gary’s web sofa

Ben Dunne has bought hours of radio air-time on Newstalk over the last month telling everyone about his new website that would revolutionise buying of stuff and doing of things that was coming on the 19th of October. It caught my eye because nobody does a hard launch on the Internet. The accepted wisdom is to soft launch/beta the website first to iron out the kinks and build up some content and then put out the ads. Out of curiosity I took a look at his site today and it’s an empty page for some reason, so that marketing investment is largely wasted.

He (or his advisors) is exhibiting a strange naïveté about the ways of internet business for someone so successful in other areas. Geography is immaterial and operating costs are minimal so there’s lots of competition for eyeballs and wallets. Your business either needs to be either new, better or cheaper; and preferably at least two of the three. Bendunne.ie or his previous attempt tenderme.ie (also launched in the same way) is none of these.

Adverts.ie, an offshoot of boards.ie, crucially realise that the buyers don’t come unless there’s a large volume of sellers. The only way to get a large volume of sellers is if you have a large volume of buyers (like eBay), or you make it cheap enough that they’ll list there products on the off chance… Crucially by charging a fee bendunne.com are reducing the volume of sellers as who’s going to pay for a listing on a site with no track record? Adverts.ie makes it’s money by embedding Google AdWords advertising in the listings and allows anyone to list for free. They’re listing 1000+ items each day and generating serious traffic, and traffic = money.

The secret is in where you put grub for each OS. Moblin, being cute ‘n friendly assumes that it’ll be the only OS on the disk so slaps it in /dev/sda (or whatever your hard disk is). Ubuntu Network Remix defaults to doing the same. What you need to do is install Moblin first but use a custom partitioning scheme (to leave room for Ubuntu). I created a 2GB /dev/sda1 root partition and a small swap partition. I then installed Ubuntu on /dev/sda3, again using a custom partition layout, but I clicked the “advanced” button to put grub on /dev/sda3 rather than on /dev/sda. You then reboot into Moblin (which is the only bootable OS at this stage) and edit your Moblin grub menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) and tag the following at the end:

title Ubuntu
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

This has the effect of kicking off the bootloader on /dev/sda3 (i.e. the Ubuntu one) when selected, booting Ubuntu!

The new Moblin 2 distro looks like a very strong contender for an OS for your netbook. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is great if you want to do heavy work (for a netbook anyway), but there are times when all you want to do is check something quickly on Wikipedia or watch a video. At those times the 60 second+ boot time of a netbook is a PITA and Moblin’s 10 second boot time is great. Now all I need to do is get dual-boot working…

They’ll tell you! Boom boom!

It’s an old joke, but frequently true. The Irish Internet Association are electing a new board at the moment and each of the nominees get a quick paragraph about themselves on the site. There are twelve nominees but only Trinity College alumni Clare Dillon and Catrina Sheridan see fit to tell everyone about their degrees and diplomas.

VW have a flash game to promo their new Golf GTI. They’ve put a camera into a mini Scalextrix version of the car and you get to race it. Not really, but it’s fun anyway. The fastest on the leaderboard gets a loan of the real thing for 3 months (if you’re from the UK).

go play