Copacetic

Archive for January, 2007

Try not to do the most stupid thing

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Stop trying to get people to be smart and start from the other end of the scale. Try and stop them doing the most stupid thing. This works particularily well with smart people who are usually so busy being clever about stuff that they regularily do the dumbest thing in the playbook while engaging in some really smart piece of activity.

So, get your smart to start thinking about the stupidest thing they could do, and then get them to not do it!

Simple really.

Posted in 1980s, People, Software, stupdity | 1 Comment »

A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Adrian Holovay writes an excellent article entitled “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change“.

Posted in Software | 1 Comment »

Joe’s Laws of web editing

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

All blogging tools want to be content management systems when they grow up
All content management systems wish they were as simple to use as blogging tools
All wysiwyg HTML editors are capable of creating HTML they can’t edit
Its quicker to learn to fly a plane than to learn Dreamweaver
Its quicker to learn to fly a helicopter than to learn the Gimp
“Save as..” HTML usually means turn that document into HTML line noise
Nobody trusts their CSS hand edits (and nobody should)
You can nest your tables in HTML and you can also stick your face in the fan, neither are advisable
Apparently their are some Mac users who build their sites to work in Safari first. They also find themselves trying to pull their pants on over their shoes

Posted in ContentManagementSystems, Software, blogging | 2 Comments »

Ideas Park : Payment Gateway for Credit Cards

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

We pay for a whole host of stuff on a monthly basis at PutPlace. Everything from hosting to dynamic DNS. All those payments are processed by debit a credit card based on a number stored at the vendors site. So for all those annual and monthly payments I want the payment to be processed through a gateway where I can authorise payment before my credit card is debited. In this way I can cut off a given provider without cutting up my credit card or withhold payment for poor service.

Would the merchants like it? Probably not, would you, the customer like it? Yessirree.

Posted in Ideas | 2 Comments »

Advice Overload - Tell me something I don’t know

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

Heard in conversation today,

“I don’t want anymore advice from investors, I just want their money”

I sympathise, when you are running a startup eventually you’ve heard all the advice ten times over.

Posted in Startups, VC | No Comments »

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life

Posted in SecondLife, Software, darrenbarefoot | No Comments »

Do Darren’s "Why do you blog?" survey

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

Darren is asking bloggers to fill in his survey. Go on you might win an iPod shuffle.

Posted in blogging, darrenbarefoot | No Comments »

Everything you needed to know about cycling in Dublin

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

This is my cycle lane to work in the Morning. Its on Mobhi Road just outside the Na Fianna GAA club.

Yes, if you manage to negotiate the telegraph pole, that is a waste bin behind it.

Posted in cycling, dublin | 4 Comments »

Blog Moved - What a nightmare

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

So things I learnt while moving my blog,

Cedant.com cap all PHP requests to 20 Seconds of execute time which means when my shared host was highly loaded my readers were seeing php failures (this was what prompted the move)
GoDaddy.com use a brain damaged PhpMyAdmin with no import tab so I couldn’t move my blog there as my 16MB backup was well over their 2MB limit for SQL uploads
Michele Neylon works way too late into the night and as a result was able to fix all my problems when I finally registered joedrumgoole.com with blacknight.ie at 2.00pm am on Sunday morning.

So a big shout out to Michele for all his help. I should also add that ftp uploads to my site now rip along as my host is only milliseconds away. I’m still settling in, so if you see any funnies drop me a line.

Posted in blogging | 1 Comment »