it will be an interesting read!
These types of side channel attacks are always very interesting, because they can often totally circumvent traditional cryptographic techniques such as application level encryption and decryption.
I wonder are there other interesting applications for these attacks. For example, the researchers mention the possible application of their research to the keyboards used in automatic teller machines.
Last Tuesday the Irish Minister for Finance publicly announced the details of the 2009 budget for Ireland. The format of this announcement is that the Minister reads a long speech, containing all of the budget details, in the lower house of the parliament. It was a widly anticipated event this year, due to the current economic downturn.
The speech was broadcast live by the state broadcaster RTE on television, radio, and online. RTE peer at INEX, which is the main Internet Exchange in Ireland. The INEX traffic statistics are available online, and they clearly show a massive peak in traffic corresponding to the speech on Tuesday afternoon, in week 42. The maximum throughput during this time was approximately 5.3Gbits/s. I believe that this is a record for INEX!
It is not a surprise that the speech caused a new throughput record, because a new record was also set during the speech last year. (Last year this occurred in early December).
In general, the throughput appears to be influenced most by RTE broadcasting major sporting events online. For example, the peaks in June 2008 and August 2008 coincide with the European Football Championships and the Olympics respectively. It is also possible to see the distinction between the first and second halves of Champions League football matches on the daily graph.
I think that it is appropriate that my very first post in this blog should explain some of the reasoning and choices that were made in getting to this point.
The first decision that I had to make when I decided to start this blog was where I would host it. There are many guides online giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options, but for me this was a fairly simple decision. I decided to host it with my current hosting service provider Blacknight, because I like having complete control over it.
The second choice was to decide which bloging software to use. Blacknight offers three possibilities:
I did not have any previous direct experience with any of these, but I understood Drupal to be more of a CMS, so I immediately eliminated it. Initially I was leaning towards Movable Type because it seems to be favoured by Blacknight. Apparently it is significantly less resource intensive than WordPress due to its use of page caching.
I then started reading some of the many articles online that compare Movable Type and WordPress, and in the end I decided to go with WordPress. The main advantages of WordPress to me are:
WordPress is open source, whereas only some versions of Movable Type are open source. Therefore, I expect that there will be more plugins and themes available for WordPress.
WordPress seems to be more popular.
WordPress appeared to be easier, and more intuitive, to use. This is important to me, because I wanted to start blogging fairly quickly!
The WordPress implementation seems to be cleaner, since it uses only one programming language (PHP). Movable Type apparently uses a mix of Perl and PHP. I am not a fan of applications written using several similar programming languages!
There are also many advantages of Movable Type, but since these are not relevant to me I have not covered them here.
So now we are here! I will keep this blog updated with my opinions and experiences of WordPress. I also will cover plugins and accessibility in future posts. Now I think that this is enough for my first post!
