Stephen's Thoughts

TV3 apprentice website couldn’t handle the traffic?

Stephen Downey — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:53:31 +0000

I was just watching the Tv3 version of The Apprentice and decided to hop over to the website, to look at the background of the contestants in the show, only to get the following error:

It looks like the mySQL db server that the site connects to, went down.

Looks like a good show so far and obviously very popular if the site is anything to go by.

Why is VrtIreland.com being penalised by Google?

Stephen Downey — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:37:48 +0000

I launched my VRT Ireland website last month and up until the start of this month I was getting great support with an average of 100 unique visitors a day. this may not sound like a lot but when your average visitors suddenly plummets to between 9 and 15 it was a lot. I have noticed that if you search for “Vrt Ireland” in Google it will not longer lists my website. Up until now it was always in the top 5 results for this search and it was teh most popular search term used to find the site.

You can see in the Image below from StatCounter.com the dramatic effect this has had to the site.

I have looked at the Google Guidelines to see if I can see why the site has been penalised but the only thing that I found were hidden links in the wordpress theme that I have been using. I have removed any link that I found embedded in the theme but the site is still being penalised.

As you can see from the stats above, the site was first removed from Google a few days from the 30th of April until the 5th of May. Matt Cutts site recommends that you fill in the “Request reconsideration” form to get Google to relist your site. I filled in the request reconsideration form at this point and it was back in the first page of results again but a few days later it was removed again. When filling out the form I explained the situation and even asking for feedback as to why the site is being penalised so I can rectify the situation if there is something I am doing wrong but I have not received any feedback from them at all.

I would really appreciate any feedback or pointers to getting my site back up the Google ranking.

Java Programming for the Nintendo Wii

Stephen Downey — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:00:23 +0000

There is a great article over at Ajaxian on programming for the Nintendo Wii. I bought a Wii myself a few weeks back and have been having great fun with Tiger Woods golf. (It is actually my first game console) Up until down the idea of playing a game console alone did not appeal to me but the Nintendo Wii experience is amazing.

The Wii console connects to the controller or Wiimote via bluethooth and uses an accelerometer built into the wiimote to detect the location of the wiimote as well as it’s acceleration. This leads to a really interactive experience for the user.

I have been amazed by responsiveness of the Wiimote and now Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith over at Ajaxian have developed an Ajax app that uses Wiiusej to interact with the Wiimote. The Wiiusej API is a java wrapper for the C based Wiiuse library.

We then wrote a Java class that acts as a state machine for what the remote is doing. It understands the movements, which buttons are pushed, how fast you are moving the device. With this data we could build a simple darts game. With the state machine Java code, and an Applet wrapper that exposed the information, we were ready to get to the Ajax side of the house.

Checkout the video below of the guys in action:

Wii Darts in Ajax from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

You can find the article here.

Great blog for Java Design Patterns

Stephen Downey — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:10:51 +0000

I came across this great site via DZone. The site provides a great overview of the Gang of Four patterns as well as J2EE patterns with UML diagrams and sample code for each one. Here what the author, Andre Mare wants to get from the blog.

Java Design Concepts will provide information on how to design, implement and deploy system in a high availability enterprise environment. The design concepts include design patterns, and Object Oriented Programming (OO). Java technologies include J2EE, EJB, JAF, JMS, JSP, JSTL, JDBC etc..

As the site is still in development some of the J2EE patterns are not complete yet but this is definitely one for your RSS reader.

Check out the site here...

New Irish site for Vehicle Registration Tax

Stephen Downey — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:30:07 +0000

In July of 2008 the Irish government intend to change the way it determines the amount of tax to pay to register a car in Ireland. The old model was based on the size of the engine while the new model will be based on the Co2 emissions from the car. The same model will be used to determine the amount of road tax to pay for new vehicles.
I was looking for information on Vehicle Registration Tax and found it hard to find a site that would let me compare the various cars in a band. There are sites out there where I can look for a particular model and see the emissions for that car but no site would compare ‘All cars in emission Band A’ .

I decide to create a site myself. Its very basic at the moment and provides tables for each car type as well as one very large table that contains all of the cars and allows the user to sort by band. I’m using the wp-Table plugin to build each of the tables on the site. This plugin uses a mysql table to store the various rows of each table. It also allows you to upload the data in CSV format which helped a lot.

Visit the site here...