Cormac Moylan

Marc sent me a message via my contact form about three tickets he has for Oxegen. They’re weekend tickets for the red camp site and are priced at €190 each or nearest reasonable offer. The tickets are available for pickup in Dublin and/or Drogheda today and tomorrow.

Leave a comment or send me a message via my contact form and I will pass on Marc’s email to you.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting! Cormac

I was meaning to do a post like this a few weeks but never got around to it. I spotted quite a good few blog posts recently that deserve a bit of linkage, so here it goes..

Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant, has guest posted on Read Write Web about how Digg is okay, Stumbleupon is better but Reddit is moving into a potential slip stream to take its place as the #1 online news source.

Dave Child no longer loves Jack Daniels. Boo Jack Daniels.

Donncha has posted about kicking spam up the arse with some apache trickery. Sounds very interesting.

EdenWeb are looking to hook up one of their clients with a new graphic designer.

Darren Rowse will shortly be sending out an email digest about pro blogging and the like.

Rand talks about passing more link juice to increase indexation of large sites by using nofollow on links and menus.

James wants to know if you can noindex within <p> tags on the Irish Webmaster Forum.

Chris’ blog got hacked and he is going to dump Wordpress for a Ruby on Rails blogging system by the name of Simple Log.

I went halves with Christ (typo) Chris on a VPS  from Blacknight VPS a few days ago but I am waiting on PayPal to reconfirm my Credit Card after I exceeded my payment limit. They said it would take three days but today is the fifth day of waiting. Boo PayPal.

Katie Crowley’s errie and amazing picture of Ross Castle in Killarney.

Will it piss rain? Will it shine? Will it snow?

The five day forecast for Dublin isn’t looking too good for Oxegen.

Punchestown is going to soak it up on Friday and Saturday and a little bit on Sunday but it does it get better as the weekend goes on.

Time to buy those wellies and rain coat tonight then.

For those going up early on Thursday you will enjoy some sunny intervals at around 19 Celsius. Great!

So it looks like Wet Wet Wet are going to be playing each and every stage this weekend. I hate Wet Wet Wet.

Here is MSN’s take on the weather for Naas, just to confirm the wetness

37 Signals are soon to drop IE6 from their supported browser range. IE6 has long being the most common browser on the web but with the birth of IE7/8, the growth of Firefox and the increased migration from Windows in OS X has since seen the dinosaur that is IE6 edge closer to extinction.

The Internet Explorer 6 browser was released back in 2001, and Internet Explorer 7, the replacement, was released nearly two years ago in 2006. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it’s time to finally move beyond IE 6.

IE 6 is a last-generation browser. This means that IE 6 can’t provide the same web experience that modern browsers can. Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers, and continuing to support IE 6 holds us back.

So that means 37 Signals are going to develop without considering IE6’s restrictions. The article doesn’t mention how many 37 Signals users actually use IE6. I’m sure a lot of people would like to know the metrics behind their decision. What’s a reasonable figure for dropping a browser? 10%? 5%? Less than 1%? None?

Matt, from Wordpress, has replied with a post on his blog about IE6 support. He has posted a summary of stats obtained from the 787 million unique hits from the 1st of January to June 30th of 2008. I think it’s fair enough to argue that the stats gathered from Wordpress.com would reflect a general browser usage.

The stats from Wordpress.com

1. 59.41% - Internet Explorer (down 3.05%), sub-breakdown:
   53.42% - Version 7.0 (up 18.25%)
   46.28% - Version 6.0 (down 17.82%)
   0.14% - Version 5.5 (down 0.14%)
2. 32.82% - Firefox (up 2.08%)
3. 4.81% - Safari (up 0.98%)
4. 2.04% - Opera (up 0.26%)
5. 0.41% - Mozilla (down 0.11%)

The operating system breakdown for Wordrpess.com

1. 89.41% - Windows (down 0.95%)
2. 7.86% - Macintosh (up 1.13%)
3. 1.82% - Linux (down 0.37%)
4. 0.17% - iPhone (out of nowhere!)
5. 0.10% - PlayStation Portable (up 0.07%)

So as you can see, IE6 users account for about 27% of all the visits we saw. If I were building something for “the internet” IE6 compatibility would still very much be on my radar. Everyone’s users or customers are different, and if I saw IE6 falling below 10% on one of my sites I’d probably very seriously consider what 37signals is doing.

< 10%  usage is a reasonable cut off for browser support according to Matt. That seems quite high to me. I would hope that a graceful degradation support model would be put in place rather than a complete phasing out of browser support.

For the sake of some people being interested, here some stats gathered from this blog (I get a little less than 787 million hits).

My own browser stats

1. Firefox - 50.94%
2. Internet Explorer - 30.64%
   IE 7 -  19.34%
   IE 6 -  9.75%
3. Safari - 16.09%
4. Opera - 1.75%
5. Mozilla - 0.14%
6. Konqueror - 0.11%
7. Camino - 0.06%
8. Netscape - 0.06%
9. Mozilla Compatible Agent - 0.05%
10. Playstation 3 - 0.05%

Browser by Operating System

1. Firefox - Windows - 30.67%
2. Internet Explorer - Windows - 30.61%
3. Firefox - OS X - 19.11%
4. Safari - OS X - 15.46%
5. Safari - Windows - 0.31%

Operating System Stats

One third of Firefox users are using version 3 while 10% of visitors to this blog are using IE6 and nearly 20% of IE users are using version 7.

Operating system wise, Windows are leading at 63.11%, OS X is amazingly close at 34.9% and Linux is above 1% at 1.34%. That number for OS X is quite high but if you look through the comments on this blog you’ll notice a large Mac user base. The amount of people I know who have moved to OS X is quite large. I think I could list 20 people who have ditched Gates for Jobs.

So what do the stats say? Not much really. Stats aren’t real. People are real. Support people gracefully. Not browsers.

But who cares, 63% of all statistics are made up on the spot anyway!

On Thursday myself and the guys are heading to Oxegen. I’m hoping the ol’ itinerary below is enough to bring with me in order to survive four nights in the wilderness of a campsite at Oxegen. Anything missing?…

1. Ear Plugs - cancel out the noise of folk partying at 5AM when you’re wrecked.
2. Flash Light - I can’t see in the dark anymore.
3. Pillow - I have a nice little pillow which I bring with me on trains.
4. Disposable Plastic Cups - for Jack Daniels.
5. Booze - can’t bring in glass so need to pour JD into plastic bottles. Tough times.
6. Toilet Paper - for when the toilets at the festival get destroyed.
7. Radio + CDs - for listening to music in the morning.
8. Toothbrush/Mouthwash - if I forget either of these I will have a cranky weekend.
9. 2 Towels - small and big one for the showers.
10. Shower Stuff - shampoo and body wash.
11. Baby Wipes - for when you’re dirty but can’t fit in a shower or the showers are crap.
12. Suncream - hopefully I will need this.
13. Foldable Chair - going to bring up a cheap deck chair and leave it behind.
14. Wellies - have to have ‘em.
15. Bin Liner Bags - for my wet and mucky clothes.
16. 4 Changes of Clothes (cheap clothes) - God bless Pennys. Picked up loads of clothes for about €60.
17. Water - lots of water. 10 or 12 liters between a few friends sounds good.
18. Fruit - apples and bananas can’t be beaten for the old hangovers according to Paul. + orange juice.
19. Gun - a flare gun for a distress signal. A real gun for killing idiots who fall on your tent.
20. Blankets - Blankets keep you warm at night. The night can be cold.
21. Sunglasses + Hat - for defending yourself against the elements and starring at girls.
22. Raincoat - Ireland is no longer a hot tropical country.
23. Bags of Nudity - Eh? Don’t know about this one but don’t go to a festival with Phil. (see comments)
24. Passport - For proving your age. Some festivals accept coloured photocopies so that’s a better choice if they accept copies. Thanks to Dave for the reminder.
25. Glow Sticks - because you’re only young once.
26. Anadin - or other types of pain relief.
27. Mobile Phones - I’m bringing three charged up phones with me. I doubt there are electrical points at any festival so bringing a pack of charged up phones means I just need to swap around the SIM card to avoid being phoneless.

And before you say “tent”, we’re renting out equipment from Tangerine Fields. They’re supplying us with the tent, sleeping bags and some pillows. We also get bumped up to the ‘posh’ camping site as a result of using Tangerine Fields.

Check out the comments for more things to bring with you to a festival..

We all know of Rage Against The Machine, Editors, Interpol and their kin. Some of us are unfortunate enough to know of The Stereophonics and REM (shudder).

But what about all the other, less familiar bands? There are some great gems of bands propping up on various stages other than the main stage and here are some of the groups I am looking forward to most.

dEUS - The Architect. Taken from their 2008 album, Vantage Point. They’re playing the 02 stage on Friday from 7.30. They’re pretty much kicking off the festival as they’re the first biggish band playing.

My Morning Jacket - Off the Record. This is the commercial release from their album Z. It’s a catchy indie pop type number but the rest of the album is absolutely rocking. They’re like an older version of Kings of Leon in places. My Morning Jacket are playing the Pet Sounds stage at 4.10 on Saturday.

Black Kids - Hurricane Jane. Black Kids are everybody’s favourite Cure replica band. They haven’t released an album yet but there have been some free EP downloads from their website. Which is nice. They play Saturday night from 9.10 on the 2FM New bands stage which probably means not many people will see them. Shame.

Alphabeat - Fascination. Remember the 80’s? Remember 80’s disco pop? Remember multi-colour striped shirts and crew cut hair cuts? Here ya go, have a flash back… Alphabeat play before Black Kids on Saturday’s 2FM stage at 8.15.

MGMT - Electric Feeling. Don’t know too much about this band other than me liking this song. They’re playing at around 6PM on Saturday on the Pet Sounds stage.
Video is disabled so you’re gonna have to click to view it.

Friendly Fires - Paris

. FF played support to Interpol a few months ago. They stole the show. They’re playing at 10.30 at the 2FM new bands stage on Friday night. They’re unreal live. Like an electronic version of Hot Chip. They’re one of my favourite new bands.

Slam - Positive Education. I can’t leave out Slam :). This is an oldie from 1993. If you like your thumping dirty tunes then check out Slam’s DJ set on Saturday night in the Dance Tent (where else?) from 7.45.