It has now been four days that the planes over most of Europe stayed grounded and although the light at the end of the tunnel is insight the problems it has caused are far from over yet. Not only will the financial loses that the airlines and airports have an impact on the aviation markets there are also be other problems arising that have a more global impact. For example think about the employees that were on holidays and are due to return home last Thursday, the work they were suppose to be doing has not been done yet and the backlog of work needs to be caught up and paid for of course. Or what about the couriers like DHL and FedEX, the next day delivery promise has been broken and although the alternatives as shipping the packages by boat or car might have gotten the packages on the destination. They would have been late and it would have cost the companies a whole lot of cash more and let’s not forget the packages them selves that might have contained important documents or contracts to close a business deal or even a hearth or a kidney for that transplant patient waiting in the hospital. All these costs will have to be come out of somebody’s wallet and sadly enough most likely this will be paid by the EU Taxpayer, saving another airline from going bust. So just look ahead the coming months for a possible mini recession but this time we can’t blame the greedy bankers… we can only accept nature and its powerful force it still has upon us.
Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category
The recession cause by an ash cloud.
Sunday, April 18th, 2010If Dublin bus would give Spanish lessons…
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010After a week of travelling through the south of Spain, visiting top spots like Seville, Cordoba, Toledo and eventually Madrid it was time for me to return home to Dublin. Even though I am not a native to Ireland I do feel that after 6 years of living and working here I can call it my home. So after travelling over a thousand kilometres around in Spain in my rented Toyota Yaris which I have to admit was a fine vehicle and flying for 2 and a half hours with Aer Lingus who might be a bit more expensive then Ryan air but at least you don’t feel dirty after sitting in a plane with them (unlike Ryan air) it was time to head home. Since I spend most of my money on the holiday it was an obvious choice to take the bus which drops us off very close to the apartment anyways. For those who have never taken the airport bus serviced by Dublin Bus let me give you a small run down. The bus is actually the same as a normal Dublin bus but some seats have been removed to make space for luggage and two monitors have been fitted. Half way in to the journey you will be greeted with the poor audio quality of the recording that has to convince the tourists to take a Dublin bus tour and a ghost tour. Sadly enough the video and audio editing are so poor and amateurish that it is more laughable then convincing, the Dublin sightseeing tour shows video’s of industry pipes with smoke coming out, dread full weather and a few ugly buildings (including that of Dublin Bus in O’Connell street does not feel appealing and I don’t blame tourist for just heading in to the pub and drinking until the holidays are over. The Ghost tour video / presentation I am not even going to mention since it is equally bad if not worse. What I do want to talk about a little bit is the great way Dublin bus translates the stopping location in various languages. Someone in their marketing department must have believed that saying something in English with a Spanish accent will make the Spanish people understand. Well wrong so please guys try this out for a change,
Instead of saying:
Arriving in Central Bus station (with Spanish accent)
Try
Término de autobuses central (With any accent you like, maybe in a cork accent for comedic relief)
Anyway that was my shout out for today… It’s been a while that I have blogged but I will definitely try to work out some more posts.
Christmas gifts for men
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Since the fat man in red is arriving pretty shortly I decided to put on a little wish list of gifts most guys can appreciate. Just so that you don’t have to ask your boyfriend , husband , brother , friend etc directly you can pick some of these..
The low budget ones:
Gillette Mach 3 – Even if your boy is an electronic shaver user this would be most likely because he never had a proper blade one. For about 10 euro’s you have a great little set and often with Christmas there are special offers going on. PS Go for the Original Mach3 – Fusion ones are crap.
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The mid budget ones
So you got a bit more cash to spend… Good then why not buy..
A External Hard drive: If he is a bit of a tech head , or he downloads / watches a lot of movies then this might be a great little gift. For about 70 buck you can give him a great 1 Terabyte ( 1024GB ) sized drive.
Very cool laptop speakers: Who doesn’t love music ? Well this set of speakers will really rock any laptop and they are pretty cheap as well!
Now the high budget section.
As you can tell the high budget for me is not thousands but maybe 100 to 200 euro because that’s what 90% of the Christmas loving people might spend in this recession..
XBOX Arcade: Yes forget about Play Station , WII, DS’s just buy the Xbox arcade.. Not only is it the cheapest one of the bunch it also is great for online movies, facebook , digg and other popular websites and it has some of the GREATEST games available. Don’t think too much about it. Just get it
Apple IPOD Touch 3g: Ok it is not a IPhone but it will give you almost all the same features (except for calling people). You can pick it up around 150 euros and will make a great little gift.
Generation 2010 : A new business perspective
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009If I would ask you the question describe a businessman in 5 words? The chance that you come up with terms like: Suit, sleek, smooth, direct, greedy, grey , boring. Is very well likely even when you are in business yourself you tend to have this kind of stereo type in your mind and most likely you will have met 1 or 2 of these types of business people. But more then often the average business person is not the boring suit wearing stereotype we all can in vision. The new generation of business men and women will be a bit looser, more social and funny. You will have to admit, you rather do business with a fun person than with a grey person when it comes to new and innovative ideas. The internet with its social media networking for example is where businesses try to “connect” to their consumers and the only way to connect is by relating with them. Hence lets get rid of this picture:
And with that picture would also come the businesscard….
Now let’s get rid of it 
Let’s get ready for the business view of the future.
And lets not forget to spice up the businesscards like mine :
What happened to VoIP?
Monday, October 19th, 2009When I first got introduced to Voice over IP it arrived in the form of an Asterisk PBX system back in the summer of 2005. Ploughing through the config files and trying to get my first BRI ISDN card to work was the difficult part but once you’re done with that the “real” fun could start. As I was getting in to it more and more really seeing a future in to the system made me invest in myself by getting the Digium Certificed Asterisk Certificated (DCAP) which I received in the beginning of 2008. So almost 2 years later where is Asterisk and its VoIP system now?
My company’s mailbox received sporadic mails in asking me for support on their Asterisk build or Trixbox system but the “boom” on VoIP has still not arrived to my disappointment. Would it be that this great technology could not cope with the pressure of mobile network companies and negative advertising from leading PBX brand systems like Alcatel and Cisco?
The best way to answer questions like this is by finding out how popular it was during the years. I am using Google Insights Search to find out this information and this is what happened.
Ah this explains already a bit more what happend to me. Since I learned about Asterisk in 2005 it was when VoIP was HOT. The tipping point was building up and keywords like: VoIP and Future where widely coined. Sadly enough this hype was kind short lived since in January 2006 the search for VoIP declined rapidly. So does this mean VoIP does not have a future anymore.
Lets try to figure this out as well by find out relations of VoIP by using Google Sets and Insight search.
http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=VoIP&q2=Asterisk&q3=&q4=&q5=&btn=Small+Set+%2815+items+or+fewer%29
Google sets provided me with the following keywords: voip,asterisk,linux,pbx,sip,software,telephony,ser,opensource,ip,skype,phone,voice
So lets do some insight search with a couple of these
By compairing the various Opensource PBX systems and also the widely used VoIP Application called Skype we notice that although the Trixbox,FreePBX,Asterisk systems are not really widely used the SER system is.
So a conflict , on the one side we see a rapid decline in VoIP and Asterisk and on the other side we see a big rise in SER and Skype. So what are we doing wrong ?
Go out on grafton street and asking anyone about Asterisk or VoIP…The chance that they know what you are talking about is very slim ! So that is the problem with our graphs and results. We need to related the information to not what it really is but to what it really means. So lets do this “check” again but now with understandable terms.
So it looks like internet calling is really on its way out… But not completely because how many people have a land line these days ? Often the younger generation will just have there mobile and no landline phone at all. So
Well a little light at the end of the VoIP tunnel since we have a rising volume of Internet mobile calling and VoIP Mobile and GSM searches… And Skype ofcourse with its steady stream, but to be honest I would put my eggs in the basket that will offer free phone calls which will be most likely a google system that offers free mobile wifi on its android system and it will make its money by advertising on the mobiles once in a while and finding out the so called hotspots in mobile phone numbers. By the way the “hotspots in mobile phone numbers” is another artical all together !
A very good way to get rid of spyware & adware Video tutorial
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009I added this video to show you how its done !
(original blog text)
Hearing more and more complaints about how spyware is ruining pc’s and how the only solution is formatting your drives I decided to write down a simple 5 step config for getting rid of most of them (With these steps I got rid of the Brittiania Search / Feed Yard Virus for example)
So first up download the following 2 programs
1. GMER (http://www.gmer.net/#files)
2. MalwareBytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam-download.php)
3. Install GMER and start scanning , after the scan remove all items that are marked RED (see this vid for an example )
4. Install Malwarebytes and do a Quick Scan
5. After the quick scan is finished delete the selected “problems” and reboot your pc.
You should now be adware free !
How did you learn that stuff you do !
Sunday, October 4th, 2009Recently i got asked the question, how did you get where you are at now? To be honest , it didn’t take me long to think about the answer. You might find the answer in the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell but I will give you the summery and a little bit more.
It started when I was 9 years old, as a smaller then average boy living in a small village called Rilland in the province of Zeeland in The Netherlands I spend my days doing mostly geeky stuff. From taking bugs home instead of playing football or playing with my microscope, if you can imagine a 9 year old geek then most likely you will find something very similar to how i looked at that age.
Now a new addition came to the house in the form of a MSX Computer. It was the year 1992 and the MSX was already 10 years old which resulted in a few problems… one of them was that the games were not made anymore ! My solution was that of roaming around the monthly flee markets in “De Zeeland hallen” in a town called Goes.
There I bought the old games and MSX magazines which were my first real study books that i found interesting. My games were made of the examples I found in the MSX magazines which often consisted of 10 or more pages of BASIC code.
Now the lethal combination of geekness , a old MSX with no games and no money to buy any newer computer and 15 years and voila you have the making of an IT Consultant.
Hence if I can give anyone an advice on how to get up and running in an IT Business, IT Services or Anything in live it is to just do it. You want to learn Linux, go ahead download debian , ubuntu ,centos and install it.. You want to do penetration testing install OpenVas and start following the security and hacker scenes . You want to learn how to build a pbx system go download asterisk and get your self a softphone installed… Everything you want to learn is available for you, just be aware that you might need to spend 15 years on it in order to fully understand it for about 1 min.. And then the information is old and you will have to study some more again.
